Book review: The Island of the Day Before, Umberto Eco

I just finished The Island of the Day Before, by Umberto Eco. The original is in Italian, I have the English translation. It seems like a good novel to review here, as it has a smell of physics and mathematics, philosophy and history about it. The subject is set in the 17th century and has to do with a sort of castaway.

Where the bee sucks, there suck I

The mass media’s latest assault on public confidence is a series of articles about the mass deaths of bees. As is usual, the articles either misquote statistics or give statistics that are carefully worded in such a way that one is unable to determine how significant the effect is.

A Short History of San Antonio, part I (general Texas history)

The Texas Folklore Society had its annual meeting in San Antonio, Texas this year and I thought I would write a few paragraphs describing the history of San Antonio. Unfortunately, this has gotten way out of hand. I’ll call this the first of two posts.

Texas Folklore Society gets a new Fellow

My aunt, Frances Vick was honored by the Texas Folklore Society this past week in San Antonio, largely for publishing many Texas folklore books over the years.

Ticks

When I was a boy, an inevitable consequence of tramping around in the East Texas pasture and woods was that one would end up with ticks. Ticks are small blood sucking insects that tend to pick out the most sensitive parts of ones body, stick a barbed thingy in and glue themselves on for a few days. If you have difficult imagining this, perhaps photos and movies will help explain. When one finds a tick on oneself, there is a presecribed series of events that are required to remove them. If one simply grabs them, then the head is left in your skin and it will fester badly.