"After six months or so in the womb of the cave, Flamini succumbed to its rhythms. She stopped trying to track time..."

"... because doing so had only added to her anxiety. She became neither hopeful nor despairing. 'In the cave, the line of time disappears, and everything floats around you,' she told me.  'A while ago I was born. A while ago I was going to visit Mongolia. There is no past, there is no future. Everything is present, everything is a while ago, and it’s all brutal and strange.' One temporal marker remained. After five defecations, she would carry her waste, in plastic pouches, up to the exchange point, and then hurry back down.... There came a moment, she told me, when she thought that she was dying. It felt like an act not of suicide but of release: 'There was no difference between what I was feeling then and what I understand as death.'"

From "The Woman Who Spent Five Hundred Days in a Cave/Beatriz Flamini liked to be alone so much that she decided to live underground—and pursue a world record. The experience was gruelling and surreal" (The New Yorker).

"I had a series of caves and each had different amenities – some were next to springs, or near better fishing, hunting and foraging."

"The 'main cave' had a bed in it – by which I mean a big pile of grass and leaves, which was comfortable. It had a bit of a skylight, so the smoke from my fire could rise through it and I could see the stars. I would jam a stick between the cave walls and dry clothes on it, and would keep an old soup can there for boiling water in. That was the cave that had the most resources, but I would move from cave to cave. I’d cache animal hides in one, and if I wanted to treat myself to something special, I’d put a jar of dried mangoes in another... I always had a notebook with me with a photo of my sons.... I missed my sons, but I also knew that this was my time to really heal and reflect...."

Writes Donny Dust, in "A moment that changed me: I had a heart attack at 37 – so I went to live in a cave" (The Guardian).

Now, Dust has "a place," a truck, a TV, and a YouTube channel. 

"I didn't talk to myself out loud, but I had internal conversations and got on very well with myself."

"You have to remain conscious of your feelings — if you're afraid, that's something natural, but never let panic in or you get paralysed."

Said Beatriz Flamini, quoted in "Spanish athlete Beatriz Flamini emerges from cave after 500 days — and she did not want to come out" (ABC News).

Cut off from all communication, she broke the world record for time spent in a cave. She was monitored and sent food and clean clothes, and she was always able to hit a panic button, but she never considered doing that and "In fact I didn't want to come out."

She spent her time exercising, painting, drawing, knitting, and reading, and she "focused on retaining 'coherence,' eating well and relishing the silence." She said the experience was "excellent, unbeatable."

Antic grotesquerie.

I'd thought this morning was the first time I'd ever used the word "grotesquerie" on this blog. I was talking about the female Olympics figure skaters. But no, back in 2014, I wrote of "the grotesquerie of politicians finding love with the Hollywood stars." I did not like seeing Leonardo DiCaprio and John Kerry locked in embrace.

But it felt new. I even looked it up in the OED to see if it counted as an English word (because if it were only a foreign-language word, I'd have put it in italics). Yes, it's English. They were saying it back in 1655:

1655    Ld. Orrery Parthenissa IV.  ii. vi. 536   In a large Compartiment compos'd of Groteskery were seene Sphynxes, Harpyes, the Clawes of Lyons, and Tygres, to evidence, that within, inhabited Misteries, and Riddles.

Of course, "grotesquerie" is just a noun version of "grotesque," and I got sidetracked into the original meaning of "grotesque": "A kind of decorative painting or sculpture, consisting of representations of portions of human and animal forms, fantastically combined and interwoven with foliage and flowers." 

"They were very, very proud to cast a Latino actress as Snow White, but you’re still telling the story of ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.' You’re progressive in one way … but you’re still making that … backward story about seven dwarfs living in a cave. What … are you doing, man?"

Said Peter Dinklage, on the Marc Maron podcast, quoted in "Peter Dinklage slams Disney’s plans for ‘Snow White’ remake: ‘Backward story about seven dwarfs living in a cave’" (WaPo). 

