Dateline 19 Dec 2024. I’m writing this early and scheduling it to post on a day when I won’t be available for posting.
Every now and then we have subscribed to a stock trading service, trying to improve our financial management and our financial outlook for our retirement years. Rarely have these services done anything valuable for us. Most of the time we’ve broken even or done a little better than the cost of the service.
It used to be that people would contact us and offer stock trading tips for $4995 per year, or just $5995 lifetime. Slowly, those numbers came down to $1995 and $2995. Eventually, we started getting pitched newsletters for a few hundred per year. The last time I checked, most of the newsletters were down to $49.99 per year, almost cheap enough to take a risk.
These offers come via e-mails. No doubt the stock trading services we once were with sold out email address to other services, who sold to others. These guys are great at collecting e-mails, but do they really know any more than I do about stock trading?
How many of these gurus are out there. I just went through my email trash folder, and these are the “services” I found in it , all from e-mails deleted from Dec 1 to Dec 19.
Prime Trading Alert
Long Live American
Market Commandos
Market Trend Alert
Proud for Profits
Wave Traders
Global Income Experts
Peak Hours News
Bald Eagle Traders
Safe Investing Daily
Daily Gold Index
Capitalists Today
Profit Tools Journal
Strategic Finance Hints
Market Guru Digest
Groovy Trades
Easy Budget Goal
Fresh Market Data
C’mon, people. There really can’t be that many experts in stock trading. They may be experts in newsletter writing, but they make money off those newsletters and the occasional sucker who buy in for $2995 lifetime.
I unsubscribe to all of these, and they all disappear. But new ones are always there to take their place. The cheapness of transmitting e-mails makes it easy for them to do. The fact that I never asked them to send me an e-mail seems of no importance to them.
1790 depiction of the Bounty’s launch being cast off with Bligh and those loyal to him.
As I said in my last post, I really enjoyed reading The Bounty Trilogy, especially reading it as I did, switching between the three volumes to get the story chronologically. I liked the way the story in Volume 1, Mutiny On The Bounty, agreed with my memories of seeing the 1962 movie and the comic book (graphic novel) I had. That book followed the story of Roger Byam, an upper class Brit who shipped on the Bounty for the purpose of putting together a grammar/dictionary of the Tahitian language.
Byam took no part in the mutiny, but did not leave the ship with Captain Bligh due to the Bounty‘s launch being overloaded. He was one of a dozen or so non-mutineers who went back to Tahiti on the ship and were left there when the Bounty sailed on in search of a hiding place. Byam and the others were captured a couple of years later when the Brits sent a ship to hunt down the mutineers. He faced a court martial and was found guilty, in part due to a certain sailor’s absence, a sailor who had witnessed a conversation that worked against his defense. That witnessed finally arrived back in Britain, testified on Byam’s behalf, and the conviction was reversed.
I enjoyed the book so much I wanted to read more. I went first to Wikipedia and read there, but I still wanted more. One problem with the Wikipedia article is that Byam was not listed as being part of the ship’s crew. I searched some more and found several items at JStor, a site I’ve registered at to have access to scholarly articles. The first article I read was “Nordhoff and Hall’s Mutiny on the Bounty: A Piece of Colonial Historical Fiction”. Charles Nordhoff
and James Norman Hall wrote The Bounty Trilogy. The article was written by Sylvie Largeaud-Ortega, of the University of French Polynesia. It’s not really an article, but rather a chapter in a 2018 book titled The Bounty from the Beach: Cross-Cultural and Cross-Disciplinary Essays. Here’s what I learned from reading that:
It’s all a lie! The one book Mutiny on the Bounty can barely be considered historical fiction, and it certainly isn’t history. The point-of-view character, Byam, is fictional. No such man shipped on the Bounty, there was no linguistic mission on the voyage. The book, alleged to have been taken from Byam’s recollection, had no such recollection to draw from.
Oh, I am so angry about this! Ms Largeaud-Ortega has destroyed, for me, a 60 year-old memory and ruined a recent pleasurable read. I’ll have more to say about her article/chapter in my next post.
I suppose I should have known that it’s likely that a novel, and a movie made from the novel, might not be faithful to history, but in my interaction with Bounty dramatization it never occurred. And now I’m disappointed.
Don’t get me wrong. I enjoyed reading the book and I’m not sorry I devoted the time to it. The movie was good. The old graphic novel was good. But, man, I sure was taken in thinking it was history.
I’m really glad I found this on the shelf of legacy books of my family.
Many years ago I saw the 1962 movie Mutiny on the Bounty, starring Marlon Brando and Trevor Howard. Young as I was at the time, I thought it was a great movie. I remember that I also had a comic book (a graphic novel?) of the Bounty story. But it followed a different story with a different end. I have good memories of both the movie and the comic book, remembering details of what the characters did and what happened to them.
On our living room bookshelf was a book The Bounty Trilogy, containing three novels in one book. I knew it had to be about the Bounty adventure, but didn’t know what it contained. Once I started listing our legacy books for sale, I saw The Bounty Trilogy on the shelf, listed it on Facebook Marketplace, and wished I could read it before it sold. I finished whatever book I was reading sometime last month, and decided, “Why not start it?” At an advertised price of $20, I figured it might not sell quickly. if I could read 10 pages a day, it would take me over two months to finish. I took the book from the sale shelf and started, not being sure whether I hoped it sold or didn’t.
