Mysteries of the Snake Goddess

Five things you didn't know about forgeries:

1- Michelangelo (reputedly) got his start in art by forging Greek and Roman works of art, even burying them to appear "authentic." Enough anecdotal and circumstantial evidence exists to suggest this almost certainly happened to some degree, but some scholars believe he was responsible for some well-known "Greek" treasures such as the Laocoon.

2- The world's most famous forger was only caught after he was charged with...treason? After the Second World War, Han van Meegeren faced the death penalty for selling a Dutch national treasure, a Vermeer painting, to Hermann Göring. Van Meegeren's defence? Goring got a fake. Van Meegeren proved he had painted it himself, and conned Göring . All's well that ends well? He was acquitted for treason, but went to jail anyway. He'd been making and selling fake Vermeers for quite some time. And not just to Nazis.

3-In 2000, Famed Japanese archaeologist Shinichi Fujimura sparked a national crisis when he was filmed digging holes and burying artifacts, only to discover them, often the next day. Fujimura had been considered the leading expert on Japan's paleolithic age, mostly because of his uncanny luck discovering artifacts. This necessitated a complete rethink of Japanese's prehistoric past. How complete? Well...Japan may not actually have been settled during the paleolithic age. 

4- Unsurprisingly, religion has inspired generations of forgers - sometimes to make money, sometimes to provide "proof." The Kinderhook Plates belong in the latter category. "Found" in a Native mound in Illinois, they were bell-shaped brass plates with Egyptian inscriptions, which the Mormon church seized on as evidence that a lost (white) tribe of Israel really did end up in America. (They've since conceded they were fakes. Probably. Though maybe not.)

5- According to various sources, 19th-century French landscape artist Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot is the most-forged artist of all time. Why? Very simple: he was popular, and his work wasn't too difficult to duplicate. You were expecting some shadowy Da Vinci Code-esque conspiracy?  It's not always a convoluted answer, kids. 


"The existence of forgeries can hardly be regarded as an unmixed evil.  The knowledge of their existence tends...to encourage a more minute and scholarly investigation of every detail in genuine objects of antiquity."
- Sir John Evans, 1893

The lady herself. Not pictured: authenticity

Any freshman art history student can tell you all about the Boston Goddess. 

Long the centrepiece of Boston's Museum of Fine Arts' Minoan collection, the goddess was the apex of a huge wave of interest in pre-classical archaeology in the early 1900s. 

The sudden interest was partly an offspring of Heinrich Schliemann's incredible finds at Troy and Mycenae, and partly because white Europeans and North Americans were keen to discover ancient white civilizations to rival their better-known cousins in Egypt and Mesopotamia.

That sounds pretty racist by today's standards, and undoubtedly there was an element of an inferiority complex and chauvinism at play. But the Iliad and Odyssey had literally been popular for 2,500 years - and that's conservative. Discovering the actual city, which most believed was mythical, naturally attracted a lot of interest in civilizations and artifacts from the era.

Another myth from (approximately) the same era involved the Minotaur, which lived in a labyrinth on Crete, and had to be fed virgins. Excavations at Knossos revealed a huge palace complex, with a floor plan that looked...well...labyrinthine.

Public interest inevitably leads to ways of making money. And ways of making money lead to grasping and abuse. And forgeries - ever noticed how many relics from the Titanic for sale online? If they were all genuine, the poor boat would've sunk in the harbour. 

I assure you, this goddess is 1,000% genuine

Which brings us to Boston.

Desperate to get in on the Minoan craze, museums played loose with rules of provenance and provenience - where stuff came from, and who owned it.

The problem was most of the stuff dug up at Knossos was in horrible shape.  (A lack of obvious artifacts being a primary reason it lay hidden so long.) What recognizable items and images did emerge became huge draws.

Boston's Snake Goddess, allegedly from Knossos, was the biggest draw of them all. Mostly restored, it was a striking and hauntingly beautiful figure, much rhapsodized over by writers, scholars, poets, and more. 

Possibly also a fake.

From the beginning, the museum was vague about how, exactly, it came into their possession.  It was a gift.  It was imported secretly by a refugee. It was fake. 

