The Monday Mix (31/10/2022)
Hi friends
I’m not the biggest fan of Halloween, so today is a weird experience for me. If I had children that might change, as I can see the attraction for kids. But, I’ve never really bought into the whole thing. Halloween feels more like an American holiday than anything else. It wasn’t very popular when I was a child, and I never went trick or treating. But now it’s become much more popular here in the UK, and in most other places too.
It’s only one day, and I do like the spooky stuff and reading about all the weird legends behind the day. Who knows, maybe one day I’ll come to enjoy Halloween! Though, I think that may be a way off.
Here’s what I want to share this week:
Origins of Halloween
Interesting article on the origins of Halloween, which states that the festival of Samhain was the inspiration. I didn’t realise that the popularity of Halloween in America is due to Irish immigrants taking the custom with them during the mass immigration in the 1800s. Which is even crazier as the article states celebrating Halloween was largely forbidden by early American colonists. History is weird and dull of surprises and the world has us Brits and Irish to blame for Halloween. Who knew!?
Rogue Orcas and Boats
This is a crazy article and as soon as I saw the headline I had to read it. During six months in 2020, a group of orcas ‘attacked’ boats off the coast of Spain and Portugal, with 40 incidents reported. I put attacked in quotation marks because as you read the article it becomes clear the orcas might not have been attacking the boats. Scientists aren’t sure what caused the behaviour. Explanations range from revenge due to previous incidents with boats, playing, or perhaps attacking boats due to overfishing. Whatever the cause, it’s an interesting look at a highly intelligent species and the dangers of placing human emotions onto a complex animal we don’t fully understand.
Welcome To Hell, Elon
A very good article on the reality that now faces Elon Musk as the CEO of Twitter. He’s overpaid for a company which is wholly dependent on the people that use the product. Yet, those same people aren’t going to use the product if you allow absolute free speech, which is what his position as a ‘free speech absolutist’ denotes. Musk strikes me as someone who’s very good at engineering, but has a tendency to dream up simple solutions for complex problems. I don’t understand why he bought Twitter, especially as he’s massively overpaid and Twitter doesn’t make that much money at all. Every problem that has previously existed on Twitter is now his problem and a lot of them are mundane and boring compared to rockets and electric vehicles.
My prediction is that he gets bored after a few months and delegates responsibility to someone else. If he’s lucky he might be to negate a loss in his personal fortune but his personal brand will take a kicking from this purchase. Displaying him not to be the genius many people thought he was.
Book I’m reading - Doomed Love by Virgil
This is part of the Penguin Great Loves series and is an extract from the Aeneid, considered a Roman epic. While it’s not as good as The Odyssey, it’s still an interesting read and will probably encourage me to buy the Aeneid to read the whole thing.
Quote I’m pondering: – “Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see.” – Arthur Schopenhauer
That’s all for this week.
Until next time,
Tom