. . . . Storm barreling down on us, They Warn, bringing 12 - 14 inches of snow and wind / gusts reaching 45 mph, beginning this evening and continuing into Tuesday. And cold, which it already is and has been, for days. Did I mention cold? The wind will make the cold felt even more so. As this storm will delay vaccine deliveries, distribution and administration even more, it will delay other deliveries too, as to our supermarkets. It covers midwestern regions on one of the divided atmospheric branches, and the mid-Atlantic, into New England and beyond. Hope everyone has a enough milk on hand for all the hot tea, hot chocolate and coffee we'll be drinking.
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Let's begin with good stuff. Since my photo archive is now available on the desktop, I get to choose a screen wall paper photo to replace that hideous bloat of HP's umbrella display Ultimately I picked a photo of part of the battlement and tower complex around the Avignon Palais des Papes by night. Such happy memories flooding through the mind's eye, browsing through the archive of photos from Southern France.
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A darling GameStop story!
....The fifth grader was gifted 10 GameStop shares, each at $6.19, as a Kwanzaa present from his mother in December 2019. She bought the stock simply because her son liked to buy video games at the store and she wanted to teach him a little about the stock market.
In a matter of minutes this week, Jaydyn Carr became an unexpected beneficiary of the market mayhem, as his $60 stake in the video game retailer grew to $3,200....
....When Carr bought the 10 GameStop shares in 2019 as a Kwanzaa gift, she certainly did not anticipate the value would one day spontaneously soar, she said. Her sole intention in purchasing the stock was to teach her then-eight-year-old son about Ujamaa, which means, “cooperative economics.” It’s one of the seven principles of Kwanzaa.
“The goal was to ensure he knows the value of a dollar and how to manage money,” Carr said, explaining that Ujamaa is the idea of sharing wealth, while also strengthening personal finances and self-reliance....
The story has a more than happy ending too!
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Black Lives Matter has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. It already has won Sweden's Olof Palme human rights prize for 2020.
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I just finished with The Habsburgs: To Rule the World (2020) by Martyn Rady
Perhaps the favorite thing I took from this book was hearing monasteries referred to as "prayer factories."
Among the vital information is Austria and the Habsburg's deep involvement and facilitator of the eastern African slave trade to the Ottomans, and the western Atlantic slave trade, via Portugal, to the New World. In case one isn't aware of how this landlocked empire could do such a thing, here is the explanation (this era has long been one of el V's favorite go-tos when it comes to the history of Cuba and Latin America, by the way.
Charles V, who became King of Spain in 1516 and was elected emperor in 1519, had as his motto “plus ultra”, meaning “still further”. In the 16th and 17th centuries Habsburg power spread across the globe, with the dynasty establishing a presence in sites from Brazil, Mexico and Peru to Goa, the Philippines and Taiwan, at the same time as their forces fought for dominance against those of the Ottoman sultans to the east. In 1700 Habsburg power came to an end in Spain and its associated territories, but the central European branch of the family would remain a pre-eminent force for two centuries yet.
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The Dig takes place in 1939, at what becomes called the site of Sutton Hoo. Watched while WWII era pop musics played on a radio in the other room leaked into the headphones through which I was hearing the film.
We travel to the dead, and the dead travel to us. Time slips when we confronted palpable evidence of the past such as fingerprints in paint, paint applied by the hands thousands of years ago.
We begin with images of Ancient Egyptian rulers' images in a book read by one of the protagonists. We conclude with the reburial of the excavation of the anglo-saxon ship to protect the dig site from WWII's aerial blitz. Throughout is threaded the child's enthralled imaginative play with space travel. The child effortlessly holds the past, the present and future simultaneously. The site's invading Saxons' ship enthralls him as much as his imagined space invaders' ships, while he carries the present-day concern for his mother's ill-health, and those whom loves are called to fight the nazis. Invasion, past, present and future, all at once.
The scripted drama gives us the heroes of archaeology, those who have been lost and written out of the discoveries. The vast inequalities of social and class division, the imposed hierarchy imposed upon the site, mirror those of society at large, past and present. This is a story of some of those and how they are the ones who made the Sutton Hoo discoveries: the non-wealthy, those lacking formal academic bestowed degrees, women, those who are classed as "merely laborers,", yet without whom nothing can be done, whenever then is, whenever now is, whether building the pyramids or rediscovering them. These who tend to be forgotten or written out of history even as they were the history movers and shakers.
Even entire groups who historically were movers and shakers, creators of history that we study, can be written mostly out. Merovingian! They said the word Merovingian and Merovingians! Merovingian objects in grave ship's burial chamber. Now this is unlikely to have had the same electrifying effect on other watchers -- see, written out of history -- but it sure did on this one, a Merovingian watcher if there ever was one.
Now I want a cat or dog, so I can name him or her Basil Brown. after the character played by Ralph Fiennes. I will call dog or cat, Baz.
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Now, coming to the history of the United States: as part of leading the therapeutic treatment for the Members hunted and threatened during the armed 01/06 Insurrection, Nancy Pelosi has requested each one to write an essay detailing their experience of that day.
“Be your own historian, be part of writing the history of this, because there’s nobody who can be a better validator of what happened in your experience than you,” Pelosi said . . . .
Pelosi leading trauma therapy for the members in the 01/06 armed attack insurrection. Part of this is having each one write an historical essay of their experience.
Among other news is there's a bullet shortage as reported to us by friends in places like New Orleans. When they went to get ammo, after going through the paper work for legal purchase, registration and concealed carry, they went to the places where one buys ammunition. They are out of supply.
One does fear very much the next armed attack in D.C. will be during the impeachment trial. This shyte ain't over; the shooting civil war is just getting going.
And it's still January!
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