Right now there's a perfect lazy Sunday companion going. Man Vs. Wild marathon on the Discovery Channel. It's about this nutbag survival expert named Bear Grylls who is dropped into isolated environments with as little equipment as possible and tracks how he finds his way back to civilization. It may be a stunt but it's my kind of stunt.



I always wonder though with shows like this: how the hell does the camera operator do it? They go through all the same physical challenges but have to carry their gear and shoot, too. It's like the sherpas who go up to Everest. They deserve some big credit, too.

One of my favorite gifts to give people is the SAS Surivial Guide, which I think may be one of the most indispensible books ever written and compiled. It's a perfectly compact, concise, and apparently thorough list of every essential fact of surivival on this planet; how to source and purify and obtain water, food, shelter, and what dangers exist in the environment and how to deal with them. Too bad the pocket version is out of print. But seriously it's a compendium of some of the most important and hard won information as a species we've ever collected.

I've been writing some things on the side which is sort of antithetical to blogging; I need to use the experiences around me to borrow for that sort of thing. Apologies on the lack of updates, but it may run that way for a little while.

I promise though to write some more thoughts about my tyrrany of narrative theories as a followup; and I'll try to be more lucid and clear about it, too. Everyone instinctually knows fairy tales are impossible but that doesn't stop yearning. Narrative and tropes and archetypes are not in themselves harmful, either. I think however reptition of a mythic structure is, though.