#I think she does amazingly well on the eras tour but I’m also never going to call her the best pop star dancer or whatever

[lunar-years]

Those posts that sometimes go around Twitter claiming the problem with Taylor is that she “still acts like a teenager and pretends to be a teen pop star on stage” are so funny for a number of reasons (being that they’re crazy) but the number one to me is that it always boils down just to the fact that they don’t think she can dance. They post a 5 second clip of her flipping her skirt to fearless on the eras tour and then criticize her for “not acting grown” …Like just say you don’t think she can dance why are you making this into this whole insane thing. Bye.

[thecrownnet]

weekendmagsocial  The Diana we’re desperate to meet. The return of The Crown [...]

*Spoilers Alert*

*Spoilers Alert*

The Diana we’re desperate to meet. The return of The Crown will feature assassinations, avalanches and the tension between the Queen and Mrs T. But the most anticipated entrance has to be Diana’s. Today Weekend tells how they’ve captured her charisma

[...] The upcoming fourth season will take Diana from her early days as a shy kindergarten teaching assistant to a fairytale princess and an iconic global figure, as well as explore the early days of her disastrous marriage to Prince Charles.Her entrance comes when it returns to our screens in November or December, almost exactly 40 years after Nigel Dempster revealed in the Daily Mail in 1980 that Charles had found his ‘future bride’, having transferred his attention to Diana Spencer from her older sister Sarah.

Like Diana at the time, the actress playing her in The Crown is also a young unknown. Emma Corrin, 24, is a privately educated Cambridge graduate, who didn’t go to drama school.

By coincidence she’s originally from Sevenoaks in Kent, where Diana went to West Heath School from the age of 12 to 16.

Aware of how challenging the role would be for any actress, the producers started their search with a desperate call for ‘a mesmerising new young star with extraordinary range.’

The brief added, ominously: ‘She has to play charming comedy, flirt and social exhibitionist on the world stage, desperate and lonely self-harmer at her lowest ebb and the kind of psychological intensity of Mia Farrow in Rosemary’s Baby.’

It would obviously be helpful too if she resembled Diana, and in some of the new scenes, as the kindergarten teaching assistant, and wearing a pink polka-dot dress on her 1983 tour of Australia, the likeness is uncanny.

Emma’s co-star Josh O’Connor, who plays Prince Charles, agrees, saying it was ‘spooky’ how much of a ‘breathtaking spitting image’ of Diana she was.

But Emma says she has never been told she looks like Princess Diana before – although strangely her mother, who works as a speech therapist, has been! ‘I have never had that,’ she adds. ‘I get told I look like a young Jodie Foster.’

Emma spent more than two hours a day in the make-up chair to achieve the Diana look, accentuating her doe eyes, and with several wigs re-creating the journey from ingénue to one of the most stylish women in the world.

Amazingly, she was still working hard for her final exams at Cambridge when she went through the auditions for The Crown.

‘They actually offered me the part in person,’ she says of her last audition. ‘It felt like I’d just been proposed to; it was the best moment of my life. There’s a lot of pressure, but I’ve been glued to the show since the first episode and to think I’m now joining this incredibly talented acting family is just surreal.’

Peter Morgan, the creator, writer and producer of The Crown, has complete confidence in her. ‘Emma is a brilliant talent who immediately captivated us when she came in for the part.

'As well as having the innocence and beauty of a young Diana, she also has, in abundance, the range and complexity to portray an extraordinary woman who went from an anonymous teenager to the most iconic woman of her generation.’

Like all the cast in this heavily researched production, she was given a large bundle of written material and documentaries to watch, and she spent hours on perfecting the princess’s distinctive high voice with a vocal coach and learning how to re-create her particular habit of glancing up from under her fringe, as well as her graceful way of moving.

It’s not an impression, I’m going for essence - Emma Corrin, who plays Diana ‘Something they have been making clear from the  start is that this is not an impression,’ says Emma.

‘I am going for essence. Any movement and voice work we have done has been figuring out why she talks the way she does, and how she was a massive departure from the Royal Family, a bit like Meghan is now I guess, by bringing something different in the way she talks.’