From the comments over there: "I listened to the podcast before reading this article. The editors that picked the title should ask themselves whether they deliberately feed th[e] media hyperventilation. Dinklage didn’t 'slam' anything. He calmly discussed the issue and critiqued it in a thoughtful way. Stop ginning up controversy where there need be none."

In any event, Disney responded: "To avoid reinforcing stereotypes from the original animated film, we are taking a different approach with these seven characters and have been consulting with members of the dwarfism community. We look forward to sharing more as the film heads into production after a lengthy development period."

It seems to me that the original animated film made a big point of giving each dwarf an individualized characteristic — Sleepy, Happy, Grumpy, Sneezy, etc. — so isn't that the opposite of stereotyping? Or is it stereotyping to say that in this category people have one and only one outstanding characteristic — these are a one-dimensional — or 2-dimensional, if you count dwarfism — kind of person.

I remember a times when saying "dwarf" and "dwarfism" was considered politically incorrect and one had to use a euphemism, and I'd happily — not grumpily — do that if I were not taking the lead from The Washington Post and Disney. I don't know exactly when that changed.

"With no daily obligations and no children around, the challenge was 'to profit from the present moment without ever thinking about what will happen in one hour, in two hours'...."

"In partnership with laboratories in France and Switzerland, scientists monitored the 15 team members’ sleep patterns, social interactions and behavioural reactions via sensors. One sensor was a tiny thermometer inside a capsule that participants swallowed like a pill. It measured body temperature and transmitted data to a computer until it was expelled naturally. The team members followed their biological clocks to know when to wake up, go to sleep and eat. They counted their days not in hours but in sleep cycles. 'It’s really interesting to observe how this group synchronises themselves,' [project director Christian] Clot said earlier in a recording from inside the cave.... Two-thirds of the participants expressed a desire to remain underground a little longer to finish group projects started during their stay.... "

From "15 French volunteers leave cave after 40 days without daylight or clocks/Deep Time project investigated how a lack of external contact would affect sense of time – and two thirds wanted to stay longer" (The Guardian). 

FROM THE EMAIL: ALP writes:

I found this very interesting - the fact that so many wanted to stay in the cave. Like you, I don't do "real travel" - the kind that involves airports and exotic places. Prefer ordinary days as well. My ideal vacation is one in which I have a stretch of days where I do not have to look at the clock. I am constantly worried about time passing when I'm on the job; such is life in Big Law. Just listening to traveling types describe their plans, designed with near military precision to fit it all in, is annoying. Of course the Cave People want to stay in the cave - we are so linked to the passing of time it is such a nice change to be divorced from it. I totally get it.

You're reminding me how much I hated working "billable hours." It's something I only did for a couple years after law school, but I've never forgotten how much I appreciated moving into a job where my time wasn't connected to the money. The money flowed in over there, and nothing about the way I did my work made me feel that time equals money. I know some people prefer to feel the connection between work and money. It can be quite motivating! But I love the disconnect. 

AND: SGT Ted emails:

The experiment of the cave dwellers is interesting but seems like contrived science to me, by removing normal activity that is required for survival, like finding food, raising the next generation and living in a natural diurnal environment. Maybe as an application towards living in outer space it has some merit. But they could just as easily have done that with a sealed building instead of underground caves.

"For over a century, film was at its core a theatrical art form: While it’s true that movies could be watched on TV, the primary cinematic experience was immersive viewing in a theater surrounded by strangers."

"Now there is a push to make the movie theater merely one platform among others, offering an experience deemed no more meaningful than watching the same feature-length visual narratives on a home entertainment system, a laptop, or even a cell phone." 

Writes Jeet Heer in "Movie Theaters Aren’t Dying—They’re Being Murdered/The Covid-19 pandemic is providing a perfect cover for media giants bent on replacing theatrical moviegoing with streaming at home" (The Nation).