Not the last one.  Definitely not the last one. 

The problem was, real artifacts did start to emerge, including other "snake goddesses." Boston's goddess didn't really look like any of them. Neither did the handful of other, inevitable forgeries.  (Even more ridiculous, the factory where this and other forgeries were made, right down to the individual artisan, were identified. The story was ignored.) 

In the end - well, there really isn't one here. Author Kenneth Lapatin makes a pretty conclusive and damning case the Boston Goddess is a fake, but it's hard to prove a negative. Even the otherwise-conclusive carbon 14 test (which makes the statue "several hundred years old") is prone to serious error, as the statue was restored using modern materials. 

So what happened? The Minoan craze died out. Nobody cared whether the Snake Goddess was real or not.  But she definitely did inspire a whole generation of archaeologists, and almost certainly funded two of them. 

So yeah - forgeries aren't all bad after all.*

*Do not forge art.  Forging art is bad.

Endgame, 1945

Five things you didn't know about the last days of the Second World War:

1-The Allies (especially the Americans) were absolutely, totally convinced that Hitler planned a desperate last stand in the Alps, surrounded by the SS and elite "Werewolf" commando units. This would have resulted in Stalingrad-level casualties. Instead, "Onkel Adolf" stayed in der bunker and killed himself.

2- The Third World War nearly broke out before the Second was totally finished.  In Trieste, part of Italy but claimed by (soon-to-be Communist) Yugoslavia, allied soldiers stared down their Yugoslav counterparts - and a few shots were (probably) fired in anger. Stalin decided this wasn't the hill to die on.

3-As many realize, the Third Reich had two Fuhrers - Hitler, and Admiral Karl Doenitz, who took over after Hitler's suicide. What many don't realize is the Allies kinda sorta cooperated with Doenitz's government for a short time. Even after the fall of Berlin, the Germans were still entrenched and very much in control of northern German ports, Denmark and Norway. Stretched to the limit in manpower and resources, the allies left Doenitz in administrative control in Flensburg, a town near the Danish border. This lasted about a week. Wasn't popular, put it that way. 

4-It sounds like biased history, but by every account, shred of evidence and anecdotal record, occupying Allied troops were saints compared to their Soviet allies. While looting and occasional rough treatment were far from unknown, there were startlingly few accounts of rape. Unfortunately, murder and gang rape was systemic in lands liberated by the Red Army. Certainly German troops believed so, running day and night to have the opportunity to surrender to Canadian, British, or American soldiers.

5-It sounds like an urban legend, but recently unsealed evidence indicates the war ended just in time: Hitler's scientists were perilously close to developing truly advanced missiles and rockets, and possibly even atomic weapons.



It's always darkest before the dawn.

No match for bombers, tanks, and drunken Russians

Or so they say.

In April and May 1945, the 20th Century's long, dark night was coming to an end. Mussolini was dead, and Italy almost pacified. Hitler's Luftwaffe no longer existed in any meaningful or effective way, and his armies comprised of old men and terrified teenagers firing handguns at tanks. 

But still Hitler's opera - his crazed ode to gotterdammerung, the Twilight of the Gods - wasn't quite played out.  In the keen retrospect of history, it's all too easy to look back at the end of the Second World War as the obvious and natural conclusion.

You know the story: with the Russians and Allies closing in from three directions, Hitler eventually offs himself, the good guys win, and then Harry Truman hands over Eastern Europe to Stalin on a silver platter. 

But at the time, it didn't seem like a foregone conclusion. David Stafford's gripping history tells the story of the war's final few weeks through the eyes of those who lived through it: a Canadian paratrooper, English and Kiwi war correspondents, English soldiers, and poignantly, a German mother of two separated from her two young children, and her desperate cross-continental search for them.

The End. But that wasn't a foregone conclusion.

But Stafford's history is more than just a series of revealing and often terrifying anecdotes.  He also describes the very real and plausible Allied fear that Hitler would abandon Berlin to fight on in the Alps, or perhaps Denmark and Norway.  He still had legions of fanatically loyal SS troops, and at least 300,000 troops in Norway. While we know now that by 1945, Hitler was a stammering, drug-addled wreck - but that didn't have to be the case. 

