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Vacation Fun [Aardvarchaeology]
Sunday, August 5, 2012 20:00
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Spent a week gloriously off-line at my mom’s glorious summer house in the archipelago. Oh the joy of reading 300 pages for fun in one day without feeling the need to check e-mail! Here are the books I read:
- Invented Knowledge. False history, fake science and pseudo-religions. Ronald H. Fritze 2009. One amazing essay covers the scifi con-man religion Nation of Islam. Did you know that Louis Farrakhan started out as a calypso singer, and that George Clinton’s Mothership was a concept borrowed from NoI mythology?
- Falling Free. Lois McMaster Bujold 1988. Charming fast-paced scifi. Four-armed gene-mod people optimised for zero-gee! Thanks for the book, Birger!
- Plain Tales from the Raj. Ed. Charles Allen 1975. Colonial India was almost as alien as that scifi novel’s world.
- Medieval Lives. Terry Jones & Alan Ereira 2004. Countless factual gems from Medieval England, like when a besieged nobleman hands his 5-year-old son over as a ransom to the besiegers, and they threaten to toss the child into the fortress with a catapult, and the father yells that he doesn’t care since he still has the hammer and anvils to make a better son. (The kid was never thrown and grew up to become a succesful and violent knight.) Thanks for this one too, Birger!
And the boardgames I played with my buddy Micke and our wives:
- Lord of the Rings: Confrontation
- Lost Cities
- Innovation
- Wok Star
- Bohnanza
What have you done for fun lately, Dear Reader?
2012-08-05 19:51:59
Source: http://scienceblogs.com/aardvarchaeology/2012/08/05/vacation-fun/
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