Season four brings back memories of naive young Diana, with a re-creation of that first photo, at the Pimlico nursery school where she worked, which showed her holding two of her charges while the sun shone through her skirt, revealing her shapely legs.

And it follows how she becomes hardened into a mature but troubled woman who is the toast of America.

The retelling of the royal romance starts with a traumatic event: the assassination of Charles’s beloved great uncle Lord Mountbatten (Charles Dance) who was killed, along with a grandson, a local boy and his son-in-law’s mother, by an IRA bomb hidden on his boat in Ireland in 1979.

Diana recalled how she’d watched Charles at the funeral on TV and when she saw him ten months later – the families were friends – she told him: ‘You must be so lonely? You know, it’s ghastly. You need someone beside you.’ He quickly decided he was in love.

Diana was turning 19 when she got together with Charles. He was 31. After 13 dates they were engaged. The rehearsal of their 1981 wedding at St Paul’s has been filmed in Winchester Cathedral with Emma wearing a replica of the blue floral dress Diana sported before the big day.

A later scene shows the joyful day when Diana, pregnant with Harry – with Emma sporting a fake baby bump – enjoyed an Easter Egg hunt at Buckingham Palace, chasing toddler William in the gardens.

The new episodes also focus on key moments – and key looks – from 1989, three years after Charles is thought to have resumed his affair with Camilla.  

In one scene Emma is seen outside The Savoy hotel in London, re-creating Diana’s appearance at the Barnardo’s Champion Awards.

Emma wears a floral one-shoulder dress, reflecting one of Diana’s favourite silhouettes – a style which suited her immensely but which the Establishment is said to have hated, deeming it ‘not royal’.

Having played Charles so sensitively in season three, Josh O’Connor, 30, says the heir to the throne will be portrayed in a harsher light this time. ‘Well, it’s the Diana years,’ he says.

‘If series three was to make people feel empathy for him, I guess we’re going to pull the rug from under him. We all have a set position on the dynamic between Diana and Charles. It’s been great to have the ability to either fight against that or, at times, acknowledge it and to challenge any question of, “Did he ever love her?” Personally, I think he must have done.

'There’s a wealth of layers to Charles and Diana, and I have loved seeking that out.

'I think Diana wasn’t completely innocent – I’m talking fictionally, in our story – so there are ups and downs. There’s the difficulty with Camilla and the whole family, so it’s going to be, hopefully, an interesting arc.’

Josh says they all enjoyed delving into an era which is so crucial to the modern Royal Family. ‘Everything changed when Diana came onto the scene,’ he says.

‘I think she changed the game, and modernised them, and made them relevant again.’

Also returning are Emerald Fennell as Camilla and Erin Doherty as feisty Princess Anne.

The real Anne revealed recently that she’d watched early episodes of the show, which she found ‘quite interesting’.

Peter Morgan says, ‘So many people asked me, after she first appeared, to put more of her in there.

Anne’s often overlooked. But Erin’s portrayal means that everybody has fallen in love with her. I read that searches about her on Google went through the roof, she’s now one of the most popular royals.’

Prince Andrew’s romantic life is set to come under the spotlight too. His most famous affair was with actress Koo Stark, who is said to have threatened to sue producers if the portrayal of her is negative, while the period covered in this series also sees him marry Sarah Ferguson.

Meanwhile, Edward is seen growing up and going to university.

There was a rush to finish filming before lockdown was announced.

It meant one key scene of an avalanche had to be moved from the Pyrenees to Ben Nevis.

The incident is likely to be a re-creation of the fatal moments in 1988 when a skiing party including Charles was caught in an avalanche in Klosters.

Major Hugh Lindsay, a former equerry to the Queen, was killed and Charles was seen weeping as he was helicoptered off the slopes.

The bizarre affair when Michael Fagan broke into the Queen’s bedroom in Buckingham Palace in 1982 will also feature in this run, but the 1987 It’s A Royal Knockout embarrassment, when the lesser royals dressed in medieval garb to play games for charity, is mercifully absent.

Once this series is over, an older cast are preparing to take the lead roles, with Imelda Staunton as the Queen and Lesley Manville as Princess Margaret.