Stafford also describes - in heart-rendering detail - the sheer impossibility of the task facing Allied occupational armies. The entire continent was months away from starvation, they had millions of civilians and prisoners (of war and concentration camps) to feed (and often, restrain), and central Europe was plagued by roving gangs of recently-freed slave labourers who (a) had zero intention of returning to the Soviet Union, yet (b) didn't have many qualms about killing and raping their way from town to town.

Not a few - Winston Churchill chief among them - also believed there was a fourth (after Italy, Germany and Japan) menace to deal with - Russia. 

Nobody beloved by girls can be evil, right?

 The allies were well aware of their Soviet friends' penchant for installing local communists in power, removing absolutely everything of value back to Russia (literally including kitchen sinks), and - worst of all - raping and killing their way across the continent. 

Mother Russia was angry, and that was to be expected. But while the Allies were horrified by what they found in Nazi prison and death camps, it's not a stretch to say they were actually more frightened by reports trickling in from Soviet-occupied areas. 

How frightened? The Brits commissioned a quick report codenamed Operation Unthinkable - you can't make this stuff up - which basically asked what would happen if everyone stopped pretending to be friends and continued the war.

It was deemed hopeless (at best) for the allies, who would most likely lose, condemning most of Europe to a long, Stalinist stupor. 

Cold comfort for Poles and Hungarians, I know. But Allied restraint probably saved Austria, Italy and possibly even France from communism.

Oh yeah - the German who lost her kids. Despite all odds, she did find them. There were still some happy endings to be found. 

Journals 1952 - 2000

Five things you didn't know about recent U.S. history:

1- Arthur Schlesinger's first journal entry, in 1952, describes a conversation among Democratic Party bigwigs about the possibility of General Dwight Eisenhower running for President against Harry Truman. His last, in 2000, centres on the Al Gore/George W. Bush/Hanging Chad thing (you might just recall it).  His final line describes Bush making a speech while "looking like a frightened ventriloquist's dummy." 

2- Disgraced ex-President Richard Nixon bought a house immediately adjacent to one of his foremost political adversaries in Schlesinger. The two did not make friendly neighbours - Nixon complained about Schlesinger's kids climbing the fence, and Schlesinger mocked Nixon's wardrobe. Sounds petty and more than a little nosey, I know - but seriously, who naps outdoors on a chaise while wearing a suit?

3- The Bay of Pigs Invasion was an even bigger fuckup than given credit for today, which is a pretty amazing accomplishment. The CIA and Kennedy Administration signed off on a plan that sent 1,200 lightly-armed men against a battle-tested professional army of 200,000, with zero air or naval support. (Spoiler alert: the Cubans won.)

4 Arthur Schlesinger didn't commit too many gaffes, but his gravest public misstep was among his last. During the height (depth?) of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, Schlesinger attempted to defend Bill Clinton by saying "only a cad tells the truth about his love affairs." That didn't help. At all.

Probably three martinis deep

5-There really isn't a single quote or reference to back me up (and it's a 1,000-page book, so cut me some slack), so you'll just have to take my word for it: people drank a LOT more booze in the 1950s. By modern equivalents, enough to anesthetize a rhinoceros - and then  happily driving home.  A different world.



Context is amazing.

It's one thing to read a history - necessarily written after the fact, with the benefit of hindsight. But to read what was actually going on at the time is quite another.  Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. had the unique privilege of being around Democratic Presidents from Harry Truman to Bill Clinton.  Not merely "around," but actually and sometimes decisively influential. He was a speechwriter, adviser, and sometimes official Cabinet member. Between administrations, he was sometimes a kingmaker.

Not pictured: Orville Redenbacher. I swear!

This alone would make his journals worth reading.  I mean, he was there. For events like the murders of JFK, RFK and Martin Luther King, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Bay of Pigs, Watergate, Vietnam, the Iranian Hostage Crisis, Grenada, Oliver North, the first Gulf War, and the Hanging Chad fiasco. 

