Monday Cup Of Links #53 - Rahul Roushan Interview, Roman Villa, Birbs, Serpent
Where I compare Andy Dick with Charles Sobhraj
Happy Monday!
It’s been insane how there’s been a spike in covid cases in India over the past month or so. I was supposed to be in India now, but ended up not going over various reasons, so I’m just glad my family there is vaccinated. I hope things clear up soon, so I can actually go home safely.
I’ve pulled my novel out of cold storage, finally. I had actually put away all my books to make room for baby things, but now, I’m rereading them, as well as rereading my novel, and I’m back to writing it. It’s exciting.
Onto our links!
If you haven’t already read my Thursday post, which was an interview of the bestselling author and media entrepreneur Rahul Roushan, do so right away! It’s a great interview that goes into 2000s Internet nostalgia, writing discipline, avoiding entrepreneurial FOMO, and somehow, Hindi imposition. If you’ve already read it, share it with your social network so they too might have the pleasure!
When is a bird a birb? The Audobon society establishes some ground rules. (Link via Diane. Her Youtube is awesome, check her out!)
Cahokia was a Native American city in southern Illinois that is directly across the Mississippi river from St. Louis, MO. It is said to have been at its peak in 1100 CE, and had about 15-18k people, which was more than London had at the same time. The city declined and was abandoned by about 1350 CE. People theorized a lot about why the city had been abandoned, and had theorized that they overused wood, and cleared the areas around the city too much, which led to flooding, leading to the decline of its population. However, new research shows the area stayed stable all the way until the 18th century, so it seems unlikely that flooding was what caused its decline.
What I learned from this piece was what “pre-Columbian” meant - it means things that existed before Columbus came to the Americas. And also that climate change based narratives about why civilizations declined are pretty common - it’s one theory why the Indus-Sarasvati civilization declined, or rather, de-urbanized.They discovered the remains of a Roman villa in Scarborough. It’s the first of its kind anywhere in the Roman empire. Interestingly, it was discovered by a real estate developer, who has since decided to preserve the discovery and build around it. All I can find is that there’s a central circular room, bath houses, and also a Roman-style central heating system. I wonder why this is one of its kind. How does it compare to the homes in Pompeii, for instance?
I obsessively binged on The Serpent, the BBC series about Charles Sobhraj, the serial killer who preyed on western tourists on the Hippie Trail in the 70s. I’ve mentioned the Hippie Trail before in my posts, and they even had a bus at first, that went from Europe through the Middle east, Afghanistan, India, and went on all the way to Thailand and Cambodia; so this series was just a delight to watch. Now I’m reading Serpentine - Charles Sobhraj’s Reign of Terror from Europe to Asia, and I’m impressed by the level of detail about Charles’ earlier years. Having just read a whole slew of parenting books, it feels like they made every mistake in the book with him - early childhood trauma, rejection from parents, lack of attachment to stable adults, which led to peer orientation, which led to a whole slew of issues.
The odd thing to me was it had parallels to how Andy Dick described his childhood on Marc Maron’s podcast - he was adopted by a nice suburban family, but he was just filled with anger at being rejected by his birth parents, and then he met his birth mother who had a less than perfect life, and then he was filled with resentment then as well. The effects of this are long-standing - in a comedy club in LA, the emcee once asked “How many of you have seen an elephant?”, and fewer hands went up than when he asked “How many of you have been molested by Andy Dick?”
Yeah, go hug your kids, and hug your parents.