Thursday Things

February 14, 2019

What I’m Reading

I’ve been making bread with my learnings from Flour Water Salt Yeast: The Fundamentals of Artisan Bread and Pizza. This book is fantastic and great for beginners like me. I first checked it out from the library then after making a loaf or four ended up purchasing the book.
On the advice of an uncle I read Lords of the Desert: The Battle Between the US and Great Britain for Supremacy in the Modern Middle East and thought it was average. It fell into the trap that many history books do: too much “this happened then this happened” without a binding narrative to tie it all together. A bit too academic for my taste, though extremely well researched.
I read most of The Case Against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money, mainly wanting to reconcile ideas with my own teaching approach. This is more focused on K–12 and general liberal arts education. I think Caplan has fewer issues with vocational and professional education. Main point: a BS/BA degree is primarily a signal to employers that the degree holder is capable of completing some amount of focused work. The degree itself is often not valuable otherwise.

Is Ayn Rand important? – Headline is reason enough to read.
The Mysterious Career of Matthew Slater, Special Teams Superstar – Love stories like this about special players.
Why 5:30 Is the Ultimate Dining Time – Another reason: I got to bed about 9pm each night.
How tax brackets actually work – Very 101 video but still perhaps helpful to some.
John Dingell: My last words for America – Civil thoughts from a civil man.
Why have countries moved away from wealth taxes? – Either good lessons to consider here, or perhaps good reasons to avoid it completely.

A Separation – Outstanding movie by Iranian director Asghar Farhadi. I now want to explore the rest of his titles.
Sholay – This was recommended to me a long time ago as a classic Bollywood film to experience. It didn’t disappoint, but like many Bollywood films this is loooong.
Tokyo Story – The classic Ozu film about a pair of elderly grandparents visiting their children on a trip from the fishing village to post-war Tokyo. Subtle, heartbreaking at times, and especially poignant as a relatively new empty nester.
The Great Escape – Amazon Prime has some great classic films available right now (hard to find!) and this was one of them. It seems like my viewings of this movie are always far enough apart that I forget the details of the endings of the various escapees.
All The President’s Men – The second classic film on Amazon Prime that I watched this week during my cold-recovery movie binge. Wonder if there will be a similar move made in the coming years about the Mueller Report?

Ken, Spence and I played A Feast for Odin again, this time using my own copy that has an awesome custom foam core insert built in.
We had more time left on Superbowl Sunday so we then played Railways of the World. I made some stupid choices early on but still had fun playing. We used the wrong income track, which lowered and compressed the income scale. At least we were all playing with the same constraints. Fun game but also a reminder of how poorly done the human factors are in most of these Eagle games.
Jacob and I teamed up against Rob and KC at Game On! last weekend in a 2 v 2 game of Holland ’44: Operation Market-Garden. We played from about 10am to midnight and go through turn 12 I think. This is clearly a 2 day game to get the entire experience.
Jacob and I also played in the ASL tournament, so the rest of the weekend was all ASL, all the time. Mini game, Round 1, Round 2, Round 3, Round 4.