Love this and yes - books - the real thing - are a remarkable technology - I was just looking at a stamp issued to commemorate Gutenberg's Bible - the stamp came out in 1952....and was marking 500 years of movable type. We have been transformed....
Gutenberg's breakthrough was in being able to cast type using a standard set of molds. It helped that he was printing in an alphabetic language, so he only needed a hundred or so glyphs. Chinese languages are word oriented, so thousands of glyphs were needed.
Didn't Francis Bacon point out that the compass, paper, the printing press and gunpowder were all originally developed in China but became important elements of European civilization. (Other technologies from China were also adopted like spaghetti and the familiar European plow.)
There's still hope for the survival of books. A new Barnes & Noble opened up in Orange Ca years after the old one closed because of a fire. The store is packed every time I go in there. And the book selection doesn't reflect the corporate publishing world's idea of what we should buy but, rather, the tastes of the employees and the residents of Orange County with it's large Hispanic and Asian population. It's great to have a neighborhood bookstore again.
I love the caves of the Dordogne, especially Lascaux and Pech Merle. I did a ton of research for my book METASKILLS, including several trips to France to gather information. Like Ted (and many others) I've hypothesized that the caves were used primarily to prepare tribesmen for the hunt. if you use a flashlight to simulate a flickering torch, the painted animals appear to fly across the walls and ceilings of the larger caverns. You can easily imagine the thunder of hooves being simulated by the drug-fueled drumming of the hunters. These caves were the sacred cinemas and of their time, central to the culture of the tribe. As to scaring away large animals on the surface, that seems a bit of stretch. Besides, the whole point of these rituals was to screw up their courage to take down a mastodon, or at least a few bison.
Peche Merle was amazing. Werner Herzog did a movie about a newly discovered cave with lots of cave paintings in his movie The Cave of Forgotten Dreams. It wrapped up with albino alligators swimming in warm nuclear power plant waste water, but that's Herzog for you.
Caves may have been used for hunt preparation, but they might also have been used as schoolhouses. Not that long ago, a British furniture salesmen recognized that a lot of cave paintings of animals had a set of markings that indicated which month after the solstice that the animals returned to the area. Odds are the cave paintings were educational tools, and, as noted, education was an important part of preparation for the hunt.
I think people underestimate the need for education in early human society. If you visit Uluru, for example, there was an area used as a boys' school and another area for a girls' school. Children aren't just little sponges. They respond to and learn better from explicit instruction. (There used to be a paper on this that one could find by searching for "spoodle", but then they started using this as the name of a dog breed, so now it's hard to find.)
Barnes & Noble is succeeding because it is inefficient by design. By letting local humans choose books, the stores create "serendipity"—the joy of finding a book you didn't know you wanted.
In an age of digital fatigue, people are increasingly willing to pay a premium for human curation over a cold algorithm.
During the Cold War when the USSR was a menace and Communist China a threat, American ideologues used to rant against central planning. They'd complain about government interference in the economy and picking winners and losers. They'd joke about having to buy bread from Community Bakery 35 rather than one with a proper name.
It's different now. Most businesses are dominated by a handful of colluding big players, so they are as centrally planned as any business establish by some remote Politburo. We don't even give our stores identifying numbers, let alone names. This works for some businesses, if you ignore the price fixing, where the product is a commodity. Red wheat #3 was one of those inventions that let us feed the world.
It even worked for some cultural products, though at a cost. Hollywood cranked out movies that were seen throughout the country, though carefully edited for the racist South. Singers and musicians could become wealthy thanks to mechanical reproduction. The upside was a shared culture. The downside was a vulnerable monoculture. Central planning works until it doesn't work, and bookselling is a case in point.
If your name was Mao, you had no problem getting the people to read your books; they were required to do so voluntarily. 100% readership = perfect efficiency, with no marketing costs.
There are better angels living among us, reminding us to reach a little higher, try a little harder, give a little grace more often. Taylor Swift is one of those angels.
Im not sure why. Is it so hard to imagine people making noise in a cave and settling where it sounds the best? Any little kid(well at least when i was a kid) knows how to do this. Testing the sounds of new spaces is almost instinctual, maybe not even almost.
"Reading for pleasure is down 40% but Barnes & Noble is growing steadily."
