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hookem2010

Certifiably Surly
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Everything posted by hookem2010

  1. Covers of the books mentioned above
  2. Bunch of Native American books popping up recently. I've read a bunch of them, and agree that Empire of the Summer Moon was perhaps the best. I recently read 'The Earth is Weeping', which essentially was a summary of all the Indian wars I had read about previously, but consolidated and abridged a bit. Great way to learn about all the western tribes (and how they were routinely, and predictably fucked by the US Govt). The Ice at the End of the World was a great book about Greenland, spanning epic Scandinavian explorers to the present-day scientists giving us a front-row preview of how and why climate change is going to fuck our shit up. Great combination of non-fiction adventure and science. I'm currently reading 'Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art'. It gets a bit dry when talking about stone technology, but the information archaeologists are able to tease out of shattered bones, chipped rocks and ash deposits on rock walls is crazy. I also learned about Bruniquel Cave for the first time. It kind of looks like a Paleolithic Thujone creation, but imagining hominids nearly 10,000 GENERATIONS ago creating something that is clearly symbolic and not simply functional blows my mind. I would love to go back and observe the world 50,000-100,000 years ago, as the Neanderthal, human and insane ice age world collided.
  3. I feel like this is as good a place as any to discuss the biodiversity crisis, as it often overlaps with climate change, although not in this instance. https://www.npr.org/2021/10/22/1048336907/elephants-tuskless-ivory-poaching-africa
  4. It's not really an all-or-none proposition. Even if we don't cap warming at 1.5 degrees C (we won't), it certainly doesn't mean we shouldn't try to prevent 3+ degrees of warming.
  5. Can someone else marry Bezos, take more of his billions, and donate it? We need many more MacKenzie Scott's, since DC clearly isn't going to get it done.
  6. Just stopping by to say Fuck Joe Manchin. The fact that a man who owns coal companies is able to dictate our response to the climate crisis is a fucking travesty. Carbon sequestration ain't gonna do shit for us any time soon, if ever. Go enjoy the fall weather tomorrow. Who knows how many days like it we will have in the coming years.
  7. hookem2010

    OU @ KSU Fox

    This game is great. Either OU loses or we get to beat a top 5 team next week. I love that the KSU curse has been transferred to the sooners.
  8. I missed that one, but already seen too many of those this year.
  9. When they go go to the aerial view on the Oregon-Stanford game, it feels like I'm watching a game filmed in 2001. Looks so shitty
  10. That's true, and it's unsettling. Iowa should win 7-9 games every year, with a final ranking of 15-25, just like the Atlanta Hawks should always lose in round 1 of the playoffs. I feel weird when these things don't happen.
  11. I remember the first time I had to tell someone they were going to lose a limb. Certainly do not remember the last one. (These were due to chronic, controllable illness, not trauma. That would fucking suck.)
  12. My sense of time is all fucked up now. Things that happened the first year of the pandemic seem like years ago. Notable trips or big social events seem like they were a year or two more recent than they actually were. I also feel like I should still be 31 and not 33.
  13. Yikes, that is a tough dude.
  14. In somewhat related news... https://www.cnn.com/2021/09/29/us/extinct-animals-2021-list-scn-trnd/index.html Most of these species have generally been assumed to have been extinct for a few decades now. CenTex makes the list with a fish. Hawaii's remaining native birds are pretty much fucked thanks to avian malaria, and warming temperatures allowing those mosquitoes to move to higher elevations. It's going to be really surreal watching creatures I've seen vanish entirely during my lifetime.
  15. The massive human suffering is going to be horrible. It also really sucks to lose the things that provide joy. As someone who likes to spend leisure time, hiking, camping and wildlife watching/birding, my favorite activities are going to become a shadow of what they currently are in the not-so-distant future. Fuck...
  16. I just read The Uninhabitable Earth mentioned in the article, as well as The Ice at the End of the World. The latter at least began with tales of Scandinavian and Native badasses making incredible journeys into the interior of the Greenland ice sheet before getting into how fucked we are. Even since I was a kid, I was concerned about the state of the natural world, but some time in the last couple of years, the bleak reality has hit me. The world is only going to become a more difficult, less beautiful place to live for likely all remaining generations of people. We can make it less bad (if climate denying fuckers would get out of the fucking way), but that's the best we can hope for now. Not a pleasant realization as someone with potentially several decades of life ahead of me. Happy Tuesday, everyone!
  17. I had a guest at the park yesterday strike up conversation with me. 50ish year-old white dude in an American muscle shirt with cutoff sleeves. He was being very friendly and asking a lot of questions. He found out that I used to work in medicine, then immediately hit me with "What do you think about HCQ and Ivermectin?" By this time, his wife was interested in the discussion as well. I was so taken aback that he would want to steer the conversation this direction that I instinctively answered immediately and honestly that I didn't think much of them for this illness and that everyone should just get the vaccine. He went on to say that he didn't feel like much was being done to help those who were very sick, to which I responded that hospitals are overwhelmed right now and it's difficult to treat people who are that sick. Shockingly, they were not as eager to talk to me after that and left for another area of the park. The Covid denial shit was bad enough when I was still seeing patients last December. I can't imagine dealing with this shit on a daily basis with the idiots of the north Texas extras, much less still living in sub-40% vaccinated Wise county.
  18. DeMangoion Dobershown thinks the wait for even an 11 AM kick is interminable.
  19. I remember being a 160-pound freshman. Didn't score that much though
  20. Weird how making no real changes is not preventing us from careening toward disaster the scientists have been warning us about for decades. https://www.cnn.com/2021/09/17/us/catastrophic-climate-change-un-report/index.html
  21. I don't visit my parents because the people making those racist comments on a social media platform I don't use also make those comments in person and are a constant presence when I am there. And while they may contain themselves to some degree when my wife, who is not white, and I are around them, I know that my parents are not above those same thoughts. Did I spell it out well enough for you this time?
  22. Tell me you're listening to NPR without telling me you're listening to NPR
  23. Ha, Conroe is pretty bad but perhaps they were visiting the big city from the nearby town of Cut and Shoot, Texas. I try to avoid conversations with random strangers in Conroe, as the conversations with the people I know there are unpleasant enough.
  24. I don't visit my parents in Conroe, because the lake water seems to have rotted the brains of everyone in Montgomery County. I told them this would be the case a little over a year ago, when all their buddies were spouting off hateful shit on Facebook (which I don't have, but the especially heinous comments get relayed to me). They can drive to central Texas to see me, which they have done a couple of times. I certainly don't have the respect I once did for them, though.
  25. This shit is pretty fun to dig into, minus the whole state of the Republic being at stake thing.
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