Month: August 2020

1. “Why it is so hard to change someone’s mind.” This was really good and you would be smarter watching this.

2. Via National Geographic, Mario Rigby, a Canadian-Turks and Caicos Islander explorer, made a two year walk (and kayak) across the continent of Africa, from the south to the north:

On the human side, it was probably in Mozambique. They put me on TV out there, and because there are only a few news channels, everyone saw it. When I started walking, people kept on coming up to me and saying, “Hey, you’re Mario!” There was this one tough walk just coming out of the monsoon season, and a guy came up to me and invited me to stay at his home. It was one of those beautiful, traditional red earthen huts with cashew trees in the front garden, and he was so excited for me to meet his family. They wanted to cook me a meal, but their stove was broken, so as a thank you I bought them a new one. It was the least I could do, and you should’ve seen the happiness over such a simple purchase — but one that would really change their lives. I stayed for a couple of nights in the end, and they welcomed me like I was family. We spent long evenings outside looking at the stars, with the whole Milky Way lit up above us.

3. I know I have a preconceived notion about Sudan (and I’ve been to Ethiopia, which is a neighbor) but these photos from Smithsonian were terrific. there’s so much history in almost every corner of the planet.

4. Want to go on a fun adventure? Me too. Ryan Van Duzer is a YouTuber and he is taking a bike ride down the Great Divide Mountain Bike Route.  He went as far as he could go, I think he had to stop before he entered New Mexico as they are in quarantine. This is the first episode, but there will be more to come as he starts in Montana.

5. SideTracked Magazine on the Khurdopin Glacier, which is in Pakistan. The photo of the valley in the second picture and the photos of the people are magnificent.

As I’ve reminded you before. What is the most important thing in the world? It is the people. It is the people. It is the people.

1. I have two wild stories. This is from Narratively’s Dylan Taylor-Lehman, “Jay J. Armes is a legendary and controversial Texan investigator with hooks for hands and six decades chasing criminals. This was his most epic murder case ever.” Everything about this is wild.

2. Wild story no. 2. Texas Monthly’s Kathy Vine, the story of Theodore Roosevelt Wright and the most insurance fraud I’ve ever seen in my life.

3. Nostalgia. The controls on Speed Racer’s car.

4. FieldMag on a new book by Sarah Decker Jones, the shelters, lean-tos, and huts of the Appalachian Trail. At the link, Jones lists her top 10 favorite shelters, which is cool. And if you’ve never gone to the Smoky Mountains, you definitely get a taste of what the trail is and can even walk a bit of it.

5. OutsideOnline with the fastest 5k in history, run by 23 year-old Ugandan Joshua Cheptegei, running it in 12:35.36. This article is interesting from the aspect that it is really about Cheptegei’s pace, which started fast and he kept that pace, slowly increasing his speed from the 2k through the 5k mark.

1. A night up in a tree in your own backyard. I think I’ve found my fall project when the weather turns.

2. I had never heard of Trini Lopez, but he was from Dallas and he was an incredible musician that was discovered by by Frank Sinatra. To bring things to modern day, Dave Grohl uses a 1967 Gibson Trini Lopez signature ES-335 to record all of the Foo Fighter albums.

3. Moving pictures from over 100 years ago: New York City 1911; Jerusalem 1897; Paris 1890s; Berlin 1902; San Sebastian 1913; London 1923; La Habana 1930; Sarajevo 1914; Madrid 1910; Marseille 1900; Belfast 1901; Amsterdam 1922; San Francisco 1906; Stockholm 1913; St. Petersburg 1914; Halifax 1902. You get the idea.

4. Via the LA Times, NBA superfan James Goldstein doesn’t know what he’s going to do if he cannot go to the NBA games.

“I can’t really grasp what it’s going to do to me,” he said.

Photo by Tatenda Mapigoti on Unsplash

5. You ever heard of Lesotho? Me neither. It’s a country within the borders of South Africa and along with Vatican City and San Marino, is one of three states completely surrounded by another singular country. Via SideTracked some beautiful pictures of a country that I’ve never even heard of before now. I’d also add that when I first looked at the photos, I thought I was looking at Europe.

1. Slovenia is absolutely ridiculous. This is Zelenci Nature Reserve and just look at that? It’s the Land of Luka.

This is a similar picture but with a bit more sun and clarity.

Photo by Mathilde Rolando on Unsplash

2. Learning something new every day. I had never considered that Australia had slavery and this historical account is a good re-telling. But it wasn’t Africans, it was the Aboriginal people as well as 62,000 Melanisians (people from New Guinea to Fiji). Those people were bought and sold.