Maybe its cool to buy books. Even cooler to be seen buying books. Js.
And idk why, bc i hate youtube, but i got some kind of pleased thrill reading the headline about yt giving billboard the finger. I dont have any animosity towards billboard either, i just like it when big players do away with pretense. Its like some refreshing level of honesty from consummate liars.
I so look forward to Ted's posts each time. My Barnes & Noble is still where it has always been but I have not visited it in many years. I think it might be time to do so now. I LOVE how people are responding to the wonderful world of reading and books. Love all of you in this Substack community too!
I read many books on megalithic sites. It is only recently more attention has been brought to light about how these structures were build using very complex geometry and harmonics that mimic the harmony of the spheres (planets). One of the more prolific writers on this subject is Richard Heath. "Harmonic Origins of the World" "Matrix of Creation" and Precessional Time and the Evolution of Consciousness. It has been speculated that Rock Art in Lascaux France depicts the Precession of the Equinox with the 6 stars over the bull (Taurus) being the six stars of the Pleades.
In 1941, a gentleman named Edward R. Dewey founded the Foundation of Study of Cycles. It was generously funded by the Rothschilds and Harry Truman in order to study hidden cycles in the economy to prevent a depression from ever happening again. The book, which was just rereleased, writes about how Dewey found cycles in every branch of human life. Cycles in music, cycles in culture, cycles in war, cycles in the fish counts in streams, cycles in yeast growth in test tubes.
No longer could you see life as a random walk, nor the economy, nor innovation in the sciences or music. Since then there has been alot more study on the subject and there are great many people who study these cycles. We're still a small group but with the internet there is alot more information more easily available then when I began my interest in the subject in 1987.
It was found that the harmonics (divisions) of the time of the precession of the equinox are the cycles in the economy and the stock market and these cycles were build into these megalithic structures and actually occulted in ancient religious scriptures. The Torah, Bible, Vedic writings and the Quran. Obviously most adherents of these religions know very little, if anything, of the deep mathematics buried in these book.
I went to the source site of the article that Ted wrote about on the acoustic properties of the caves where the art was embedded.
Heath and archeologists before him have shown these megalithic sites were often astronomical observatories in that the math was embedded into the structure and many of the paintings and hieroglyphics were astronomical symbols
Chaco Canyon has been shown to track the precession of what is known as the lunar nodes which is the 18.6 year cycle in business conditions that Edward Dewey discovered. Somebody, a long time ago was very very interested in these moments of time where I speculate they knew that change was upon them.
15 years ago, I watched this video by an archeologist who tracked this cycle and took meticulous photo's of the light entering a window at the site just like many megalithic sites. https://youtu.be/cy9BMe2CRCc?si=e-Kj1XnexDa-M89F It should give you goose bumps to realize that somebody designed a structure that would record the moment these astronomical events would be recorded. This includes all the megalithic sites in the UK including Stonehenge, Pyramids in Egypt and Mexico and the early mounds in the United States which are identical in their geometry to ones found in Ireland.
I also believe that the greatest conspiracy of our time isn't Epstein, or JFK or 9-11. Why? These are the events everyone talks about. It's the things nobody talks about that are the ones they least want you to know. I believe history is the most institutionally and government supported suppression of our world in our modern century. History and time our past knowledge where there is proof that they tracked time and it wasn't just incidental to every day living. Ancient cultures with advanced astronomical sciences and technology that would be laughed at by statist scientists.
We just experienced the ingress of the 18.6 year cycle (it's an average) which we have over 200 years of records of how they timed the turning down of business conditions. Three of them around 53-55 years, periods of war, and commodity cycles.
I had said we don't need to worry about a crash in 2025 because of this. But 2026 and 2027 is different. One of the features of this cycles is that it resonates with the real estate cycle. Did you know that when the Empire State Building opened in 1931, it opened empty? Another feature of this cycle is higher and bigger. Man attempts these humongous projects as if we were Gods. If you go to wikipedia and look up the worlds tallest buildings, you'll find more are under construction then ever before. Construction cranes in every city in the world. We've been watching and documenting. Highest salaries for nonsense, highest paid piece of digital art, astronomical stock prices for stocks with no income.
