pumpkinstrokemarrow

Further evidence that we live in a meta rather than a real world, by which I mean that we are much keener on talking about things than doing things. I wanted to get a quick overview of the animal kingdom. Animals, arthropods, chordates, insectivores and so on. So I ask Mr G. about animal taxomony and I get a wealth of sites with very learned articles about how to do taxonomy. Lots of fine print about when to invent a new genus and when not too. On the naming rules for new species. But I could not find something simply listing out the top part of the tree of the animal kingdom. Until I came across Cody and Garry at the Nebraska Wesleyan University who had produced a sort of tree, presumably supporting materials for a biology course (http://www.nebrwesleyan.edu/), which was quite good enough for my purposes when supplemented by my ancient copy of Romer on the vertebrate body. So I have now been reminded about kingdoms, phyla, classes, orders and all the rest of it. Fascinating business. But odd that I had to go at it by this roundabout route. Perhaps taxonomy is far too real to have a place in a modern biology course, where one talks about systems, pathways, econnitches and themes. Merely looking at animals is very old hat.

TLS scores a hit with Iran. There has been a very modest amount of coverage of the recent election in Iran. I think it was rather overshadowed, in the DT anyway, by the expenses scandal. But the TLS managed a timely review of two or three books about the place. And for once, one did not mind that the reviewer took the space to do a quick tour of modern Iran and its problems, in the margins of telling you about the books under review. It seems that the election was pretty hopeless; well up to the standard of some basket case country in Africa. To think that Iran is a three thousand year old civilisation: any civilised people left there must be getting ready to turn in their graves. I also learn that to say that Mossadeq was a heroic democratically elected leader kicked out by the machinations of the evil CIA&MI6, is a little economical with the truth. To the point where when Mr M. chucked in the towel because the Iranians had had enough of him (perhaps with a little prompting), he took refuge, in his pyjamas, in the headquarters of the US aid operation in Teheran, luckily next door to his own house. Maybe the Guardian did rather better than the DT on all this. Maybe there was some coverage.

Now tucking into a book on the Mossadeq business by a US journalist. So far, on his telling, Mossadeq was heroic. But only on page 7. We shall see how things develop.