Amazing work by the National Geographic photography team

In the past, the National Geographic would routinely include maps, diagrams, and other material in special inserts inside the magazine, and some of these maps are among the most beautiful ones I've seen.

That practice seems greatly reduced nowadays, but in the latest issue there is such an insert, with a detailed map showing the major river systems and drainage basins that emanate out from the Himalayas, the Tian Shan, the Hindu Kush, and the other ranges of the Tibet Plateau.

And, on the back side of the map, is the most amazing photograph of Mount Everest that I think I've ever seen, or probably ever will see, blown up to a gorgeous six square foot image.

The photograph is panoramic, covering a 290 degree field of vision, and it is actually a composite image, stitched together from many separate pictures taken from an elevation of 27,000 feet above sea level, in mid-air.

Wait, you say! How can a picture be taken from mid-air from 27,000 feed above sea level?

The photography team hiked up to a camp at 23,000 feet at the top of East Rongbuk Glacier.

Then they deployed a camera-equipped drone and were able to pilot it 4,000 feet higher into the air, to a position where it could hover at 26,500 feet above the North Col of Mount Everest, approximately 1.5 miles away from the peak of Everest itself, and the drone took 26 ultra-high-definition images.

Then they successfully recovered the drone, took it to the National Geographic photography labs, and used computer software to stitch together the photos into the astonishing panoramic image.

Lovely!

Read more on the National Geographic website.

Down they go

I've been there.

I've seen them.

This is fine with me: City of Richmond Begins Taking Down Confederate Monuments

The city of Richmond, Virginia, took down a statue of Gen. Stonewall Jackson on Wednesday as part of a broader push to remove roughly a dozen Confederate-era monuments on city land.

I have to concede, however, that invoking the Coronavirus is just a tiny bit troubling:

Richmond Mayor Levar Stoney ordered the removal of statues on city property, bypassing the new state law’s timetable by extending emergency powers granted by the governor. The mayor framed the expedited removals as in the interest of public safety that is threatened by demonstrators gathering and potentially spreading the coronavirus, as well as injuring themselves or others toppling the monuments themselves. The 39-year-old Democratic mayor, “bucking advice from the city attorney and relying on emergency powers, dispatched a crew to take down the statue after the City Council delayed a vote on removing it along with three others owned by the city along the avenue,” the Washington Post reports. “In addition to Jackson and Davis, the other two city-owned statues on the avenue honor Confederate figures J.E.B. Stuart and Matthew Fontaine Maury.”

But I'm not there. And I'm no fan of the statues. And I can only imagine the frustration that the foot-dragging is causing. And I'd say it's, oh, at least 100 years past time.

Check that. It's 155 years past time.

So, Mayor Stoney, let's move forward.

The Witch Elm: a very short review

Surely I qualify as a Tana French addict.

For one thing I have read every single one of her books, including the most recent The Witch Elm.

For another thing, I can't stop raving about her work to anyone who gives me a chance.

French is best known for her Dublin Murder Squad books, so The Witch Elm represents a bit of a diversion. True, it is still a murder mystery set in Dublin, and Dublin Murder Squad detectives feature prominently, but here they are not the protagonists of the novel.

Instead, our hero is Toby, a sort of slackabout 20-something who has made it this far through life without doing anything meaningful, and who isn't really quite sure why. "I've always considered myself to be, basically, a lucky person," says Toby, "I managed to go through life without any of the standard misfortunes you hear about."

Toby isn't really lucky, of course. He is privileged, protected, coddled, and nursed by his cocoon of friends and family and their resources, and somehow he doesn't even notice them all as they are doing so. "Bad things just fall out of your head," says Toby's cousin Susanna, referring to Toby's extraordinarily selective memory.

As French matures as a writer, gone is the lyrical softness of her early novels, which always to me seemed to be swathed in a soft mist. In its place comes a directness and bluntness which is surely more accurate and appropriate to the emotions she is wrestling with in her stories, even if it can be rather a bit more jarring to the reader.

Silence again, and those glances. I could feel them considering, not how much was safe to tell me, but how much I would understand.

"Has there ever been someone," Susanna said, "who treated you like you weren't a person? Not because of anything you'd done; just because of what you were. Someone who did whatever they wanted to you. Anything they felt like." Her eyes on me were unblinking and so bright that for a wild moment I was afraid of her. "And you were totally powerless to do anything about it. If you tried to say anything, everyone thought you were ridiculous and whiny and you should quit making such a fuss because this is normal, this is the way it's supposed to be for someone like you. If you don't like it, you should have been something else."

"Of course there hasn't," Leon said. Something in his voice brought back the kid he had been, scuttling along school corridors, eyes down, huddled under the weight of his bookbag. "Who would ever?"

"If you don't like it, you should have been something else." It's not Burns's poetic "Man's inhumanity to man", but French's hard-knuckled prose is just as accurate, just as effective, just as on target.

I can't say that The Witch Elm is escapist fiction, or summertime reading. As with each one of French's novels, after I read it I found myself spending weeks reflecting, introspecting, decompressing.

But what I can say is that, as soon as French publishes her next book, I'll be first in line at the book store.

True, true, it's all true!

Randall Munroe reminisces about the old days.

It's all true; I was there. I even remember my day when I had to drive the van.

Oh, you young whippersnappers, you have it so easy now...

How is your county doing?

Alameda County recently released an interesting summary of the state of affairs: Alameda County Reopening Plan.

The data is already a few weeks out of date (most of the data was accurate up to June 10), but the document I think is more interesting as an overall summary of what is being tracked, what you need to know, and how you can best be part of the solution.

Keep on Keepin' on: a very short review

I very much enjoyed Keep on Keepin' On, the absolutely lovely story of Clark Terry and Justin Kauflin.

You don't really need to know much about the history of American Jazz or about piano or trumpet, though you might enjoy the movie more if you do.

At its heart, Keep on Keepin' on is about people connecting with people, and about two wonderful talents who somehow find each other and share a most remarkable collaboration.

Interesting stock market data point

Shared without a lot of commentary: One out of Five Investors Sold All of Their Stocks

The stock market falls because people want to sell and people want to sell because the stock market falls.

Fidelity has the receipts. They showed that nearly one in five investors sold all of their stocks some time between February and May.