We're not there yet but 2026 to 2027 should mark the top (for while) And while I don't expect a 1929 repeat at this point, I do think flash crashes are highly possible. Recession, war. This might also synchronize with a renaissance of the art. I have found the 36 year cycle plays a role in the evolution of jazz, music and film. And that hits this year.
Despite all my reading on megaliths, cave paintings and time cycles, this is the first time I've heard about the acoustic properties of these sites. I'm stoked to learn this. I have alot of research to do.
That whole cycle business is very imteresting to me. My whole life it seems is dictated by, often "vicious", cycles. Almost comically so. Most people ive tried to talk to about this look at me like im crazy.. unless until weve known each other long enough that i can start pointing things out. One friend was so perturbed by this she started hiding things she knew fit some cycle i had drawn attention to.
Monthly cycles, seasonal, yearly, and longer periods, things repeat. Even what music i like and when, so much so that ik when to listen to certain of my favorite artists to effect(and affect). And when i listen to those artists "out of time"(damn im on a roll) they *do not* do it for me.
Idk, its some crazy shit. I could go on for pages about this but you get my point. Its validating to hear im not as crazy as i think.
The pendulum wave is an example of the hidden order in chaos. What we call "chaos" and "order" are simply two different views of the same thing. They are the Yin and the Yang, or the Yin/Yang. Sort of like Jazz/Classical, or Silence/Sound, or Male/Female. The part contains the whole, and the whole, the part. The universe in a grain of sand.
welcome to the bat shit crazy club!! I definitely get your point!! The idea of cycles of life, men and nations has been wiped out of our consciousness. Any man who writes a book on the nature of randomness will likely have his book nominated for a Pulitzer and put on the front desk of Barnes and Noble. Any man who writes a book on the universal order of the world will be relegated as a nut job. Indeed, I have cycles of music I listen to.
There is a time for everything,
and a season for every activity under the heavens: a time to be born and a time to die,
a time to plant and a time to uproot,
a time to kill and a time to heal,
a time to tear down and a time to build,
a time to weep and a time to laugh,
a time to mourn and a time to dance,
a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them,
a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing,
re the cave/singing business, ted. Several years ago we visited a cave system in Niaux which is up into the Pyrenees beyond Foix. This is a closed system and guided tours need to be booked well in advance. We descended underground for over a Km through dark and claustrophobic tunnels, guided only by the hand torches of the three guides accompanying around twenty visitors. We eventually reached an area where the cavern opened both out and upwards. this was where the cave paintings were located but what was immediately apparent was the immense acoustic space which allowed the slightest sounds to reverberate naturally and echo. The guide said bone flutes had been found in this chamber and the assumption was indeed that these people had both prepared for hunting and celebrated their success with chanting/singing and playing as well as the paintings. We were encouraged to sing and the atmosphere was eerie and impressive. This was a very profound experience which caused many of us to rethink such terms as “primitive” and “modern”.
Barnes and Nobles (at least the ones surviving / newly opening in LA) have much reduced square footage. I appreciate the clean, well-lit stores, but offerings are more limited and the tight spaces discourage reading and the cafe / third place aspect of the older stores.
"Daunt cares deeply about books and hires people who feel the same way. Then he enlists the support of booksellers in individual stores—who are given more freedom now to promote works they love. He even stopped taking promotional money in order to focus on the quality of the book instead of kickbacks from publishers."
So that's why the big strategically located stacks of right-wing remainder fodder are no longer on display at my local B&N! That alone makes them supporting.
I'd like to know how many devoted readers stopped going to brick-and-mortar stores partly because they didn't want to be confronted by Sean Hannity or Ann Coulter's paper presence.
The only people in the Annapolis Barnes and Noble are old white guys who are reading magazines without buying anything. As they were in 2005. Which is why the beautiful displays of gorgeously written books are only looked at fleetingly through the storefront windows by people on their way to Starbucks.
Love this and yes - books - the real thing - are a remarkable technology - I was just looking at a stamp issued to commemorate Gutenberg's Bible - the stamp came out in 1952....and was marking 500 years of movable type. We have been transformed....
The irony being that the Chinese had movable type centuries before Gutenberg.
Gutenberg's breakthrough was in being able to cast type using a standard set of molds. It helped that he was printing in an alphabetic language, so he only needed a hundred or so glyphs. Chinese languages are word oriented, so thousands of glyphs were needed.