There is a tradeoff, however. Schlesinger is an astonishingly tribal partisan. That doesn't just mean he's a Democrat and tends to disagree with Republicans - heretical Democrats earn just as much of his ire.  If not more, really. Schlesinger never has much time for Jimmy Carter, for instance, and bends over backwards to avoid saying even one remotely positive thing about, say, Ronald Reagan.

Maybe closer to the truth than we remember

Where the book suffers most is Schlesinger's uncompromising man-crush on the Kennedys. He is simply incapable of viewing them as anything other than demigods, sent down to walk among us and die for our sins.  (Interestingly, Schlesinger was an atheist.)  They've been made into legends and martyrs, but JFK wasn't exactly universally effective and wise at the helm. Even more forgotten today is just how divisive Robert Kennedy was, even and especially in his own party.

Schlesinger will occasionally hint at it ("I can't understand how much hatred there is for RFK...") but never gets to the heart of the matter.  Namely, that even vast swaths of his own party saw the Kennedys almost exactly how their descendants are seen today: unreliable, gaffe-prone, and not to be taken seriously.

All this is forgivable - he was good friends with both men (Teddy less so) and nobody is expected to be completely objective about murdered friends and colleagues.

That said, Journals is sometimes most fascinating for the little events - especially that reveal the changing times. Schlesinger's later years are filled with astonishment at the younger generation's fondness for wine (or worse, Perrier) instead of hard liquor at lunch. He refers to all couples as "the Joe Smiths" instead of Joe and Jane Smith. He cannot believe the maid would raise such a fuss about a harmless fondle.

Okay, that last one isn't true - but he was mystified that the intern would raise such a fuss about an innocent blowjob.

Cosmopolis

Five things you didn't know about limousines:

1- According to the infallible wisdom of Wikipedia, the word limousine is "derived from the name of the French region Limousin, because this covered compartment physically resembled the cloak hood worn by the shepherds there."

2- At 70 feet long, with room for 40 people and requiring a crew of three, the world's largest limousine might just plausibly be the Midnight Rider.

3- The "First Limo," or the car used to ferry President Barack Obama, isn't far behind.  It's a 2009 Cadillac "Presidential Limousine," with five-inch armor plating.

4- Heart of a Lion, Wings of a Bat is one of the signature anthems of Limozeen, a mostly fake hair metal band created by the Chapman Brothers, the guys behind Homestar Runner. 

5- I know I've ridden (rode? rided?) in a limo before...but I have absolutely zero memory of it. Weird, huh?


Books are funny.

No. Just no.

They're not (usually) very time-sensitive things, especially if, like me, you spend your time sifting through dozens of smelly used bookstores. 

But once in a while, they'll surprise you.  Just last week, I finished Don DeLillo's Cosmopolis.  The very next day, I happened to be in Victoria's Bay Centre food court - absolutely NOT having any A&W, how dare you suggest such a thing - when I glanced up at the Entertainment News. 

Yup, the book I just read is going to be a movie. Interesting. 

Starring this guy over there. To the right. Yeah, him. 

Yeah, I know.

Sigh.

Right, the book.  Cosmopolis, unlike DeLillo's previous work, met with reviews best called "mixed."  Reaction ranged from "not his best" down to "fucking awful."  (Not an exact quote, but you get the idea.) 

Whatever your reaction, it's certainly an ambitious attempt. Just as every actor deeply and badly wants to play Hamlet, most writers have a secret little altar dedicated to James Joyce's Ulysses...which they believe to be a great novel. The fact that precious few can be bothered to get through the whole thing is part of the appeal; it's a badge of honour thing. Or maybe just pure snobbery.  It's tough to tell.

Eric Packer's Universe. Not pictured: rectal probe

Like Ulysses, Cosmopolis takes place in a single day.  Eric Packer is a multi-millionaire asset manager, but he seems even richer than that. Money literally has zero meaning to him.  He spends the day being driven across New York in search of lost time a haircut. He stops along the way to meet a bizarre collection of characters, and have some fleeting and often quite nasty sex. 

(How nasty? He propositions an employee while having a doctor examine his prostate. That's as much detail as you need.)