As media giants like Netflix, Disney, and Warner Media try to downgrade the moviegoing experience, it’s important to articulate how essential immersive theatrical watching is. When we watch a movie at home, or on an airplane, or on a treadmill at the gym, the movie is a small part of the environment. It’s easy to be distracted from the movie by everything else all around us, even if we have a giant wall-screen TV. When we watch a movie in a theater, the movie isn’t part of the environment; it is the environment. We’re enveloped in the movie and taken away from our humdrum existence.

Our humdrum existence! It's the big screen that makes us feel like the little people out there in the dark. 

But even as theatrical moviegoing is more all-encompassing, it is also more social. At home, we watch a movie alone or with people we know. In a theater, we watch a movie with strangers, who are as immersed in the narrative as we are.

Except when they're not, which ruins the effect. Maybe we could get a virtual crowd to stream within our headset device. Make them perfect movie companions. Couldn't we have beautiful, witty partners sitting on either side of us, whispering perfectly apt comments and learning our sense of humor and our comfort with interruptions? 

When a comedian like Jim Carrey does a pratfall, the laughter in the crowd is infectious. When the romantic couple finally unites and kisses after endless complications, everyone watching can swoon in unison....

Yeah, that can be virtual, with an audience calibrated to my humor preference and sentimentality. I might want a more sophisticated crowd — with a few really smart hecklers.

[T]he film critic Johanna Schneller observed that “there is a collective emotional energy that floats above the people who are watching movies.”...

Yeah, this is The Nation, so I'm not surprised to encounter enthusiasm for the "collective" mind floating over us. 

The streaming future that these media giants are creating is very much a future that is favorable to capitalism: a deeply privatized, fragmented world where everyone watches in their own individual cave and is incapable of forming a collective identity. It’s the ideal autocracy as imagined by Plato—with Mickey Mouse as the philosopher king....

Here's a little movie about Plato's allegory of the cave. Let me know if you see any connection between that and the author's hope for "collective identity" and the practice of seeing movies in the theater: 

Elon Musk — sued for defamation by the man he called "pedo guy" — has won at trial.

CNBC reports.

In his testimony during the defamation trial this week, Musk apologized to [Vernon] Unsworth and said he did not believe the cave explorer was a pedophile....

Musk and his employees developed a device that they billed as a mini-submarine or escape pod, and which they thought could transport the [trapped Thai] kids out of the caves.... After the rescue, Unsworth was asked during a television interview on CNN about the mini-sub and Musk. He said Musk could “stick his submarine where it hurts,” and viewed the escape pod as “just a PR stunt.” Lashing back, Musk called the caver a “pedo guy”...

Musk’s lead attorney, Alex Spiro, in closing arguments characterized Musk’s offensive tweets as merely insulting and not statements of fact.

He argued that "pedo guy" was just a slang way to say "creepy old guy."

Spiro also said that Unsworth was telling the court, “I’ve been horribly damaged. Pay me lots of money,” but then failed to prove he had been damaged at all. Referencing the fact that Unsworth had earned a little money for speaking engagements since the cave rescue, he asked, “You wanna award damages? How about one dollar?” And he implored the court not to engage in policing speech.

“An escaped prisoner who had been on the run from police in China for 17 years was finally tracked down by authorities....”

“A police drone spotted a blue piece of steel among the trees in the forest — and came in for a closer look to find garbage and debris around the entrance of a small cave.... Yongshan police officers made the climb to the site and found Jiang — disheveled and struggling to communicate after years of isolation — living in a cave of just over 2 square yards. Jiang later told police he survived by collecting water from a nearby stream and cooking food over small fires....”

The New York Post reports.

"In A New Email, Elon Musk Accused A Cave Rescuer Of Being A 'Child Rapist' And Said He 'Hopes' There's A Lawsuit."

"In an email to BuzzFeed News, Tesla CEO Elon Musk accused a Thai cave rescuer of moving to Thailand to take a child bride. The rescuer denied all the claims," Buzzfeed reports.

