Short Mediterranean Quotes

Language is my whore, my mistress, my wife, my pen-friend, my check-out girl. Language is a complimentary moist lemon-scented cleansing square or handy freshen-up wipette. Language is the breath of God, the dew on a fresh apple, it's the soft rain of dust that falls into a shaft of morning sun when you pull from an old bookshelf a forgotten volume of erotic diaries; language is the faint scent of urine on a pair of boxer shorts, it's a half-remembered childhood birthday party, a creak on the stair, a spluttering match held to a frosted pane, the warm wet, trusting touch of a leaking nappy, the hulk of a charred Panzer, the underside of a granite boulder, the first downy growth on the upper lip of a Mediterranean girl, cobwebs long since overrun by an old Wellington boot.

Had his room been facing west he would have noted the sparkling twenty-five-mile vista to the sea which looks almost like the Mediterranean. He would have noted how the streets of L.A. undulate over short hills as though a finger is poking the landscape from underneath. How laid over this crosshatch are streets meandering on the diagonal creating a multitude of ways to get from one place to another by traveling along the hypotenuse. These are the avenues of the tryst which enable Acting Student A to travel the eighteen miles across town to Acting Student B's garage apartment in nine minutes flat after a hot-blooded phone call at midnight. Had he been facing seaward on a balcony overlooking the city the writer might have heard drifting out of a tiny apartment window the optimistic voice of a shower singer imbued with the conviction that this is a place where it is possible to be happy.

The Mediterranean-DASH Intervention for Neurodegenerative Delay diet—or MIND diet, for short—was specially designed to improve brain health. Recent well-done studies have found that sticking to the MIND diet helps people avoid mental decline and remain cognitively healthy. One study even showed that people who stuck to the MIND diet cut their risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease in half. That’s extraordinary. And since no drug has yet been developed to prevent dementia, it’s your only move.

Depending on where it falls, the prognosis for a water molecule varies widely. If it lands in fertile soil it will be soaked up by plants or reevaporated directly within hours or days. If it finds its way down to the groundwater, however, it may not see sunlight again for many years—thousands if it gets really deep. When you look at a lake, you are looking at a collection of molecules that have been there on average for about a decade. In the ocean the residence time is thought to be more like a hundred years. Altogether about 60 percent of water molecules in a rainfall are returned to the atmosphere within a day or two. Once evaporated, they spend no more than a week or so—Drury says twelve days—in the sky before falling again as rain. Evaporation is a swift process, as you can easily gauge by the fate of a puddle on a summer’s day. Even something as large as the Mediterranean would dry out in a thousand years if it were not continually replenished. Such an event occurred a little under six million years ago and provoked what is known to science as the Messinian Salinity Crisis. What happened was that continental movement closed the Strait of Gibraltar. As the Mediterranean dried, its evaporated contents fell as freshwater rain into other seas, mildly diluting their saltiness—indeed, making them just dilute enough to freeze over larger areas than normal. The enlarged area of ice bounced back more of the Sun’s heat and pushed Earth into an ice age. So at least the theory goes. What is certainly true, as far as we can tell, is that a little change in the Earth’s dynamics can have repercussions beyond our imagining. Such an event, as we shall see a little further on, may even have created us.

Once trade connects two areas, the forces of supply and demand tend to equalise the prices of transportable goods. In order to understand why, consider a hypothetical case. Assume that when regular trade opened between India and the Mediterranean, Indians were uninterested in gold, so it was almost worthless. But in the Mediterranean, gold was a coveted status symbol, hence its value was high. What would happen next? Merchants travelling between India and the Mediterranean would notice the difference in the value of gold. In order to make a profit, they would buy gold cheaply in India and sell it dearly in the Mediterranean. Consequently, the demand for gold in India would skyrocket, as would its value. At the same time the Mediterranean would experience an influx of gold, whose value would consequently drop. Within a short time the value of gold in India and the Mediterranean would be quite similar. The mere fact that Mediterranean people believed in gold would cause Indians to start believing in it as well. Even if Indians still had no real use for gold, the fact that Mediterranean people wanted it would be enough to make the Indians value it.

