Why do we ever change out of sweatpants?
Assumes facts not in evidence.
Heebie may have a tapeworm, but she dresses better than Eggplant.
Jewish moms are known for keeping their little ones well fed.
"In other words, the likeliest outcome after two years of expensive tariffs, bankrupt farmers, and nervous markets is that the United States might just be able to get back to where it was in the last year of the Obama administration,"
5: So... a decent chance that things won't just keeping getting worse? Optimism!
Not really?
"A weak phase one deal can be hung around his head, and contrasted to what he [Trump] promised," Scissors said--unless the mini-deal becomes too big an anchor, in which case he could just tear the whole thing up and redouble efforts to punish China. Which would start the trade wars all over again.
Hard to think of escapist books that haven't already been mentioned a hundred times. The Kitty Norville series, maybe? The Stormlight saga or something else by Brandon Sanderson? You'd want an e-reader, most of his books are huge tomes. I'm sure they've been mentioned before, but maybe somewhat less than some. Any classics you haven't read?
Semi-OT, but the last two books I read had something weird in common. They were both published in 2005 (that's not it). The Trudeau Vector is a semi-techno-thriller about scientists studying a mysterious disease north of the Arctic Circle. There's a subplot about a Russian submarine and her captain, an old warhorse pulled out of retirement or close to it. He's nostalgic about the Cold War and resents the gangsters who have taken over his country. Forbidden, which I'm about halfway through, seems like a color-by-numbers young adult post-apocalypse dystopia. The apocalypse was a nuclear war or something similar, between the US and Russia.
Meanwhile, in real life, in 2019, Russia is destabilizing the US not out of ideology but more or less out of realpolitik, and not with nuclear weapons but with social media. They couldn't write fiction about this.
Any classics you haven't read?
All of them! Honestly, I should just dust off the old thread. There are vastly more recommendations than I've been able to read (partly because I alternate with book club choices) and so the only thing that makes that older thread unhelpful is my lack of memory for it, or for locating it.
I was just about to suggest an end of the year book thread. Should we just use this one? Unfortunately, most of what I've read this year doesn't really count as escapist by most definitions (unless you'd like to escape to the Napoleonic wars or the Holy Roman Empire).
Talk, AL! (I've read appallingly little.)
Best books I read in 2019:
Favorite escapist lightweight fiction:
- Daisy Jones and the Six, by Taylor Jenkins Reid. Composed of interviews with the former members of a 70s rock band loosely based on Fleetwood Mac. Really fun.
- The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue, by Mackenzi Lee. This is a YA romance about a teenaged aristocrats in 18th century Europe. It might not be your bag, I certainly didn't expect it to be mine, but it charmed my socks off.
- The Lager Queen of Minnesota, by J. Ryan Stradal. This wasn't quite as good as Stradal's previous book, and retreads a lot of the same territory (semi-fantastical plot about nice midwestern people who care a lot about food), but I enjoyed it.
Favorite non-escapist novels:
- Normal People, by Sally Rooney. I cared so much about what was going to happen that reading this turned out to be a really stressful experience.
- Ask Again, Yes, by Mary Beth Keane. I really like long, winding, intergenerational novels, and this is a good one.
- Everything Here Is Beautiful, by Mira Lee. This was just so well-written, and really beautiful. Super sad.
- Severance, by Ling Ma. Millennial anomie and zombie apocalypse. I thought this was great, but everyone else I know hated it.
- My Year of Rest and Relaxation, by Ottessa Moshfegh. This one is not for everyone, but I really loved it. So obnoxious, so boring, so fun to read.
Nonfiction I found really engrossing, although most of these are not escapist in the least, and may increase your stress levels:
- Bad Blood, by John Carreyou.
- Catch and Kill, by Ronan Farrow. I read this and the Carreyou book almost simultaneously, and one of my main takeaways was that, JFC, Boies Schiller Flexner are some of the worst people on the planet.
- The Library Book, by Susan Orlean. I loved this book so much that I had to set limits on the number of pages I could read at one time, so that I could prolong my enjoyment as much as possible. It was way too short.
- Trick Mirror, by Jia Tolentino. Essay compilations are always uneven and this is not an exception, but the best ones are really insightful, and even the worst are well-written.
