The Monday Mix (20/02/2023)
Hi friends,
I forgot to send this out yesterday as I got sidetracked and ended up watching the final three series of Clarkson’s Farm. It then slipped my mind that I hadn’t sent this email out. So, here it is a day late and with my humble apologies. If you haven’t watched Clarkson’s Farm, I’d recommend giving it a watch. Clarkson can be boorish at times but seeing him trying to run a farm is interesting.
Not only does it show how difficult it is from an expertise side, but it also shows how hard it is in other regards, such as dealing with the local council. Here in the UK, local councils are notorious for skewing towards NIMBYism, blocking all kinds of planning requests on new housing estates, restaurants and the like. I don’t know what it’s like in other countries, Barcelona seemed to have a reasonable council when I lived there, but here in the UK, it’s almost an iron rule of politics that no matter who’s in charge of local councils, they’re aren’t the best run and almost militant in their desire to preserve the status quo.
If you want to read more of this from an English perspective, this article goes some way to explain what I’m talking about in the context of Clarkson’s Farm.
Human Composting
I’m not sure where to start with this article. I can’t work out whether I find the idea brilliant or creepy. Perhaps a combination of the two. The article describes the process of human composting, which is an alternative to burying or creating a loved one when they die. The idea is that it will reduce carbon emissions, as burning a human does release CO2. However, I can’t help but feel this is a solution in search of a problem. Should we compost people after they die instead of cremating them to reduce emissions? I think it’s much better to reduce and decarbonise transport and other heavy industries than go down this road. But, I mean, if it’s up your street, then who am I to judge?
The Lionel Messi of Cliff Diving
I love articles like this where I learn about an obscure and fascinating person I hadn’t heard of before. This article looks at Gary Hunt, who, as the article states, is considered the Lionel Messi of cliff diving. It’s a brilliant article that gives you a deep insight into Hunt, a much more compelling figure than Messi and something of an enigma. This piece has made me want to go and watch one of these events and see what happens up close. Cliff diving sounds like an intriguing sport, and after jumping off some cliffs a few times when I was in the Philippines and being shit scared, I’d like to see how the pros do all the flips and somersaults and make it look easy.
Here’s a video of Hunt so you get an idea of his talent at cliff diving.
3700 Year Footsteps of a King, Barber and a Slave
Fascinating article about a tablet that’s 3700 years old. For context, that’s 1700 years older than the New Testament and 1100 years older than the famous Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar II, who was in the Old Testament. Reading the article, you realise how much human history is lost to us. Either recorded on tablets or stones such as these that have long since gone or never recorded at all and lost to the ether. It does make you wonder how much more we’d understand about the world today if we had access to the large repositories of human history that aren’t available to us.
Book I’m reading - In Europe by Geert Mak
I’ve had this book on my shelf for a while now, and I’ve been putting off reading it because it’s 800 pages long. But I decided to start it last week and remembered why I bought it in the first place! It’s a travelogue written by a Dutch journalist who spent 1999 travelling around parts of Europe while writing columns for a Dutch newspaper. It’s an intriguing read and delves into some fascinating stories about Europe’s past, the present when it was written and the future we now inhabit.
Quote I’m pondering: – "What you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone monuments, but what is woven into the lives of others." – Pericles
That’s all for this week.
Until next time,
Tom