Musk last month apologized for accusing Vernon Unsworth of pedophilia after the diver questioned the value of Musk’s contribution to the rescue, a small submarine that ultimately went unused. But in a series of emails to BuzzFeed News, Musk repeated his original attacks on Unsworth — and made new and specific claims, lambasting the rescuer as a “child rapist” who moved to the Southeast Asian country to take a child bride....

“I suggest that you call people you know in Thailand, find out what’s actually going on and stop defending child rapists, you fucking asshole,” Musk wrote in the first message. “He’s an old, single white guy from England who’s been traveling to or living in Thailand for 30 to 40 years, mostly Pattaya Beach, until moving to Chiang Rai for a child bride who was about 12 years old at the time. As for this alleged threat of a lawsuit, which magically appeared when I raised the issue (nothing was sent or raised beforehand), I fucking hope he sues me,” he added....

Musk’s renewed attacks on Unsworth come after a series of erratic public gestures, notably a widely publicized suggestion that he would take Tesla private and the narration of his home life by the rapper Azealia Banks....

What's the Azelia Banks story? I had to look that up. This is from The Cut (last week):

Ever since she went to Musk’s home for a recording session... Banks has been airing the Tesla CEO’s dirty laundry in lengthy Instagram Stories — claiming that he had been tripping on acid when he tweeted that he was considering taking his company private for $420, and by sharing screenshots of texts she allegedly exchanged with his girlfriend Grimes, in which the musician says Musk’s accent is fake, his D is big, and Russians are trying to kill him. But now, the rapper has apologized, Billboard reports....

We all live in a yellow submarine. A small submarine. With a big dick.

"They should spend time in a monastery. It's for their protection. It's like they died but now have been reborn."

Said Seewad Sompiangjai, identified as "grandfather of Night" in the BBC article "Thai cave boys ordained in Buddhist ceremony." Night is the name of one of the rescued boys.

The group will spend nine days living in a monastery, a tradition for males in Thailand who experience adversity....

This step is intended to be a "spiritual cleansing" for the group, and to fulfil a promise by the families to remember one of the divers who died in the rescue operation....

One of the boys, Adul Sam-on, will not be joining the rest of the "Wild Boars" football team as he is a Christian. Their coach Ekkapol "Ake" Chantawong, 25, will join them for the same period of time but as a fully fledged monk rather than a novice.

The coach had spent time in a monastery as a novice before this. Although he has attracted some criticism for taking the boys into the cave, he is also credited with helping them through the ordeal by reportedly teaching them meditation techniques to help them stay calm and use as little air as possible.

The NYT article on the ordination puts the focus not on the boys' spiritual journey but on the debt owed to Saman Gunan, the Thai SEAL who died:

Their ordination was full of reminders of the former Thai Navy SEAL member Saman Gunan, 38, a volunteer diver who died while placing oxygen tanks to be used in their rescue. A large portrait of Mr. Saman was displayed....

Phra Mahapaivan Worravanno, a Buddhist monk and writer from Wat Soi Thong in Bangkok, said.... “When it comes to these boys and their coach, they said they would ordain for Lieutenant Commander Saman Gunan, because the man is their benefactor; he sacrificed himself to help them,” Phra Mahapaivan said. “Ordaining for Lieutenant Commander Saman Gunan is the Wild Boars’ way to show their gratitude and thanks.”...

“For the Wild Boars, they will ordain to redeem vows that their parents made, and more important, they will ordain in order to consign merit to Lieutenant Commander Saman Gunan’s soul,” said Anyatida Musittavee, 32, an office worker in Bangkok. “I think this is a great thing.”

Any questions about religious freedom here or is knowing that the Christian boy was left out enough?

"I will live my life very carefully from now on, to thank everyone."

Said Ekapol Chanthawong, the assistant coach who was rescued, along with the 12 soccer-playing boys, from the cave in Thailand, quoted in "Thai soccer players and coach speak publicly for first time since their rescue from flooded cave" (WaPo).