They are due to start filming next year, and die-hard fans will be cheered by Peter Morgan’s recent change of heart, when he announced in July that there will be a sixth series to come.

The Crown will return to Netflix later this year.    

- Source: Daily Mail August 14, 2020

*It has just been announced that Jonathan Pryce will portray Prince Philip in season 5 and 6.

[umichenginabroad]

Cambodia - My Favorite Travel Experience

This weekend I had the most incredible opportunity to travel to Cambodia. Out of all the places I’ve been in Southeast Asia, and probably all over the world, Cambodia has been my favorite. From the four short days I was there, I quickly realized how kind every person I met there was. This post is long and heavy at times, but I feel that it’s important to share what I experienced and learned. 

We arrived in Phnom Penh, the capital, early Thursday morning after sleeping on the floor of the Kuala Lumpur airport the night before. This was to save on plane tickets, like typical broke college students. In Phnom Penh, the first activity we planned was to visit the Killing Fields. To explain, in the year 1975 the Khmer Rouge, an agrarian communist group headed by Pol Pot, took control of Cambodia and began a genocide on the Khmer people. They targeted the educated, those living in cities, foreigners, and the minority Christians and Buddhists. The people in metropolitan areas were forced to the countryside to work in labor camps, under extreme conditions with little food or water. Many people that weren’t taken to the work camps were sent to the Killing Fields to be executed. This went on for 4 years until 1979, and by then an estimated three million people or 25% of the Cambodian population had been killed. The pictures below are from the Killing Fields at Choeung Ek, one place where prisoners were sent to be killed by Pol Pot’s military forces. 

When we visited the Killing Fields, it could immediately be felt how solemn the atmosphere was. There are no guided tours, but rather audio tours with headsets which better suited the quiet environment. At the middle of the field sits a large Buddhist stupa to commemorate the people who lost their lives in these fields. 

As we made our way through the tour, we learned how mass graves in this field had been uncovered after Pol Pot’s regime had ended. I can’t imagine the horror of discovering what had happened in these fields, which before the genocide had been a peaceful apple orchard and Chinese graveyard. 

The Khmer Rouge often used extremely brutal and terrible means to kill the prisoners, including beheading, and killing with axes, shovels, and crowbars because bullets were too expensive. 

I had seen the tree where infants were murdered on a travel show on TV, but seeing it in person was an extremely hard moment for me. I had a tough time holding back tears. 

The hardest part of this tour was when I arrived to the part where they described that no one was spared, not women, not children, and not babies. The reason for this was to get rid of all the children, because they feared they would grow up and come back to avenge their parent’s death. Infants were murdered by beating them against this tree, and they were buried in mass graves as well.

The audio tour concluded at the stupa again. Inside holds many of the skulls that were unearthed in the 80s at the Killing Fields. These were studied for cause of death and they tried to piece together who they had belonged to. There are still many thousand that remain un-excavated. Those are being left where they lay to keep their peace, although every year more bones and bone fragments are unearthed due to heavy rain storms. Maintenance on the grounds includes picking up bone fragments and clothing from those victims forty years ago. We saw a large bone in a path of dirt, possibly a femur, that had been pushed to the surface. 

The hardest part of all of this is how very recently this had all occurred. We said never again after the Holocaust, but then thirty years later another atrocity happened. I don’t know if this was confirmation bias, but I distinctly recognized a lack of older Cambodian people as we traveled around the country. We couldn’t stop thinking about how our parents had been alive during this, and wondered why the rest of the world didn’t realize what was happening in this small Asian country. The wounds of this genocide are so deep and so recent, but I was shocked how amazingly kind the people were to us. 

One example of this when we stopped to get smoothies after visiting the fields. and the young lady serving us brought over a paper with some words written. We were confused at first, but realized she wanted our help spelling English words - she said she was practicing her English. I was happy to see the Cambodian people’s willingness to welcome visitors to learn about their history, and to hopefully prevent this from happening to anyone ever again. 

I realize this is a lot and very heavy, but I want people to know how deeply important learning as well as traveling is. I don’t think there could be any way for me to understand these events as well as I did going there and learning from the people that it actually happened to. 

