If you haven’t seen the Ken Burns special on the national parks you are missing a treat. I think Burns has a mixed record, but on this one, he has nailed it. Of course, the scenery is stunningly beautiful, and the edting is clever and professional. Of course, also, the research for both text and visual materials is first rate and would do any historian proud. The narration and voice-overs are very good. But, for me, the biggest jolt was in the discovery of how interesting the people are, and about how little I really knew about any of them. My series favorite, so far anyway, is John Muir. Everybody knows the name, and a boatload of Amercians have visited Muir woods near San Francisco, but exactly how deep and complicated a person he was came through in the show, especially in the power of his writing. And, he’s not the only one. Almost all the people appearing, whether as heros or villains, wrote and spoke with a compelling power that makes you pay attention. It also underscors how far public discourse has fallen, and how impoverished our expressions have becomed. Even the simplest letters to friends are marvels of concision, choice of words, and aptness of comparison. And these are ordinary blokes, remember, not university grads. When you listen to the dreadful word salads tossed out by people who hold or aspire to high office, and compare them to these works of ordinary citizens, it’s enough to make you despair of the country’s future. How is it possible that the politicians of the 19th century could express themselves so clearly and forcefully, when our contemporary leaders can produce only ungrammatical stammerings? What happened?

Google has opened for examination and testing a new product called The Wave. It blends into one interface several functions such as Wiki, blogs, email and others. The Wave is intended as a “sharing” software package working in real time. Some 100,000 testers were recruited earlier by Google and now their suggestions will be considered for incorporation into the final release. Things are happening.

The Wave
The Wave

Time here equates with interest. Tina Brown, formerly editor of the New Yorker and other mags and now running a blog about journalism called The Daily Beast has signed a deal which will help authors get books published while the topic they address is still, well, topical. Ms. B has a point. The present gear-up cycle is too slow in many cases to get a book into draft, edited, approved and produced while people are still interested in the subject. Of course, you can run a sloppy job through without much difficulty, but I’m sure that Tina Brown has higher standards. Perseus Publishing Group will issue books under the Beast Books imprint, and the expectation is that writers will spend no more than three months working up the books, which will appear in e-format initially. A paperback version may be issued as well, if interest and demand suggest this is a good move. It’s an interesting experiment, but don’t expect too much in the way of contributions to world literature. I think celebrity bios and more detailed treatments of current topics already covered on The Beast are more likely candidates, at least at first. Ms. Brown mentioned that she foresees the typical Beast book as running about 150 pages. There are some precedents that other publshers have launched, and some of them have been quite successful. So, again, we’ll see.

Beast

It was introduced on this day in 1792. The revolutionaries of the French Republic wanted to break with the past in every way possible, and introduce new ways of doing familiar things. They replaced the set of customary weights and measures with what we now call the metric system. And they junked the old Gregorian calendar in favor of a new one, a “rational” creation. There were twelve months, each of thirty days, and a month contained 3 “decades” or “weeks” of ten days. The last day in each “decade” was a day of rest. At the end of the year there were five consecutive holidays. The months were renamed with poetic titles such as Brumaire “foggy or misty”, roughly February, and Thermidor “heat bringer”, roughly August. The whole contrivance was to mark the course of that very special new something, the French Republic. So, Sept.22, 1792 became 1 Vendémiaire of An I, the first day of the first month called Winegiver, in the first year of the Republic. It lasted until 1805, when Napoleon returned the country to the Gregorian observances. It never really caught on among the people at large, and those who had to do business outside the territory of the Republic had to keep constantly calculating and converting to sure the equivalent dates on contracts and shipping assignments were correct. Many were displeased at the loss of a day off, and I have to say that a ten-day week does seem like an awfully long haul. Napoleon wanted to dump all the trappings of the Republic and get back to bare-faced monarchy, with himself as bare-faced monarch, so he was not reluctant to see it go.
WIRED has a good story about it.
Calendar

Norman E. Borlaug, the father of the so-called Green Revolution, died in Dallas over the weekend at the age of 95. Borlaug was a plant scientist who researched and developed new forms of high-yield grains. He was widely credited with having saved millions from the horrors of starvation and millions more from the misery of chronic undernourishment and slow death. Borlaug was awarded the Nobel, but that doesn’t seem anything like enough as a sign of appreciation.