3. Eater’s Craig Mod walked over 600 miles across Japan just eating pizza toast. Imagine eating something foreign to a foreign country and walking for 600 miles. That’s from Durango to Denver. Mod would eat at Kissa, which are cafe’s or bars and this pizza toast is basically bar food for Japan.

Kissa — as they’re affectionately called — are suspended, like mosquitoes in amber, in a very specific moment in time. Japan operates on a non-Western calendar of eras, recently entering Reiwa this past May as Emperor Akihito abdicated the throne. Before Reiwa was Heisei, and before Heisei, Showa. Kissa are inextricably linked to Showa, an era that ran from 1926 to 1989. Showa is generally looked back upon as the “golden age” of modern Japan: technicolor, hardworking, patriarchal, industrial, with the romantic focus squarely on those postwar lean years. Showa is the jumble of alleyway bars in the now tourist-overrun Golden Gai nook of Tokyo. Showa is an old-school barber shop with hair tonics and hair liquids tucked between gleaming Mori and Mitsui skyscrapers. Showa is, above all, kissa.

Kissa, I presumed, like barbershops, would be everywhere on my journey. Many would have pizza toast. The kissa would connect the vast physical geographies of the walk. Pizza toast, the cosmic geography of my life in Japan.

4. Absolutely love this. The design of Lego computer screens. Fitsum’s Legos are all over the house and these screens bring back all sorts of memories as a kid who loved to play with Legos.

5. Via the BBC the most popular soccer kit is not really a soccer club, but an imaginary club. Who wants to do one for Lubbock or your hometown? If I had even a smidgen of graphic design ability I’d be all over this.

1. Want to know how to make me jealous? Show me a story about a guy traveling the world with his dog.

Everybody love everybody.

2. This is great. OutsideOnline tells the story of Bryan and Patrick, who quit their jobs to build a cabin in the middle of the woods with almost no experience.

During those last few weeks of work in the spring, if we had the energy, we stayed up late talking about where we wanted to be in ten or 20 years. There was something about building that was exactly as we had hoped. We loved that we weren’t staring at our computers all day. We loved how stiff our backs felt. Loved that our hands were so sore by dinner that squeezing a lime onto a taco felt like an Olympic event. We loved the excitement that would come from kicking the friggin’ bejeezus out of a task, screws flying into boards straight and strong, music blaring, working as a team without the need for communication beyond high-fives. Building felt like a natural extension of everything we valued in our lives: creativity, friendship, purpose, responsibility.

3. I love science and I love the fact that we’re still learning and what we think we know changes based on new evidence. Again, that’s a good thing too. Via National Geographic’s Kristin Romey, new evidence has been discovered that places humans in North America 30,000 years ago, which is twice as early as originally thought. The cool thing about this is that it is debatable if the evidence is correct. Still learning is a wonderful thing.

Then there’s the startling fact that the style of toolmaking—the distinctive way the stones appear to have been shaped—is utterly unique.

“It’s very curious that the assemblage is so different from anything anyone has known before,” says archaeologist Tom Dillehay of Vanderbilt University. “How is it possible that it’s not related to anything previously found? Well, it’s possible.”

4. Sometimes slavery seems like something is so long ago, but these are the words the son of a slave. Via the Washington Post’s Sydney Trent, the words of Daniel Smith, 88 years old, and he listened to his father, Abram Smith, tell stories of being born a slave and the Civil War.

There was the whipping post in the middle of the plantation where enslaved people were tied up and beaten.

There was the lynching tree. Two enslaved people in chains had run away together, and rumors held that they had been hanged there. Later, when Dan Smith wanted to date white girls, his mother would warn: “I don’t want to have to cut you down.”

There was the wagon wheel. The enslaver accused a man on the plantation of an unspecified offense, and the man denied it. “The owner said, ‘You’re lying to me,’ and had the man and his whole family line up in the winter in front of a wooden wagon wheel,” Smith recounted. The enslaver ordered the man to kneel and lick the wheel’s metal rim. His tongue froze there until the desperate man pulled part of it away.

5. It’s ridiculous how much I see the world through my kids’ eyes, but from the BBC, DNA evidence suggests that 12.5 million Africans were traded as slaves from 1515 through the mid-19th Century and that most descendants of slaves have roots in Angola and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The DRC is Youssouf’s home country and cannot help but think that his although his direct family wasn’t affected, what about family members that may have been taken that are here in the USA now? What if he has close descendants here, right now? Obviously, the genetic test is something he’ll have to choose to do.