After spending the day in Phnom Penh, we took the overnight bus to Siem Reap, a city in the North of Cambodia. We hopped off the bus at 5am and immediately took a tuk tuk (a small carriage pulled by a motorcycle, the Cambodian version of a taxi) to Angkor Wat. 

We had the incredible experience of watching the sun rise over Angkor Wat. 

Angkor Wat is the largest religious monument in the world, and was constructed in the early 12th century as a Hindu temple, but was later converted to a Buddhist temple when Buddhism took over Cambodia. Unfortunately, many of the ancient Buddha statues had their heads cut off and sold to Thailand by Pol Pot during the Khmer Rouge era. 

Inside the top of the main temple, I’m wearing a sweatshirt and leggings because in temples women are not allowed to wear tank tops or shorts. Also, it was a little chilly at 5am before sunrise. 

There are three main areas in the complex, all are great examples of Khmer architecture. These pictures are from the main temple, but there are also smaller temples down the road which are great examples of ancient monument restoration. Some of the temples have been restored to allow people to see the original architecture, but some have been left to grow into the forest to show the age and wonder of the complex. 

Almost every surface is limestone carved with religious murals and stories. 

Devin and Emma (mechanical and chemical engineering students) have a Michigan moment

Where Tomb Raider was filmed, can you picture Lara Croft here?

Andrea (a Michigan industrial and operations engineer) and I had a monk at Angkor Wat give us a water blessing, it’s said that we will be blessed until the bracelets he tied around our wrists fall off. 

The next day we visited the Floating Village Kompong Khleang. The floating village is about an hour outside of Siem Reap, and the people here have built their houses up on stilts to accommodate the change of water levels of the Tonle Sap lake. 

A young boy who seems very strong for his age helps dock the boat we will ride on. 

There seemed to be a lot of children working, I told myself that it was a Saturday so maybe it was his day off from school, but this is probably not the case. Our guide told us there was one primary and one secondary school in the village, but for 900 families that does not seem like a lot of schools. He also said 95% of the families are Buddhist or Hindu, which seems to be close to the general demographic of Cambodia. 

The flood season is in the fall, but now is the dry season, so the houses were all up on stilts and you could walk the streets. 

Fishing is one of the major occupations in the villages, our guide said they catch tiny shrimp in the river and lake, cook them, then lay them to dry on the dusty street. Our guide was very helpful in answering questions, he said that many families either get their water from wells or from the river - which was troubling because the river is also where all the waste is dumped. Electricity is run only at night from a generator in the temple. 

Shrimp cooking over a fire on the side of the street.

To conclude the day, we took a boat ride through the mangrove trees surrounding the large freshwater lake that the city sits beside. Overall, it felt very strange to go through someone’s town and take photos, but I thought that overall it was positive because they receive money from the tourism and donations and we get to learn more about their life and their history. 

I noticed all the boat drivers were women, some even had their babies on their lap. I thought this was good that they were able to make money for their families while staying close to their young children. 

One thing that still troubles me is the amount of children we saw working, from the little boys running our boat, to the little girl that helped her mother cook my food at a roadside cart coming home from a late night out. I’m stuck between wanting to help the extreme poverty I witnessed in the floating village, and not wanting to change the way these people have lived for many years. 

We concluded the evening by watching the sunrise over the huge lake, it was definitely an amazing view and a great way to reflect on what we had experienced and learned in the past few days. 

Overall, I’m so grateful to be able to have this experience. Truly every person I met was so kind and willing to accommodate foreigners who had come to learn about the history of Cambodia, both the beautiful masterpiece that is Angkor Wat and the more troubling lesson of the genocide.

When I was in middle school, we read a book about a refugee family who came to America from Cambodia called Children of the River. I found myself thinking about this experience a lot while I was in Cambodia. It had been great that we read about refugees, but I wish that children were taught more about Cambodia’s history and why we need to help the refugees of the world whose own country has turned against them and left them no where to go. 

When I had read this book as a child, Cambodia and even Southeast Asia seemed so far away, and I still can’t believe I’m actually here now. Going abroad has given me a chance to see things I’ve only read about as distant destinations. I realized in Cambodia that I had never seen a rat (that isn’t someone’s pet) until I came to Southeast Asia, I’m so lucky to have grown up where I did and also be able to experience the world. 