Yet why should Chinese, Indians, Muslims and Spaniards – who belonged to very different cultures that failed to agree about much of anything – nevertheless share the belief in gold? Why didn’t it happen that Spaniards believed in gold, while Muslims believed in barley, Indians in cowry shells, and Chinese in rolls of silk? Economists have a ready answer. Once trade connects two areas, the forces of supply and demand tend to equalise the prices of transportable goods. In order to understand why, consider a hypothetical case. Assume that when regular trade opened between India and the Mediterranean, Indians were uninterested in gold, so it was almost worthless. But in the Mediterranean, gold was a coveted status symbol, hence its value was high. What would happen next? Merchants travelling between India and the Mediterranean would notice the difference in the value of gold. In order to make a profit, they would buy gold cheaply in India and sell it dearly in the Mediterranean. Consequently, the demand for gold in India would skyrocket, as would its value. At the same time the Mediterranean would experience an influx of gold, whose value would consequently drop. Within a short time the value of gold in India and the Mediterranean would be quite similar. The mere fact that Mediterranean people believed in gold would cause Indians to start believing in it as well. Even if Indians still had no real use for gold, the fact that Mediterranean people wanted it would be enough to make the Indians value it.

Once trade connects two areas, the forces of supply and demand tend to equalise the prices of transportable goods. In order to understand why, consider a hypothetical case. Assume that when regular trade opened between India and the Mediterranean, Indians were uninterested in gold, so it was almost worthless. But in the Mediterranean, gold was a coveted status symbol, hence its value was high. What would happen next? Merchants travelling between India and the Mediterranean would notice the difference in the value of gold. In order to make a profit, they would buy gold cheaply in India and sell it dearly in the Mediterranean. Consequently, the demand for gold in India would skyrocket, as would its value. At the same time the Mediterranean would experience an influx of gold, whose value would consequently drop. Within a short time the value of gold in India and the Mediterranean would be quite similar. The mere fact that Mediterranean people believed in gold would cause Indians to start believing in it as well. Even if Indians still had no real use for gold, the fact that Mediterranean people wanted it would be enough to make the Indians value it. Similarly, the fact that another person believes in cowry shells, or dollars, or electronic data, is enough to strengthen our own belief in them, even if that person is otherwise hated, despised or ridiculed by us. Christians and Muslims who could not agree on religious beliefs could nevertheless agree on a monetary belief, because whereas religion asks us to believe in something, money asks us to believe that other people believe in something. For thousands of years, philosophers, thinkers and prophets have besmirched money and called it the root of all evil. Be that as it may, money is also the apogee of human tolerance. Money is more open-minded than language, state laws, cultural codes, religious beliefs and social habits. Money is the only trust system created by humans that can bridge almost any cultural gap, and that does not discriminate on the basis of religion, gender, race, age or sexual orientation. Thanks to money, even people who don’t know each other and don’t trust each other can nevertheless cooperate effectively.

Yet why should Chinese, Indians, Muslims and Spaniards – who belonged to very different cultures that failed to agree about much of anything – nevertheless share the belief in gold? Why didn’t it happen that Spaniards believed in gold, while Muslims believed in barley, Indians in cowry shells, and Chinese in rolls of silk? Economists have a ready answer. Once trade connects two areas, the forces of supply and demand tend to equalise the prices of transportable goods. In order to understand why, consider a hypothetical case. Assume that when regular trade opened between India and the Mediterranean, Indians were uninterested in gold, so it was almost worthless. But in the Mediterranean, gold was a coveted status symbol, hence its value was high. What would happen next? Merchants travelling between India and the Mediterranean would notice the difference in the value of gold. In order to make a profit, they would buy gold cheaply in India and sell it dearly in the Mediterranean. Consequently, the demand for gold in India would skyrocket, as would its value. At the same time the Mediterranean would experience an influx of gold, whose value would consequently drop. Within a short time the value of gold in India and the Mediterranean would be quite similar. The mere fact that Mediterranean people believed in gold would cause Indians to start believing in it as well. Even if Indians still had no real use for gold, the fact that Mediterranean people wanted it would be enough to make the Indians value it. Similarly, the fact that another person believes in cowry shells, or dollars, or electronic data, is enough to strengthen our own belief in them, even if that person is otherwise hated, despised or ridiculed by us. Christians and Muslims who could not agree on religious beliefs could nevertheless agree on a monetary belief, because whereas religion asks us to believe in something, money asks us to believe that other people believe in something. For thousands of years, philosophers, thinkers and prophets have besmirched money and called it the root of all evil. Be that as it may, money is also the apogee of human tolerance. Money is more open-minded than language, state laws, cultural codes, religious beliefs and social habits. Money is the only trust system created by humans that can bridge almost any cultural gap, and that does not discriminate on the basis of religion, gender, race, age or sexual orientation. Thanks to money, even people who don’t know each other and don’t trust each other can nevertheless cooperate effectively.