The problem? Well, there are several. Packer is completely alien, and not in a good, interesting way. He's not fully realized - you never get a sense of who he is. It's more like DeLillo decided to make his main character always turn left when every other human being would turn right - even (spoiler alert) if turning left meant certain ruin and violent death.

There's special, and then there's different for the sake of being difficult. And that's Packer.

You wish, buddy.

The characrter is most like is probably either Dostoyevsky's Raskolnikov, or Camus' Outsider.  In other words, an existentialist. But again, merely being a distant asshole (possibly a sociopath) does not an existentialist make.

The other, bigger problem?  The book is a sprint, and it doesn't really need to be. We're fleetingly introduced to Packer's killer, who used to work for him, and for whom killing Packer is Super Meaningful. And stuff. But he's just kind of there because DeLillo wanted to kill off his half-formed creation with a Super Meaningful Death. But it's not meaningful just because you say it's meaningful. 

Am I interested to see the movie?  Well, you know how they say the book is always better than the movie?  In this case, the book...well, it's not very good.


So, no.  Even if Robert Pattinson dies.

Snakes with Wings & Gold-digging Ants

Five brave defences of some of Herodotus' wilder claims:

Just ignore the legs.

1- Snakes with Wings sound far-fetched, yes. But only if you want to be all modern and nitpicky. There are several varieties of winged and flying lizards, which look pretty snakelike to my eyes. 

2- Wait, there's more. Some snakes fly - such as (you guessed it) the Flying Snake.  (Or, if you're feeling snooty, Chrysopelea.) It glides by using its ridge scales along its belly, pushing against rough bark surface of tree trunks, allowing it to move vertically up a tree. From there, it "leaps" and glides diagonally down wherever it wants to go.

3- Okay, I can't find any basis for gold-digging ants. But Heordotus is far from the only writer to talk about them, and they appeared in bestiaries well into the middle ages. 

4- Okay, so did Cyclops, the Phoenix and Griffins. But still.

5- Herodotus also described some pretty weird people, too.  Like the Gyzantes, all of whom paint themselves red and eat monkeys.  Not that there's anything wrong with that.

4th Century BCE growth industry

Snakes with Wings and Gold-digging Ants is basically two books: the first section is a first-person travelogue.  Herodotus had been exiled from Halicarnassus after supporting the worst kind of coup d'etat - an unsuccessful one.  His subsequent travels and observations, mostly of Egypt, give us the world's first real travel literature. 

Unless you want to be cute and count The Odyssey, or even Exodus.  And I don't. 

Herodotus is a marvelous travel writer. He notices a lot, from accurate descriptions of animals strange to him but familiar to us, from the plover up to the mighty hippo and crocodile.  He's also a keen observer of people.  His depictions of Egypt's many and varied religious practices are fascinating, but better still are his detailed observations of mummification.  Not merely the process(es), which we still don't completely comprehend today, but the culture of mummification.

As any 19th century Egyptologist could tell you, the Egyptians mummified everything.  Pharaohs, priests, common people, pets, parts of pets - you name it, someone wanted it embalmed.  Once you decide that (a) life continues after death, and (b) you need your body and possessions afterward; (c) embalming everything but the kitchen sink is a natural conclusion. 

Like anything else, this became a class and status issue. The wealthy could afford more and better and more comprehensive procedures, and got them. The poor had to make do with just enough to keep them from revolting. 

"The peasants are always revolting...in odour! Ha ha ha! Old jokes are the best, no?"

The second is very different. It's wholehearted hearsay and rumour-mongering.  That's not really a criticism; after all, Herodotus is admirably honest:

"Up to this point I have confined what I have written to the results of my own observation and research...but from now on the basis of my story will be the accounts given to me by the Egyptians themselves."

That's good to know, because some of what you read after that point is fucking terrifying.  Consider the titular creatures themselves, the Gold-digging ants.

Not pictured: gold.