Didn't Francis Bacon point out that the compass, paper, the printing press and gunpowder were all originally developed in China but became important elements of European civilization. (Other technologies from China were also adopted like spaghetti and the familiar European plow.)
It’s in the way that you use it - they had gunpowder before the West as well.
There's still hope for the survival of books. A new Barnes & Noble opened up in Orange Ca years after the old one closed because of a fire. The store is packed every time I go in there. And the book selection doesn't reflect the corporate publishing world's idea of what we should buy but, rather, the tastes of the employees and the residents of Orange County with it's large Hispanic and Asian population. It's great to have a neighborhood bookstore again.
I love the caves of the Dordogne, especially Lascaux and Pech Merle. I did a ton of research for my book METASKILLS, including several trips to France to gather information. Like Ted (and many others) I've hypothesized that the caves were used primarily to prepare tribesmen for the hunt. if you use a flashlight to simulate a flickering torch, the painted animals appear to fly across the walls and ceilings of the larger caverns. You can easily imagine the thunder of hooves being simulated by the drug-fueled drumming of the hunters. These caves were the sacred cinemas and of their time, central to the culture of the tribe. As to scaring away large animals on the surface, that seems a bit of stretch. Besides, the whole point of these rituals was to screw up their courage to take down a mastodon, or at least a few bison.
Peche Merle was amazing. Werner Herzog did a movie about a newly discovered cave with lots of cave paintings in his movie The Cave of Forgotten Dreams. It wrapped up with albino alligators swimming in warm nuclear power plant waste water, but that's Herzog for you.
Caves may have been used for hunt preparation, but they might also have been used as schoolhouses. Not that long ago, a British furniture salesmen recognized that a lot of cave paintings of animals had a set of markings that indicated which month after the solstice that the animals returned to the area. Odds are the cave paintings were educational tools, and, as noted, education was an important part of preparation for the hunt.
I think people underestimate the need for education in early human society. If you visit Uluru, for example, there was an area used as a boys' school and another area for a girls' school. Children aren't just little sponges. They respond to and learn better from explicit instruction. (There used to be a paper on this that one could find by searching for "spoodle", but then they started using this as the name of a dog breed, so now it's hard to find.)
Barnes & Noble is succeeding because it is inefficient by design. By letting local humans choose books, the stores create "serendipity"—the joy of finding a book you didn't know you wanted.
In an age of digital fatigue, people are increasingly willing to pay a premium for human curation over a cold algorithm.
During the Cold War when the USSR was a menace and Communist China a threat, American ideologues used to rant against central planning. They'd complain about government interference in the economy and picking winners and losers. They'd joke about having to buy bread from Community Bakery 35 rather than one with a proper name.
It's different now. Most businesses are dominated by a handful of colluding big players, so they are as centrally planned as any business establish by some remote Politburo. We don't even give our stores identifying numbers, let alone names. This works for some businesses, if you ignore the price fixing, where the product is a commodity. Red wheat #3 was one of those inventions that let us feed the world.
It even worked for some cultural products, though at a cost. Hollywood cranked out movies that were seen throughout the country, though carefully edited for the racist South. Singers and musicians could become wealthy thanks to mechanical reproduction. The upside was a shared culture. The downside was a vulnerable monoculture. Central planning works until it doesn't work, and bookselling is a case in point.
If your name was Mao, you had no problem getting the people to read your books; they were required to do so voluntarily. 100% readership = perfect efficiency, with no marketing costs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotations_from_Chairman_Mao_Tse-tung
Brilliant. I agree about Taylor Swift. She is revolutionary in so many ways.
There are better angels living among us, reminding us to reach a little higher, try a little harder, give a little grace more often. Taylor Swift is one of those angels.
"I was completely amazed,” says archaeologist
Im not sure why. Is it so hard to imagine people making noise in a cave and settling where it sounds the best? Any little kid(well at least when i was a kid) knows how to do this. Testing the sounds of new spaces is almost instinctual, maybe not even almost.
"Reading for pleasure is down 40% but Barnes & Noble is growing steadily."
Maybe its cool to buy books. Even cooler to be seen buying books. Js.
And idk why, bc i hate youtube, but i got some kind of pleased thrill reading the headline about yt giving billboard the finger. I dont have any animosity towards billboard either, i just like it when big players do away with pretense. Its like some refreshing level of honesty from consummate liars.
