Kev Ebbs retweeted
This is Carole Tonkinson, Russell Brand's editor at Macmillan. She's a registered therapist. When she she signed Brand up she explained: “I wrote to Russell on 1st January this year asking if he would write this book, because I woke up thinking that if there were one book we could publish in the year ahead that would make a huge difference it would be this book." She was one of my keenest persecutors.
I hope before I retire I get to excuse my absence from work with “I was drinking with Khonsu”! I have 4 months left
This is a 3200 year old attendance sheet from Ancient Egypt, and some of the reasons it gives for missing work are absolutely wild:
1. Drinking with Khonsu
2. The scorpion bit him
3. Brewing beer
4. Embalming his brother
5. His feast
6. Building his house
7. His wife is bleeding
8. With Khons making remedies
9. Strengthening the door
10. Making remedies for the scribe’s wife
The craftsmen who built and decorated the royal tombs in the Valley of the Kings lived in a village of their own, Deir el-Medina, and in the fortieth year of Ramesses II’s reign, around 1250 BC, someone drew up a register of their absences on a large flake of limestone. There are forty names, the dates each man was missing are written beside them in black ink, and above most of those dates, in red, is the reason.
The man who went drinking with Khonsu, probably a coworker, could hardly have imagined that his day off would go down in history, let alone that we’d still be reading about it more than 3000 years later. Somewhere along the way, brewing beer stopped getting anyone out of work, and nobody consulted the rest of us, although I doubt any boss would ask a follow up question if you called in and said, "Sorry, I’m embalming my brother."
All joking aside, what strikes me most is how little of this needs translating. Many of the entries I left off the list are about sickness and family, a mother who was ill, a man caring for a relative, and they could have been written yesterday.
Three thousand years have changed almost everything about the way we live, and almost nothing about what it means to be human...
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Kev Ebbs retweeted
Elon Musk sitting in the garage with the Tesla on for hours wondering why nothing's happening
Kev Ebbs retweeted
That much ketamine lowers the heartrate to around 45 bpm. Will take him a bit to recover.
Kev Ebbs retweeted
I don’t give much for the chances of survival of Disneyland’s ‘World of Harvey Weinstein’ now
