tingilinde

feynman's patent story

storytelling and dolly parton

the oldest story?

It might be

... maybe...

...

Long ago, four giant beings arrived in southeast Australia. Three strode out to other parts of the continent, but one crouched in place. His body transformed into a volcano called Budj Bim, and his teeth became the lava the volcano spat out.

Now, scientists say this tale—told by the Aboriginal Gunditjmara people of the area—may have some basis in fact. About 37,000 years ago, Budj Bim and another nearby volcano formed through a rapid series of eruptions, new evidence reveals, suggesting the legend may be the oldest story still being told today.

The study raises a provocative possibility, says Sean Ulm, an archaeologist at James Cook University, Cairns, who was not involved with the work. “It is an interesting proposition to think about these traditions extending for tens of thousands of years.” But he and others urge caution, as no other stories passed down orally are believed to have survived that long.

...

a tip of the hat to Sukie

 

 

adventure

Some fields offer more than others

 

jólakötturinn

not every holiday tradition is child-friendly

 

it starts out "my dad died" ...

.. but it picks up from there

this series of tweets is excellent

a tip of the hat to Brian

 

 

the only good commentary on game of thrones

(I've never watched it, but this seems useful)

Zeynep Tukekci on psychological vs sociological story telling.  

snip

...

After the show ran ahead of the novels, however, it was taken over by powerful Hollywood showrunners David Benioff and D. B. Weiss. Some fans and critics have been assuming that the duo changed the narrative to fit Hollywood tropes or to speed things up, but that’s unlikely. In fact, they probably stuck to the narrative points that were given to them, if only in outline form, by the original author. What they did is something different, but in many ways more fundamental: Benioff and Weiss steer the narrative lane away from the sociological and shifted to the psychological. That’s the main, and often only, way Hollywood and most television writers tell stories.

This is an important shift to dissect because whether we tell our stories primarily from a sociological or psychological point of view has great consequences for how we deal with our world and the problems we encounter.

I encounter this shortcoming a lot in my own area of writing—technology and society. Our inability to understand and tell sociological stories is one of the key reasons we’re struggling with how to respond to the historic technological transition we’re currently experiencing with digital technology and machine intelligence—but more on all that later.

...

 

 

reference elvish

J.R.R. Tolkien wrote his fantasies to create a world where the type of language he liked might seem real.  Here he reads the poem Namárië from The Lord of the Rings in Quenya. 

 

nearly every christmas eve

I listen to Alan Maitland's reading of Frederick Forsyth's The Shepherd.  I listened to a lot of Canadian Broadcasting in the late 70s and caught the first broadcast in 1979.  They've repeated it every year since and I've listened enough times to make it a tradition.

Here's a recording..  I'll listen to it with Canada tonight

 

update This year's reading on As It Happens

 

the best opening line in a christmas story

"The last thing I do every Christmas Eve is go out in the yard and throw the horse manure onto the roof."

The H Street Sledding Record by Ron Carlson

years ago it was read on Selected Shorts