Good morning. Hello. How are you? #636
The oldest human ever discovered in the Americas is 66 miles from where I grew up.
Good morning! Hello. How are you? I am good. It is Friday, which is nice, even if I have to work today. Working on Fridays is dumb. Especially when it’s going to rain all weekend and Friday is the only day you can definitely get anything done in the garden. But I think my garden’s in pretty good shape, not too much to do this weekend. Wanted to film a nice little tour for you guys, though. The carrots have sprouted along with the radishes. The corn has sprouted. The tomatoes are growing nicely. A few more beets have sprouted. Still no sprouts from the beans, celery or onions, but I remain optimistic. The compost is going just great. I love my garden. We are having a bit of a drainage problem, though. I got it all trenched and draining into a mulch bed but from there it doesn’t soak into the soil or drain into the adjoining grass. If I wanted to do it right I would trench my entire yard and put a drainage pipe in leading to the trees by the pond, but that seems like overkill, plus I’d have to re-grow grass and who wants to do that. Not sure exactly what to do.
Hello a couple days ago I mis-stated the fever amount of my friend’s kid. It was one hundred and four point eight degrees. So now you can see why she was stressed.
Jane is at Grammy’s this morning. She had a good day yesterday. She told Bat Guy “I love you.” We tried to explain to her the difference between “like,” “love” and “care,” but I think it’s kind of great she doesn’t know the difference. That kid is so ridiculously sheltered. This trip to Boston is gonna be great for her. We are very excited. Even with the COVID. Lots of outside parks. We’re staying near Albion Park in Somerville. Who wants to come hang in the park and watch Jane play?
Here is a story about a small Japanese town that is working towards zero waste by 2030. They are 80% of the way there. This involves a recycling center that requires (encourges?) the citizens to recycle their waste in 45 different ways and my god I am so here for thast I want to do that so much that is absolutely right up my alley. Emma meticulously takes the paper labels off of those horrible Amazon envelopes so we can recycle them with the plastic film. We remove the little plastic window from our cookie boxes so we can recycle them with the cardboard. I was out absolutely everything before recycling. I want to recycle things into 45 different bins. I want to know exactly what is and isn’t recyclable and I want to know the market prices and exactly where it goes. That would be the absolute best.
So I am reading a new book called Origin: A Genetic History of the Americas by Jennifer Raff and it is exactly what sounds like: a survey of the latest science — along with the history of this science — about where, when and how humans got to America. She hasn’t come out and explicitly said it yet (I’m not very far along) but it seems that the “humans came over the land bridge” theory is out of favor these days, at least it is not the only way we got here. I think she’s saying people got here a bunch of different ways. But even though she is downplaying the land bridge route, there is a lot of archeological action going on in Alaska and it kind of makes me miss home. In fact I learned that the oldest human we have ever discovered anywhere in the Americas was discovered 66 miles from where I grew up. That is crazy! There were the remains of two infants discovered at the Upward Sun River Site, in the Tanana Valley, which I could literally see from my house, that were well over eleven thousand years old. I couldn’t really understand why I did not know about this, but then I learned that these infants were only discovered in 2006, so, you know, I’d been gone for, like sixteen years at that point, my mom was living in Wasilla at the time, I guess my sister didn’t think to tell me. But isn’t that crazy? I often think about the western migration of humans from Europe to the Americas and then their migration across the continent, and from that point-of-view, Alaska is kind of the end of the road, right? Like if you compare Fairbanks and Reykyavik, two cities of approximately the same size and at the same latitude, they’re night and day. Fairbanks is so new, so plastic, so devoid of any history, while Reykyavik just fills like it’s been there for thousands of years, because it has. And yet Reykyavik and Iceland were populated this millennium, meanwhile, by that point, people had been wandering around the Fairbanks area for ten thousand years. Fascinating.
The Upward Sun River babies beat out another Alaskan site, on Prince William Island, called Shuká K Aa Cave (originally On Your Knees Cave), that previously held the record for Oldest Human Found in The Americas, at 10,000 years old. Also, someone needs to put the correct name of the cave in that Wikipedia page, don’t be jerks. Suká K Aa was discovered in 1996, when I was out of my mind road managing a goth tour across America, so I guess that’s why I didn’t hear about it at the time.
Also, across the twentieth century over a hundred mummies have been found in the Aleutians. Crazy! I am embarrassed I didn’t know this. I’m embarrassed and sad Alaskan schools never taught us about Alaska’s pivotal role in the archeology of the Americas. I mean, I guess in fairness we learned about the land bridge theory like everyone else, but. Wow. Crazy.
