"In my reading about the rain forest, however, I have found very little description of what it's like to actually be in a rain forest. There's a good reason for this, the same reason that little girls' baby dolls don't smell like actual babies. Not that the rain forest smells. You'd think something so wet, hot, and biological would stink like boiled Times Square, but it doesn't. Jungle has a nice fresh scent, the reason being that there's so much life in the jungle that anything which dies or is excreted or even gets drowsy is immediately a picnic for something else." -P.J. O'Rourke, All The Trouble In The World
My neighbors probably think I'm nuts for occasionally cackling like a loon on the front porch...
11 comments:
That man is a genius.
I love that book so hard it's one of the few I brought to college with me to sit on my grand six inches of shelf space. I also think it should be required reading for conservationists.
when Mike started his sneaky campaign to unliberal-ize me, having me read P.J. O'Rourke was his first strategy.
It worked.
Seen Bill Whittle's Palin piece?
at least you have a legitimate reason to be cackling on your porch. I do it for kicks.
I buy 2nd hand copies of O'Rourke every chance I get and give them away to promising lefties-who-never-learned-to-think. Converted a few. As the twig is bent...and I do mean bent...so grows the tree.
In the Army, they make maintenance manuals in cartoon form to make them actually readable to the enlisted, so they're not ignored, but truly read. O'Rourke's writing to me is the same: it takes what could be as boring and staid as any ideological writing, and jazzes it up in a humorous story form.
For example, when talking about the Balkans, he says that the Serbs mostly look like Belushi in Animal House, while Croats look like the rest of the gang in the fraternity. Isn't that better than a five sentence description of the ethnic differences between the two?
Maybe it's because he writes with humor instead of heavy, pondering thought, but I think P.J.'s the most underrated political writer today.
Sorry to report but we thought it was kinda decaying and stinky about and around Tikal, and when we went up to Uaxactun. We were the first outside people in three years to sign-in on the register at Uaxactun, in October 1988. Maybe it depends on the mud underneath but there was an odor that got into the clothes and stayed. It took a couple washings to get it out once we returned home. There was a machinegun emplacement at the crossroads on the way up to Chichicastenengo, they were sill fighting in places.
I found the floor of the jungle pretty clean because of the constant gleaning of the little animals and millions of insects, especially the ants. And men on march with gear stink enough to mask anything else except potent polecats.
I thought my eyes were going to pop out of my sockets from laughter before I finished the preface to "Parliament of Whores" after my professor suggested I read it. It didn't take long to round up all his other books.
They're books that don't seem to come back when lended out. :)
You can find a temperate rain forest and experience that wonder up close and personal. All you have to do is take a flight to Seattle!
http://anthony-pacheco.com/2008/08/02/god/
Post a Comment