I found Bad Blood to be escapist. Such terrible people occasionally entertain me in a Bluth way, if they've already gotten their comeuppance.
I can only watch like half an episode of Arrested Development before I get too embarrassed for Michael to continue.
My Sister, the Serial Killer is a fun, short read. Fleishman is in Trouble was longer but also fun - kind of an updated version of a Phillip Roth novel, but written by a woman. Flights was my ongoing attempt to be cultured by reading the new non-controversial Nobel-prize winner -- I'm not sure how it's a novel exactly, but it's bizarre and mostly maintained my interest.
14: The secret is to realize that he's the worst of all of them. Laugh at him.
12: I had the exact same experience with Normal People. It kicked my ass; I had physical stress reactions reading it. I haven't experienced anything like that from fiction in years.
Non-fiction:
Days of Rage: America's Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence, by Bryan Burrough - History of left wing terrorism in the 70s. Starting with the Weathermen and ending with collapse of the last underground groups in the early 80s.
Creepy Crawling: Charles Manson and the Many Lives of America's Most Infamous Family, by Jeffrey Melnick - Not a history of the Manson murders, but a history of how the Manson Family entered popular culture and has never really left for 50 years. Also a survey of the entertainment industry and the counterculture at the moment that Manson came on the scene. Pairs well with Days of Rage: "When countercultures go bad". Interesting aside, Melnick really seems to dislike Joan Didion. He mentions her several times in the book and seems to lose his composure each time. She clearly gets under his skin in a big way.
Emperor: A New Life of Charles V, by Geoffrey Parker - Just what it says. It's interesting to note how much outrage their was in Europe about the behavior of the conquistadors at the time the conquests were happening. Not that people objected to conquest per se, but the massive looting/killing that was going on. Charles even floated the idea of sending an army to the Americas to get the conquistadors under control, but was informed that he had no money and already had run up huge debts with his wars in Europe.
The Holy Roman Empire: 1000 Years of Europe's History, by Peter Wilson - just what it says.
Lotharingia: A Personal History of Europe's Lost Country, by Simon Winder - third in Winders trilogy following Germania and Danubia. Rambling observations of history, art and architecture in the vaguely defined region between France and Germany that stretches from Belgium to Switzerland.
The Grand Strategy of the Habsburg Empire, by Wess Mitchell - exploration of how the Habsburgs remained a great power for as long as they did given that were surrounded much of the time by hostile powers stronger than they were.
The Dialogue of Civilizations in the Birth of Modern Science, by Arun Bala - Traces the many streams from India, China and the Islamic world that fed into the Scientific Revolution of the 17th century. Quite good. It's so rare to see "multiculturalism" done right. My only complaint is the eye punishingly small print.
White, by Bret Easton Ellis - a collection of non-fiction pieces ranging from recollections of growing up in the 70s to observations on Hollywood folks losing their shit over Trump. He's kind of a troll, but he mostly trolls people who deserve it.
The Problem with Everything, by Meghan Daum - similar to White in some ways, but Daum eschews trolling. She's almost exactly my age, so it was interesting reading her recollections of growing up in the 70s/early 80s. In trying understand why she's so puzzled by the anxieties around gender that seems to be such a thing with The Kids These Days, she notes that the 70s were just about the most androgynous time in history as far as childhood is concerned, and wonders if the subsequent super-gendered Disney-princess-pink-vs-blue-everything parenting that came in in the 90s is part of the explanation.
The Spanish Ulcer: A History of the Peninsular War, by David Gates - just what it says.
Why Nationalism, by Yael Tamir - defense of the nation state and a case for why it's still the best protection from rampant capitalism available to most people.
Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power, by Byung-Chul Han - ruminations on how we're voluntarily commodifying ourselves so giant tech corporations can get rich.
The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity, by Kwame Anthony Appiah - thoughts on the contradictions and limitations of common identity categories (race, religion, nationality & etc.) by Appiah, who has been writing about this subject for a while now.
I might be forgetting something.
I'll add fiction later. I feel like I read fewer books this year than last year. On the other hand, more the (non-fiction) books this year were massive doorstop tomes.
I read Tom Jones this year, which dragged here and there but which I really enjoyed overall. Genuinely escapist 40% of the time for me, left me with the strong feeling that Fielding would have been pleasant conversational and/or beer company.
