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The Lost City of Z: An amazing book. A true story of Loyal British subject Percy Fawcett, an explorer’s explorer in the early 20th Century, pursuing his vision of finding the remains of an advanced society in the heart of the Amazon jungle. To no avail. Late in life, scoffed at by his peers and with his eldest son in tow, he makes one last thrust into the interior of the Amazon forest, alas, never to be seen again. But the story does not end. Eighty five years later author David Grann follows in Fawcett’s footsteps and learns that Fawcett may have been right all along. Good stuff, this. I read that this book is being developed into a movie starring Brad Pitt. I can’t wait. As a true life Indiana Jones film I doubt if it will be used to enlighten the world on the latest findings in ancient South American archeology but you can never tell. Either way it should be a fabulous romp in the forest. It would be nice to see Fawcett’s name restored to a higher level of respectability. |
Got an email from a person on the publishing staff of Libraries Unlimited the other day to inform me that the TimePage was being mentioned in an article they were including in their March 2010 issue of School Library Monthly on generations and teaching to the generations. I was flattered, of course, and gave them permission to do so.
Yesterday they sent me a copy of the article and I must say I was pleased with the results. They had used the TimePage as a source link for the ideas in Strauss and Howe’s generational books. I am not sure if Strauss and Howe would be all that pleased with the connection but I have to say it made my day. I mentioned the citation in the TimeLog blog as well.
It is always nice to get recognition for the work that you do. Over the years the Timepage has been linked to and mentioned on the web but I am unaware of many citations in print. The article won’t be published on the website until the print run is over. When that happens I will post a link. Besides the TimePage there are a lot of great links to generational sites on the web.
| “Half Moon: Henry Hudson and the Voyage That Redrew the Map of the New World,” by Douglas Hunter. This was one of those books that expanded what had been, for me, a tiny footnote in Early American History into a full blown tale of intrigue and adventure. It is really difficult to ignore Henry Hudson’s contributions towards the Discovery of the New World. His name, after all, is featured as one of North America’s most famous rivers (The Hudson River) and as one of its biggest nautical features (Canada’s Hudson Bay). But, other than those names and a faint memory of his crew’s mutiny, with him being set adrift and lost, I didn’t really have a very good notion of what he actually did as an explorer. Thanks to Mr. Hunter, I now know more than I probably ever wanted to about his voyages of discovery and their political setting. The author made great use of his nautical knowledge to supplement an amazing amount of research in original documents and maps. If there was a problem it was the author’s, maybe excessive, enthusiasm regarding the supporting data to the extent that I found myself occasionally struggling to keep all of the events/references straight. |
I have been working on the TimePage timelines a bit lately. The pages were of several different vintages and states of repair. I have now reduced all of the pages ( five cycle pages and 20 era timelines) to a common format. The data itself is still a bit ramshackle while I move it around and the links are still in deplorable shape but it is a start at least.
As part of the TimePage upgrade I am also gradually synchronizing the timeline entries with the “Today in History” entries in the TimeLog and adding some family genealogy to the page. Just for fun, I also have added a “All Generational Baseball Team” entry to the timelines. All of this is being added slowly over time but hopefully will be a little more fun when it is finally in place.
| I don’t quite know how to categorize this little book by Christina Thompson. The title, Come on Shore and We Will Kill and Eat you All: A New Zealand Story, certainly doesn’t help. It is partly a memoir of an American woman whose own life becomes intertwined with the culture of the South Pacific, specifically the Maori culture of New Zealand, when she meets and marries a man from that culture. It is also partly a history of the Maori people themselves and their dismal lot in the age of Western Colonization. In trying to tell both of these stories, however, the book jumps around a lot and in the end struggles to tie all of the colonial history of Western Europe together, for good or bad, to her own family story. On the whole, though, this touching reflection had enough interesting history and was written well enough that I must say I enjoyed reading it. |
Since I started working with my family history a couple of years ago I have gradually been able to track down nearly all of the important Census data for my family. One of the important items, however, eluded me. The 1930 U. S. Census numbers for my father’s family could not be found. I needed to find it because there was some uncertainty about when the family left their traditional homestead in Montana and headed west. I had waded through the search forms many times trying to find them, even going through the census data by hand in places that they might have been.
Then, yesterday, I convinced myself that, if they were counted, the surname must have been fouled up beyond recognition when the forms were transcribed. So I went into the search form with a first name only and the State they were probably in. It worked. I had to wade through several pages but there they were. When the census taker had written their name down he had messed it up, overwritten, and left a smudgy mess. I could read it because I knew what I was looking for but I doubt if I could have if I saw it cold. Whoever did the transcribing came up with a name that was just too different for the search engine to suggest it to me. To further complicate things they were not in the town I was expecting but a short distance away in another town.
The final result, however, was that the family still lived in Montana in 1930, leaving only a short period of “unaccounted for” time before they had finally settled in Oregon where my father attended High School and met my mother.
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Today is the anniversary of the first crossword puzzle being published (1913) and the opening of the first animated feature film (Disney’s Snow White in 1937).
Just got back from the movies. I saw The Road, based on a book of the same name by Cormac McCarthy. I liked the movie but I will have a hard time recommending it to anyone. Especially if the viewer hasn’t had the psychological preparation of having read and come to terms with the book. If you are sympathetic with one or more of the current apocalyptic theories making the rounds today it would help too. I mean this movie is bleak.
I must admit that, even though I can logically accept the possibility of human catastrophe and even the collapse of civilization, I have a hard time accepting the full implications of these ideas. I expect most of us fall into that category. The Road forces you to face those ultimate negative outcomes, however, by unflinchingly serving up the worst case scenario as the theme of the movie. The glimmer of optimism at the end of book is preserved in the movie but it isn’t enough to keep your jaw off the floor as you are exiting the theatre. See this movie during the day. You will need to see the blue skies when you are done.
This is a test of the Windows Live Writer blogging tool. Please disregard.
If you look through my previous posts you will notice a lot of extraneous characters scattered about haphazardly. This happened after my website was hacked. I first thought it might be a further hack but it turns out it is a result of my site having been moved to a newer server, with theoretically greater security, after the hack was corrected. I think it is a problem with the character set on the old server databases vs. the new one.
I will be looking into fixing the problem if it continues, but if it disappears from now on I will probably just ignore the old posts. They are readable.
Last week I experienced something that all web page owners dread. My website, timepage.org, was hacked.Â
I only noticed it because some of the formatting suddenly became garbled. I didn’t see any new comments or activity. When I went into the web files I saw that most of them had long bits of random spam inserted into the code.  I, being the strong logical person that I am, immediately panicked and started flailing around the web directories, trying to see if I could figure out some pattern. It soon became apparent that it was a pretty complete graffiti attack.
Eventually I had the web people restore a backup (Thank goodness for those.) and I have been fiddling around with various permissions and file updates all week to get it back to where it was. I think I may be OK now. We’ll see.
The really bad part is the insecurity it has introduced into my computing life. We had a break-in at our house many years ago and I remember how we felt violated and vulnerable for a long time. It seems that way again. They apparently had used a password to gain access. My ISP thinks that they must have got the password off of my personal computer with some kind of virus/malware that I picked up. I can’t find any such application with any of the pile of security applications I know about and have access to.  Very disturbing. I am in the process of removing password caches from my browsers and applications and changing passwords to more secure versions.  Who knows where he got the darn things.
Computers were supposed to make thing easier, remember? When something like this happens, all of the efficiencies you have spent all this time building up go down the toilet. It is really getting harder and harder to have fun on these things.
