I’ve updated my Memoirs page with a number of essay posts from the past year, and promoted the whole page to the top level menu. I’ve cleaned up with consistent headers this page and the Family History page.
I began this project with the notion to scan family photos, especially the ‘slides’ in the three metal boxes I inherited from my father, of their family and travels in the 1950s. Yet over the past year, I’ve written many essays of family history and personal memoirs, without having scanned many of the remaining family slides in over a year now. Well, I think the narrative is more important, and I’ll get to the slides eventually; I’ve already done the slides that show family members. There are also photos from my albums, prints of photos taken on various trips, and to conventions, from the 1980s and 1990s, that I may scan to supplement my memoir essays. By the 2000s everything became digital, and I have lots of folders of those photos to post, perhaps, too.
Ironically, one of the people I’ve had most in mind as a target of these family history essays and photos (and perhaps my memoir essays), was my younger brother and his family (in Tennessee). But when I challenged his support for the Plandemic documentary back in, what, April 2020?, after a couple email exchanges, both he and his wife unfriended me on Facebook, and he hasn’t replied to my emails since. (We’ve never kept in touch by phone, over the decades.) So I suspect he will never see or care about this family history, or anything else I have to say.
But whose family history ever survives? A generation at best. And then it will all be forgotten. Try as you might. We will all soon disappear in history.
Here’s another book on a seemingly familiar theme: why people so frequently misunderstand the world, and what we can do to correct our thinking. However it’s not aligned with Shermer’s WEIRD THINGS or Shtulman’s SCIENCEBLIND, as much as to Rosling’s FACTFULNESS in its focus on contemporary issues. It actually complements Rosling. Rosling arranges his book by “instinct” and shows how each one affects views of the world; Duffy arranges his book by peoples’ views of the world, and shows which biases or social effects cause them.