Eastward of India lies a desert of sand…. There is found in this desert a kind of ant of great size—bigger than a fox, though not so big as a dog…. These creatures as they burrow underground throw up the sand in heaps, just as our own ants throw up the earth…. The sand has a rich content of gold, and this is what the Indians are after when they make their expeditions into the desert…. When the Indians reach the place where the gold is, they fill the bags they have brought with them with sand and start for home again as fast as they can go; for if the ants—if we can believe the Persians’ story—smell them, they at once give chase.




Sorry, what?  Ants the size of FOXES?  That GIVE CHASE?  No way, man.  I saw that movie.

Pharsalia

Five things you didn't know about Nero:

1- His name is synonymous with egotism and debauchery - but this might be (somewhat) unfair. No contemporary sources have survived.

2- That said, did Nero fiddle while Rome burned? Nope. The fiddle hadn't been invented yet.

3- Okay, that's nitpicky. Nero was accused of fiddling while the city burned because he was widely accused of starting it. This is probably unknowable (Nero rushed to blame Christians, a sect previous Emperors mostly ignored) but Nero definitely took advantage of the fire, seizing the opportunity to build a massive palace, the infamous Domus Aurea (Golden House.)

4- Nero's economic policy has been compared to that of recent United States presidents - large-scale public works projects intended to create jobs. In short, Nero believed in the stimulus package.

5- Nero was the last of the "Julio-Claudian" Emperors: Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, and then Nero.

Lucan made this face a lot. It got him killed. Progress is good.

Like a lot of classics, most translations were wooden and sound archaic.

It's one thing to read Shakespeare in his original words, but Lucan wrote in Latin (duh) and for a very contemporary audience - first-century hipsters. He was trying to be the Jon Stewart of his day - avant garde, satirical, and where the worldly types got their news. (You know, instead of the Fair and Balanced loud guy in the Forum.)

Of course, Nero's secret (and not-so-secret) police didn't look too kindly on tame economic criticisms, much less incitement to revolt and assassination.  Lucan's solution was to compose an epic poem about the civil wars between Julius Caesar and Pompey the Great, some 100 years prior. (Pharsalus, in Greece, was the site of the decisive battle.)

Lucan blamed the current political situation on Caesar's victory; an oversimplification, but really not too far off. While the Republic wasn't quite in living memory anymore, it certainly wasn't the distant past, either. Lucan's retelling is a tragedy for the lost Republic and having to endure Emperors.

Nero was an easy Emperor to roll your eyes at (in private.) He ruled Antistius, a top public official, should be put to death for speaking ill of his Emperor at a party. Antistius was far from alone. Nero also rode chariots, sang and danced for literally captive audiences.

Not even the Emperor could make this fashionable

So Lucan was a patriot? Well...maybe. His uncle Seneca had been Nero's tutor and desperately tried to steer the promising young Emperor towards sensible policies before giving up in despair. But Lucan had recently been a favourite of the Emperor's, winning an award at the Neronian Festival (there's that reputation for egomania) for extemporaneous speaking.

The two had a falling out. By some accounts, Nero simply tired of Lucan and moved onto new pets. By others, Nero grew insanely jealous of Lucan (he saw himself as a transcendent artist) and effectively proscribed his best work.

Robert Graves, who wrote I, Claudius (my all-time favourite book) was a man who knew his classical Latin and how to make it relatable, but still authentic. This is a rare skill. Like anything else, language and idiom ages - sometimes, not so well. (When was the last time you called anything groovy? Or tubular?)

This happened a lot under Nero. Also, above and around him.

Graves doesn't put words in Lucan's mouth, but keeps him from sounding like a bad parody of a Shakespearean soliloquy.

Pharsalia is essentially a historical novel - well, historical epic poem, anyway - so there's no worries about spoilers: Caesar wins, the Republic falls, stuff happens, and Emperor Nero makes his citizens applaud his mad dance skills. 

In another sense, though, Pharsalia has a different, depressingly predictable ending - it doesn't. 

It was never completed. Lucan was forced to commit suicide.

In 2010, 105 journalists were killed worldwide. Some things, sadly, have not changed.

The Third Man Factor

Five things you didn't know about "Guardian Angels":


1- About one-third of Britons believe they have their own personal guardian angel.