FWIW, I think B&N mostly sells tchotchkes.
I so look forward to Ted's posts each time. My Barnes & Noble is still where it has always been but I have not visited it in many years. I think it might be time to do so now. I LOVE how people are responding to the wonderful world of reading and books. Love all of you in this Substack community too!
I read many books on megalithic sites. It is only recently more attention has been brought to light about how these structures were build using very complex geometry and harmonics that mimic the harmony of the spheres (planets). One of the more prolific writers on this subject is Richard Heath. "Harmonic Origins of the World" "Matrix of Creation" and Precessional Time and the Evolution of Consciousness. It has been speculated that Rock Art in Lascaux France depicts the Precession of the Equinox with the 6 stars over the bull (Taurus) being the six stars of the Pleades.
In 1941, a gentleman named Edward R. Dewey founded the Foundation of Study of Cycles. It was generously funded by the Rothschilds and Harry Truman in order to study hidden cycles in the economy to prevent a depression from ever happening again. The book, which was just rereleased, writes about how Dewey found cycles in every branch of human life. Cycles in music, cycles in culture, cycles in war, cycles in the fish counts in streams, cycles in yeast growth in test tubes.
No longer could you see life as a random walk, nor the economy, nor innovation in the sciences or music. Since then there has been alot more study on the subject and there are great many people who study these cycles. We're still a small group but with the internet there is alot more information more easily available then when I began my interest in the subject in 1987.
It was found that the harmonics (divisions) of the time of the precession of the equinox are the cycles in the economy and the stock market and these cycles were build into these megalithic structures and actually occulted in ancient religious scriptures. The Torah, Bible, Vedic writings and the Quran. Obviously most adherents of these religions know very little, if anything, of the deep mathematics buried in these book.
I went to the source site of the article that Ted wrote about on the acoustic properties of the caves where the art was embedded.
Heath and archeologists before him have shown these megalithic sites were often astronomical observatories in that the math was embedded into the structure and many of the paintings and hieroglyphics were astronomical symbols
Chaco Canyon has been shown to track the precession of what is known as the lunar nodes which is the 18.6 year cycle in business conditions that Edward Dewey discovered. Somebody, a long time ago was very very interested in these moments of time where I speculate they knew that change was upon them.
15 years ago, I watched this video by an archeologist who tracked this cycle and took meticulous photo's of the light entering a window at the site just like many megalithic sites. https://youtu.be/cy9BMe2CRCc?si=e-Kj1XnexDa-M89F It should give you goose bumps to realize that somebody designed a structure that would record the moment these astronomical events would be recorded. This includes all the megalithic sites in the UK including Stonehenge, Pyramids in Egypt and Mexico and the early mounds in the United States which are identical in their geometry to ones found in Ireland.
I also believe that the greatest conspiracy of our time isn't Epstein, or JFK or 9-11. Why? These are the events everyone talks about. It's the things nobody talks about that are the ones they least want you to know. I believe history is the most institutionally and government supported suppression of our world in our modern century. History and time our past knowledge where there is proof that they tracked time and it wasn't just incidental to every day living. Ancient cultures with advanced astronomical sciences and technology that would be laughed at by statist scientists.
We just experienced the ingress of the 18.6 year cycle (it's an average) which we have over 200 years of records of how they timed the turning down of business conditions. Three of them around 53-55 years, periods of war, and commodity cycles.
I had said we don't need to worry about a crash in 2025 because of this. But 2026 and 2027 is different. One of the features of this cycles is that it resonates with the real estate cycle. Did you know that when the Empire State Building opened in 1931, it opened empty? Another feature of this cycle is higher and bigger. Man attempts these humongous projects as if we were Gods. If you go to wikipedia and look up the worlds tallest buildings, you'll find more are under construction then ever before. Construction cranes in every city in the world. We've been watching and documenting. Highest salaries for nonsense, highest paid piece of digital art, astronomical stock prices for stocks with no income.
We're not there yet but 2026 to 2027 should mark the top (for while) And while I don't expect a 1929 repeat at this point, I do think flash crashes are highly possible. Recession, war. This might also synchronize with a renaissance of the art. I have found the 36 year cycle plays a role in the evolution of jazz, music and film. And that hits this year.
