George has become a cottage dog
Microposts
Finished reading: Superbloom by Nicholas Carr is a fascinating, alarming, and important book about how communication technology and social media are shaping society, mostly for the worse 📚
🏃♂️ Clouds on today’s run, instead of smoke. Much better
Finished reading: Canada by Richard Ford is remarkable. A good cottage read 📚
Time to get up!
Impressive repurposing of a dead tree here at the cottage we’re renting
🎧 A poignant memorial to a father in this episode of Strong Songs
Finished reading: I Am Ozzy by Ozzy Osbourne is quite the tour through rock and roll debauchery. Hard to understand how he got anything done. Great excuse to revisit the music though 📚
Finished reading: A Theory of Everyone by Michael Muthukrishna is a compelling and fascinating book about us, our culture, and our future. Any book like this has a unifying principle and I found this one’s focus on Energy Return on Investment intriguing. 📚
🏊♂️ The lake is the only cool place around here and I’m grateful for it
Finished reading: I really liked the premise of The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley: how would people adjust to being brought from the past into the present? Well written too. The last third was a bit too much standard time travel plot though, which detracted from the cool premise 📚
First week of vacation was a great success
🏃♂️ A sobering war memorial on today’s run. Likely a large proportion of the young men in the area are inscribed on it
George has settled into cottage life
Finished reading: Although it took two library loan periods, I enjoyed Lord of Chaos by Robert Jordan 📚
Finished reading: The Imposition of Unnecessary Obstacles by Malka Older continues a fun series: solving mysteries on a gas giant planet. 📚
Finished reading: Tapper’s Day Off by Dan Moren is a fun short story. I’m glad to read more in this universe 📚
Finished reading: Despite having watched and really enjoyed Slow Horses on Apple TV, reading the first book by Mick Herron was still great fun. 📚
🏊♂️ Nice to be back in a lake
Finished reading: An Immense World by Ed Yong is a remarkable book. A fascinating exploration of the senses and what we can learn by trying to understand the perceptions of other animals📚
🏃♂️ Hazy out there from the forest fires on today’s run
Vacation starts now!
After three weeks with a Readiness to Train score around two, I’m glad to be back in the green. Time to get active again!
Finished reading: A Field Guide to Lies by Daniel J. Levitin is a clear and thorough summary of all the ways we need to be on guard for misinformation. Targeted to beginners though, so not a lot of new information for us veterans of the internet 📚
Finished reading: The Longbow, the Schooner, and the Violin by Marq de Villiers is an interesting exploration of wood via those three objects. A bit clunky in sections, though pretty good overall 📚
🇨🇦🥃 Enjoying the Bearface Triple Oak whisky
Finished reading: The Tomb of Dragons by Katherine Addison continues the great Cemeteries of Amalo series. I’m impressed with how casually and simply such a rich and complex world is created in this series 📚
New notebook day!
George is recovering well from recent, minor surgery by sleeping at my feet
🔗 Matt Gurney: How Hollywood screwed with our civic expectations
Why do we assume the same government that is, for instance, struggling to fill potholes in my city, or hire enough nurses in my province, or fix a federal payroll system, is going to be more competent when presented with something totally out of the blue? This flies in the face of all of our lived experiences with government. It’s a generous assumption of state capacity that is, to put it charitably, unearned.