2- The Catholic Church has never said whether or not each soul has its own guardian angel, so this belief is not a matter of faith. However, the New Advent Catholic Encyclopedia says "this doctrine is clearly discernible" in the Bible. 

3- Belief in guardian angels (called something else, of course) long predates Judaism, and is mentioned in Babylonian and Assyrian monuments. 

4- October 2nd is the unofficial Feast of the Guardian Angels.

5- On December 1st, 2010, The Third Man Factor author John Geiger interviewed Christopher Hitchens about religion. The transcript (and mp3) can be read here. It's well worth your time. 


Charles Darwin and The Third Man Factor author John Geiger have something in common.  Before Darwin explicitly claimed that species change and evolve - and more to the point, that human beings aren't exempt from this process - he first presented the evidence. 

Here, look at all these finches on different islands. They're very different. This eventually led to species evolve. 

(I'm grossly oversimplifying, I know, but bear with me.) 

Leading the way out of the closet

Darwin did this for two reasons. First, the concept and theory of natural selection didn't come to him fully formed, but was shaped by his observations.  These observations - the evidence - gradually drew him towards a coherent (not to mention revolutionary) theory.  Second, he knew that his conclusion (once he reached it) wasn't going to make him very popular. 

John Geiger, I believe, is doing something similar.  Here, look at all these cases of people reporting a shadowy figure who makes them calm and helps them survive dangerous situations. This, it seems, will eventually lead to Guardian Angels exist. 

Whether you believe in God, angels, et cetera, that seems to be the direction Geiger is heading.  He doesn't make his explicit claim in The Third Man Factor - he's still at the evidence-gathering stage -and to be fair, does broach the subject.

Is this the only possible answer?  Of course not. Near-death experiences - the iconic light at the end of the dark tunnel - may be the eternal soul floating to heaven, but they might also be a neurological response to oxygen starvation. Similarly, "third men" might be straightforward hallucinations. The subconscious, knowing it's in deep trouble, reaches deep into its bag of tricks. 

Shackleton's crew. Not pictured: angel

 But whatever you believe the answer is, it's fairly conclusive that something weird and wonderful is happening.  From Ernest Shackleton's famous account of an extra crew member in Antarctica, down through modern explorers and survivors of horrific disasters, there's a mountain of anecdotal evidence. 

The individual stories themselves are, at times, scary, poignant, touching, and chilling. Each is well worth reading.

 Not all third man stories come from famous explorers or 9/11 survivors, of course.  Geiger has a homepage where people can and have shared their own stories. 

The Third Man Factor is a wonderful compilation of odd and mysterious survival stories. But it does leave one thinking the follow-up will be even more shocking. 

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

Five things you didn't know about autism:

1- Autism Spectrum Disorder - actually a range of disorders - occurs in between 3 to 6 children out of every 1,000.

2- Boys are four times more likely than girls to have autism.  Nobody knows why.

3- Michael Fitzgerald, an autism researcher and child psychologist with Dublin's Trinity College, has speculated several notable historical figures were autistic. His list includes Thomas Jefferson, Michelangelo and Isaac Newton.

4- Fitzgerald's list also includes Adolf Hitler, Jeffrey Dahmer and Ted Kaczynski. 

5- There is no cure for autism. There are a variety of treatments and therapies, some of which are "revolutionary" and controversial - many of which attempt to completely remove mercury from the body, either through injections of hormones, or IV drips. Mercury has been linked to autism, but not conclusively.


I'll admit something to you here and now: I vastly prefer nonfiction to fiction. When fiction is bad, it's a waste of time. When nonfiction is bad, at least you might learn something new. Even worse, when I do read fiction, it often tends to be historical fiction, such as Robert Harris' unfinished Cicero trilogy. 

How Christopher copes with the world

I do try and leave my comfort zone every so often, though, because of gems like Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. 

The book's Wikipedia page mentions a film version is in the works. Given the book's success, this was probably inevitable, but I can't say I'm looking forward to it. The book's wonder comes from successfully and believably getting you inside Christopher John Francis Boone's head - and being autistic, Christopher is a hard person to understand.

