| Just finished reading Earth Abides, by George R. Stewart, and have to say I was completely blown away. I have had this book on my “to be read” list for a long time and I am glad I finally picked it up. The book was originally published in 1949 and I must admit I was expecting a dated science fiction story with little connection to my experience or todays realities. I was so wrong. Not only is the book still relevant it almost seemed to speak directly to our times.
In writing this book, the author stripped away the meaningless detail that we all use to define our lives and instead told his story at the basic level at which all people actually live their lives, no matter the time and place. The result was a story that was just as fresh as if it had been written last year. If you want to really understand what civilization is all about, and how it relates to humankind and to our world, read this book. You will not regret it. |
Apr 17
Apr 05
Monday is opening day for the Seattle Mariner’s American League baseball team. They are my team of preference, me being from the Seattle area and all. Baseball has been a big part of my life. My father’s family were baseball people. My grandfather played on local baseball teams in Montana when he was a young man in the early 20th century. My dad and his brothers played. I played organized and sandlot ball all the way through high school.  Needless to say baseball is in my blood.
This time of year I get a little excited when spring training winds down and the final lineups are set for that first game of the season. It’s a little harder when your team hasn’t been playing well but there is always something to get you going. Ichiro has developed an ulcer problem so he won’t be starting the season but Jr. is back. Ken Griffey Jr., possibly the most exciting player I ever watched, has returned to Seattle for a career ending stint with the team who brought him out. He won’t be the player he was but he will probably be the person he was and that is worth a lot. Good omens and bad. We are starting and I am ready.
It was about this same time of year, 2 or 3 years ago that it occured to me that it would be really interesting to look at major league baseball history from a generational standpoint. That gave me an excuse to spend hours pawing through old baseball statistics online and in various giant baseball statistics books. I eventually ended up with a web page I call Baseball Generations that essentially proposes generational all star teams for each of the generations since major league baseball became a reality. I made some changes recently but it is essentially the same idea. It was a blast and I would invite you to visit the page and see if you agree with my picks.
With all that in mind I wanted to announce that, once again, I have started thinking about baseball in the spring and I have decided I need to recognize all of the baseball Hall of Famers on my baseball page. I am in the process of adding them into the generational lineups and I am glad I am doing it. A lot of people that get picked for the Hall of Fame do so in spite of not ending up on the Top 10 lists because their ongoing, consistent contributions are overshadowed by the statistical wonders that dominate the headlines every day.  To me, that seems like a good enough reason to make a spot for them on my lists.  Also, since my lists spans the entire history of major league baseball, this exercise brings back some deserving names that have faded with time.
Mar 29
| Just read Beat the Reaper, by Josh Bazel, and liked it? That question mark is not an error because I don’t really understand why I liked it. It was a rough book. Rough language, gratuitous violence and sexual references were liberally applied throughout the book. Indeed the whole premise was kind of rough. The hero was a twenty something Mafia hitman who becomes a doctor through the witness protection system, and is working in a chaotic urban hospital. When the two parts of his life come in contact the story goes into “rough” overdrive. The structure of the book is strange and shifts between being a crime/mystery thriller and a medical journal but it manages to work somehow. Like I said, hard to tell why, but I liked it. |
Mar 18
We were all flying high there for awhile. Many of us took the easy money and ran, fearing deep down in the back of our mind, even while not fully understanding why, that it couldn’t last.  Big banks and financial firms took the money and ran too, but they should have, and probably did, understood what was going on as they did it. It was too good to pass up, though. Then, by the time we began to run into problems keeping it all working, it was too late. We were heading down the mountain with no brakes or horn.  We should have known.  It has happened before. Continue reading »
Mar 12
I have been working with the TimePage, in one form or another, for a dozen years or so now. Â It isn’t surprising, then, that my notion of history has been thoroughly shaped by the generational model of social cycles in history. Â About two years ago, for reasons completely unrelated to my TimePage activity, I became interested in my genealogy. Â I spent many hours grinding through the seemingly endless databases at Ancestry.com, wandering through old family photo albums and bothering relatives with requests for information about the family. Â Then, just recently, I was quietly staring at the family tree one night when a thought suddenly pushed its way into my old, cluttered brain. Â You know, my TimePage time lines and my family tree are really the same thing. Â Wow. Â Talk about a light bulb moment. Â In retrospect, it seems so obvious that I don’t know how it could have escaped me. Â At one time I had even mentioned a couple of my direct ancestors in the time lines. Â Maybe, all this time, I have been tapping the same, hidden need to understand my past in both of these commitments.
Anyway, to make a long story short, I am now trying to come up with a way to combine the two elements within the TimePage structure. Â I have mentioned in earlier posts that I am instituting a slight philosophical shift in the content of the TimePage. Â In fact, part of that shift is related to the inclusion of genealogical data into the timelines. Â I haven’t completely sealed the deal yet in my head but as time goes on expect to see a few more family tree details appear in my time lines. Â If you think about it, the representation of social cycles are really just a family tree for everyone. Â I just have to come up with a good way to hook the two together.
Mar 05
My website, The TimePage, is about social cycles in history. It is an interesting idea and many people have used these, and other, cyclic ideas to try and predict what will happen in the future based on what we have seen happen in the past. That is one way to look at cycles in history. There is a bigger and better lesson to be drawn from the study of these cycles though. A lesson that is maybe not as mathematically precise as we would like but a lesson that is almost impossible to avoid if you look at history with open eyes. What I take from my observations of patterns and repetitive events in history is this. Things are not linear.  Things change and sometimes even repeat. Things go up…and, almost without fail, they then go down. If you are going to stay on top of things you must plan for these possible variations. Continue reading »
Mar 02
Another bad day in the financial markets. It seems like all the news is bad and all the bad news is getting worse. I am retired and so I don’t have a lot of options open as my Net Worth tumbles along with everyone else’s. I try not to get too discouraged. I can only hope that I am staying ahead of the fall and that I am not losing more than my fair share. I hope that you are finding a way to cope with the madness too.
We are truly experiencing a once in a lifetime event, I believe. There are very few people left who remember the Great Depression (I sometimes wonder if that might not be the reason we are in this mess) and nobody that was in charge during those trying times is around to help us. We are on our own and have nothing but history to guide us.  I don’t think anyone that is in charge today knows what is happening either, do you?  So I don’t think anyone knows when it will end. Like anything new and difficult we will only know it has passed when we realize we are cleaning up the mess rather than still creating it.
Feb 28
I normally won’t be using this blog for link suggestions but one of my favorite sites needs to be mentioned. I live in the Seattle area and HistoryLink.org is probably the best site for Seattle and Washington State History. It claims to be a free encyclopedia of Local History. With its huge collections of personal contributions and archival material along with their own research, it more than lives up to that claim.
HistoryLink.org – Seattle History
Feb 28
It is becoming more and more apparent, as time goes by, that we are living through a truly historic time. The politics of the recent election and the enormity of the economic and governmental crisis that we are facing, will both someday rank right up there in the top events in our country’s history, maybe even the biggest. And that doesn’t even count the Big Three issues of energy depletion, climate change and population control that I discussed in an earlier post. We are living large my friends and I’ll bet you can feel it swirling in the air around you. Continue reading »
Feb 28
Sarah Vowell’s The Wordy Shipmates is a look at the Puritan settler’s creation of the City Upon the Hill. She makes a distinction between the Pilgrims of Plymouth, who were technically “separatists,” and the Puritans that later settled Boston who are the subjects of the book. Her writing style is humorous but still informative and I am looking forward to digging into this book. Look for a final review when I am finished.
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