I suppose I’m a sucker for sea exploration stories.
The three novels are
Mutiny on the Bounty, covering the Bounty‘s sail from England, landing at Tahiti, start of the return trip, the mutiny, the lives of some of the men who went back to Tahiti, including the capture of some and their court martial in England. It is told from the point of view of Roger Byam, an educated man who sailed for the purpose of putting together a grammar and dictionary of the Tahitian language. This is the POV that was in my graphic novel so many years ago.
Men Against the Sea, telling the story of those sailors loyal to Captain Bligh that were put in the Bounty‘s launch to fend for themselves. Rather than land at some nearby island that was inhabited by people hostile to European boats, Blight sailed the open boat 3,600 miles to the island of Timor, where he knew there was a European colony.
Pitcairn’s Island. This is where a large number of the mutineers, including Fletcher Christian (2nd in command who led the mutiny), landed to hide out. The island was mis-charted on all British maps. It was almost 20 years before an American boat found them, and another six years before a British ship. By that time all but one of mutineers had died at the hands of others.
5-Stars for this sea story. Multiple points of view were not hard to follow.
The mutiny took place on pages 98-112 of the book. I reached that point after about eight days of reading. The cast of characters split into two points of view: the mutineers and a few loyal men sailing east in the Bounty’s launch sailing west. I decided to read the two POVs simultaneously. That was easy enough, as the open launch reached Timor a couple months, and the Bounty’s contingent reached Tahiti in a similar time frame. It was only a month before those people split up, some remaining on Tahiti and taking their chance that no British ship would visit there soon, and some sailing in the Bounty in search of an isolated place to hide. At that point, I began reading in three places in the volume. That got somewhat complicated, but I think I was able to keep the three POVs straight and chronological.
The book included a few color plates.
The book was exceedingly well written. Maybe I’m a sucker for sea exploration, but I devoured this book, finishing it in less than a month. I found the story of Byam’s life faithful to the comic book. Every detail I remembered from all those years ago were in the first book, do that pleased me. Except they talked a lot more about Byam’s dictionary and grammar than I remembered.
One sad part of the book was the death of Byam’s mother, perhaps brought on by an ugly letter Bligh wrote her. She died while Byam was enroute to England to face a court martial.
Toward the end, I was reading at the rate of 50 pages a day. It’s been a long time since I’ve found a book interesting enough to devote this much time to reading. I give the book 5-stars. But is it a keeper? Alas, no. I’ll keep it listed for sale. I hope it goes to someone who really wants to read it.
But, having said all of this, look for my next post, which is a follow-up to this, telling more that I’ve learned.
Into he trash went my engineering seals, lead sharpener for engineering drawing work, and service anniversary pins.
The main work I’m doing now—work at home that is, but not including my writing and stock trading work—is shedding possessions in anticipation of future downsizing. It’s wearying work. Not so much physically wearying, but mentally so. For a couple of months we’ve been pulling books from the basement and listing them for sale on Facebook Marketplace. We’ve sold a fair number, though have many more to go.
We have cleared out a fair number of things. We donated 400 children’s books to a church function. With our son’s and daughter’s help, on separate trips here, we took at least three loads of donation stuff to Goodwill. That included some odd pieces of furniture.
Some day I’ll have to actually read this old probate document and see how it fits in with family history.
One thing I was doing, but which was delayed by my hospitalizations and recuperation, was scanning my genealogy papers, saving them electronically in a retrievable manner, and getting rid of the paper files. This week I got back to that project, and over three days got rid of around 50 sheets. Some of those sheets were probate records from Massachusetts in the 1600s and 1700s that I had my son research years ago. The sheets are difficult to read, and I don’t really remember how some of the people fit into our family tree. I’ll have to transcribe the probate documents and figure out exactly who the people are (ancestors or relatives). That’s something I can do from the electronic files better than the paper files, because I can enlarge the e-docs and read them easier. But when will I ever take the time to do this additional step?
You know dis-accumulation cuts deeply if I’m getting rid of Carlyle books.
Another thing that we did in the storeroom was pull out our daughter’s old bedroom set, unused for at least 10 years, and little used for 20 years before that. We snapped some photos and I listed it for sale. Only one person showing interest so far.
With the bedroom set pulled out and on display, this allowed me to reorganize stuff. I moved an old entertainment center and restacked stuff around it. That allowed me to see what stuff we have, and gave me an idea of what we can get rid of soon with the greatest reduction in volume. Those would be the old VHS tapes.
Some of the things I’m going through are cutting deep. In a box of things I brought home from the office, I found my professional engineer seals. It took me a few minutes to make the decision to put them in the trash. The seals meant a lot to me when I was a practicing engineer, but that ended close to four years ago (retirement followed by two years on retainer. I also found a large roll of discarded engineering drawings that I salvaged with the intent of using the backs to draw big genealogy charts. But I now know that’s not going to happen, so the paper roll is moved to recycling staging. Last week I tossed twenty-five years of continuing education certificates and a couple of stacks of my old business cards. Next will be my many organization membership and annual licensing cards.
One big space keeper is my old stamp collection. After years of storing it in the storeroom, I’ve decided to get rid of it. I don’t know if it has any value these days. Does anyone still collect stamps? Are dealers out there and are they buying? Or is it possible to find a private collector? So much work to do.
Downsizing, which requires dis-accumulation, has become more important now that I’ve had health issues. My recovery from heart surgery is going well (including three days a week in cardio-rehab), recovery from my last stroke less so. But clearly my health is not what it was a year ago. We’ve got to cut deeply into our possessions, got to. We are leaner than we were a year ago, and significantly leaner than we were four years ago. But we have much much more to do.
All this is quite wearying. Dealing with the genealogy papers is more wearying than anything. Each piece of paper I toss in the recycling basket feels like I’ve parted with something I should keep, something that someone among my descendants may want or benefit from someday. Ah, well, in the future the Internet will contain so many records and resources that my paltry files may have no value.
Tonight, after dealing with books for about an hour, I pulled two genealogy notebooks off the closet shelf and went through them. They were mostly forms for copying information on. I kept two of each kind of sheet and discarded the rest. I did keep any lined sheets without writing on the front or back (maybe 20 of them), as who knows what I could use them for someday.
A mix of sacred and secular on this old album. Well, it’s not really old to me.
I can see and hear it. It’s been more than 50 years since the turntable in our house on Cottage Street, next to the hallway by the secretary. It would be sometime after Thanksgiving when the Christmas records would be brought out and played. One I remember well was the Arthur Godfrey Christmas album. I shall have to find it on line and listen to it at some point this Christmas season. There’s only one song on that album that I remember specifically: Mele Kalikimaka. It’s worth listening to, should you not have heard it before.
We had a few other Christmas records as well, almost all of them secular. Gene Autry singing “Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer” and “Here Comes Santa Claus”. Another singing “Santa Claus is Coming To Town”. We were a nominally Christian family, attending church every week, but making sure that didn’t really slop over into our lives between Sundays and other days of obligation.
I vaguely remember new Christmas songs being introduced. I remember when one year (1962) “Do You Hear What I Hear” was a new record. We bought it the next year, the Bing Crosby release, and played it over and over. But it was a new song, and took me a long time to warm up to it.
We listened to sacred Christmas hymns too, but over the radio. And each of the albums we had were probably a mix of secular and sacred songs.
Strange, looking back over a long chain of years, with my life being centered around the sacred for so long, to remember the secular Christmas music so well and so fondly. I wonder, though, if I’ve made a post about this in years past. If so, I’m sorry for the repetition.
For previous Christmas-themed posts, check out this link.
I’ve had trouble sleeping the last two nights. It’s now Thursday evening. Today I drove to Fayetteville AR for a CT scan of my head. This was to follow up on my Sept 3 stroke. I wasn’t expecting good news from this, as I’ve struggled against continuing impairments to speech and left hand fine movement (giving me problems with handwriting and typing,
From the 1;30 p.m. CT scan, which ended early since I got there early, I rushed back to Bella Vista to attend the bi-monthly meeting of the Scribblers & Scribes writers critique group. As I was walking out of the Bella Vista Library at the end of our meeting, I was a little dizzy; nothing major, but a little more sustained than, say, from standing after a long time sitting. I got to the car and sat a while until the dizziness passed, which it did after a minute or two.
From there I went to a nearby grocery store for a couple of things. Pulling into the parking space, I tapped the cart corral with my right front of the car—no damage that I could see. I got through the store okay, bought the couple of items on my list, and drove home. The dizziness did not return.
As I drove into our garage, my cellphone rang. It was the nurse practitioner from the neurology clinic with the results of the scan. The blood clot from September has “resolved” itself—meaning it has disappeared! So that was good news.
Here at home, I’m barely functioning due to tiredness. I had plans to read and write this evening, but there’s no way I can accomplish that. One thing I was going to write was a follow up post for the blog. But that’s not possible tonight.
Maybe tonight will be better for sleep and I’ll be able to finish a chapter in my book tomorrow. Hope so.
This 1999 book is likely of interest only to the staunchest of Lewis students.
In June we made a trip to Lake Jackson, TX to first watch two of our four grandkids and family pets, then to pick up grandson Ezra to spend a week with us. While there, I went through their shed and found books gathering dust. I brought two back with me: The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis and the Bright Shadow of Holiness by Gerard Reed. I’ve always intended to read The Hobbit, and have put it in my reading pile. I have other Tolkien items to read first. The other I couldn’t resist, being a Lewis fan. It came to the top of the pile in late October, and I finished its 177 pages in about 15 days.
I’m not sure that I got everything out of this book that I hoped to. It was kind of hard to understand the author’s purpose, and so I didn’t think that helped in my understanding.
This won’t be a long review. I’ll return this to my son-in-law on the next trip to Texas. I don’t plan on reading it again. I give it 3-stars. On to my next Lewis read, which will be an attempt at The Allegory of Love.