Also:

The Thai navy SEALs who stayed with the lost team until the rescue said Wednesday that they worked to keep the boys’ spirits up and ensure they were in good health. Wearing hats and sunglasses — Thai SEALs are not identified due to the nature of their work — they said they gave the boys high-protein rations and played chess with them to pass the time.

The SEALs used food as motivation, reminding the boys of all the treats that awaited them when they returned home....

“They were like my brothers, like my family,” Ekapol said of the SEALs. “We ate together, and we slept together.”

"Elon Musk, insisting he helped in Thai cave rescue, calls actual rescuer a ‘pedo.'"

WaPo reports.

The Silicon Valley engineer and billionaire was briefly seen in Thailand last week, hauling a miniature submarine to the mouth of the cave just before an international dive team rescued the boys without it... ... Musk insisted that his submarine (designed in consultation with “cave experts on the Internet,” he wrote) would have worked. He bragged that he would one day pilot it through the now child-free cave system as proof.

And midway through his rant, for some inexplicable reason, he accused [Vernon] Unsworth of sex crimes. “Sorry pedo guy, you really did ask for it,” Musk wrote, clarifying in a follow-up tweet that he meant “the Brit expat diver” was a pedophile....

“Bet ya a signed dollar it's true,” Musk wrote late Sunday morning, a few hours before he deleted his tweets — too late to avoid yet another deluge of public criticism.

BBC writes that Unsworth is considering suing. I think this is a situation where Unsworth must sue, because the defamation is so severe and so specific that failure to sue leaves a cloud.

It's strange to see this other Elon Musk story in the news at the same time: "Elon Musk draws fire for donating $38,900 to a Republican fundraising committee" (Business Insider).

Great news: All 12 boys — and their coach — are now out of the Thai cave!

The NYT reports.

“Twelve Boars and coach are out of the cave. Everyone is safe. Now we are waiting to welcome our frogmen,” read a post on the Thai Navy SEAL Facebook page on Tuesday night.

Soon after, another post went up: “We are not sure if this is a miracle, a science, or what. All the thirteen Wild Boars are now out of the cave.”

Also in the article are quotes from the letters the boys wrote to their family when they were still trapped:

One boy promised to do his chores when he gets home. Another asked for barbecued pork....

“Don’t worry about me,” wrote Ekkarat Wongsookchan, 13, who is called Bew. “I’ve been away for two weeks. I’ll help Mom every day. I’ll be back soon.”

“I’m happy in here,” wrote Panumat Saengdee, 14, known as Mix. “The SEAL team takes very good care of us.”

Beautiful! What a lesson in gratitude.

"Today is D-Day. At 10 a.m. today (0300 GMT) 13 foreign divers went in to extract the children along with 5 Thai navy SEALs."

The Daily Beast reports:

The rescue mission began after rain showers soaked the Tham Luang Cave area in northern Chiang Rai province for the past 24 hours, heightening the risks in what the governor has called a “war with water and time” to save the team....

Weather.com forecast sustained thunderstorms lasting through Sunday and Monday, with further stormy weather expected for around the next two weeks....

To escape, the children must dive through dark, narrow passageways sometimes no more than two-feet wide, that have challenged some of the world’s leading cave divers. A former member of Thailand’s SEAL unit died during a dive on Thursday night....

ADDED: More information, with excellent graphics at BBC:

There are some parts of the route where the diver must remove the air tank to get through a narrow space, but you can see in the graphic that the boy will not be wearing a tank at all. He only needs to wear a mask and swim forward while tied to a man in front and followed by a man behind him. The boy's mask is a full-face mask, which, we're told, is "easier for novice divers than traditional respirators."

AND: "At least two of a group of boys trapped inside a cave in northern Thailand for two weeks have been been successfully brought out, reports say." Wonderful!!

UPDATE: "Four boys have reached chamber three and will walk out of the cave shortly..."