SHRIMP PAELLA Serves 4 Prep time: 10 minutes Cook time: 25 minutes DAIRY-FREE | GLUTEN-FREE | QUICK & EASY Paella is the national dish of Spain. It usually consists of saffron-scented rice cooked with vegetables and topped with a mixture of seafood, sausage, and other meats. This simplified version includes shrimp and peas. A paella pan is the ideal cooking vessel, but a large cast-iron skillet is a fine substitute. 2 tablespoons olive oil 1 medium onion, diced 1 red bell pepper, diced 3 cloves garlic, minced Pinch of saffron (about 8 threads) ¼ teaspoon hot paprika 1 teaspoon salt ½ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper 3 cups chicken broth, divided 1 cup short-grain white rice 1 pound peeled and deveined large shrimp 1 cup frozen peas, thawed 1. Heat the oil in a wide, heavy skillet set over medium heat. Add the onion and bell pepper and cook, stirring frequently, until the vegetables are softened, about 6 minutes. Add the garlic, saffron, paprika, salt, and pepper and stir to mix. Stir in 2½ cups of broth, and the rice. 2. Bring the mixture to a boil, then lower the heat to low, cover, and simmer until the rice is nearly cooked through, about 12 minutes. Scatter the shrimp and peas over the rice and add the remaining ½ cup of broth. Place the lid back on the skillet and cook for about 5 minutes more, until the shrimp are just cooked through. Serve immediately.

He had slightly Mediterranean looks, olive skin, black short hair and sideburns around his sticky-out ears. Quite the catch… if you had a thing about ears.

Alexander the Great, conqueror of the Mediterranean basin and the Middle East through to India, had had the great Aristotle as his tutor and mentor, and throughout his short life he remained devoted to philosophy and his master’s teachings. He once complained to Aristotle that during his long campaigns he had no one with whom he could discuss philosophical matters. Aristotle responded by suggesting that he take Callisthenes, a former pupil of Aristotle’s and a promising philosopher in his own right, along on the next campaign. Aristotle had schooled Callisthenes in the skills of being a courtier, but the young man secretly scoffed at them. He believed in pure philosophy, in unadorned words, in speaking the naked truth. If Alexander loved learning so much, Callisthenes thought, he could not object to one who spoke his mind. During one of Alexander’s major campaigns, Callisthenes spoke his mind one too many times and Alexander had him put to death.

She had become reconciled to the idea of an eternal shadow; she discovered that, far from being a threat, her bodyguards were much wiser sounding boards than many of the gentleman courtiers who fluttered around her. Police officers like Sergeant Allan Peters and Inspector Graham Smith became avuncular father figures, defusing tricky situations and deflating overweening subjects alike with a joke or a crisp command. They also brought her mothering instincts to the fore. She remembered their birthdays, sent notes of apology to their wives when they had to accompany her on an overseas tours and ensured that they were “fed and watered” when she went out with them from Kensington Palace. When Graham Smith contracted cancer, she invited him and his wife on holiday to Necker in the Caribbean and also on a Mediterranean cruise on board the yacht owned by Greek tycoon, John Latsis. Such is her affection for this popular police officer that she arranged a dinner in his honour after he had recovered which was attended by her family. If she is dining with friends at San Lorenzo, her favourite restaurant, her current detective, Inspector Ken Wharfe will often join her table at the end of the meal and regale the assembled throng with his jokes. Perhaps she reserves her fondest memories for Sergeant Barry Mannakee who became her bodyguard at a time when she felt lost and alone in the royal world. He sensed her bewilderment and became a shoulder for her to lean on and sometimes to cry on during this painful period. The affectionate bond that built up between them did not go unnoticed either by Prince Charles nor Mannakee’s colleagues. Shortly before the wedding of the Duke and Duchess of York in July 1986 he was transferred to other duties, much to Diana’s dismay. In the following spring he was tragically killed in a motorcycle accident.

