In this story idea, an Earth astronaut travels to a planet where there is a highly evolved super-smart species that dominates. There are also humans, who are about as smart as we are, but their role is more akin to our animals, because they are nowhere near as smart as the dominant species.
As it turns out, humans are also considered to be a delicious delicacy, and much desired by the dominant species. However, because they also have a highly evolved sense of morality, they have devised a compromise that allows them to eat humans without killing them.
Humans volunteer to give up, for a handsome price, an arm or a leg, and have it replaced with a bionic prosthesis that is more powerful and versatile than a normal arm or leg.
Our human astronaut takes a dim view of this, and tries to persuade the humans that it’s terrible to allow themselves to be taken advantage of this way.
But the humans are quite happy with the arrangement. They love the extra money, and they love the high-tech replacement limbs.
The astronaut can’t leave well enough alone, so he keeps stirring up trouble — trying to convince the humans to rise up and revolt.
The dominant species gets wind of this, and sends a representative to meet the astronaut. The rep notes that while humans do get a lot of money for a limb, it is nothing compared with the riches for giving up a brain. Not only that but the brain replacement makes you super smart — almost as smart as the dominant species.
The representative, along with being super smart, is also super persuasive and convinces the astronaut to give up his brain. After waking up from his operation, the astronaut can’t believe how smart he is.
And he also can’t believe he ever thought there was anything wrong with the planet’s human-eating arrangement.
I had no idea habit-tracking was such a fad. The App Store currently features 13 of them, all with bells and whistles out the yin-yang.
As you might expect, though, all but two them involve in-app purchases, which no doubt involve some kind of outrageous subscription.
One exception costs a straight-up $6.99, and has many excellent reviews. It’s called Streaks if you want to check it out.
I downloaded the only free one, called Steady Habit. It really does have no strings attached — they don’t even ask for your email. On the other hand it’s quite straightforward. You list the habits you want, and check them off as you do them.
There are a bunch of templates for habits you may not have thought of. Mine are all once a day, but you can also choose certain days of the week.
Steady Habit also has notifications, which can be a nice touch if you need reminding.
The thing about the paper sheet I’m using is that it doesn’t need to send a reminder. It sits in front of me on my desk every day, making it almost impossible to forget.
The apps with in-app purchases have many amazing features, usually involving variations on charts and forms of encouragement. But the thought of spending a lot of time in an app to check my habits seems a little weird, especially when one of my goals is to spend less time on my phone.
update I occurred to me a couple of days later that you could use the iPhone’s built-in Reminders app as a habit-tracker. The downside is that the habits might get mixed in with other reminders, which would not be ideal.
When people talk about the good old days, they are often referring to when they were children, or maybe in their teens or early 20s.
In other words, the reason the old days were good was because they were young.
In our culture generally, it’s the 1950s that are often thought of as the good old days. Life was simpler, there was post-war prosperity.
If you went back in time to the ’50s, though, you might get a different story. People who lived in that time didn’t necessarily think those were the best of times.
For example, an episode of the Twilight Zone that came out in 1959 featured a man who was desperately tired of the rat race, work pressure and the demands of urban life.
He wound up going back in time to what he imaged to be the good old days — the 1920s. Yes, even the Depression era seemed better than the ’50s. You could sit back on the front porch with your extended family and enjoy a cool drink. You worked for yourself on a tidy little farm.
A lot of our ideas about the ’50s come from TV and the movies. They often portray an idyllic life back then: mom, dad, two or three kids, a dog, a house with a white picket fence. Only dad had to work, and his job was well-paying with regular hours. Mom stayed home to look after the kids.
This portrayal was indeed accurate for some people. If you were a white middle-class male, the world was your oyster.
Recently, TV and the movies have been showing the ’50s for what they really were: an era ruled by bigots, bullies, sexists, racists and homophobes. One show that comes to mind is HBO’s Watchmen. Another that just came out is Ratched on Netflix. Also on Netflix is Hollywood. On Apple TV+, there is For All Mankind.
Watch any of those shows, and you’ll realize that the ’50s, and even the 1940s or 1960s, were absolutely not the good old days for most people.
