Reptile & Amphibian Forums

Sorry, this is a little off-topic, but as many taxonomists are also inveterate book-lovers, I thought the following might be of interest...

Richard Wells

Twelve reasons for the death of small and independent book stores:

Ever thankful to those who made the effort before us, with heartfelt apologies to those who are still in the fight and the few who support them--offered upon the closing of Avenue Victor Hugo Bookshop in Boston.

1. Corporate law (and the politicians, lawyers, businessmen and accountants who created it for their own benefit)--a legal fiction with more rights than the individual citizen, which allows the likes of Barnes & Noble and Walmart to write off the losses of a store in Massachusetts against the profit of another in California, while paying taxes in Delaware--for making ‘competition’ a joke and turning the free market down the dark road toward state capitalism.

2. Publishers--marketing their product like so much soap or breakfast cereal, aiming at demographics instead of people, looking for the biggest immediate return instead of considering the future of their industry, ignoring the art of typography, the craft of binding, and needs of editing, all to make a cheapened product of glue and glitz--for being careless of a 500 year heritage with devastating result.

3. Book buyers--those who want the ‘convenience’ and ‘cost savings’ of shopping in malls, over the quaint, the dusty, or the unique; who buy books according to price instead of content, and prefer what is popular over what is good--for creating a mass market of the cheap, the loud, and the shiny.

4. Writers--who sell their souls to be published, write what is already being written or choose the new for its own sake, opt to feed the demands of editors rather than do their own best work, place style over substance, and bear no standards--for boring their readers unto television.

5. Booksellers--who supply the artificial demand created by marketing departments for the short term gain, accept second class treatment from publishers, push what is ‘hot’ instead of developing the long term interest of the reader--for failing to promote quality of content and excellence in book making.

6. Government (local, state and federal)--which taxes commercial property to the maximum, driving out the smaller and marginal businesses which are both the seed of future enterprise and the tradition of the past, while giving tax breaks to chain stores, thus killing the personality of a city--for producing the burden of tax codes only accountants can love.

7. Librarians--once the guardians, who now watch over their budgets instead--for destroying books which would last centuries to find room for disks and tapes which disintegrate in a few years and require costly maintenance or replacement by equipment soon to be obsolete.

8. Book collectors--who have metamorphosed from book worms to moths attracted only to the bright; once the sentinels of a favorite author’s work, now mere speculators on the ephemeral product of celebrity--for putting books on the same level with beanie babies.

9. Teachers--assigning books because of topical appeal, or because of their own lazy familiarity, instead of choosing what is best; thus a tale about the teenage angst of a World War Two era prep school boy is pushed at students who do not know when World War Two took place--for failing to pass the torch of civilization to the next generation.

10. Editors--who have forgotten the editorial craft--for servicing the marketing department, pursuing fast results and name recognition over quality of content and offering authors the Faustian bargain of fame and fortune, while pleading their best intentions like goats.

11. Reviewers--for promoting what is being advertised, puffing the famous to gain attention, being petty and personal, and praising the obscure with priestly authority--all the while being paid by the word.

12. The Public--those who do not read books, or can not find the time; who live by the flickering light of the television, and will be the first to fear the darkening of civilization--for not caring about consequences.

Thus, we come to the twilight of the age of books; to the closing of the mind; to the pitiful end of the quest for knowledge--and stare into the cold abyss of night.

John Usher

From THE HOUND by John Usher, copyright 2004. Permission to reproduce is granted to all upon request with proper attribution.

[Snakepimp] *Raises hand*

Thank you for that poignant observation. The abandonment of the art of bookbinding is a sore point for me.

I wish more people in design science and civil engineering could take the initiative (regardless of the lack of funding) to embrace the ethics of sustainable civilization, such as those championed by R. B. Fuller. We might stand a chance at long term survival...
Unfortunately, short-sighted greed-driven culture is likely to end our existence prematurely.