- Reilly Wong

Computer Science Engineering

Nanyang Technological University, Singapore 

[braindamageforbeginners]

Intermezzo: Writing

Pre-Cycle 11

I will not be writing about my Thanksgiving, again, although I intend to once I can feel my left side (again, nothing bad happened but I’m still amazingly worn-out, which, for neurology patients, is a uniquely terrible feeling because it usually exacerbates your symptoms). However, when I come back and discuss Recent Personal Events, one thing I wanted to cover was the writing process. Or my writing process, anyway.

As usual, I tell most people that even though I might exaggerate some things or clarify details or the sequence of events, I try not to to fictionalize my experiences too much, not only because that would possibly be a disservice for anyone trying to replicate my “results” (again, for the complementary stuff, I do take CDB and a combined THC/CDB edibles for pain/chemover issues, I eat mostly fiber-based stuff, and lots of protein - usually in the form of protein supplements, but I’m not picky; make no mistake, I don’t think those will cure me, but they will enable me to survive the cure by eating, going to the gym, and those other issues that tend to promote health while not simultaneously giving the disease an edge)(also, to my LDS friends who were asking about medical marijuana, the new law says that it’s acceptable for “cachexia” - that’s the wasting that comes from final-stage cancer, by which it has so thoroughly taken over your system, it’s actually stripping you of nutrients - you want it to fight the weight-loss that comes with chemo, especially since even dear ol’ Zofran will make you too queasy to eat regularly); but also because I genuinely don’t have a good enough imagination to improve upon reality. This isn’t to say that I don’t like fiction or that it doesn’t have its place, just that, if you know how to look, you can find stuff that is way, way weirder than fiction. Case in point, my neighbor is a cop (true), owns a bloodhound (sorry, coonhound - I guess it’s bad form to mix up hunting hounds) which he uses to hunt... wild boars, not raccoons (also true). Which he makes into sausage. He also makes his own wine. When I was introduced to his dog, the line used was - and this is verbatim - “He’s named ‘Henry,’ but he prefers ‘Hank.” Let us just pause and appreciate what a glorious universe we live in where that line could be used unironically to describe a dog. All of this is true and not exaggerated - or not consciously exaggerated, anyway. Faulkner himself couldn’t imagine a character that good.

And that’s really how I was trained to write. Even though I’ve had many, many formal classes on writing, they were mostly focused on history, or science, or art/literature discussions - really, I’ve had a fair amount of training as a journalist more than a creative writer (I’m not really sure I’ve taken a creative writing class, come to it). Again, though, sometimes you can, with some research and observation, find something far more interesting than fiction. Which brings us to the main topic; a recent, hilariously bad attempt at contacting a real-life lost tribe. I normally try not to describe current (or even historical) events, but, sometimes, I just can’t help myself. So, before I go on, I will go with my usual warning that this is not a broad endorsement or condemnation of anything other than stupidity and/or incompetence (I have specific opinions that we’ll get into shortly, but, this tale does feature the world’s most disastrous missionary attempt, and that might put people on edge),

So, bit of background, We live in an era where there are almost no blank spaces left on the map. Hell, thanks to Google Earth, we have a few photos of the Area 51 terrain (again true, but it happened almost 10 years ago). However, there are a few left, like the Darien Gap (the undeveloped jungle-y area between Panama and Colombia, inhabited mostly by drug or gun-running operations), the Kibera Slums of Nairobi (by all accounts, an exceedingly dangerous place to go), parts of Beirut and the Gaza strip, and northern Pakistan. I realize it might be a bit of a stretch to cal them terra incognita, but, go ahead, try and get there and back. I’ll wait. There is also North Sentinel Island. That last one has been featured in a few Cracked articles. Now, even though I loved visiting France - and would do so again, especially if I didn’t have to do it as part of a package tour - I have, later in life, developed a much more, shall we say, spartan view of travel. This really kicked into overdrive after going to the Emerald Pool in Dominica, which I would absolutely endorse to anyone who doesn’t mind a few mosquito bites, and is largely protected because it’s way off the beaten path (if I hadn’t gone to grad school in the vicinity, I probably wouldn’t have gone). Even though I love the Met and Times Square, my most memorable stories from my week in New York a few years ago are from venturing out to Brooklyn, to find a little-known nerd bar that was Doctor Who themed (also true; it’s called The Waystation). My favorite spot in Miami was a dive bar in the middle of an upscale neighborhood (it has, sadly, since been demolished). In other words, I prefer those weird, unique places that seem to last only for a minute or two before they implode. Places like that require finding, and, in some cases, some reliable, competent guides or local fixers to get you there and back (well, not to Zeke’s in Lincoln Road, although finding a parking spot was hairy). North Sentinel Island, however, has stayed on my radar for a while, under the “NONO” file, because the minute it opens up for a nanosecond, it will vanish (it’s worth noting that, even though); also because, like traipsing through Waziristan, being the first one there is not a good idea, for reasons we’ll get into very quickly.

