Aeonian and a great quote

I get dictionary.com's Word of the Day email. I often don't read it, particularly when I'm busy, but today's word was 'aeonian'. It means 'eternal, everlasting'. Which makes sense because 'aeon' (also eon) is the word for a really long period of time.

Each day there's an example of the word in use, often from a quote or extract. Today I wanted to share that quote, because it was quite lyrical and wordy.

"It was the caverns drinking from the tempest overhead, the grasses growing under the snow, the stars making music with the dark, the streams filling the night with the sounds the day had quenched, the whispering call of the dreams left behind in 'the fields of sleep,'--in a word, the central life pulsing in aeonian peace through the outer ephemeral storms."

-- George MacDonald, Robert Falconer, 1868

Some lovely imagery I just wanted to share.

Anyway, back to my re-watching of the X-Files. There's a Ghost in the Machine today (probably running on a Pentium 2 given the year it was filmed!)

'The World Until Yesterday' by Jared Diamond

I've just finished 'The World Until Yesterday' by Jared Diamond, and more than most books I've ever read, I want to share this with others.

Jared Diamond is a writer and scientist, who has spent decades researching the indigenous tribes of Papua New Guinea (this is obviously his area of expertise, but he's done a lot of research into other indigenous cultures all across the world for this book). He's most well known for his book 'Guns, Germs and Steel' about how Europeans came to dominate the world (for the answer to that, the clue is in the title!). He seems a fascinating man with a great mix of interests and fields of study. The bio on his website is definitely worth a read if you want to know more.
The book is a non-fiction book that doesn't neatly fit into any category, but instead I'd say it is a mix of geography, history, anthropology, with a bit of philosophy, science, memoir and no doubt various other things in it. The central concept of the book is looking at many different traditional societies to examine their approach to various different aspects of everyday life including crime and punishment, religion, languages, bringing up children, dealing with the elderly and diet and lifestyle. The book is called The World Until Yesterday because by examining traditional cultures around the world, many of them hunter-gatherers, the book is also examining the way all of our ancestors lived, until about 10,000 years ago (i.e. for most of 200,000 or so years that modern homo sapiens have existed for).

This concept is one that greatly interests me, because although there are many different cultures around the world, in many respects we are starting to live in one giant culture, because the vast majority of the world (certainly the Western World, but increasingly a lot of the rest too) operates very similarly in terms of the way it is run, the way people act and live out their lives. This is as a result of European colonisation in the 16th-19th century, and the spread of globalisation and American consumer culture in the 20th and 21st centuries, It is easy to assume the way people are is the only way we could be, when it is simply not true.

So the premise is one I really like, but how well did the author manage to fulfil my expectations? While not all topics are equally good (the crime and justice section at the beginning seemed to drag after a while), it was all fascinating and enlightening. The section on health was particularly excellent. Some of the conclusions were new and surprising to me, others more familiar but still had many new insights. For a knowledge junkie like me, this book was manna from heaven.

Here's a couple of quotes/facts I picked out from the book.

"Looming behind this increasing social isolation of the modern elderly is that they are perceived as less useful than were old people in the past, for three reasons: modern literacy, formal education, and rapid technological change."

"the Inuit themselves abandoned war in their own self-interest in order to have more opportunities to profit from trade, and the !Kung may have done the same"

"Roman soldiers were paid in salt, so that our word “salary” for pay is derived not from the Latin root for “money” or “coins” but from the Latin root for “salt” (sal)." [Not particlarly relevant to the thread of the book, but a fact is a fact, I never turn them down!]

"Around the year 1700 sugar intake was only about 4 pounds per year per person in England and the U.S. (then still a colony), but it is over 150 pounds per year per person today."

This wasn't the lightest read, but it wasn't particularly difficult either. I should give a shout out to the wonders of the Kindle - I did start reading this over a year ago but put it down after getting bogged down in the first section (on crime and justice). I picked it up again a couple of weeks ago, and was able to go straight to where I left off. If this had been a paper book I'd probably have taken it to the charity shop ages ago and never picked it up again!

Really enlightening and fascinating book. There were some areas I felt he didn't touch on much that I'd have liked to read about - such as more about the politics and economics of traditional cultures but maybe that is for another book. Still, for a knowledge junkie like me, this book was manna from heaven. 9/10

Boise, Idaho

One of the - many, many - things that fascinate me, is all the thousands of places around the world that I've never been to, and probably never will (though the possibility that I could visit some of them doesn't hurt). What is it like to walk round there? What are the people like? What is there to see there?

