Inquiline (n) - An animal that characteristically lives commensally in the nest, burrow, or dwelling place of an animal of another species.

Read, read, read, read, read. Those who read own the world; those who immerse themselves in the internet or watch too much television lose it.

Werner Herzog

On this day in 1940, Polish underground resistance soldier Witold Pilecki was voluntarily captured by the Nazis and sent to Auschwitz to gather and smuggle out information on the camp. He escaped 30 months later, and was executed by the Soviet-backed Polish government in 1948.

Pleonasm (n): The use of more words than are required to express an idea; redundancy. As in the man he said.

The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.

-Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

Today I learned about Müllerian mimicry, “in which species with strong defences evolve to resemble one another. By mimicking similarly coloured species, the warning signal to predators is shared, causing them to learn more quickly at less of a cost to each of the species.”

Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.

Fernando Pessoa

Today I learned about Henry Wickham, an “explorer” and braggart who, in 1876, smuggled rubber seeds out of Brazil to Kew Gardens in England, who in turn used them to grow rubber in Asia, collapsing the Brazilian economy: “The greatest act of biopiracy…maybe in history.”

Pierre’s insanity consisted in the fact that he did not wait, as before, for personal reasons, which he called people’s merits, in order to love them, but love overflowed his heart, and, loving people without reason, he discovered the unquestionable reasons for which it was worth loving them.

-Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, Part Four, Chapter XIX (I bet that reads badass in the Russian)

Prolepsis (n) - The representing of a thing as existing before it actually does or did so. As in he was a dead man before he entered.

It is decidedly difficult to tell a lie when you don’t know the truth.

Péter Esterházy, from this article full of his amazing sentences

A generation that cannot endure boredom will be a generation of little men, of men unduly divorced from the slow processes of nature, of men in whom every vital impulse slowly withers as though they were cut flowers in a vase.

Bertrand Russel, The Conquest of Happiness, 1930, as mentioned in this Aeon article.

On this day in 1942, President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, clearing the way for the incarceration of 112,000 Japanese Americans in prison camps.

Check out this fantastic word: autochthonous au·toch·tho·nous (ô-tŏk′thə-nəs) adjective: 1. Originating or formed in the place where found; indigenous: autochthonous rocks; an autochthonous people; autochthonous folk tales. (American Heritage Dictionary App)

Today I learned that oropolitics is the use and abuse of mountaineering for political purposes. The most notable example of which culminated in the Siachen conflict.

Events in themselves are not so interesting to me as the conditions that led to the events. These conditions are often quite commonplace, and yet full of what is imminent. Immanent and imminent.

David Goldblatt, from this Places Journal article

The whole usefulness of education consists only in the memory of it, for just as having heard something does not profit one who cannot understand, likewise having understood is not valuable to one who either will not or cannot remember.

Hugh of Saint-Victor, Chronicle (c. 1130)

Why, yes, I did get a new Lapham’s Quarterly in the mail earlier this week: “Memory.” Having a ball.

In true reality, there is nothing but relationships.

• Piet Mondrian (via a MoMA placard)

One of my favorite acts of early technoanarchy, the Max Headroom broadcast signal intrusion, occurred on this day in 1987. The perpatrators were never identified.

The movers and shakers depend on the visions of the dreamers: those for whom the world is real are nothing without the others for whom the world is an idea: the two have to work together to reshape the chaos into a world we can live in.

• Gregor von Rezzori, in Abel and Cain

On this day in 1907, railroad engineer Jesús García saved the entire town of Nacozari de García by driving a burning train full of dynamite six kilometers away before it could explode. Hence the town’s name.

Today I learned that in 1831, French satirical artist Charles Philipon “published a drawing of the king’s head, metamorphosing in four stages to a rotting poire (pear-head), also French slang for ‘fool’ or ‘simpleton.’ Philipon was hauled into court and, as legend has it, avoided prison by demonstrating the resemblance—of king to pear—to the jury, by means of sketching and (very likely) verbal panache. He was acquitted of the charge of defamation.”

That’s a win!

Today I also learned that Standard Oil founders John D Rockefeller and William Rockefeller Jr. were sons of snake oil salesman William A Rockefeller Sr. aka Dr. Bill Levingston.

Today I learned that Waylon Jennings gave up his seat on the flight that crashed and killed Buddy Holly, The Big Bopper, and Ritchie Valens in 1959.

You know, people say that things move faster nowadays, but Napoleon’s empire only existed for ten years.