Despite all my reading on megaliths, cave paintings and time cycles, this is the first time I've heard about the acoustic properties of these sites. I'm stoked to learn this. I have alot of research to do.
That whole cycle business is very imteresting to me. My whole life it seems is dictated by, often "vicious", cycles. Almost comically so. Most people ive tried to talk to about this look at me like im crazy.. unless until weve known each other long enough that i can start pointing things out. One friend was so perturbed by this she started hiding things she knew fit some cycle i had drawn attention to.
Monthly cycles, seasonal, yearly, and longer periods, things repeat. Even what music i like and when, so much so that ik when to listen to certain of my favorite artists to effect(and affect). And when i listen to those artists "out of time"(damn im on a roll) they *do not* do it for me.
Idk, its some crazy shit. I could go on for pages about this but you get my point. Its validating to hear im not as crazy as i think.
You are on to something. You might be interested in this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b8O1jlHyKpU
The pendulum wave is an example of the hidden order in chaos. What we call "chaos" and "order" are simply two different views of the same thing. They are the Yin and the Yang, or the Yin/Yang. Sort of like Jazz/Classical, or Silence/Sound, or Male/Female. The part contains the whole, and the whole, the part. The universe in a grain of sand.
Here is another sample:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLwClbpnIaM
Dunno about you, but I find these examples quite profound and moving.
How about "the one in the many"?
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=40+part+motet
welcome to the bat shit crazy club!! I definitely get your point!! The idea of cycles of life, men and nations has been wiped out of our consciousness. Any man who writes a book on the nature of randomness will likely have his book nominated for a Pulitzer and put on the front desk of Barnes and Noble. Any man who writes a book on the universal order of the world will be relegated as a nut job. Indeed, I have cycles of music I listen to.
There is a time for everything,
and a season for every activity under the heavens: a time to be born and a time to die,
a time to plant and a time to uproot,
a time to kill and a time to heal,
a time to tear down and a time to build,
a time to weep and a time to laugh,
a time to mourn and a time to dance,
a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them,
a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing,
a time to search and a time to give up,
a time to keep and a time to throw away,
a time to tear and a time to mend,
a time to be silent and a time to speak,
a time to love and a time to hate,
a time for war and a time for peace.
re the cave/singing business, ted. Several years ago we visited a cave system in Niaux which is up into the Pyrenees beyond Foix. This is a closed system and guided tours need to be booked well in advance. We descended underground for over a Km through dark and claustrophobic tunnels, guided only by the hand torches of the three guides accompanying around twenty visitors. We eventually reached an area where the cavern opened both out and upwards. this was where the cave paintings were located but what was immediately apparent was the immense acoustic space which allowed the slightest sounds to reverberate naturally and echo. The guide said bone flutes had been found in this chamber and the assumption was indeed that these people had both prepared for hunting and celebrated their success with chanting/singing and playing as well as the paintings. We were encouraged to sing and the atmosphere was eerie and impressive. This was a very profound experience which caused many of us to rethink such terms as “primitive” and “modern”.
😂 “The first rock music — surrounded by actual rocks”
Barnes and Nobles (at least the ones surviving / newly opening in LA) have much reduced square footage. I appreciate the clean, well-lit stores, but offerings are more limited and the tight spaces discourage reading and the cafe / third place aspect of the older stores.
"Daunt cares deeply about books and hires people who feel the same way. Then he enlists the support of booksellers in individual stores—who are given more freedom now to promote works they love. He even stopped taking promotional money in order to focus on the quality of the book instead of kickbacks from publishers."
So that's why the big strategically located stacks of right-wing remainder fodder are no longer on display at my local B&N! That alone makes them supporting.
I'd like to know how many devoted readers stopped going to brick-and-mortar stores partly because they didn't want to be confronted by Sean Hannity or Ann Coulter's paper presence.
The lack of artist development by the music industry has a directly corollary in how and why the roomba was killed: research takes money that could go to stock buybacks: https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/how-wall-street-ruined-the-roomba
The origins of rock music! Yes, this...
The only people in the Annapolis Barnes and Noble are old white guys who are reading magazines without buying anything. As they were in 2005. Which is why the beautiful displays of gorgeously written books are only looked at fleetingly through the storefront windows by people on their way to Starbucks.
Great call on the cave paintings.