It’s no secret that Will Cuppy is one of my favorite historians. Along with Ambrose Bierce he has a certain way with words, as found in The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody. Here is how he sums up the pyramids:

The fact is that building a pyramid is fairly easy, aside from the lifting. You just pile up stones in receding layers, placing one layer carefully upon another, and pretty soon you have a pyramid. You can’t help it. In other words, it is not in the nature of a pyramid to fall down…

And then there’s the origins of America

Captain Smith reached Virginia on April 26, 1607, with a number of English gentlemen and some people who were willing to work. Then they all held a meeting to discuss ways and means of civilizing everybody. They made a great many speeches and accused each other of various crimes and misdemeanors and arrested some of themselves as an object lesson, and American history was started at last.

Perhaps my favorite quote of all by Cuppy is in regard to the Aztecs.

Montezuma had a weak and vacillating nature. He never knew what to do next.*
(*He had the courage of his convictions, but he had no convictions.)

I was reminded of this style of humor recently when I read the slightly less prosaic but still curmudgeonly lines of thinking in a blog post from James Iry, an abridged history of programming languages:

1964 – John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz create BASIC, an unstructured programming language for non-computer scientists.

1965 – Kemeny and Kurtz go to 1964.

[…]

1972 – Dennis Ritchie invents a powerful gun that shoots both forward and backward simultaneously. Not satisfied with the number of deaths and permanent maimings from that invention he invents C and Unix.

One afternoon in 1990 as I rode in a dusty, bumpy bus over the Himalayas an elderly man told me extracts from his life story. He had rented a scooter in the early 1950s and rode the 10,000 km from India to England, through the Middle East. In England he went to medical school and became a successful doctor.

I asked how he handled his fears through rough terrain and bad weather and he just smiled. “Ahhh, where you see Pakistan today and the dirt roads through Afghanistan…there was no pavement…they were like a dream. It was great to be alive,” he said as he described to me with wistful eyes how a fearless boy could make his way to anywhere in the world back then with only a small engine on two wheels.

It sounded like he was doing in his youth what he thought should come naturally to humans. Sitting next to me in the safety of a bus made him seem uncomfortable or sad; a metal cage on four wheels obviously depressed him. He brightened up again when he described plans to run up the hills to the north of Pokhara in the middle of day.

“Mad dogs and Englishmen out in the midday sun” I thought to myself when I next saw him. He was covered in sweat huffing and puffing his way down from the foot of the Annapurna Mountains.

I myself had climbed with difficulty earlier that day through the cool pre-dawn darkness of thick brush and narrow dirt ledges to the Summit of Sarangkot. And I expected to face solace after overcoming my fear and obstacles to reach the top. Instead a group of children had run up ahead of me and played in the warm morning sun as if it were any street or park anywhere in the world. They laughed and yelled “Coke one dollar”. Here is the photo I took of my welcome party.

The little girl is demonstrating how to drink the bottle. Here she is again after I gave her a piggy-back ride and walked with them down to their village.

The old man’s stories, his views on risk, and life in the Himalayas came to mind recently when I saw the trailer for a new documentary called The Highest Pass.

The movie follows a modern motorcycle journey on the highest road in the world. Seven Americans with modern safety equipment and supplies, led by a Yogi named Anand Mehrotra, set out to find and face risk decisions outside their normal comfort zone — from high-altitude and steep, icy cliffs to chaotic Indian traffic.

Anand…bears the burden of a Vedic prophecy that predicts he will die in his late twenties in an accident. He is that age now, yet leads with a fearlessness and wisdom that reminds us that “Only the one who dies, truly lives.”

It looks like a movie about outsiders learning to trust insiders on new perspectives and how to manage risk.