In truth, Christopher is often a hard person to like. This sounds harsh, and it is. But his parents are divorced, mostly because of the stress of caring for him. Like Rain Man, Christopher is incredibly gifted with numbers, math, and puzzles.  But he's also moody, distant, and occasionally even violent. When overwhelmed by life - which is often - Christopher shuts down, slumps over, and groans loudly to block out the noise. Most devastating for a parent, he loathes being touched - no high-fives, no handshakes, and certainly no hugs. Haddon doesn't pull any punches: living with Christopher is difficult.

This happens a lot. Sometimes with biting.

The story itself - no spoilers, but Christopher decides he must solve the mystery of his neighbour's dead (murdered?) dog - is compelling and even amusing. But the genius is it's told completely from Christopher's perspective.  The world, filled with menacing strangers, is terrifying, bewildering, and unfathomably big.

The movie is being written and directed by Steve Kloves, who's done some of the Harry Potter films. And that's encouraging, I suppose. But I just don't see how he's going to transport us into Christopher's head, or manage to make Christopher as difficult yet somehow lovable. 

There are books I read and set aside, in case I want to read them again "somewhere down the line." And there are a few I know I will read again, very soon. The Curious Incident is one of those precious few.

The Beluga Cafe

Five things you didn't know about inter-species communication

1- Whether or not animals have their own "languages," some species can certainly learn them. Koko the gorilla had a working vocabulary of over 2,000 words in American Sign Language, and often signed complex but comprehensible sentences. Captive bottlenose dolphins in Hawaii can understand (and respond to) basic sentences, including a direction to "be creative" and come up with something on their own. 

2- On April 26, 1998, Koko the Gorilla participated in a live online chat. 

3- When I typed "interspecies" into my Google search bar, the first suggested phrase was "interspecies mating."  I don't know what that says about us, but it says something. 

4- The Department of Fisheries and Oceans estimates the eastern Hudson Bay population of beluga whales dropped from 4,300 in 1985 to 3,000 in 2008.  The beluga whale is officially endangered, but in 2010 most hunting quotas actually increased. 

5- Finnish cultural anthropologist Jöns Carlson speculates that belugas may not be talking to one another in a "language" (as humans define that term). They may use sound instead, to externalize and communalize their own emotional state as it relates to the group’s stability.  (Quoted directly from Interspecies' website)

"I wish they all could be California..."

Do animals talk? Not in words, obviously. But do they communicate?  And if so, can we communicate with them?

Well, of course they communicate.

"Hey, I'm hungry."
"Hey, I'm horny."
"Hey, I know I'm not ordinarily supposed to get into the garbage, but surely that doesn't apply this one time."

But people like The Beluga Cafe author Jim Nollman aren't talking about grunts, groans and tweets here. Sure, your dog barks one way when he wants out, another way when he's hungry, and makes that adorable noise when he's scared. We're not talking about that. 

So what are we talking about? Actual, linguistic communication? Is that possible? Jim Nollman thinks so. Interestingly, he thinks music - not words - are the key. 

He's got a point. Ever hear humpback whales sing? Surely, that's not all random squawking. And as we've seen above, it's not a huge mental leap. But if animals are smart enough to learn our languages, does that mean we're smart enough to learn theirs?

Apparently a documentary

I'd like to believe so. But probably not in my lifetime.  

But if you're looking for an account of Nollman's successes or failures communicating with belugas, The Beluga Cafe will disappoint. They didn't actually see any; the kind of thing that happens in real life, but not conducive for books ostensibly about communicating to animals. 

What emerges instead is a book about conflict. Nollman and his two companions, Jonathan and Daniel - in the Canadian Arctic to "talk to the whales" - are not well-received by the locals.

It's not hard to see why. Three white dudes - two of them insufferable and self-important douchebags - who fashionably claim to respect Native culture and traditions, but don't actually know any, and tend not to like the ones they meet. They come, basically, to preach. The message is different ("stop hunting whales," instead of "Jesus is your saviour") but they never grasp that it amounts to the same thing: we object to your way of life, so change it. 

Of his three companions, Nollman comes closest to grasping the irony, but doesn't quite get there.

The author's reception in Inuvik