Also Sebald's The Immigrants, which I found incredibly absorbing. It's a book that very densely describes life around gaps, so much so that the shapes of the gaps stand out.
I finished Robert Gordon's Rise and Fall of American Growth, which had a lot of interesting historical narrative about roadbuilding and hospitals in the US among other things. Brick of a book, kind of uneven.
Robert Allen's Very Short Introduction to Global Economic History, which I liked a lot.
Wedgewood's biography of Cromwell, which was only OK, much less source material I guess than her other books about the 17th century. Short, apparently a late reworking of a book she wrote when young.
Keras documentation and some good review articles I guess.
I feel like dilletante reading is probably a weakness, but I basically love every foray I take into comparative biology-- this paper about the biochemistry of circulation in molluscs was fantastic: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4775334/ I got into it because there's another phenomenon I care about, RNA editing, that is basically a weird corner of vertebrate biology which was recently discovered to have been turned up millions-fold in octopuses and is an integral compnent of their neural development.
The Mitchell book in 18 seems interesting-- would you recommend it?
The Mitchell book in 18 seems interesting-- would you recommend it?
I enjoyed it, but it's definitely the sort of thing that people who like that sort of thing will like. So if you like that sort of thing, then I'd recommend it.
AcademicLurker: I'll have to get it! I read The Grand Strategy of the Byzantine Empire by Edward Luttwak (he's a bit of a nut when it comes to contemporary policy, but his historical chops seem sound) and it was fascinating. There's a sci-fi series called War World started by Pournelle, revolving around Byer's World (IIRC) and its history after a war (yadda yadda yadda), and the way he described the various wars really reminded me of the way Luttwak described the strategic situation the Byzantines found themselves in.
An interesting read. I also found [heavy, but still] Mortal Republic by Watts to be incredible. He writes about the end of the Roman Republic (not Empire) and how the political struggles then presage the struggles we see today. Fascinating.
Speaking of "interesting nonfiction" does anybody here read Deveraux's https://acoup.blog/ ? He's a medieval military historian, and he writes about ancient military stuff, though branches out into other areas. Really interesting. His series on Sparta was great [narrator: they weren't all that; in fact, they were pretty awful, and not even good at being awful]
Speaking of escapist reading and Byzantine history, apparently John M. Ford's The Dragon Waiting has been reprinted recently. If you haven't read it and have even a suspicion that that you might like alternate history/fantasy, I strongly recommend giving it a try.
Fiction:
As usual, I seem to have read less fiction than non-fiction this year.
Houses Under the Sea: Mythos Tales, by Caitlin R. Kiernan - I've been a huge Kiernan fan ever since picking up Silk back in 2001 (wow, I can't believe it's been that long). For my money she's probably the best writer of "weird" fiction of the last 20 years. This is a collection of her Lovecraft inflected stories.
Although I of course know of Agatha Christie and have seen a lot of movies and TV based on her work, I'd only ever read a few of her books. I went on a real Christy kick this year, though:
Evil Under the Sun
Death on the Nile
Murder on the Links
The Mysterious Affair at Styles
The ABC Murders
Sad Cypress
The Hollow
A Caribbean Mystery
The Halloween Party
Louise Penny:
Glass Houses
Kingdom of the Blind
- the latest 2 Inspector Gamache novels.
Laura Lippman:
In a Strange City
The Last Place
I'm still working my way through her novels about Baltimore based private detective Tess Monaghan (I'm clearly a bad Baltimorian).
I think that might be it for fiction this year.
24. Have you read The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire? (by Luttwak, of course). I read that but didn't realize he'd written other ones like it. Will have to indulge. (Don't forget Coup d'Etat: A Practical Handbook either.)
26. There was flurry of John M. Ford activity (including a long piece in Slate about him) because all his (meager) output is being reprinted. I re-read The Dragon Waiting a month or so ago (my old pb copy) and it was even better than I remembered it being. I think I caught more of the references than I did on the first reading, many years ago.
My uninformed impression is that Luttwak was totally unqualified and comprehensively refuted by actual Romanists?
29. Yes! That makes it even more fun. That and the fake gold leaf cover. There was a long piece about him just recently (forget where: New Yorker, maybe?), and basically he'll write about anything, whether he knows anything about it or not. A little superficial research and wham! Done! He supposedly cribbed "Coup d'Etat" from some government memo.
