Recent Notes
Andy Strangeway, 42, a painter and decorator from Yorkshire, has completed his quest to sleep on every Scottish island with an area of over 40 hectares.
The quest, which began on the island of Barra, took four years and was completed on September 3, after Strangeway spent the night on the uninhabited island of Soay in the St. Kilda archipelago.
“I think it is the greatest adventure that this country has to offer – there is nothing more difficult and I don’t think anybody else will achieve it in my lifetime. The enormity of what I’ve done is beginning to sink in,” said Strangeway.
On many of the islands, he slept alone, accompanied only by his teddy bear, Clyde. Strangeway is the first person to complete this feat, and is currently writing a book about his experience that will be available in stores in October
“The 230-acre Cathance River Nature Preserve, accessed from the Highland Green development, is a cooperative effort among BTLT, Highland Green, and the Cathance River Education Alliance (CREA).”
The stories in this book are those that Russian peasants tell their children and each other.
In Russia hardly anybody is too old for fairy stories, and I have even heard soldiers on their way to the war talking of very wise and very beautiful princesses as they drank their tea by the side of the road.
I think there must be more fairy stories told in Russia than anywhere else in the world. In this book are a few of those I like best. I have taken my own way with them more or less, writing them mostly from memory…
My book is not for the learned, or indeed for grown-up people at all. No people who really like fairy stories ever grow up altogether.
This is a book written far away in Russia, for English children who play in deep lanes with wild roses above them in the high hedges, or by the small singing becks that dance down the gray fells at home.
Russian fairyland is quite different. Under my windows the wavelets of the Volkhov (which has its part in one of the stories) are beating quietly in the dusk. A gold light burns on a timber raft floating down the river. Beyond the river in the blue midsummer twilight are the broad Russian plain and the distant forest.
Somewhere in that forest of great trees—a forest so big that the forests of England are little woods beside it—is the hut where old Peter sits at night and tells these stories to his grandchildren.
The Trendalyzer software (recently acquired by Google) turns complex global trends into lively animations, making decades of data pop.
“Scott Simon reflects on the newest member of his family, and on the special magic of sisters.”