One of the rescue divers at the Thailand cave has died.

"Saman Kunan, 38, a volunteer and former Thai Navy Seal... died on his way out of the cave complex where he had been delivering air tanks to different locations along the treacherous submerged route that leads to the chamber some 2.5 miles from the main exit," the UK Telegraph reports.

After delivering oxygen, he ran out of oxygen.

The tragedy was a frightening reminder of how dangerous it would be to dive the boys, in a weakened state and some unable to swim, through a labyrinth of winding, dark passages which take even fit, expert divers five hours, using four oxygen tanks, to battle through strong currents.

“Inside the cave is tough,” said Thai Seal commander Rear Admiral Arpakorn Yookongkaew. But he added: “I can guarantee that we will not panic, we will not stop our mission, we will not let the sacrifice of our friend go to waste.”

"Cave Found in Kenya in Which People Lived for 78,000 Years/Unique discoveries in tropical forest cave show gradual development of weapons and other skills, negating the theory of sudden spurts of innovation."

Haaretz reports.

Panga ya Saidi is actually a network of caves about a kilometer long in limestone hills: the main chamber is about 100 square meters (1,076 square feet) co-author Prof. Michael Petraglia of the Max Planck Institute tells Haaretz. It was used from the Middle Stone Age to this day, though people don’t live in it any more: now they use it for burials and rituals, he says. In any case, it was big enough to have supported hundreds of people....

At Panga ya Saidi, tools go back to the earliest occupation 78,000 years ago. But the occupants’ technology changed markedly 67,000 years ago, with smaller, finer implements appearing, reflecting changes in hunting practices and skills.

After that turning point, the archaeologists observed a mix of technologies rather than sudden changes. That argues against a series of cognitive or cultural "revolutions" theorized by some archaeologists, they write....

"Student survives three days in a cave after college spelunking group leaves him behind."

"The Indiana University student [Lukas Cavar (luckless caver?)] had been exploring Sullivan Cave, about 10 miles south of his school in Bloomington, Ind., on Sunday with other members of the Caving Club, a campus extracurricular group that promotes 'responsible caving practices with opportunities to visit caves around the area.' Over several hours, Cavar got separated from the group — and then left behind in the cave after the other the club members exited and padlocked the entrance gate.... On Sunday, after he realized he had been forgotten by the group, Cavar spent hours screaming out of the cave’s locked entrance — about a 1½-by-3-foot hole in the ground, surrounded by concrete with metal bars welded into place — in the hopes that someone would hear him from a nearby road. No one did.... He used the energy bar wrappers to collect moisture and the water bottles to collect rainfall and puddled cave water. Cavar also licked the cave’s damp walls to quench his thirst. Hunger drove him to consider foraging for cave crickets, although he didn’t eat any of the small insects.... His friends noticed that he missed physics class Monday, which was unlike him, they said. When he didn’t show up Tuesday and never went to work that day, they knew something was wrong..... When Norrell and other friends couldn’t find Cavar around campus, they contacted the Caving Club, and that’s when they realized that he might still be in the cave...."

WaPo reports.

Glad he survived, but what an incredible screwup! How does something like that happen? How many people were in the group? How do you separate yourself from the group and not remain aware that they are leaving a place that has a 1½-by-3-foot exit hole with a lockable gate on it? How does the group not take care to count that everyone's out before locking the gate? What kind of kind of "caving club" is this? And how sad to have friends who not only lock you in a cave but only notice your absence when you fail to show up for physics class and only think of trying to help you after you miss that class twice.

"Hardly a man takes a half-hour's nap after dinner, but when he wakes he holds up his head and asks, 'What's the news?' as if the rest of mankind had stood his sentinels."