North Sentinel Island is home to a completely uncontacted tribe. And they (the Sentinelese) are super-murder-y. This is an island in the middle of the Indian Ocean - so it’s not like you’d bump into it on the way to Monte Carlo, so I can understand the appeal and mystique right away. The tribe in question hasn’t had contact with the outside world for... well, my sources differ, but since we’ve had records in the area, certainly. If they came over when the aboriginal tribes of Australia migrated from Asia (that’s a weird anthropological riddle unto itself, but we’ll talk about it another day), 30,000-40,000 years wouldn’t be out of the question, although, again, my data on this subject is from anthropologists and/or travel writers, which aren’t exactly “hard” sciences. That’s like “Skull Island” in Kong. Except scarier, because, what do have definitive, written records of, is a very, very hostile environment combined with the Home Owner’s Association from Hell. Literally every single account of the place involves the natives - or the terrain - killing and driving back any outside force. For all of our recorded history. The most recent recordings we have are from fishermen who go near the island, being harassed and shouted at by the inhabitants; that was twenty years ago. None of this is not an exaggeration, although that’s all from secondhand sources, at best (and I’m not going out there), and I’m trying to provide the sort of context I use to figure out if something’s interesting or not. If you’re like me, you’re getting an odd tickling sensation at the top of your spine that indicates something far more interesting than fiction is in the offing. Because no one has any real contact with the Sentinelese (well, no one’s coming forward, anyway), even though most experts think they’re related to other tribes in the chain (which may not mean much - as Maarten Troost points out, some of these islands can be such dangerous, divided places that over a dozen completely different languages were spoken on a single island), they’re also all completely susceptible to modern germs. Which is another one of life’s delightful oddities to consider that a used Kleenex might wipe out the scary natives (well, it would be more delightful if we weren’t celebrating that one time the European powers successfully used that approach to colonize the Americas and utterly decimate the locals long before most had even seen a white man). The Indian Government - who has jurisdiction over the area - has declared it off-limits to anyone without special government clearances and permission. Which I think is fine and agree with, but, I also think it’s to ensure that the Sentinelese don’t get access to boats and decide to expand the neighborhood. Again, we are talking about a people who the British Crown thought it wasn’t worth the risks to actively conquer, and we all know Queen Victoria’s life expectancy was dependent on how many countries her own occupied (okay, so that’s not true, but if you compare how long she reigned vs how many places she claimed ownership of, there’s an odd correlation). Like the other places on my list of “Don’t Ever Go There/Travel Musts,” it combines seclusion with danger, and I’d think the Indian Government might be as effective at banning travelers to it just by ignoring it and discouraging commercial activity in the area. Telling people not to go there or do something isn’t always the wisest policy, as Adam and Eve can attest. At the same time, 30000 years?! The last time they had contact with the rest of the species, we were eating Mammoths. And they’ve been actively resisting/killing everyone else for that long (okay, terminal cancer patient moment, there’s a bit of me that’s shouting.”I hope they never give in!”).

