Chris Navin

R.I.P.

Some tragedies happen because of a lack of knowledge, and a lack of knowledge distribution when it is matters most.

There were people sitting in homes and businesses in Rolling Fork MS, who knew it was storming, and knew they should probably keep an eye on the weather, and knew how to stay safe in most situations.

But they didn’t know there was an EF-4 or EF-5 monster bearing-down. They didn’t know they might have had minutes to live. These wind-speeds can sweep walls from foundations.

If these poor folks even knew what the storm-chaser driving-by knew, when he knew it, this could have made the difference.

It’s terrifying to think there could have been someone in that vehicle, hovering a few hundred feet in the air, being swept around this beast.

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Accurate prediction[s] save lives.

Some of the experience of storm-chasers, and collected knowledge from that experience, already exists but needs to be channeled through complex and more predictive modeling to establish the science within these monsters.

This is where the new frontiers should be pushed.

The Short, Happy Life Of Francis Macomber, by Ernest Hemingway:

‘Francis Macomber had, half an hour before, been carried to his tent from the edge of the camp in triumph on the arms and shoulders of the cook, the personal boys, the skinner and the porters. The gun-bearers had taken no part in the demonstration. When the native boys put him down at the door of his tent, he had shaken all their hands, received their congratulations, and then gone into the tent and sat on the bed until his wife came in.‘

Honor matters…but:

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‘Bartleby, The Scrivener: A Story Of Wall Street‘

–Herman Melville

Catch-up with Turkey, Nippers, and Ginger Nut; their daily routines at the office.

Our narrator:

‘I am one of those unambitious lawyers who never addresses a jury, or in any way draws down public applause; but in the cool tranquillity of a snug retreat, do a snug business among rich men’s bonds and mortgages and title-deeds. All who know me consider me an eminently safe man. The late John Jacob Astor, a personage little given to poetic enthusiasm, had no hesitation in pronouncing my first grand point to be prudence; my next, method.’

We all want to be alone, and to be with others, and Bartleby…Bartleby would just prefer not to:

‘Ah Bartleby! Ah humanity! ‘

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Old Playboy MLK Jr interview here.

Worth a read:

‘That night will never leave my memory. It was the angriest I have ever been in my life.’

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A short story by Flannery O’Connor, as sent in by a reader:

Hmmm…

‘He had not walked five hundred yards down the road when he saw, within reach of him, the plaster figure of a Negro sitting bent over on a low yellow brick fence that curved around a wide lawn. The Negro was about Nelson’s size and he was pitched forward at an unsteady angle because the putty that held him to the wall had cracked. One of his eyes was entirely white and he held a piece of brown watermelon.’

Redemption, mercy, original sin, and a decent short-story leaving you not knowing what to think, exactly.