language

Cooking is a human universal. No society is without it....Without cooking, the human brain (which consumes 20-25% of the body’s energy) could not keep running.

For Salvador Dalí, the point of his painting was “to be showered with a diarrhoea of gold, money and cheques”... Even the mustache was a fraud...

As they ride the wind, vultures seek dead things, not dying things, using a sense of smell far more highly developed than any other bird's. They can detect a dead mouse under leaves from 200 feet up. They are discriminating, preferring corpses between two and four days dead....Vultures, whose name comes from vellere, Latin for to tear, begin their eating at vulnerable spots on the carcass—the anus and eyes. All that being said, you really wouldn't want to live in a world without them...

Quite a few people walk around feeling superior to, or at least more intelligent than, animals. Because we have language, because we have culture and make music, art, and so forth. And because we make and use tools. But it turns out that quite a lot of animals make and use tools. And here's a fine page listing (and giving video for) ten of the more interesting instances of toolmaking by animals.

Consider nature: without watches, monarch butterflies know to migrate from North America to Central America at the same time each year; cicadas emerge from the ground after exactly thirteen or seventeen years for a few fleeting weeks of frenzied mating...Now consider people and modern timekeeping.

Tragicomic distinction: airport as metaphor for speed, transience, and postwar optimism and progress vs. airport as mall, panopticon, fiercely guarded border, and site of hijackings... Alastair Gordon's Naked Airport has musings about all this and more.