So, the second part of this drama involves organized religion. I will try not to get into my snide, militant agnostic (the older I get, the more I think it utter arrogance to claim absolute certainty - one way or another - about anything, let alone deities), but it will, at points, be somewhat unavoidable, because it’s both too amusing, and because someone claiming to represent God made something of a boo-boo that might endanger our bloodthirsty paleolithic friends there. Or, worse, give them access to boats. So, to all my religious friends, I don’t have any particular problems with your beliefs, as long as you aren’t doing anything horrible with them (like the Catholic Church and that long-running problem regarding pedophilia in the employees)(also, to all my friends who got in touch about the recent legislative/ballot measures, even though I love you all and your church, I hate to  say it, but it’s not like your church would be above the sort of greed and corruption that plagues any institution run by humans, and I’d be immediately suspicious of the stock portfolio or intentions of any authority figure who tells you how to vote), but, at the same time, historically, religion has not always been, shall we say, totally beneficial to every situation. Which is important in this context because some nitwit recently tried to make contact with the Sentinelese in order to convert them. That was his stated intention; if I were inclined to be cynical, I’d point out that visiting Skull Island would be the travel story of a lifetime, and, as a species, we are amazingly good at rationalizing selfish motives to unselfish ones; and I see lonely, desperate people in the chemo ward every Tuesday who’d probably love to talk to you about beliefs (in other words, if you’re actually serious about converting someone, there’s far more receptive and easily-accessible groups than the Lost Atlantis Colony). This is particularly important because John Chau’s method of first contact was also uniquely unsubtle, and had a depressingly predictable (albeit amusing, if you have my twisted sense of humor) outcome.

Just as I kind of have to give props to the Sentinelese for utterly committing to their way of life, I have to admit that religion has - mostly for the better - evolved with us. It’s had to - we started off painting on walls in France in the hopes it’d control aurochs, and now it’s an entity in the modern array of nation-states. In order to do that, it’s had to reign in that impulse to spread the word of God at the end of a sword, and use much more subtle techniques. Again, that sort of sentiment isn’t something you think about until you see the world’s most convoluted form of suicide in action.

And I bring this up because, when I thought about it, if I decided to visit Mega Murder Island (and I’m not sure I would, since I still have strap on an ankle brace any time I think I’m going to need to move at more than two miles an hour, and I still haven’t survived any of my other “Amazing/Awful Travel Destinations”) there might be a few ways I’d go about it, 1. Go back to school and study anthropology and/or linguistics (as needed) and become a Noted Figure in the field, and get official public permission/funding for such a project. 2. Hire a PMC or similar mercenary group to storm island and force my way into the interior at gunpoint (not recommended, this was the approach the British took in the 19th century and they still didn’t subdue the natives). 3. Make friends/contacts among similar tribes in the island chain, in the hope that one of them would offer an “in,” 4. Very quietly organize some sort of quiet, covert expedition to reconnoiter the island while avoiding the Sentinelese in hopes of parlaying that information into a better strategy later, also while staying alive.

It’s not often you get John Chau’s approach, which is to bribe local fisherman to take you within kayak-range of the shore, and read the gospel to the natives, loudly, and then, after a while, paddle back to the waiting fishermen. Let us just pause - again - and appreciate that the same way you ask for directions in Helsinki or St. Petersburg when you have a clumsy phrasebook was the chosen method of contact by a modern human to people whose customs and culture would - if the estimates are correct - completely predate the Lascaux cave paintings. Again, to put it into context, to paraphrase Dan Carlin of “Hardcore History,” it’s a little hard to understand or empathize with writers from 500 BC, because the values and beliefs of the time are so out-of-sync with modern thought. And now imagine a culture that branched off from the rest of us over ten times earlier than that. Predictably, like every other time the outside world has tried to intrude on their island, the natives killed him. I guess  the moral of the story is that Jesus won’t interfere on your behalf if ten minutes’-worth of research on a smart phone would inform you that, hey, maybe going to visit the uber-hostile cavemen isn’t a good idea. Another dream deferred, perhaps, but such is the price of remaining not-killed-by-obviously-not-friendly locals. Yes, my finding this darkly hilarious is probably callous on my part, but, at the same time, in the wake of Honnold ascending El Cap unaided, I’m thinking we, as a society, need to have a discussion about the difference between a calculated risk, and recklessness. Also, as mentioned, life is frequently weirder than fiction, and if you develop an instinct for that (and it’s very easy to do), there’s really no need to agonize over character motivation or plot.