When I finished reading The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow, I immediately started reading it a second time. I can count on one hand the number of times I've immediately reread a book, and two of them were on similar topics, so before I tell you what I thought of the new book, I'll tell you about the other two so we can see how they relate.
mining progressively closer to the surface:
More stuff worth saving from a sinking ship:
Continuing to mine the past for what's worth keeping:
Here is our annual roundup of the past year, in words and in pictures.
continuing to mine the past for stuff worth keeping...
When I was in school, I frequently asked my parents for recommendations of what to read for book reports. They had an extensive collection of classic speculative fiction, so I read famous titles including The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis; The Invisible Man, The Time Machine, and War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells; Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell; The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin, and Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein.
The weekend of November 5, 2021, Jessie and I made our first overnight trip in our 2018 Nissan Leaf SV. The car has a theoretical range of about 120 miles, but the highway route from Omaha to Topeka is 162 miles. There's a rapid charger in Auburn, Nebraska, and we figured if we were lucky we could make just one stop, but if we ran short of range, there were a couple other, slower chargers we could visit. Here's what we learned:
Continuing mining the past for stuff worth keeping...
I joined Facebook in 2008, but it wasn't until 2009 that I recognized its potential as an audience for my sense of humor. I've been looking through my old posts just in case I leave the platform in the future. One of the main lessons I've learned is that I used to get sick a lot more often when I wasn't sheltering from a pandemic! Most of the articles I linked to are now 404, sadly.
Here are some of my posts from 2009 that I still think are funny or insightful: