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- Written by: Rod Boyle
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The quaint and romantic tale of the "Bridegroom's Oak", a tree in Germany where lovelorn singles hope to find their match by leaving notes for interested parties.
Sort of like the Craigslist of Yesteryear.
"The tree received so much mail that, in 1927, the German postal service, Deutsche Post, assigned the oak its own postcode and postman."
Link: http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20180213-in-germany-the-worlds-most-romantic-postbox
Of related interest, Love Locks: Wiki
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
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Hank Green does a lovely narration of "The Broccoli Tree", a modern fable about sharing the things you love.
{embed:youtube:ESyJop31cmY}
And a longer prose description here: http://thebroccolitree.com
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One of my earliest memories, living with my mother, a high rise apartment somewhere in Victoria, cereal for breakfast, a plastic jet surprise inside that I could keep.
This excited me.
And outside, on the balcony, a shallow swimming pool filled with water and sand and all the little creatures I had gathered from the beach, crabs, starfish, that would soon die, I was too young to understand the consequences...
A small T.V., black and white, the Wonderful World of Disney, looking at it over the kitchen table...
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Screen, backlit, black letters on a dazzling white screen, pretty sure it's making me blind, unlike real reading in so many ways...
The screen, for example, 95% light, 5% dark lettering, often other distracting ads, colors, copy. The experience - intended to mimic reading, instead mocks it, scatterbrained ideas scattershot into your brain, always geared to the shortest possible attention span, the clicking from one uncompleted idea to another, becoming broadly informed about nothing as opposed to deeply informed about anything. This is the way of the future.
Then take the printed word, softer, all of it, reflected light, the brightness dulled by the fibres of the page, the pigments in the ink, hundreds of lumens less than the dullest computer monitor, laptop, cell-phone, bookmarks in pages, underlined passages, they will be revisited, found again, contrast this to your list of internet favorites, shortcuts, the hundreds of bookmarks that you've never returned to, that you likely never will, and by the time you get around to it the pages will have invariably expired or moved on.
Reflected, reflective words, your mind reasons as you read, the screen hypnotizes you, slips things past your conscious mind, bombards you with contrary, contradictory information and sets your mind at odds with itself, the backlit alphabet dumbs us down. The words disappear, they were never there, only the spaces around them, the phosphor, lumens of the screen obliterating them, you make sense in the negative spaces, compare this to ink, upon paper, an additive process, the words, the sentences, paragraphs and plots remain, time will decay them as well but at an infinitely slower pace, the plots, characters, themes, the turn of the phrase, they all carry on in memory.
I need to read more books.
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
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I remember being very curious about this upon hearing of it from the "Bush Tucker Man" programs of Australia. He was both informed and persuasive. And so, my imagination was reignited by the Futility Closet Podcast "The Wild White Man" I thought I'd revisit the notion, and see if anything had been resolved. It seems - to an extent - that it has, bu the controversy is ongoing. I'll let you do your own research and make up your own mind.
Links:
- The Original Article that Raised the Question
- Prospect of Dutch Settlement Pre Fleet Raised
- The Bush-Tucker Man's Theory
- Modern DNA Testing Results
So, some questions answered, some remain, but curiosity feeds the mind...