To end on a taxonomic note, where can I find information about the reclassification of the former elaphe, if indeed the re-c;lassification is holding up against peer review? I have found basic information about most of the North American taxons, but have found next to nothing about the Asian Elaphe.
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Jeremy J. Anderson
snakepimp.com
gemstatereptiles.com
Of course it's my opinion, I said it, didn't I?
Breeding season is always just around the corner....JOY!!!

Jeremy,

I certainly agree about the dying art of bookbinding...it's appalling what most publishers no peddle as binding, although their standards are perfectly in keeping with most other aspects of human endeavour now I'm afraid. Your comments in regards to Buckey's work are deserved too. You may be interested to know that my latest activity is the design and construction of underground (ie earth-covered) housing. It's virtually sent me (temporarily) broke, and distracted me from herpetology of late (which will send anyone broke), but I hope to have a few successes on the board soon. Here in Australia, as elsewhere, land is being gobbled up for urbanization at a frantic pace. What's left is now largely rural or bushland sites, and these have major bushfire and biodiversity conservation issues that impact upon housing development pretty severely in places - and rightly so in most cases I think. However, the march of population growth is merciless, so unless we start to be proactive and build accordingly our whole planet is going to go down the gurgler and take us all with it. One strategy that I feel can work towards a more sustainable civilization concerns the modification of our housing choices. In effect, I am convinced that earth-covered reinforced concrete (and its various permutations) type of buildings are a viable alternative to the present highly destructive surface suburbia that we have created. I am one, like most, who has lived amid the sea of brick veneer (or venereal) houses in Australia, and I have seen and experienced their failures as living spaces up close. The wonderful thing I find about earth-covered housing, is simply the fact that when it comes to biodiversity, you can have your cake without having to eat it too! When finished, underground house are covered with living creatures, there is virtually no maintenance required, and if soundly built they can last for centuries - not a merely a few years like our modern brick boxes. Further more, they are energy efficient, secure and virtually natural disaster proof - they can provide effective protection against earthquakes, bushfires, tornadoes, cyclones, hurricanes and a whole range of other nuisances - such as noise pollution. When one takes an honest and open look at the way we have treated the surface of this planet, one must come to the conclusion that it is a path to destruction of our species and virtually everything else as well. I believe that we should in fact be bulldozing whole cities into rubble - suburb by suburb - and rebuilding underground. Our transport networks should be similarly modified by earth-covered tunnels at least every few kilometres to reconnect vast areas of the land surface that have been isolated and fragmented by our roads and railway lines. Building inhabitable spaces beneath the sea has also been touted as a viable future strategy for human population - and indeed this is likely correct - but the technical problems are at present so vast and costly per head of population, that I believe it can't be done in time to save us. For those who think that all is well with our existing cities and housing choices, I would say that they should just look at the need for, and potential costs associated with, the maintenance of our existing structures. Everything is virtually falling down around our ears as it is, and in the case of a large mega-city like Sydney or worse - New York - that there may no longer be sufficient quantities of the resources needed just to provide such repairs! A study undertaken on base metal reserves some years ago now but still relevant, concluded that if New York city were to be destroyed in a nuclear attack, there is probably insufficient accessable world reserves of copper left just to replace the wiring and other copper-based components in that city. Let's get with the program people and build a sustainable world before the few people that can make it happen die off and leave the world to its fate.
On Elaphe, I can chase up some info for you, but that group is somewhat outside my experience, although I have worked with some at Taronga Zoo years ago. I will say however, that I have seen various opinions on the relationships of the group in recent times, that are often quite contradictory and so lead me away from any interest in unraveling the mess. There seems to me to have been some pretty slick big-time science involved in formulating some of these opinions, and some of this work has often has been at the expense of, or in opposition to, basic morphology and ecology - which after all, with all its faults, still stacks up pretty well when the the group is considered in relation to the habitats in which they live. While not wanting to encite a mass attack amongst some workers on Elaphe, I just can't resist saying that I feel the genus "Elaphe" overall is probably less the catch-all genus that some would prefer it to be, and more likely, an amalgum of several genera, that reflect quite distinctive origins in space and time in a more complex manner than some would prefer or accept.

Regards from

Richard Wells