LAPHAM'S QUARTERLY

I've started reading the spring issue of LAPHAM'S QUARTERLY, whose subject is animals.  Just today I read an essay about the taxidermic displays at New York's American Museum of Natural History.

One of the subjects in the Boston bombing had the first name Tamerlane, so I've been reading about the original Tamerlane on wikipedia.  In his forty-year career of conquest and destruction, he killed something like five percent of the world's population!  Christians had had a small presence in Persia and Central Asia, but as a faithful Moslem he wiped them out, much like Catholic Spain would obliterate its Moslem and Jewish communities a century later.

It seems ridiculous to me that the surviving suspect should face a federal charge of using weapons of mass destruction.  It's one thing with a real WMD like an A-bomb, which can devastate more than one state.  And trying to blow up an airliner is different, because aviation is a federal matter.  But it seems to me that a mere pressure-cooker bomb like this should clearly be a state matter. (The politicians calling for a death sentence are contemptible, especially "liberals" like Senator Charles Schumer.)

Today I reached the end of my book on Portuguese grammar.  That language actually has a future subjunctive!  In Portugal they have the expression "oxala," which comes from the Arabic "inshallah," meaning "God willing." (Like many Spanish and Portuguese words that start with al-, it goes back to the Middle Ages when Arabic-speaking Moslems dominated the region.) Now I've started translating that book of Portuguese folktales.

At choir practice we're doing several opera pieces along with the folksongs.  Tonight we rehearsed the gypsies & bullfighters chorus from LA TRAVIATA.  Giuseppe confirmed that this concert will be his last one. (He'll be 75 in June, and age is finally catching up with him.)