Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Robert Frost

Each plant is intensely competitive and sacrifices individual bulk for the advantages of height. But when collected together they tend to allow their colour to leak into the spaces between them, forming a mass of pigment which collects and reflects the light.

It is strange to see that the brief lives of these petals have blown and ended by the time we make our return journey the following month.

No dinner, then, watching apprehensively as the crew packed away the Scandinavian buffet; and no sleep either, for those in peril on the sea.

Rimbaud provides the exemplary example of a writer who packs it all in. What is even more astonishing than this case of a writer who quits is how early, in his case, it happened. Before his twenty-first birthday he had changed the course of French literary history. As Arthur Symons put it in his pioneering monograph The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899):

He catches at verse, at prose, invents a sort of vers libre before anyone else, not quite knowing what to do with it, invents a quite new way of writing prose, which Laforgue will turn to account later on; and having suggested, with some impatience, half the things that his own and the next generation are to busy themselves with developing, he gives up writing, as an inadequate form, to which he is also inadequate.

In the words of Charles Nicholl, author of Somebody Else, a fictional account of Rimbaud’s life would come to an end at the moment when he crossed the remote salt lake of Assal, 500 feet below sea level:

if Rimbaud’s years in Africa seem like a flight from what he was – from Europe, from poetry, from himself – then it is surely here, on this desolate desert trek, that he reaches the furthest point of that arrow-flight, arriving at this utter privation, at this landscape of nothingness . . .

Terror of Flight 101: An echo of Orwell.
The flight leaves Heathrow airport’s Terminal Four, every Wednesday bearing the number KQ101. The echo of George Orwell’s Room 101 is unhappily appropriate. On this Kenya Airways jet, many asylum-seekers’ worst nightmares do come true. KQ101 is the deportation flight chartered by the British Government to return refugees to Africa. According to human rights groups, this flight carries out the most Africa-bound removals of unsuccessful asylum applicants to the UK. It has also become a flight that has attracted allegations of abuse by guards. From Nairobi the detainees are flown all over Africa where they are handed over to security and immigration authorities.

An investigation by The Independent concludes that many of the deportees suffer assault and racial abuse at the hands of the guards who accompany them.

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Delocator is an open-source site which finds independent cafes and coffee shops in the UK, based on postcode. Useful if you’d rather avoid corporates and help circulate money in your local community while maintaining a diverse cafe culture.

The sister site in the USA is: delocator.net.

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We have pacified some thousands of the islanders and buried them; destroyed their fields; burned their villages, and turned their widows and orphans out-of-doors; furnished heartbreak by exile to some dozens of disagreeable patriots; subjugated the remaining ten millions by Benevolent Assimilation, which is the pious new name of the musket; we have acquired property in the three hundred concubines and other slaves of our business partner Sultan of Sulu, and hoisted our protecting flag over that swag. And so, by the Providences of God – and the phrase is the government’s, not mine – we are a World Power. - Mark Twain on our nation-building in the Philippines.

Thanks to Undernews for this one.

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Neocons on a cruise. Johann Hari, in The Independent, sets sail with America’s swashbuckling neocons:

From time to time, National Review – the bible of American conservatism – organises a cruise for its readers. I paid $1,200 to join them. The rules I imposed on myself were simple: If any of the conservative cruisers asked who I was, I answered honestly, telling them I was a journalist. Mostly, I just tried to blend in – and find out what American conservatives say when they think the rest of us aren’t listening.

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This sounds like an interesting read; Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert. The story of a woman who decided to reverse the assumptions and choices in her life and become someone closer to the person she wanted to be. Starting off by eating her way around Rome . . .