Falling in Love with Mongolia

"Falling in Love with Mongolia" is the name of an excellent five-part series by writer Tim Wu at Slate.com. Read the whole thing, and click on the slide show too. It really brought back the memories.

A couple of highlights...

About the terrible food, Wu writes: It is the mutton, the unending mutton, that gets to you. After just a week, I felt like the Troll in The Hobbit who complains, "Mutton yesterday, mutton today, and blimey, if it don't look like mutton again tomorrer."

About the former Mongol Empire, and why it is no more: If you look carefully, there are little signs. The Mongolians walk or ride around like lords of the earth, which, in the Mongolian countryside, they are. Rural Mongolians spend a good amount of time on horseback, suggesting that a cavalry could be raised very quickly. Genghis Khan's face appears on the national vodka brand—perhaps he would leap out of the bottle if you rubbed it the right way. The empire might be just resting: After the nuclear holocaust, the Mongolian hordes will emerge from their gers and retake the world.

And about the perception that Asian men aren't macho: The antidote to any idea that this might be a racial, as opposed to cultural, trait is a trip to Mongolia. Mongolian men in the countryside spend their time riding horses, killing animals, and breaking firewood. They tend to hold their face in a fixed grimace. At times, it is like a country of Daniel Craig impersonators. Along with parts of Latin America, it's probably the most macho place I've ever been. And so, my Asian brothers, if you ever want to know what the extremes of Eastern manhood look like, forget about Jet Li or even Bruce Lee. It's Mongolia where Asia gets tough.

It is a very good series. My only gripe is Wu uses the Russian name of the capital, Ulan Bator. The MONGOLIAN spelling is Ulaanbaatar...

Another Angry Aussie Animal

More tales of misanthropic animals in Australia. This time, it seems a pig is terrorizing a vegetarian animal lover in rural New South Wales.

This lady invited the pig in, was nice to him, and this is how he repays her. Ungrateful animals. At least the pigs in Australia aren't poisonous, though.

We're Alive! We're Alive!

Woo hoo, we haven't all been sucked into a black hole centered on Switzerland!

Scientists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (called CERN to keep us all confused, or maybe it has something to do with being a French acronym) today fired up the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) to recreate the conditions of the Big Bang. And we survived it.

See, some people thought that using the LHC would create a black hole that would swallow up Earth and everybody on it.

But that didn't happen. At least, my molecules do not appear to be being ripped asunder by powerful forces!