"Some give directions to be waked every half-hour, doubtless for no other purpose; and then, to pay for it, they tell what they have dreamed. After a night's sleep the news is as indispensable as the breakfast. 'Pray tell me anything new that has happened to a man anywhere on this globe' -- and he reads it over his coffee and rolls, that a man has had his eyes gouged out this morning on the Wachito River; never dreaming the while that he lives in the dark unfathomed mammoth cave of this world, and has but the rudiment of an eye himself."

An old quote that crosses my mind as I realize I have yet to check the news this morning.

Do you recognize that quote? It's from the oft-quoted "Walden," and I'm amused to see the next paragraph:

For my part, I could easily do without the post-office. I think that there are very few important communications made through it. 

Read in isolation, that sounds like Henry David Thoreau foresaw email and the internet, but, in fact, he's at the opposite end of the technology spectrum:

To speak critically, I never received more than one or two letters in my life... that were worth the postage. 

I have written 34,859 posts on Blogger — this is #34,860 — and they were surely worth the "postage," since I have paid $0.00 to write to you like this.

The penny-post is, commonly, an institution through which you seriously offer a man that penny for his thoughts which is so often safely offered in jest. And I am sure that I never read any memorable news in a newspaper. 

Boldface added.

If we read of one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by accident, or one house burned, or one vessel wrecked, or one steamboat blown up, or one cow run over on the Western Railroad, or one mad dog killed, or one lot of grasshoppers in the winter -- we never need read of another. 

But a man on a vintage tractor was killed by a vintage firetruck in a 4th of July parade, and a cop shot the Rottweiler of a man he was arresting for photography the other day, and what's happening with those 17-year cicadas? Surely, these details from elsewhere need to be uploaded into our furiously grinding cogs of cognition.

One is enough. 

If you've read one dead dog story, you've read them all.

If you are acquainted with the principle, what do you care for a myriad instances and applications? To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea. 

In my defense, I am an old woman. I've had coffee, and have moved on to water. Are you a philosopher? The test is: Do you think all news is gossip?

Yet not a few are greedy after this gossip. There was such a rush, as I hear, the other day at one of the offices to learn the foreign news by the last arrival, that several large squares of plate glass belonging to the establishment were broken by the pressure -- news which I seriously think a ready wit might write a twelve-month, or twelve years, beforehand with sufficient accuracy. 

What news stories are you reading this morning that might just as well have been written a year ago?

As for Spain, for instance, if you know how to throw in Don Carlos and the Infanta, and Don Pedro and Seville and Granada, from time to time in the right proportions...

All these people that you mention/Yes, I know them, they’re quite lame/I had to rearrange their faces/And give them all another name...

.... they may have changed the names a little since I saw the papers -- and serve up a bull-fight when other entertainments fail, it will be true to the letter, and give us as good an idea of the exact state or ruin of things in Spain as the most succinct and lucid reports under this head in the newspapers: and as for England, almost the last significant scrap of news from that quarter was the revolution of 1649; and if you have learned the history of her crops for an average year, you never need attend to that thing again, unless your speculations are of a merely pecuniary character. If one may judge who rarely looks into the newspapers, nothing new does ever happen in foreign parts, a French revolution not excepted.

What's the news from Egypt?

What news! how much more important to know what that is which was never old! "Kieou-he-yu (great dignitary of the state of Wei) sent a man to Khoung-tseu to know his news."

All these Chinese names you mention... presumably, what's the news of how to spell them today?

"Khoung-tseu caused the messenger to be seated near him, and questioned him in these terms: What is your master doing? The messenger answered with respect: My master desires to diminish the number of his faults, but he cannot come to the end of them. The messenger being gone, the philosopher remarked: What a worthy messenger! What a worthy messenger!" The preacher, instead of vexing the ears of drowsy farmers on their day of rest at the end of the week -- for Sunday is the fit conclusion of an ill-spent week, and not the fresh and brave beginning of a new one -- with this one other draggle-tail of a sermon, should shout with thundering voice, "Pause! Avast! Why so seeming fast, but deadly slow?"

What is the fit conclusion to your ill-spent week?