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May 5, 2007 at 5:58 pm #26892Leapy LeoMember
I would like to share a passage from one of Mr Bryson’s books that I liked so much I copied it down:
As soon as the mountains were built they began, just as ineluctably, to wear away. For all their seeming permanence, mountains are exceedingly transient features. In Meditations at 10,000 feet the writer and geologist James Trefil calculates that a typical mountain stream will carry away about 1,000 cubic feet of mountain in a year mostly in the form of sand granules and other suspended particles. That is equivilant to the capacity of the average sized dump truck – clearly not much at all. Imagine a dump truck arriving once a year at the base of a mountain and, filling up with a single load and driving off, not to reappear for another twelve months. As such a rate it seems impossible that it could ever cart away a mountain, but infact given sufficient time that is precisely what would happen. Assuming a mountain 5,000 million cubic feet of mass – roughly the size of Mount Washington – a single stream could level it in about 500 million years.
From Bill Bryson’s “A walk in the woods”.
May 6, 2007 at 2:07 am #160616PhilipModeratorThank you for sharing that wonderful passage with us, Leapy. I look forward to seeing more…please keep them coming.
Thanks again!
May 6, 2007 at 2:53 am #160615LucifinaMemberHmmm, makes you think doesn’t it? How life seems so immortal at times or just…i don’t know…there (not to sound unappreciative or anything). Truly though, what is life other than another part of death?
In one of my moods I guess:)
Thanks for the post…it was interesting. Find any on life, please post, I’d like to read.
May 6, 2007 at 10:10 am #160618Leapy LeoMemberThanx for the replies Philip and Lucifina.
I find this stuff fascinating.
Of course there are more factors than just mountain streams at work in the process. When you take into account wind and rain [which are far more more aggressive factors in erosion than streams] you begin to see that a mountain hasn’t a hope in hell of lasting forever.
I’m sorry I don’t have the book to hand anymore as I borrowed it from a friend, otherwise I would quote further…
May 6, 2007 at 2:52 pm #160617PhilipModeratorLeapy Leo;218095 wrote:Thanx for the replies Philip and Lucifina.I find this stuff fascinating.
Of course there are more factors than just mountain streams at work in the process. When you take into account wind and rain [which are far more more aggressive factors in erosion than streams] you begin to see that a mountain hasn’t a hope in hell of lasting forever.
I’m sorry I don’t have the book to hand anymore as I borrowed it from a friend, otherwise I would quote further…
Leapy, it doesn’t have to be just Bill Bryson’s stuff. Please feel free to share with us any thought-provoking extracts you happen to find or read. It is so refreshing to find these great nuggets posted on a forum like this. I should be reading more books (I used to, in my younger days) but now I’m just too glued to my computer :confused:
August 14, 2007 at 6:01 pm #160619Leapy LeoMemberReading this section from my second Bill Bryson read The Life and Times of The Thunderbolt Kid [Travels Through My Childhood] I wondered if anybody else had been puzzled as to exactly what “The McCarthy era” entailed in the USA.
I have so often encountered the phrase in other novels, in newspapers and stories, that I hoped I might give some clarity to other members by quoting BB’s excellent summary of what actually happened.
“No one exploited the [“Cold War” fear of Communism] better than Joseph R McCarthy, Republican senator from Wisconsin. In 1950, in a speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, he claimed to have in his pocket a list of twohundred and five Communists working in the State Department. The next day he claimed to have another list with fiftyseven names on it. Over the next four years McCarthy waved many lists, each claiming to show a different number of Communist operatives. In the course of his spirited ramblings he helped to ruin many lives without ever producing a single promised list. Not producing evidence was becoming something of a trend.
“Others brought additional prejudices into play. John Rankin, a senior congressman from Mississippi, sagely observed: “Remember, Communism is Yiddish. I understand that every member of the Politburo around Stalin is either Yiddish or married to one, and that includes Stalin himself.” Against such men, McCarthy looked almost moderate and fairly sane.
“Such was the hysteria that it wasn’t actually necessary to have done anything wrong to get in trouble. In 1950, three FBI agents published a book called Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television, accusing 151 celebreties – among them Leonard Bernstein, Lee J Cobb, Burgess Merideth, Orson Welles, Edward G Robinson and the stripper Gypsy Lee Rose – of various seditious acts. Among the shocking misdeeds of which performers stood accused were speaking out against religious intolerance, opposing fascism and supporting world peace and the United Nations. None had any connection with the Communist party or had ever shown any Communist sympathies. Even so, many of them couldn’t find work for years afterwards unless [like Edward G Robinson] they agreed to appear before HUAC as a friendly witness and name names.
“Doing anything at all to help Communists became essentially illegal. In 1951, Dr Ernest Chain, a naturalised Briton who had won a Nobel Prize six years earlier for helping to develop penicillin, was barred from entering the United Syates because he had recently travelled in Czechoslovakia, under the auspices of the World Health Organisation, to help start a penicillin plant there. Humanitarian aid was only permissible, it seems, so long as those bei9ng saved believed in free markets. Americans likewise found themselves banned from travel. Linus Pauling, who would eventually win two Nobel prizes, was stopped at Idlewind Airport in New York while boarding a plane to Britain, where he was to be honoured by the Royal Society, and had his passport confiscated on the grounds that he had once or twice publicly expressed a liberal thought.
“It was even harder for those who were not American by birth. After learning that a Finnish born citizen named William Heikklin had in his youth briefly belonged to the Communist party, Immigration Service employees tracked him down to San Francisco, arrested him on his way home from work, and bundled him onto an aeroplane bound for Europe, with nothing but a dollar in change and the clothes he was wearing. Not until his plane touched down the following day did officials inform his frantic wife that her husband had been deported. They refused to tell her where he had been sent.
“In perhaps the most surreal moment of all, Arthur Miller, the playwright, while facing congressional rebuke and the possiblity of prison for refusing to betray friends and theatrical associates, was told that the charges would be dropped if he would allow the chairman of HUAC, Francis E Walter, to be photographed with Miller’s famous and dishy wife, Marilyn Monroe. Miller declined.
“In 1954, McCarthy finally undid himself. He accused General George Marshall, the man behind the Marshall Plan and a person of unquestionable rectitude, of treason, a charge quickly shown to be preposterous. Then he took on the whole of the United States Army, threatening to expose scores of submersive senior staff that he claimed the Army knowingly shielded within its ranks. In a series of televised hearings lasting thirtysix days in the spring of 1954 and known as the Army-McCarthy hearings, he showed himself to be a bullying, blustering buffoon of the first rank without a shred of evidence against anyone – though infact he had always shown that. It just took this long for most of the nation to realise it.
“Later that year McCarthy was severely censured by the Senate – a signal humiliation. he died three years later in disgrace. But the fact is that had he been just a tiny bit smarter or more likeable, he might well have become President.”
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