On the other stage, there was a girl who looked like a mix of Japanese and something Mediterranean or Latin. A good mix. She had that silky, almost shimmering black hair so many modern Japanese women like to ruin with chapatsu dye, worn short and swept over from the side. The shape of the eyes was also Japanese, and she was on the petite side. But her skin, a smooth gold like melted caramel, spoke of something else, something tropical. Her breasts and hips, too, appealingly full and slightly incongruous on her Japanese-sized frame, suggested some foreign origin. She was using the pole skillfully, grabbing it high, posing with her body held rigid and parallel to the floor, then spiraling down in time to the music. There was real vitality in her moves and she didn’t seem to mind that most of the patrons were focused on the blonde. Mr. Ruddy held out a chair for me at an empty table in the center of the room. After a routine glance to ensure the seat afforded a proper view of the entrance, I sat. I wasn’t displeased to see that I also had a good view of the stage where the dark-haired girl was dancing. “Wow,” I said in English, looking at her. “Yes, she is beautiful,” he replied, also in English. “Would you like to meet her?” I watched her for another moment before answering. I didn’t want to wind up with one of the Japanese girls here. I would have a better chance of creating rapport, and therefore of eliciting information, by chatting with a foreigner while playing the role of foreigner. I nodded.

The Zionist chapter proper in the country’s history began in 1882, after the outbreak of large-scale pogroms in the Russian Empire (although the term was only invented a few years later). The first settlers called themselves Hovevei Tzion (Lovers of Zion), a network of groups which aspired to forge a Jewish national life in Palestine and, in a significant novelty, to use the reviving Hebrew language rather than Yiddish. In August that year a two-hundred-strong group from the Romanian town of Galatz landed at Jaffa, where they were locked up for weeks before enough cash could be raised to bribe the Turkish police to release them.6 Their goal was a plot of stony land that had been purchased south of Haifa. Laurence Oliphant, an eccentric British traveller and enthusiastic philo-Semite, described the scene shortly afterwards at Zamarin, a malaria-infested hamlet on the southern spur of Mount Carmel overlooking the Mediterranean. It is a remarkably vivid portrayal of two very different sorts of people who were warily making each other’s acquaintance as future neighbours – and enemies: It would be difficult to imagine anything more utterly incongruous than the spectacle thus presented – the stalwart fellahin [peasants], with their wild, shaggy, black beards, the brass hilts of their pistols projecting from their waistbands, their tasselled kufeihahs [keffiyeh headdresses] drawn tightly over their heads and girdled with coarse black cords, their loose, flowing abbas [cloaks], and sturdy bare legs and feet; and the ringleted, effeminate-looking Jews, in caftans reaching almost to their ankles, as oily as their red or sandy locks, or the expression of their countenances – the former inured to hard labour on the burning hillsides of Palestine, the latter fresh from the Ghetto of some Roumanian town, unaccustomed to any other description of exercise than that of their wits, but already quite convinced that they knew more about agriculture than the people of the country, full of suspicion of all advice tendered to them, and animated by a pleasing self-confidence which I fear the first practical experience will rudely belie. In strange contrast with these Roumanian Jews was the Arab Jew who acted as interpreter – a stout, handsome man, in Oriental garb, as unlike his European coreligionists as the fellahin themselves.

Dear Mr. Putnam: As I lead, to put it mildly, a sedentary life for the moment I would greatly like some books that would appeal to my queer taste. I do not suppose there are any histories or any articles upon the early Mediterranean races. That man Lindsay who wrote about prehistoric Greece has not put out a second volume, has he? Has a second volume of Oman’s Art of War appeared? If so, send me either or both; if not, then a good translation of Niebuhr and Momsen [sic] or the best modern history of Mesopotamia. Is there a good history of Poland? Putnam obliged, only to receive a presidential reprimand. “I do not like the Poland. It is too short.

