So New York City suffered a terrible, shocking attack one September day. The evil empire had fallen and Americans had thought they'd entered a new era, but then swarthy foreigners attacked their way of life in an attempt to advance their own violent agenda by killing as many people as possible. It was the worst terrorist attack the US had ever seen.
I'm speaking, of course, of the terrible events of 9/16 -- 1920, that is. Come have a read of the latest Passing Strangeness, if you're so inclined.
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Page Summary
July 2009
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Tutankhamen was notable because his tomb wasn't looted. People visit all kinds of indignities on the dead when there's money to be made. In the particular case of Egyptian dead, though, tomb robbery was not their biggest worry. In the Middle Ages and down into the 20th century people found uses for the mummies themselves, and literal shiploads of them were sent to Europe. East and west, how did they meet? The late middle ages saw a few Europeans head west into China -- most famously Marco Polo, but there were others. Today's Passing Strangeness is about what is, so far as anyone knows, the one and only journey in the opposite direction, There was a paint called Mommia or Mummy Brown used up 'til the end of the19th century or so(1). The name wasn't a flight of fancy -- it was actually made from Egyptian mummies. So I was just flipping through Rudyard Kipling's autobiography(2) and there's an aside about his uncle, the painter Edward Burne-Jones. When Kipling was a child, Burne-Jones came downstairs one day, tubes of paint in hand, aghast to have discovered that there were actual corpses in the pigment. So everyone trooped outside to bury them in the yard. It's a fan-made trailer for a non-existent Green Lantern movie: I'm thinking of buying a GPS unit, a kind of technology I know little about (I mean, I understand the technology, but I know nothing about the manufacturers). My purposes is two-fold: Just as the flu scare was at its media height about ten days ago I came across a mention of another influenza epidemic that really should have taken the place of the 1918 Pandemic in all those TV news stories. OK, maybe not entirely, but I think it's a much closer match for what we were facing just before the dance back from the apparently inevitable brink up until about a week ago -- barring one important detail. I don't think it's strange for the usual reasons -- "he" is widely discussed in creationist circles because he's close to that old favourite, the Calaveras Skull. I think it's interesting because it was taken seriously back in the early days of paleontology when we had only the murkiest ideas of human evolution. Even today it's taken as a mere accident, while to me there's pretty good circumstantial evidence of a hoax. Yes, so this game is addictive MARX, Karl (1818-1893) & ENGELS, Friedrich (1820-1895). Manifest der kommunistischen Partei. Veröffentlicht im Februar 1848. Londres: imprimé par la "Bildungs=Gesellschaft für Arbeiter" de J.E. Burghard, 1848. ...draw a picture. There's a weird incident in the history of Western relations with Japan that spawned the phrase "Yellow Peril" and then was forgotten. Altogether we have war, peace, Kaiser Wilhelm as his usual meddling self, The Madness of Czar Nicholas II, a hack propaganda artist, not one but two diplomats who married grand-nieces of Napoleon, and the Archangel Michael. The Sun doesn't just affect us with light and gravity. Charged particles stream out from it and are deflected by the Earth's magnetic field, giving us the auroras among other things. ...but does anyone have access to this JSTOR article? ...but you have seen the Mount Redoubt mushroom cloud, right? Today's Passing Strangeness is a story from the very earliest days of US history, which is to say "People from England north of the Rio Grande" -- there's some discussion of that too, because that's a mess. But the main point is the long-forgotten Popham Colony, which only started yielding physical evidence about fifteen years ago. Before that all we had was documentation, and for a long time that was believed by many to be a legend. It wasn't, it was real, and this is it's story. Does any reader have an opinion on Stephen Hunt that they'd like to share? I like the general concept of pseudo-Victorian fantasy (viz. His Dark Materials) so Hunt's stuff looks promising, but on the other hand I found the country names "Jackals" and "Quatérshift" pretty terrible--bad names are actively painful for me to read, I find. Writing Sword Worlds got me interested in the comprehensive defeat and its effect on national psychologies since nationalism and "total war" developed. Germany after WWI, Japan after WWII, the South after the American Civil War, those are the big three. People get so invested in winning that they act in fascinating ways when they lose. "Steam Engine Time" is when the world is simply ready for a technology to come into existence; multiple inventors assemble the requisite pieces independently of one another in a short period of time. Sometimes the clock strikes even before the "steam engine" is possible, though, and the odd results of trying to force a route down a dead end (*) cross-fertilize the final result. http://www.baconsaltblog.com/2009/03/ou |