I tend to re-read books I like, often multiple times, to try to squeeze more out of them, or just because they were so good. One example would be Wedgwood's The Thirty Years War. A giant slog but packed with interesting detail. On the SFF fiction side, I have reread most of Michael Swanwick's stuff several times: The Iron Dragon's Daughter et sequelae, the Darger and Surplus stories and novels, etc.
I'm looking forward to the new William Gibson novel, Agency, which comes out next month, and re-read The Peripheral last summer to refresh my memory.
21. If you want a fuller bio of Cromwell that's readable in the sense of not written to parade the author's academic credentials, you can do worse than Antonia Fraser. Christopher Hill's God's Englishman is also worth reading.
Writing about the Daum book reminded me of something. In the chapter about growing up in the 70s, she mentions the various children's television shows of the era, and pays particular attention to a show called Zoom. Now I remember watching Sesame Street, The Electric Company, Mr. Rogers, and most of the other kid's shows of that period, but I literally never heard of Zoom until reading Daum's book. I asked Mrs. Lurker, who grew up in Minnesota, and she definitely remembers watching Zoom.
Did that show just not make it to the West coast? Or was my region of Southern California the only place where it didn't air?
"Write Zoom, Z-double-O-M, Box 3-5-0, Boston, Mass 0-2-1-3-4: send it to Zoom!"
I will remember that address forever.
I forgot,
Raymond Chandler
The Big Sleep
The Long Goodbye
I tried to read Chandler ~20 years ago and couldn't get into him much at all. But this time I must have been in the right frame of mind.
36. Oh, Little Sister Chandler's Hollywood novel, I read that I think this year-- less expressionistic prose style than the others, but still out there, I really enjoyed this one. Intelligible plot with a point of view on the film industry, written after RC had worked on films.
There's a graphic novel of Chandler noir plus also (and titled) The Waste Land. With footnotes, also illustrated (jug jug tereu).
Fluff and more recent: Zen Cho's Sorceror to the Crown and The True Queen, in that order, which are Regency comedies of manners (and murder) with magicians, but the magicians are respectively black and Malaysian, and they don't have a lot of room to condemn the power structures they're in but they do their best. Also they win, which is comforting in the moment.
And a series of WWII submarine warfare novels, `Harry Gilmour' the search term, which are as optimistic as possible. The main character is a Naval officer from a suck-them-in-quick WWII program and the difference between him and the traditionally trained Navy men is extremely useful for incluing, plus also Plot.
Another vote for jms's suggestion of Trick Mirror; a couple of the essays (the one on losing her religion and discovering lean, in particular) are just beautiful. (I also read and enjoyed Normal People, and didn't find it as stressful as jus did.)
Calling out a couple things I read this year that are more on the escapist side:
* The Essex Serpent (Sarah Perry): the interactions between a late 19th century widow of means interested in naturalism; a rural clergyman; and their families.
* Swordheart (Ursula Vernon, writing as T. Kingfisher): a straight-up romance novel in the guise of a fantasy novel about a hunky barbarian trapped in a magic sword and the bosomy widow-lady who inherits him.
* The Breath of the Sun (Isaac R. Fellman): the novel I read this year that I think about the most; told in the form of a memoir written by a famous mountaineer for her girlfriend, about her ascent to the peak of the largest mountain of the world (possibly infinitely tall) with a scientist/nun. Just fantastic. Explicitly a fantasy novel--there is a whole fantasy religion, there is one instance of actual magic happening--but about as far removed from the cod-Tolkien tradition as possible.
21: I also read Sebald's The Emigrants this year (for the first time) and it's an incredible piece of work but not *escapist* as such.
(Oh, I read Ned Beaumont's Madness is Better than Defeat, which very much is--a Golden-Age Hollywood film production gets lost in the jungle for decades and forms a microcosmic society--but it's not as good as his previous Gibson-ish Glow.)
a couple of the essays (the one on losing her religion and discovering lean, in particular) are just beautiful
This essay was just so well-written. There was one line in particular -- comparing the quality of the light in Houston with the feeling of being high on lean -- that I just sat and looked at for a few minutes, I was so struck by its beauty.
Are you sure that's not just air pollution?