I got another 100% on my five continent flashcard maps yesterday. Africa is the hardest not because I don’t remember them now — I can basically do it in my sleep — but because there are 50+ countries so if you mess up with a miss click or stray thoughts at, like, country number 40, you have to go back and do them all again and it takes forever. Also I found another game on that site that is the top 150 most populous countries in the world and so I did that one. Australia and New Zealand were two that weren’t on my other maps, of course, but the other one that was on there was the Solomon Islands, which has population of 652,000! Who knew. That is a lot. So… three countries in the top 150 not in the Americas, Europe, Asia or Africa. Oh wait one more: New Guinea is not on my Asia map (though Indonesia is. Weird). I would have expected more. Anyway, I only messed up one because in my head Guyana is phonetically close to Guinea, so I kept thinking it was in Africa until on the third try I remembered it was in South America. So, yeah, over the last few months I have developed this skill. Seems like it would be useful? Some day someone’s going to be standing in front of a map going “where the hell is Eswatini?” And I will casually show them, feeling all smug. That is totally going to happen. I am sure of it.
There is a new Directors Cut 4k restoration of Star Trek The Motion Picture on Paramount+. My friend Sean T Drinkwater alerted me to this last night. In one sense, this was somewhat unfortunate timing since I had just finished a re-watch of Star Trek The Motion Picture in shitty-ass 1080p exactly one day before learning about this new version. In another sense, however, this is great because it was an opportunity to watch Star Trek The Motion Picture in 4k and watch that five-minute slow ship porn scene of Scottie taking Kirk over to the revamped Enterprise in spacedock which is just, like, the greatest thing ever put to film. So I guess I’ll just watch the whole film again. The visual effects have been tastefully improved. Same effects, but blended better, less “these are a bunch of plates shot on top of each other” feel to it. Nicely done.
The whole thing is a damn site better than Picard which is almost good but keeps messing up and being not good even though it has so much good to work with it is a real bummer. I suppose I should get over tropes in TV shows and just accept them, but I refuse to. Jean Luc Picard is not a man who will stall for ten minutes introspection when the literal fate of the galaxy and billions of people is hanging by a thread. He will focus on the task at hand. And sure, in reality, as he’s focusing on said task, he might have some introspective thoughts flash through his head, and so when they bring that to screen it is manifested in a long pause from him actually doing anything at an exactly inopportune moment. But you can shoot that differently! You can shoot it in a way that makes it clear that he is not actually stopping but his brain is multitasking! And I’m sympathetic because when the screenwriter is writing such a scene, it’s not their problem, really. Because humans can have who symphonies and epics of thoughts in their head while they’re in the middle of a firefight and you can write a ten-page memory that takes place in the middle of a firefight but then the director gets this script and they have to actually shoot it and they’re like ‘what the hell? This dude’s in the middle of a firefight I can’t, like, have him stop and monologe. But oh well, Shakespeare did it monologging is universally understood to exist outside of time so I guess I just won’t worry about it, lol, shrug, not like I’m the first director to do this, the audience will get it. Also I am on a timeline and a budget.” And I do get it. But it still feels completely unrealistic and out of character and wrong and I am trying to let that go but hell I’ll be 50 next week and it still bothers the hell out of me so I don’t think this is going to be changing any time soon.
And of course when you’re watching this done well, you don’t even think about it, it just flows, so all you ever think is “dammit why do shows and movies always do this it is so annoying” but they don’t all do it, just the ones that are poorly edited.
All right I gotta run to the recycling center, where we annoyingly only separate out the glass from our recycling instead of into 45 different perfect little OCD-friendly containers. We used to have to separate cardboard, paper and aluminum, but they gave that up. Wrong direction! I am half kidding I understand the logic but I wish they’d let us separate if we want to, making us feel like we’re saving the county money or something. But I digress.
Here’s a new goth playlist. I have been listening to it for, like, two days straight. New goth! So much great goth out there. Goth is alive and well. Goth out! Also I love that there is new synth goth, new guitar goth, the works. It’s not like the 00’s when all new “goth” was synth goth, which I love! But you want a bit of variety in your goth, dontcha.
Have a lovely weekend I hope you get some time in the garden. I talk to you guys next week!
Happy early birthday, and welcome to the 50 club! Personally, I have loved being 50+! ; )