What were the good old days for me? Sometimes I like to recall funny things that happened in the past, but mostly I prefer to get the most out of the present.
After 90 minutes of tai chi, I feel warm, a little sweaty and kind of achy in those muscles that normally don’t get much movement. A lot of people don’t think tai chi is much of an exercise, but I’m feeling it.
We’re starting over from the beginning of the form, with newcomers taking their first awkward steps and old-timers refining the ones they know. I’ve been doing tai chi off and on for decades, and learning never ends.
My habit tracker has been a big help in recent weeks, keeping me on track to practise tai chi twice a day — once in the morning and once in the late afternoon. Habits really are an amazing thing if you harness them for good.
After all that practice, I thought I was doing pretty good, and that I would wow my classmates by whipping through the form. But the learning does indeed never end. I now have a much better idea of how to position my feet in those opening moves. In fact, it’s embarrassing that I hadn’t thought about it before.
My on-again-off-again relationship is definitely on again — and this time I aim to keep it on permanently.
I learned from the Vexillology subreddit that Western Togoland has declared independence. This is of interest to vexillologists because Western Togoland has a flag. Also, because the flag is quite similar to Azerbaijan’s. The main difference is that the Western Togoland flag has a heart handshake icon in the middle of it, likely taken from Wikimedia Commons.
Meanwhile, in the MapPorn subreddit, there are maps showing the location of Western Togoland. It is a sliver that makes up the eastern edge of Ghana. It started life in 1884 as part of a colony of Germany, which was sliced in two after the First World War, with Western Togoland going to Ghana and the remainder carrying on as the present-day Togo.
There is a lot more you can learn about Western Togoland in Wikipedia.
This is what you write about when you have “write something” in your habit tracker, and don’t really have much to say.
The App Store led me to something really cool, but it wasn’t an app. It was a sheet of paper.
The App Store has all kinds of things for you to “discover” and one day it had a habit-tracking app. That sounded interesting, so I looked into it.
I can’t remember the name of the app, but they wanted a lot of money every month for the privilege of helping me form new habits. So I looked for similar apps that are free.
And they exist! But every single one of them wanted my email address. Why should I have to give up a little more of my privacy for something so simple?
Then I found out that you don’t need an app. You can buy an expensive journal instead.
You can see where this is going. Everything we do in life has become so commercialized that it’s almost impossible to find information about it without someone trying to extract money from you.
It’s not so much that I mind paying. It’s just the principle of thing. Is there no one in the world who just wants to be genuinely helpful?
So, anyway, about that sheet of paper. It turns out that there are stationery and paper companies that provide templates you can download as a PDF, then print off.
And yes, some of them demand an email address in return. Are they really that desperate for leads?
But others, happily, are plain old free. The one I like is from Evermore Paper Co. They only thing they get out of it is spreading the word about their business, which I am glad to do because their template is quite nice.
The sheet is a grid. The numbers for the days of the month are in a row across the top. In the first column is space for a list of habits that you would like to acquire. In the squares that intersect between the habit and the month number, you place an X or check mark if you have done the thing that day.
It is oddly satisfying to have a completed column of X’s each day. And so I have been building up new habits.
One of them is writing each day. If you’re reading this, you can thank my Evermore Paper Co. habit tracker. For me, it works. Maybe it will work for you, too.
They say watching TV shows about nature is one of the most soothing things you can do for yourself. I can vouch for that.
There have been times when I’ve had a bad case of insomnia, so I get up in the middle of the night, turn on Netflix, and look for a nature show — preferably one narrated by David Attenborough.
It’s possible that I learn a few things about nature, but mostly I just let David’s voice lull me to sleep. Even when he talks about the danger of an animal going extinct, which is a terrible thought, his voice remains calm and relaxing.
There is a new nature show on Netflix called My Octopus Teacher that is also soothing, but it will definitely not put you to sleep. And I really did learn something this time — something so profound that it will stick with me for a long time.
It’s basically the story of diver Craig Foster, who befriends an octopus in the ocean waters off the southern tip of Africa. The key word here is “story,” because this is a journey of personal awakening, an experience that deepens his connection with the world we are part of.