So anyway, I'm watching the X-Files tonight, first season, starting at the beginning. It's just appeared on Amazon Prime Video much to my delight. Episode Two, they are investigating a missing test pilot in Boise, Idaho. But where is Boise, Idaho?

Well obviously it's in Idaho, the 43rd state, which achieved statehood in 1890, and is located in the north west USA, next to Washington State and Oregon. It is one of the largest states by area at around 83,000 square miles, but one of the least popular - only 1.4 million people. Boise is the state capital and largest city in Iowa. It's called the City of Trees because it is so green, but also reputedly because a French speaking guide who came across the place shouted "le bois le bois!" or "the trees, the trees!". The best way to pronounce the name by the way is "BOY-see" which is how the locals say it.

Interestingly for a small city deep in the American West, Boise has the largest ethnic Basque community in the USA, and the fifth largest in the world, after the Basque country in Spain and France, and also Chile and Argentina. Here's a Basque fact far predating the USA. The Basque people are unrelated genetically to the rest of the inhabitants of Western Europe, and are considered a last remnant of ancient pre-agricultural people of Europe. Furthermore, their language is unrelated to the Indo-European language family and is thought to be he original language of Europe.

Anyway back to Boise. It is quite a small city, population about 200,000 but is has plenty of pubs and restaurants, as well as a vibrant nightlife and a few museums. There's also festivals and events on throughout the year, including hosting the New Year's Eve Idaho Potato Drop. It sounds like a great festival, but I'm a bit bemused at the idea of a 16 foot potato dropping on a crown of 40,000 spectactors!

I think I'll leave it there for now...

A Six Year Old's Outrage at Royal Mail!

My daughter asked Father Christmas for a Sweet Shop this year. That's right, not just sweets, but a Sweet Shop! Fortunately, she wasn't after a high street shop with rent, rates and lots of other bills. She did have entrepreneurial ideas however, and decided that she wanted to sell sweets to help brighten the lives of some seriously ill children. Remarkably, she decided this all on her own, the idea did not come from us, her parents, or anyone else.

She decided she wanted to support children through Post Pals, which she'd learned about from Rainbows (junior Brownies/Guides). Post Pals is a small charity, run solely by volunteers, which is dedicated to making the lives of seriously ill children and their siblings a bit better by facilitating the sending of letters and small gifts through the post to them. Children can search the site to find children they'd like to write to, either on a one off or regular basis.

Come Christmas Day, my daughter was delighted to receive her sweet shop from Father Christmas, and immediately set about selling sweets to the captive audience of mum and dad, then later many more family and friends throughout the festive season. She even bought sweets herself from her sweet shop to further swell the coffers, not opting for the usual business owner's perk of free stuff! A Facebook post resulted in another influx of orders.

Our daughter is quite money saavvy, and was soon counting out her earnings and working out what gifts she could buy for Post Pals she'd identified on the website. She had a few different children she wanted to write to and send something to, and she'd worked out how much she could spend and what she could buy with the money...

Unfortunately, there was a snag when mummy explained about postage. The concept that you had to pay to send letters or items in the post was something that she had not yet been exposed to. She was even more outraged that she was working hard to do such a nice thing, and yet the Royal Mail was taking nearly half of the money she'd raised just to post them. It did cost £11.20 to send 4 x small gifts with cards and is still a bit cross she has to sell 6 bags of sweets just to post each one. I still don't think she's got over it!

Learning Portuguese

At Easter I'm off to Portugal to visit my brother-in-law and sister-in-law on their small-holding, deep in inland Portugal where I believe many people don't speak much - if any - English. I have therefore decided to spend the next 3 months learning Portuguese. Hopefully it will be of some help when I am over there, but I'm doing it just as much for the challenge and because I love learning. I'm also, I've come to realise, fascinated by how languages fit together, about word origins and similarities with words in other languages. I've been surprised already with the similarities to many words in French (though they're both Romance languages, with much of the language derived from Latin, so it is to be expected).

I started this New Year's Resolution on January 1st, and immediately encountered a problem. I'm using Duolingo, a fabulous app for learning languages which I used in the summer to brush up on my French before a trip to Paris. Unfortunately it turns out there are two distinct 'flavours' of Portuguese - European Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese, and most books, apps, courses etc teach Brazilian Portuguese (understandably - 230 million speak Brazilian Portuguese, 10-15 million speak European Portuguese). I would rather learn European Portuguese, obviously.

I've come up with a sort of compromise. I'm going to carry on using Duolingo. It's a fab app and fits well with me. I'm also using Memrise, another app which offers the choice of European Portuguese, and at some point I'm going to watch/listen to some videos and podcasts and I'll make sure I use European Portuguese ones. I'm still not sure how extensive the differences are, but I believe it is mostly on the pronunciation side, with just the occasional different words.