Why do we ever change out of sweatpants?
I don't even own a sweatpants. My son as track pants that make him look like an 80s mobster, but in a good way.
According to sources, in Australia, sweatpants are called Trakky-Dacks.
28, 30: I am thrilled all to pieces that Aspects is going to see the light of day. The collection of ephemera and unpublished works will probably also be a delight.
Did you spend time at Making Light when he was there? If you like, I can dig up the link to his commentary there, there is a truly massive amount of it and some of it is astonishing. His sonnet "Against Entropy" was for the Nielsen Haydens' other blog, and he wrote it in less than a day.
46.2: I did; I was a regular contributor before and after his death, which was saddening.
Unrelated, but since anything that happens twice is a tradition:
"Sometimes there are five gold rings, four colly birds, three French hens, two turtle doves and a partridge in a pear tree, Winston. Sometimes there are four. Sometimes there are six. Sometimes there are all of them at once."
http://www.unfogged.com/archives/comments_12617.html#1529250
I have just started Svetlana Alexievich's Secondhand Time, and my socks they are officially knocked off. Have a feeling I am going to be reading all of her work (and none of Peter Handke's).
Jodi Taylor's Chronicles of St Mary's are great escapist fun. The first one especially is what happens when someone takes a worn premise and just writes the hell out of it.
Becoming by Michelle Obama really is as good as touted.
The Privilege of the Sword by Ellen Kushner is very strong, but read Swordspoint first because it's perfect. (Other perfect books include Threepenny Opera by Bertolt Brecht and Raising Demons by Shirley Jackson. Let me know if you find more.)
Other terrific books I've read this year include:
The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes, by turns a story of the joy of scientific discovery, the meeting of science and power, and a reason why if you read enough history you don't ever have to go near the horror section of the bookstore.
Golden Hill by Francis Spufford at once a lark through old New York that's just past being New Amsterdam and reflections from several different angles on what money means, at the end of the day.
Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik, which has more on the meaning of money and was the best of this year's Hugo novel nominees, despite not quite winning.
Welcome to Lagos by Chibundu Onuzo, which follows a small group of people from the countryside into Nigeria's scam-friendly big city.
My Read Children by Jo Walton. An elderly woman in a nice enough British nursing home looks back on her life, on some days the life with the marriage to her college sweetheart and four children (plus five stillbirths), and on other days the life in which she did not marry him, had two children of her body and a stepchild, "dearest of them all. She couldn't understand how she could be so muddled. If she saw Philip she knew that he was one of her three children, yet if she saw Cathy she knew she was one of her four children. She recognized them and felt that mother's ache."
A Backpack, a Bear, and Eight Crates of Vodka by Lev Golinkin has no right to be as good as it is, and yet.
Things that looking through this year's reading make me want to re-read: Bridge of Birds: A Novel of Ancient China that Never Was by Barry Hughart, The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison, Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea books.
In the other direction, things I DNF'd this year were Hitler's Empire by Mark Mazower (not bad, just not enough new to me), The Night Manager by John Le Carre (drew the Eight Deadly Words), Barbarossa by Alan Clark (too outdated). I should have DNF'd A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge.
32, 33 "We're gonna zoom zoom zoom-a zoom. We're gonna zoom-a zoom-a zoom-a zoom!"
Svetlana Alexievich's Secondhand Time
Which I read an impressive excerpt of, but apparently she took no notes and her informants cannot be verified. So.
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Gnaaah FUCK FUCKETY
I had parked the car badly over the weekend, and when I climbed in to shift it and started the engine there was the most terrible noise. It wasn't immediate, so I took a few moments to identify it. This is a Prius, with two motors, and the electric one had been silent, as usual. The petrol engine, though, was deafening. I switched off at once, so as not to disturb the neighbours. I realised I must have a hole in the exhaust and the next day rang the good little garage round the corner. I drove round yesterday very carefully and slowly on the electric motor. They rang this morning to say that it was not a hole, but that some toerag had sawed off the whole exhaust pipe to get at the catalytic converter, for the platinum within. It will cost me damn near £400 to fix and the insurance is no help at all. Nor will I have a car until the new year.
Merry fucking Christmas everyone
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As someone who has had, like, four mufflers fall off, you can drive around just fine without one. You just need to have no shame.
