“So we didn’t have to sell the kids to chemical experiments or anything,” he told The Chicago Sun-Times in 2012. “I think I’m a bit of a lucky person.”
Slightly Intrepid
Modestly adventurous, while also endeavouring to look both ways when crossing the road.
14 March 2024
Now he's out in space, fixing all the problems
07 March 2024
Lines To Be Read At the Casting of Scott FitzGerald's balls into the Sea
Jim Dandy in a submarine, got a message from a mermaid queen
06 March 2024
Crusader Kings 2: Some medieval doggerel
The Ballad of the Concubine Addiena, to whit:
G*d d*mn the Patriarchy
A tale from 9th-century Ireland, from Crusader Kings 2
Tis a tale of the wanton in the far isle of Eire
A young girl had been raised who had the longest black hair
In the palace she lived, with the Queen and the King
But the name of her sire, no courtier could sing
A bastard was she, yet cared for and fed
With the grace of the Queen, though not in her bed
The Queen lent a wet-nurse and paid for another
(But surely kept quiet about being the mother)
The girl's name was Addiena, uncommon to most
And as she grew she was more often to boast
Of her silken black hair that she wove forth in tresses
And the beauty of the linens in her fine English dresses
Now later, much later, when quite fully grown
Addiena and the Queen disagreed 'bout the throne
For the Queen's husband had become quite neglected
And Addiena, the rogue, had become quite disaffected
So Add, in her wisdom, seduced the poor King
(King Coscrach, the dotard, suspected not a thing)
And bore him a child, with no expressed shame
Arnemetia she called it, her own mother's name
A fitting tribute, she reckoned, to her bastard existence
A new life on Earth and a social resistance
The King, he ashamed, did wed off the maid
And the Queen, she angered, his doom she emprayed
So be this a lesson for every Queen to know best
If ye bring forth a babe from beyond royal nest
Set a household ban on all Concubina
And don't let your husband meet the fair Addiena
05 March 2024
Will Rogers in New Zealand
The Cherokee Kid is a gentleman with a large American accent and a splendid skill with lassoos [sic.]. He demonstrated what could be done with the whirling loop by bringing up a horse and its rider from [an] impossible position, once throwing together two lasoos [sic.] encircling man and horse separately. He also showed the spectators how to throw half-hitches on to objects at a distance, and did other clever work with the ropes. It was a very interesting performance.- Auckland Star, 20 January 1904
A novel feature was the lasso work of the Cherokee Kid, a cowboy in Mexican circus-costume, who whirls his swift rope round his head and lassos horse and rider in the twinkling of an eye. This rope work is pretty to watch, and altogether a desirable addition to the programme.- Evening Post, 8 March 1904
The Cherokee Kid is a slim chap, who toddles into the ring with a couple of lassoes, and does anything in the roping line with them, talking all the time. He gets near, fore, or off fore-leg of a galloping horse, or loops the rider — or both — with a lassoo [sic.] thrown with either hand. Also, he afterwards throws a half-hitch over each of a dismounted man's limbs. He is the most expert rope-thrower seen here to date. Moreover, his rough riding, on a grey mustang wearing a Mexican saddle, is very fine.- Free Lance, 12 March 1904
28 February 2024
The German Democratic Republic
The GDR, or The Very Shortest History of East Elbia
East Germany didn't become different because of the Russian occupation of 1945-1989; the Russians occupied the place because it had always been different.
Otto the Great invaded across the Elbe in 935 AD; the Slavs threw the Germans back out in 982 AD; the Germans tried again in 1127 and over the next two centuries they largely (but never completely) succeeded in supplanting the Slavs up to the river Oder. The Teutonic Knights went further until the Poles smashed them in 1410. Prussia was born under Polish suzerainty as an act of revolt again Rome in 1525, rose to fame in battle against Sweden, was made a great power by victories between the Elbe and the Oder, then saved from abolition by the Tsar in 1807. The fatal inability of the western Germans to unite allowed Prussia to conquer them after a single great battle on the Elbe in 1866. Prussia smashed France in 1870; it thereafter dragooned the Germans into providing manpower and money for its bid(s) to settle the 1,000-year struggle with the Slavs. That struggle ended in 1945 with part of East Elbia lost forever and what was left, between Elbe and Oder, a helpless colony of Russia.
With the creation of the GDR, this rump East Elbia formally became what it had always really been: the odd German-speaking man out in a Slavic Eastern Europe. Until the wall went up in 1961, the East Germans - above all, the young and educated - undertook a new Ostflucht to West Germany at an average rate of about 200,000 year on year, about the same rate as in the Ostflucht from the 1850s onwards. If Russia's clients hadn't built and maintained a deadly barrier to stop the fugitives in the meantime, by 1989 there would have been hardly any Germans left beyond the Elbe.
- James Hawes, The Shortest History of Germany, Devo, 2017, p.199
See also:History: Charlemagne's passion for education, 29 March 2022
Germany: NZ posters by young German artists, 30 June 2012