So along with board games and books posts, I may be posting some of Portuguese learning experiences!

For now, here's the Portuguese words for colours.

red: vermelho/a - presumably derived from 'vermillion' (In fact, yes. Latin is vermis/vermiculus. Vermis literally means worm!).
blue: azul/azuis (singular/plural). Relates to azure blue?. (Azure actually comes from Medieval Latin, which came from Arabic, which came from the Persian 'lazward' for lapis lazuli, a deep blue semi-precious stone. So there you go!)
yellow: amerelo/a
green: verde - similar to French 'vert' and verdant green.
orange: cor-de-laranja; laranja - sounds a bit like orange. Cor de means colour of, i.e. colour of an orange (fruit).
purple: roxo/a or purpura. I get the second, not sure of the first one.
pink: rosa / cor de rosa - colour of rose, get that easily.
black - preto/a
white: branco - like blanco/blank

Note - am ignoring accents for now, may try to figure out how to put them in at some point.

A note on words ending in o/a. This I understand is to do with gender. Words ending in o are masculine, words ending in a are for feminine words. This works for nouns, but also for adjectives describing things. Interesting.

That's all for now folks.

First Plays - Thoughts on Some Games I've Played Recently

I've played a few new games recently, and while I've not yet played them enough to form an opinion (most of these I've only played once), I thought I'd set out what I thought.

Roll for the Galaxy

I've played Race for the Galaxy quite a few times, and I do like it, but I'm very bad at it, and find sometimes it is hard work trying to do well which detracts from the enjoyment of the game. Enter 'Roll for the Galaxy'. In many respects it is very similar to it's older cousin, but instead of using cards, you use dice to build colonies and developments. You roll your dice, and while you can choose any action, the symbols which are face up on the dice determine whether you can use roles selected by other players as well.

I thought this game was really neat, I already like it more than Race for the Galaxy, and although there's still a full range of different strategies you can choose from, it feels less work because you often have less options to choose from when making decisions and less things you can build at any one time.

Coup

I've had this game for quite a while but never played it before, but had a couple of games at the club this week. Boy am I bad at this game, I was eliminated very early on in both games. To me it is a bit of a mix of The Resistance and Love Letter. Some people may think this is slightly bizzare comparison but that is what it was like to me. Like Love Letter, you (at the start of the game anyway) have two role cards to choose from, but unlike in Love Letter you don't have to play it. You take an action either based on one of the roles in your hand, some default actions not related to a particular role, or by bluffing and pretending you have a roll card. People can call your bluff though, and one of you will lose one of your two roll cards then.

I certainly don't love this game (I don't think I ever will), and as I said, I'm very bad at it, but I'd be up for playing again sometime. Certainly it's okay as a quick filler.

Euphoria

This is a really nice looking worker placement game, set in a sort of post-apocalyptic future I believe, not that the theme matters. It has got some really interesting mechanisms. Your workers are represented by dice, I think you start with two but can acquire more. You initially roll all your dice, and can play only one at once, unless there are two or more the same in which case you can play all of them that turn. Once all of your dice have been played on the board, you take a turn to recall them and then re-roll them all in your play area. There's a snag though. If the total of all your dice is more than a certain number, you lose one of your dice/workers. So you want to get more workers to get too many or you might lose one.

From Board Game Geek

There are all sorts of action spaces your workers can go on, many of them are better the higher the dice number (but sometimes the reverse can be true). There's spaces that affect your maximum dice roll before you start losing workers, there's spaces that increase your card hand limit, and there's the usual spaces that get you resources, cards etc. There's also a rather neat mechanism whereby you can use resources to help build a building. It does tie up workers for a while, but it gets you a victory point star and what's more once it's built anyone who didn't contribute to the building suffers some sort of penalty or restriction to what they can do. Haven't seen this sort of thing before.

Overall a really interesting worker placement game, I enjoyed a lot. It didn't hurt that I won either, after my friend Neil (whose game it is) announced in no uncertain terms near the end of the game that he had definitely won. Victory is sweet!

El Grande

I included this in my list of 'Top 10 Games I Missed Out On' on my blog recently, and my friend Gareth noticed and brought it along to one of our next games evenings - thanks Gareth! I really enjoyed this game. It is one of the grand-daddy's of area control games as it came out 20 years ago now in 1995. It is a deceptively simple game, you get a hand of cards numbered one to thirteen and you choose one to play each round. These cards do two things. Firstly, they indicate turn order - the person who chose the highest numbered card goes first. It also has another number on which indicates how many pieces you can take from your stock to your supply (i.e. bring into use to be able to play on the board). The low turn order numbers have more stock-supply markers, the higher numbers don't allow you to bring in any pieces, so you've got to carefully manage which cards you play when.

