Snark Week: Backyard Domestic Terrorists

By: | July 24, 2017

Welcome to Snark Week at LWON.

A number of years ago, when my wife was still in college, a prowler tried to break into her tiny bungalow in Berkeley, California. She heard him, first on the roof then at the door, furiously trying to get in. Normally she would rely on the dogs that lived with her (a great Dane and golden retriever) but she could hear them across the yard whimpering in fear.

So she called the Berkeley cops, who quickly came onto the scene with guns drawn.

“Ma’am, are you okay?” one said through the door.

“Yes, thank God you’re here. The intruder was just here a minute ago.”

The brave cop turned the corner and came face-to-face with her assailant. And it was worse than he could have ever imagined.

“Ma’am,” he said gravely, “I think your burglar is a raccoon.”

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Welcome to SNARK WEEK 2017!

By: | July 24, 2017

2017 seems to be shaping up to be the Year of Fear. Fear of terrorism, fear of too much Donald, fear of not enough Donald, fear of economic collapse, Brexit, socialism, fascism, fanaticism, cultism, existentialism, euphemism.

All of it is very scary and all of it deserves endless hand-wringing on cable news. And this week, cable news will be offering you one more thing to be scared of: sharkism. However, we at The Last Word on Nothing feel that sharks get way too many slices of the old fear pie and so in response we present Snark Week.

Forget hammerheads and makos, welcome to the terrifying and adorable world of kittens, puppies and fluffy little bunnies. Don’t be fooled by their cute exterior, be afraid. Behind every doe-eyed hamster lies a buck-toothed monster and inside every chubby little panda head simmers a desire to destroy all you hold dear!

The Last Word

By: | July 22, 2017

July 17-21, 2017

Ann is reading Colm Tóibín’s House of Names, and starts the week thinking about ancient Greece:  I started to wonder about the strange discrepancy between these revenge-addled murderers and the rational, educated ancient Greeks who were the foundation of Western civilization; who founded much of our sculpture, architecture, philosophy, literature, math, and science; and who told these terrible stories over and over.

Almost a century ago, Isabel Cooper accompanied scientific expeditions to the tropics, documenting biodiversity with watercolors. Helen is fascinated: On Saturday, I happened to be looking at Isabel Cooper’s art with her great-granddaughter, moaning at how we couldn’t imagine ever being that good at watercolors. . . Just look at this sloth. Doesn’t it look like it has wisdom to impart?

Christie celebrates the many pleasures of singletrack. What I love is that riding singletrack makes me feel fully present in my body, fully aware of its relationship to my surroundings and fully capable. 

Beware: next week is Shark Week. Beware more: next week is Snark Week. But Erik gives a preview: …the most annoying part of Shark Week is all the faux science. I don’t mean megalodons and mermaids, I mean the illusion that we know anything about these animals.

And on Friday, I write about lipstick. Sort of.

Come back soon—Snark Week is upon us!

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Art by Isabel Cooper, courtesy of Wildlife Conservation Society Archives

What’s My Lipstick?

By: | July 21, 2017

The rumors are true: I’m kind of a slob. In high school, I wore baggy pants during the day and boxer shorts to volleyball practice. In college, I wore pajama bottoms to morning classes. I also wore them at least once on an afternoon coffee that turned out to be a date.

Recently, while at a wonderfully dirty camp in the mountains, a friend and I were talking about what we wore when we took the kids to school. I looked down at my holey yoga pants and my sweatshirt and my dusty running shoes and said that I looked like this pretty much all the time.

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We Humans Know Nothing About Sharks

By: | July 20, 2017

Next week is Shark Week, which means that we at the Last Word will be spending the week specifically not talking about sharks. Instead, we will scour the globe for far more dangerous and adorable critters in a yearly tradition called Snark Week.

And while I might argue that Snark Week is a far bigger deal than Shark Week, I’ll allow that a few people will also be watching shark documentaries starting on Sunday.

Like any passionate shark lover, I once adored shark flicks. The brave scientist pressing into the unknown, the cool gadgets, the thrashing of a hippo-sized toothy fish from the deep that quickly returns from whence it came – this is the stuff of obsession for any nerdy 11-year-old kid.

But today, most of these movies make me want to wretch. It’s not just the puffy-chest posing and the gravely-voiced narrators, it’s the whole vibe. Sharks on Shark Week aren’t really animals anymore, they’re props. And increasingly the stars aren’t scientists, they’re stuntmen like Dickie Chivell, who gets on surfboard-like things to see if he can tempt a white shark to bite him or Micheal Phelps, who … I honestly don’t know what the hell that guy has to do with sharks.

This isn’t David Attenborough, this is Jackass. Danger porn.

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Why Is Singletrack So Awesome?

By: | July 19, 2017

I never knew it needed explaining until someone asked me — why is singletrack so much more fun than wider trails like double track or dirt roads? We’re talking here about mountain biking and the allure of the singletrack trail — a narrow path, usually 18 to 24 inches wide, that meanders through a given terrain.

The most obvious answer is that a singletrack is more aesthetically pleasing than a wider road. Continue reading →

Wild-Animal Painting in the Jungle

By: | July 18, 2017

A watercolor of a snake's head and a coiled snake

It’s not obvious how to draw a snake. Here, let Isabel Cooper tell you about it, in a 1924 article she wrote for The Atlantic Monthly.

For instance, there’s no such thing as a school of snake artists, so when the problem of making a portrait of a snake presented itself I had to think up the technique for myself. There are many odd little worries connected with this problem, such as the invention of the proper anaesthetic for deadly reptiles, to put them out of the misery of posing and yet allow the colors of life to linger from day to day.

Unlike birds and butterflies, she explained, the snakes and frogs don’t look so nice after you preserve them and put them in a museum collection.

Most remarkable and significant in the appearance of most of these creatures—and soonest extinguished by death—are their eyes. This is especially true of snakes. The instant they pass, a dreadful mildew creeps up over the sparkling black pupil and the decoration of the brilliant iris, until the eye looks like a mouldering moonstone.

In 1920, photography couldn’t touch the glory of these animals. But watercolor could. Cooper painted this snake’s portrait at a field station called Kartabo in British Guiana (now Guyana), established by the explorer William Beebe.

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The Atreides vs the Ancient Greeks

By: | July 17, 2017
Clytemnestra just murdered Agamemnon

I’d been reading a book by Colm Tóibín called House of Names.  The house is the House of Atreus; Tóibín explained through a character why he substituted “names,” but I didn’t understand it.  He took the story pretty faithfully from the plays of Sophocles, Aeschylus, and Euripedes about one or all members of the family.  The family was dreadful, every one of them, and Tóibín made each individual dreadfulness understandable, as did the original Greek playwrights.  The family is soaked in its own blood, generation after generation; crime begets murder which bets revenge killing and more revenge killing and revenge killing that never stops. The translator of the Greek plays, Robert Fagles, calls it an “inherited infection.”

Somewhere in the middle, I started to wonder about the strange discrepancy between these revenge-addled murderers and the rational, educated ancient Greeks who were the foundation of Western civilization; who founded much of our sculpture, architecture, philosophy, literature, math, and science; and who told these terrible stories over and over. Continue reading →