Check your privilege. In times to come they'll saw out the whole motor for the copper.
46. I hung out at ML for a long time but I almost entirely lurked. Here's a link to the valedictory thread about Ford. (Next thing you're going tell me is you were on the Urth list, too.)
48. I rather liked A Deepness in the Sky. I started Golden Hill but only got partway through. I don't DNF many books so I will probably pick it up again over the holidays. I really liked Red Plenty, though.
51. I hear that's a "thing." Sorry you were victimized.
I hadn't heard of stealing catalytic converters since the 80sv when they were new. I guess they came back, like waist packs and high-waisted jeans.
Anyway, it's a shitty thing to have to deal with.
Not at all. Sweet, clean air.
55, 56: I was not on the Urth list, and because of time zones I, too, mostly lurked at Making Light.
Here's a compilation of the compilations of Ford's occasional works at ML.
55 again: Back in May I wrote that A Deepness in the Sky "[has] an interesting set-up. Unfortunately, I found the characters one-note, going clickety-clack through their various machinations until the plot engine reached the high point it had been climbing toward through all those pages. It was too much for too little, in the end."
Here's my full review.
50: Have people tried to run down Kapuscinski's sources, too? I've met a lot of post-Soviet people, and they definitely say the kinds of things that Alexievich has people saying. It's an interesting question, though: how much the perceived value of a work comes from thinking it true.
55 Golden Hill is a wonderful book, though I think it is about redemption, rather than money.
Reread Present At The Creation by Acheson and McCullough's Truman. A different world, with some familiar inequalities and terrors, of US policy and politics...
The Rhodes book on the Bomb is everything that Doug says it is in 47.
Old news, fiction-wise, but I enjoyed The Power by Alderman.
Just finished The Warm South by Kerschen and really liked it. I went in knowing a minimal amount about the lives of Keats and his contemporaries and the author took it and ran with it.
Is there really a big problem with rat hair in the paprika? Asking for a friend who usually gets deviled eggs on Christmas Eve.
Just finished The Warm South by Unfogged commenter Kerschen and really liked it
I liked it a bunch too.
65: Do you think 11 rat hairs per 25g of paprika is a big problem?
63: Such a good multifaceted word, redemption
69: I researched this a little further and it turns out that it doesn't say anything specifically about "rat" hair. It could be for example, mouse hair, or squirrel hair, or capybara hair.
Maybe Whole Foods will sell rat-free spices like they sell chicken without the bleach bath.
It is interesting how different numbers of rodent hairs, and insect fragments are considered acceptable in different spices.
Can someone who used to look forward to election season, or still does, explain why? I can't imagine that honestly.
Stealing the catalytic converters out of Priuses is really common here in Sacramento.
Is there more platinum in a Prius converter?
If the owner hears you while you're busy they're really unlikely to have a shotgun.
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Isn't there a term for that literary device where you use words A and B, and soon after find a way use B and A in the reverse order? You see it in Shakespeare?
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I don't know who this was originally about, but it applied to poor old Leonard Cohen- " A tour-de-force is forced to tour".
I live near a scrapyard. Word on the street is that scrapping prices are down thanks to the Trump tariffs.
Who here is for, and who is against, referring casually to 1900 as "the last year of the 19th century"? Ex. (clumsily improvising here): "Practices had steadily been shifting towards the modern standard since 1860. But even in the last year of the 19th century, in early October 1900,..."
My sense is that, while people go on and on about how decades and centuries and millennia don't really start until the year ending in 1, it's still jarring usage in narrative or in conversation. Maybe also that references to the last year of one century or the first year of another should be avoided whenever possible. Calendrical taboo! I'm curious though.
YEAR ZERO MOTHERFUCKERS SOLVE THE PROBLEM DON'T KICK THE CAN REVOLUTION IS THE ONLY ANSWER
My gut feeling is that if you aren't writing chronological code, it doesn't really matter and people should do whatever comes naturally in the situation. Which might vary based on local custom.
"Calendrical taboo" sounds like Yoon Ha Lee's novels.
Even from a pedant's perspective, though, this logic doesn't apply to decades: we call it the 2010s, we don't call it the 202nd decade, so it starts in January 2010, not 2011. I suppose if you say "the first decade of the 20th century" it applies, but again, this creates more noise than light.