As it turns out, the octopus is quite intelligent — roughly on par with a dog or cat. After she becomes habituated to the diver, she starts reaching out and they make physical contact. She never becomes a pet, of course, but she does allow him in her space without fear.
An octopus only lives for a little over a year, so he is able to follow about 80 per cent of her life, even recording her bittersweet death. During that time we discover many amazing things about the octopus, and become so attached that we find ourselves rooting for her as she evades a shark and cheering her on as she plays with a school of fish.
When it was all over, I was left with the feeling that a more fulfilling life would mean getting closer to nature. But getting out of the house is not always easy. It’s pretty darn comfortable inside. I need to make more of an effort.
It didn’t take long for my news-cation to be disrupted by people who thought it important that I know the Leader of the Free World has COVID-19. So what should I do with this information? Did it really warrant a break from news-cation?
Underlying this news is a feeling that he got what he deserved. He was reckless at rallies, downplayed the severity of the pandemic, and is generally a jerk about everything.
I’ll admit there is some poetic justice here. Still, it’s not something I want to dwell on. I would rather think about positive things in the world that affect me — like the beautiful sunny day we’re having today.
I’m not being superficial. The weather, as mundane as it may be, still has a more immediate effect on my health and welfare than the current state of a foreign leader.
By the time my news-cation is over, on Nov. 1, the resources of the richest nation in the history of the world will have brought its president back to health, and all this to-do will be a distant blip in the rear-view mirror.
So back to news-cation. I already have a far more interesting and relevant topic in mind for tomorrow’s post.
I came across The Lord of the Flies in our collection of books, and decided it was high time I read this classic. I knew the basic plot — some boys are stranded on an island, and descend into savagery — but I didn’t know what “Lord of the Flies” referred to. Now I do.
In the story, some of the boys kill a wild boar for its meat. They decide to cut off its head and put it on a spike as a way of placating a “beast” that they believe lurks somewhere on the island. After awhile, the head is covered with flies feasting on the rotting flesh.
One of the boys has a hallucination where the boar’s head speaks to him, and identifies itself as the Lord of the Flies. Being covered in flies, this makes sense at one level. But this also refers (according to a note at the end of the story) to Beelzebub, the Hebrew word for the devil. Translated literally, the word means Lord of the Flies. Translated less literally, it refers to a general state of decay, falling apart and general mayhem — the type of thing the devil would bring to civilization if we are not on our guard.
Reading this in the middle of a pandemic, I can’t help but wonder if the ancients attributed mass misfortunes such as this to the devil. When thousands of innocent people die and suffer for reasons that come out of the blue, it’s not hard to believe that the devil had a hand in it.
Of course, as it turns out, the real evil on the island was within the boys themselves. It’s a bit depressing to think that we humans are the inevitable source of all our ills. But it’s also heartening. We have the ability to make choices for the better.
The Lord of the Flies exists only if we allow it to exist.
We recently went away for a weekend to a region that, according to health authorities, has not had a single case of COVID-19.
There were a lot of things that helped make the time away relaxing, but I’m pretty sure one of them was getting away from the news.
I’ve been a news junkie pretty much from the time I was able to read the daily newspaper that was delivered to our door. I worked a few decades as a journalist, and now, thanks to the news fire hose of the Internet, I can sate myself with current events 24-seven.
But with the ever-escalating shit show south of the border (a.k.a. election campaign), I’ve decided it’s time for a more long-term break. Half the headlines in my news feeds are about the latest idiotic thing done by the American head of state. I’m starting to think that news organizations are deliberately trolling us with trump-bait.
I’m tired of feeling alternately outraged and helpless. I can’t even vote! So I’m doing the next best thing: a news-cation.
During the month of October, I’m taking a break from the news to see what effect this has on me. Here’s what I predict.
1. Less time scrolling through news apps, and more time on hobbies, some of which I will have to develop to fill the extra time.
2. Less stress and more relaxation, which could lead to better sleep and better overall mental and physical health.
I don’t have a hard way of measuring these things, so any change I notice will have to be subjective. Still, I’m optimistic.