The year 423 was a turbulent one for politics. Court intrigue began shortly after the mid-winter death of King Atraxerxes. The eldest son, Xerxes II, seized the throne, only to be murdered 45 days later by his half-brother Sogdianus, who, with one treacherous act suddenly held in his grasp the entire Persian Empire, from the Zagros Mountains to the Mediterranean Sea. While Sogdianus may have had the throne, another son of Atraxerxes had the support and sponsorship of some of Persia’s most powerful landowners. Ochus, son of the Babylonian concubine Costmartidus and satrap of lower Mesopotamia, was living in a spacious rented residence in Babylon when his half-brother ascended the throne. One of Sogdianus’s first imperial acts was to summon his powerful half-brother to the imperial city of Susa—perhaps to put him under the sword and consolidate his own power. When the summons came in the form of an official cuneiform tablet delivered by royal messenger, Ochus had to work fast. His supporters urged him to fight, but they could not immediately provide the means for him to do so—they were land rich but cash poor, and the mercenaries and supplies to fight Sogdianus could only be obtained with silver. With Sogdianus pressing for a reply, they turned to the Murašu family for help. Ochus’s backers mortgaged their vast property holdings in the Euphrates valley to the Murašu and used the proceeds to hire an army. Deserters from the disaffected Persian regulars soon joined them, and when Ochus rode into the city of Susa, it was not as Sogdianus’s prisoner but as his successor. The usurper was usurped. Ochus took the royal title of Darius II.

A Universal Fact The problem before us now is this: if the reality behind the UFO phenomenon is both physical and psychic in nature, and if it manipulates space and time in ways our scientific concepts are inadequate to describe, is there any reason for its effects to be limited to our culture or to our generation? We have already established that no country has had the special privilege of these manifestations. Yet we must carry the argument further: if the UFO phenomenon is not tied to social conditions specific to our time, or to specific technological achievements, then it may represent a universal fact. It may have been with us, in one form or another, as long as the human race has existed on this planet. Something happened in classical times that is inadequately explained by historical theories. The suggestion that the same thing might be happening again should make us extremely interested in bringing every possible light to bear on this problem. Beginning in the second century B.C. and continuing until the fall of the Roman Empire, the intellectual elites of the Mediterranean world, raised in a spirit of scientific rationalism, were confronted and eventually defeated by irrational element similar to that contained in modern apparitions of unexplained phenomena, an element that is amplified by their summary rejection by our own science. It accompanied the collapse of ancient civilizations. Commenting on this parallel, French science writer Aime Michel proposes the following scene. Consider one of the Alexandrian thinkers, a man like Ptolemaeus, the second-century astronomer thoroughly schooled in the rational methods of Archimedes, Euclid, and Aristotle. And imagine him reading the Apocalypse, various writings about Armageddon. How would he react to such an experience? He would merely shrug, says Aime Michel: "It would never occur to him to place the slightest credence in such a compendium of what must regard as insanities. Such a scene must have taken place thousands of times at the end of classical antiquity. And we know that every time there was the same rejection, the same shrugging, because we have no record of any critical examination of the doctrines, ideas, and claims of the counterculture that expressed itself through the Apocalypse. This counterculture was too absurd to retain the attention of a reader of Plato. A short time – a very short time – elapsed, the counterculture triumphed, and Plato was forgotten for a thousand years. Could it happen again?" Only a thorough examination of the ancient records can save us from the effects of such cultural myopia.

In short, [Einstein's General Theory of Relativity] describes a colorful and amazing world where universes explode, space collapses into bottomless holes, time sags and slows near a planet, and the unbounded extensions of interstellar space ripple and sway like the surface of the sea... And all of this...was not a tale told by an idiot in a fit of lunacy or a hallucination caused by Calabria's burning Mediterranean sun and its dazzling sea. It was reality. Or better, a glimpse of reality, a little less veiled than our blurred and banal everyday view of it. A reality that seems to be made of the same stuff that our dreams are made of, but that is nevertheless more real than our clouded, quotidian dreaming.