The players then, in turn order, choose a card from one of six action cards available. These also have two functions, firstly to dictate how many pieces you can play on the board, and secondly it gives you a bonus action you can take which can be anything from 'move five of an opponents pieces anywhere on the board' to 'score an area'. Unless otherwise indicated by cards, there are three scoring rounds in the game, and you'll get different number of points for having the most pieces in an area, second most, third most etc.

In many respects this is such a simple game, but I really like it a lot. Shame it is so hard to get hold of an English version. Though I've just read there's a big box version coming out later in the year...

Mice and Mystics

I've wanted to play this for quite some time, and as it is advertised as for 7+ we thought we'd be able to play this with our six year old daughter who plays quite a few 8+ games quite happily now. I was therefore surprised at just how complicated this game was. By that I don't mean there's lots of really complicated strategy, there really isn't. It's just that there is a lot of rules to remember. There's all the general rules, then there's specific rules for the scenario you are playing. That's a lot of rules to remember and get straight. I watched the 'How to Play' video a couple of times, and read the rules before I'd got it completely figured.

In the end, I decided not to play it with my daughter, so my wife and I played instead. I liked the story aspect of the game, but because we kept checking what we were supposed to be doing it detracted from it a little. Probably not my preferred type of game, but I'm glad I got to play, and think it will be worth picking up again in a year or two and playing with my daughter.

Review of 'Neither Here Nor There' by Bill Bryson

I am not a die hard Bill Bryson fan by any stretch of the imagination. I've enjoyed several of his books, but there's been a couple of others I gave up on. I decided to give this one a go though because I was visiting Paris and Amsterdam, two of the cities Bryson visited in this book. I'm glad I did.

'Neither Here Nor There' is an account of Bill Bryson's travels in mainland Europe. He mainly travelled by train and bus, and visited many places - mainly cities - in both Western and Eastern Europe. It took me most of the book to work out exactly when the book was set, I had been thinking it was around the year 2000, but when he was visiting Eastern bloc countries it transpired that his trip took place in 1990, when many countries were on the cusp between communism and capitalism. To paraphrase Bryson, he said he was sure the place (Sofia in Bulgaria I think) would be very different in five years time, and the inhabitants would be much better for it, but he was glad he saw it before it changed all the same.

The book is not only set in 1990 however, as it features a number of flashbacks to when he travelled in Europe as a student in 1972 with his friend Stephen Katz. This allows an interesting 'then and now' comparison which I think added to the narrative.

It's interesting that of all the Bill Bryson books I've enjoyed, I've liked each one for different reasons. For instance I enjoyed 'Down Under' for all the history and interesting stories of Australia and Australians, whereas I enjoyed the autobiographical aspects and social history in 'The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid'. I really liked 'Neither Here Nor There' because it made me get up and travel to a lot of these places. I really felt the excitement and adventure of travel in this book, and loved the descriptions of some of the places that made me feel like I was there (Sorrento and Lake Como both spring to mind). I also really liked the sound of Split, Croatia and Diocletian's Palace where the corridors of the old Roman Palace are now the narrow streets of the old town. I really want to visit.

This was a really good, classic travel book, easy to read with plenty of comic moments, but also beautiful descriptions, fascinating facts and the real feeling that you are travelling along with Bill Bryson at times.

I don't tend to highlight many passages in books that I read (though it is quite easy on my Kindle Paperwhite), but there was one paragraph towards the end of the book when Bryson was in Bulgaria that I wanted to quote, because I found it quite profoundly true.

"I know Communism never worked  and I would have hated living under it myself, but it seems to me none the less that there is a kind of sadness in the thought that the only economic system that appears to work is one based on self interest and greed."

Something to think on I think. I also wonder if one was to follow in the author's footsteps today, what sort of different experience they would have. Obviously, they wouldn't be travelling through communist countries, and so many Eastern European cities would be profoundly different. I suspect everywhere would be very different too, the internet and globalisation generally have dealt a profound blow to individual cultures all over the world.

Some of the adventures of travel are lost these days too - all those hours getting lost and not being able to read or understand anything would no longer be a problem. You can just pull out your smartphone for directions or instant translations when you don't understand something. My recent experience in Europe was greatly enhanced by this technology, though I was with my family and so being able to quickly find toilets, cafes, the hotel etc were really helpful.

Anyway, that's enough of being morbid. This is a great travelogue written at just the right time I think. A worthy 9/10.