triticale - the wheat / rye guy

Accomplishments

Nykola pointed us to the Things Other People Accomplished When They Were Your Age page, which she had found at the other end of her blogging spectrum.

At my age of 53, Ludwig van Beethoven completed his Ninth Symphony and Sidney Sheldon began writing his first novel. The latter is digging into me, a bit spurlike. Any novel I would write would be very different from Sheldon's, but I doubt it would be any more a work of literary art, and I could only hope it would be as well crafted.

The entries I really want to discuss was found by paging ahead a couple of years. At 55, "Painter Pablo Picasso completed his masterpiece, Guernica." A wondrously evocative painting which makes exceptional use of a limited pallette. It als happens to be a falsehood. Whether civilians were the intended targets, or the German bombardiers simply missed the intended military targets, which happend more often than not until quite recently, Guernica was more than just a fishing village.

Also at age 55, Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring, which publicized the indiscriminate use of pesticides and helped rally support for environmental protection. That's what the age page had to say about her. Nary a mention of the questions raised about the validity of her conclusions, let alone the charge that the DDT ban she inspired has been the cause of massive death and despair across Africa.