2% of the 5 volume Cambridge Modern History

After several days of reading The Cambridge Modern History...vols 1-5 my kindle shows that I have moved from having read 1% to having read 2%.  Oooowheee!  Only 98% more to go, and then I can look for volumes 6 through 14.  Seriously though, it continues to be fascinating reading.  Chapter 2 is a consideration of the New World at the time of the Discovery, and at first I thought I'd have to skip over it. Words like Coaxiquital (I made that word up, but it's close enough) strain my brain.  They're bad enough one at a time but when I get three or four towns or Indian tribes with similar wacky names it drives me crazy.

But I stuck with it.  I even tried to work out pronunciations and find meanings, but it was a lost cause.  But the tales were great...lots of cannibalism, murders, piracy, sacrifices to the sun-god etc.  Didn't know the Mexican Indians were so high on cannibalism back then.  They had something called the Mexican Law which required a battle between tribes every twenty months, apparently mostly so they could eat the bodies afterwards.  Nowadays I think they call them drug wars and they skip dinner.

I've also read about 200 pages of Daniel Kahneman's widely praised: Thinking, Fast and Slow.  I'm still unimpressed.  I suppose it could be helpful for folks who are looking to buy a house, or invest in an IPO, but mostly what I get out of it is that Daniel really misses his friend Amos, who for all I know was a wonderful and smart and funny guy who died maybe five, ten, fifteen, or twenty years ago.  But you would think he died last week the way Kahneman keeps raising him from the dead.  Jeez, get over it.  As for Kahneman's division of the way our mind works into the imaginary System 1 & System 2, I much preferred the somewhat analogous Left Brain/Right Brain analysis provided by Ian McGilchrist in his book The Master and his Emissary....a book which is, shall we say, a bit more cerebral?

I continue to get error messages as I write this post.  the wi-fi out here in Vegas is terrible.  My i-phone is also fairly useless.  There are times when I write stuff and it suddenly all disappears unless I stop and save it.  Stopping now.  I'll get back to you soon.