:: 1 ::
Are/were you in any Yahoo groups? Phyllis told me that Yahoo Groups will be shutting down and deleting all content on December 14th. I used to belong to a handful of groups, but haven’t visited any of them in years. With that said, if you were a member of one (the old AmblesideOnline one comes to mind) and had anything you wanted to salvage, you need to do it now, before it’s too late.
:: 2 ::
I’ve changed my approach to pre-reading. For many years, I reserved a huge block of time — about four hours — and read a week’s worth of my oldest child’s assignments in one sitting. (Since I basically use the same curriculum with everyone, I’ve always tried to keep up with the oldest.) This worked best for all the time that I did it, but it doesn’t work for me any more. I can’t find a chunk of time that large, and I became unused to doing it that way after taking the year off last year when he was in that Great Books tutorial.
I realized that what works best right now is for me to pre-read obsessively. What I mean is, I always have a book with me, no matter where I am. That in itself isn’t so unusual, but I mean a pre-reading book — sometimes two or three of them — and also exact details on what I need to read. I don’t love it this way — it feels too easy to get behind. But it’s working, which is saying something.
Are you pre-reading? How are you accomplishing it?
:: 3 ::
What are you reading? I haven’t begun it (because pre-reading), but I purchased, just in case, Only the Lover Sings by Josef Pieper. I don’t know much about the book. Ravi Jain recommended it to me a few years ago when I was interviewing him for a podcast and I’ve always remembered the title. I’ve decided to start collecting English translations of Pieper’s works, and this seemed like the next best title to add.
I’ll probably read it over Thanksgiving weekend. It’s quite small — more like a pamphlet than a book. But if I know Pieper, it’ll be worth it.
By the way, we’re having Ravi back on the show this season! It’s going to be great!
:: 4 ::
This month in 2016:
I had forgotten about this post. It was amusing to me that it meshed pretty well with the post I published this very week!
:: 5 ::
This week, I listened to an interview of John Cotton Richmond, the United States Ambassador-at-Large to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons. I had no clue there even was such a position in our government, but I was very impressed with him! It was neat to listen to him, knowing that the Trump Administration has made such amazing strides in arresting child predators and human traffickers.
Of course, child trafficking is only one part of human trafficking. I found the State Department’s 2019 Trafficking in Persons Report if you want to read it.
:: 6 ::
This week’s links collection:
- California’s power outage mean problems for electric cars from Napa Valley Register
- I think we should require quotes and call them “electric” cars because we all know it’s diesel fuel, for the most part, that generates their power. (There is a great irony embedded in the “electric” car.)
- Admittedly, they’re cool to look at and we’ve especially enjoyed the Model X we see at Starbucks because of the bat wings effect.
- You know what I did before the power outage? Filled up the 42-gallon tank in my Suburban and felt ready for anything. Of course, our outage ended up being cancelled at the last minute, so it felt like a win all the way around.
- ABC News Apologizes for Airing Fake Syria Bombing Video from The Daily Beast
- I don’t actually consider ABC to be news anymore. I mean, maybe their science and tech reporting? But this is ridiculous. Do they just make stuff up?
- “ABC News regrets the error.” Or: they regret getting caught. Hard to say. We’ll never know for sure.
- Fake doctor saved thousands of infants and changed medical history from The New York Post
- This story was amazing!
- “What is true is that whatever his motive, he spent 40 years as the only medical hope for parents of babies born too early in New York City and beyond. Raffel estimates he saved between 6,500 and 7,000 lives.”
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