Ron > Recent Status Updates

Chapter 5: After a couple of actual offenses, we're back to more high school drama bulllshit. I can see how this would resonate with teens, since at that age many of us did care about petty stuff like that, but now that I'm in my late 30s it's kind of tiresome.

Chapter 2: So the tapes themselves are the terrible secret that'll get out if anybody breaks the chain? That's pretty weaksauce, Hannah. What person #2 did was jackassy, but everybody already knows about it; what's his incentive to play your little game?

Chapter one: Does Hannah get any more likeable? I assume the tapes reflect her at her lowest, but she's awful in pretty much every way.

Chapter 6, "Politics", based in "Drumhead" (s4e21). Again, I think the lesson is readily seen in the episode. Admiral Satie's past successes had led her to see conspiracies everywhere and encouraged Starfleet to trust her accusations, but when that kind of power combines with the politics of fear, innocent people get hurt.

Chapter 5, Communication. Based on "Darmok" (s2e02). I think the lesson here is obvious; communication isn't always easy, but with patience and imagination we can work toward understanding.

Chapter 4, "Competence", based on "Lower Decks" (s7e15). This one's pretty loosely connected to the episode, but the lesson is about mentoring. Go beyond training your people to do their jobs and teach them how to identify problems, make decisions, and innovate on their own. And support them when they do.

Chapter 3, "Initiative", based on "Relics" (s6e04). The Enterprise-D finds a crashed Starfleet ship on the surface of a Dyson sphere. Two engineers board the other ship and get separated from the crew, and wind up having to save the Enterprise. The reflection here is that the more you support your subordinates' well-thought-out decisions, the more equipped they'll be to take charge when you're not around.

Chapter 2, "Urgency", based on "Starship Mine" (s6e18). It certainly would have been easier for either Picard or the crew to delay making decisions or to look out for their own safety, but they recognized the greater danger and took action. However, the Captain reminds us that urgency does not mean haste. A bad decision made quickly is still a bad decision.

Chapter 1: "Focus" - Based on "The Best of Both Worlds" (s3e26 and s4e01). Despite the political distractions that Lt. Shelby presented, the crew remained focused on the more important task of dealing with the Borg. Conversely, Lt. Shelby seemed more focused on earning her next promotion than on doing her current job well, which created problems for the rest of the crew.

Front matter: This should be interesting; the rest of the book will be written in in-universe style. The remaining chapters take the form of Jean-Luc Picard's journal entries which are have been compiled into a book for Starfleet cadets. He'll reflect on his latest encounter (episode) and discuss the leadership skills he needed to help him navigate it.

Chapter 106: We're well into Tom's story now, and it looks like he'll be getting married soon.

Through chapter 100. For a seven-generation family saga, this story seems to spend a lot of time focusing on two guys. Kizzy's time as the POV character is just long enough for her to give birth to George. Maybe there just isn't much to say about the life of a field hand, but sometimes it feels like the women exist just to chastise the men and to bear children.

This was an interesting and humanizing portrait of the very poor, whether generationally poor or dealing with transient homelessness. I think the authors do a good job of demonstrating something they mention in the beginning, that more than anything these folks just want a steady job.

Chapter 85: Noah Ruins Everything. Can't blame him for trying though. Now that we've switched to Kizzy as the POV character, things seem to be clipping along much more quickly. We've covered almost a year in one chapter, whereas we spent several chapters on getting Kunta acquainted with his new surroundings.

End of Book One.

Chapter 76: Way past due for an update. It's the year 1800, which by my figuring has Kunta at 50 years old. I'll fill in the gaps later.

Through chapter 22, wherein Kunta is taken away for manhood training.

Falling behind. I'm current only Book One, Part Two, Chapter 9, wherein Andrei brings what he thinks is good news to the Austrian command, but he doesn't get the hero's welcome he'd built up in his head.

Really good so far. We're still in Kunta's childhood; I think he's around eight years old, because the kafo (school cohort) above him just went kut out for manhood training, and there seems to be a noticeable age difference between kafos. Kunta also just had an extended dream sequence about being a legendary buffalo hunter instead of watching his goats. Be careful out there; bad things lurk in the forest.

Chapter 9 focuses on the American assumption that I individually am important in God's plan. American self-interest has certainly led to many innovations and opportunities, but it also leads to a reading of the Bible where the reader is the center of the universe. God's plan revolves around me, I will be among the 144,000 chosen at the end, and it will happen in my lifetime because I'm just that important.

Chapter 8 talks about the cultural values that we often superimpose on the Bible. For example, in America its considered a virtue to save enough money to retire comfortably. However, the Parable of the Rich Fool (Luke 12:13-21) seems to directly contradict this. Such a man is seen as sinful because he'd rather provide for his future self than for his neighbors who are hungry now.

Chapter 7 gets into the Biblical idea of relationships. We westerners like to think of behavior as right or wrong. We want to be able to pick lines out that clearly say, "Eat this, not that." But back then it wasn't that simple. Relationships also came into play, and often what was done or advised in the Good Book was specific to the context of that relationship.

Chapter 6 was pretty short, but it's subject is potentially quite big: different cultures talk about time differently. In many non-Western cultures, it's quite common to tell a story in a chronologically roundabout way because that creates a better buildup and payoff. This is likely why time skips around so much in the Bible and why multiple stories about the same event (e.g., the Gospels) don't always line up.

Chapter 4 discusses individual vs. collective societies, then Chapter 5 shows how those cultures interpret positive and negative behavior, namely through justice and guilt systems in the West and hinor/shame systems elsewhere.

Through Book One, Part One. Prince Andrei has visited with his father and sister, and now he heads off to war.

From chapter 2: One of the authors, both of whom are white, adopted a black child from a local agency, and he got a crash course in the subconscious racial assumptions we all make. He soon had to field many well-intentioned but ignorant comments from his good Christian brethren, including one who asked, "Is she one of those crack babies?"

Part 1 of 3 focused on how our interpretation is shaped by social mores, views of race and ethnicity, and differences in language. Tl;dr - it's easy to assume that they valued what we value and spoke as we spoke, but that's not always the case.

So far this book covers a lot of the same ideas as a standard sociology book, but uses Bible passages to demonstrate the concepts. The main idea is to remind people that when the read the Bible, they're reading about a very different time and place, and that we can't always apply our values to them.

Book 1, Chapter 20

I'm actually almost done with this, but I haven't been recording anything. Several interesting insights, for example the authors suggest that the '96 welfare reform contributed to the deterioration of conditions and pay in entry level jobs by creating a glut of applicants.