We can't have a year zero because people before Christ put so much effort into counting time backwards.
SUNK COSTS ARE A BOURGEOIS FALLACY
Pol Pot overthrew capitalism because he couldn't get his bank to start his check numbering at 0.
That's why all the programmers supported him.
The late Stephen Jay Gould on the calendar issue:
I know a mentally handicapped young man who also happens to be a prodigy in day-date calculation. (He can, instantaneously, give the day of the week for any date, thousands of years, past or future ...) He is fully aware of the great century debate, for nothing could interest him more. I asked him recently whether the millennium comes in 2000 or 2001 -- and he responded unhesitatingly: "In 2000. The first decade had only nine years."
God is clearly fucking with us.
I think the first decade had 11 years and the second had eight.
Where applicable, please consider this my wish for you to have a Happy Hanukkah (and a Chappy Chanukah).
My new favorite Hanukkah song.
Who here is for, and who is against, referring casually to 1900 as "the last year of the 19th century"? Ex. (clumsily improvising here): "Practices had steadily been shifting towards the modern standard since 1860. But even in the last year of the 19th century, in early October 1900,..."
Against. There is no practical reason our era-delineation must align end-to-end consistently back to the distant past. The reason we divide out by tens and hundreds in the first place is because of the leading digit, so it makes sense all years starting 18** are 19th century, all years starting 200* were the first decade of the 21st century, etc. (Or to put it in terms of 89: the 1st centuries AD and BC each had 99 years.)
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Heading to Dubai tomorrow for the Christmas holiday. It'll be two years since I've been and seen any of my friends there, including Chani.
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Also, was I just not paying attention or have all the years of Anglo chatter totally failed to mention the 15,000 Sudanese troops in Yemen?
So, are people really ready to say that in England the 18th century began on March 25, 1701?
Or, as we now call it, March 14, 1701.
By my framework, it would be January 12 Gregorian, 1700. (March 25, later April 6, was the legal/fiscal year.)
Then the Declaration of Independence said the fiscal year starts October 1.
If we just went back to the practice of designating the years 1-99 in either direction by the names of the Ordinary Consuls for that year, we could start the 2nd century in the year 100 and Bob's your uncle. All it would involve would be committing to memory 396 mostly unfamiliar names in the right order, and I'm sure we could all do that.
hi all. I'm wrapping up a family reunion today, will resume regular posting tomorrow. Much love to you all.
It's probably easier to just put your family in a bag with a bow.
103: If you need a day off you're supposed to ask in advance. However since it is the holidays, we'll let you off with a warning this time.
Signed,
The Management
PS - Happy Chanukah to you, the giblets, Jammies, and the other heebsters!
PS - Happy Chanukah to you, the giblets, Jammies, and the other heebsters!
PS - Happy Chanukah to you, the giblets, Jammies, and the other heebsters!
106-108: I guess that's what passes for a Chanukah miracle in these benighted times.
102: Better yet, we could start the 1st century in the year 100, and avoid all that annoying confusion about how the 19th century and the 1900s are totally different time periods.
In fairness, peep only had enough battery for 3/8 of a comment.
|| So, I finished season 3 of The Crown yesterday. Wilson comes off very well. What's the popular reputation of Wilson like, Brits? |>
113. Mixed. Generally admired for having an actual political programme (the last one except Thatcher of whom that can be said), although not much of it bore fruit; also for standing up to LBJ and keeping us out of Vietnam). But had too many dodgy friends.
Didn't Blair have a programme?
What's wrong when an old fashioned "scheme"?
I think Wilson is largely forgotten now. But his reputation at the time was for extreme deviousness and skill. He managed decline pretty well, I think.
As for Blair, he reminds me of the 1066 And All That description of the English Civil War -- he was Right but Repulsive, whereas his enemies are Wrong but Wromantic. Of course, in the real civil was, the Right but Repulsive were the puritan Left, who are now in Labour the Wrong but Wromantic.
That makes everything so much clearer for the non-British reader.
||
Ko Myo Min Zaw takes pride in offering the first goat-oriented sustainable tour in Bagan.|>
It's good that goats have sufficient disposable income for that now.
Try the Lincoln airport. Two gates, no waiting. Or at least no way to buy food while waiting at the gate.