throw another bear in the canoe

It makes perfect sense, if you accept that it ever made sense to make the election of the President and Vice President separate, rather than a ticket.

Of course, that never made sense...

Is that Mrs. Peel?

Why yes.

(Homer voice: MMMmmmMMMmm Emma Peel...)

I never saw it, but I have heard that in her last episode, Mr. Peel returns and he looks remarkably like Steed.

I met Patrick MacNee a couple times.

I wonder if Diana Rigg has any understanding of the impact she had on a generation of young males.

Am I taking this further and further from the actual subject of your entry? Well Yes. Am I sorry? Not much.

Be Well.

Lucky you -- at least you're working with some semblance of English, with the English alphabet, and systems you've been learning about (if in rather simplified fashion) your whole life.

Good luck with it, though. I'm sure you'll treat us to something interesting, once you finally get a grip on it.

So we starve all the teachers, and recruit more Marines? How come we don't even know what that means? It's obvious!

Reading history makes me amazed that any human progress has been achieved, ever.

The reason, and i have a current paid up history card, is that the real progress is ignored in history. Pasteur saved more lives that all the despots in history destroyed, but he is a footnote.

Any problems that are ever solved are solved by technology making the problems obsolete, while politicians and generals and religious leaders posture in the spotlight..

To plug my book, Courtney Hodges was a much better general and person than patton, but he ignored the press. So an insane egotist is the very paragon of American Military might, and Hodges is forgotten... It's like Custer and Reno..

The reason, and i have a current paid up history card, is that the real progress is ignored in history. Pasteur saved more lives that all the despots in history destroyed, but he is a footnote.

Very good point. I rather feel like a great many things just clicked into place. Thank you for that.

Let me see if I can work with this new perspective: it's not history (the records of the past) itself that is so goddamn inhumane all the time, but the canon of history that puts the spotlight on a great lot of bloodyminded assholes?

That makes sense. I recall that my experience of history class in high school was rather bitter. Hearing about a lot of men who made freedom for themselves while abusing and demeaning people like me (women) and minorities was... well, I couldn't be unreservedly happy for their great democratic accomplishment. Sure, they threw in a mention of Betsy Ross sewing the flag, and Abigail Adams, but the idea communicated was that Great Men did things, and women sat around making them comfortable and sewing things.

Later I found information on the women's suffrage movements around the world myself, and learned about how they tied into the abolitionist and for worker's rights movements. It was amazing, the moral conscience, sheer grit, determination and fight within these women.

The most encouraging bit of history I ever read was about Kate Shepard and suffrage movement in New Zealand, which became the first country in the world to give women the right to vote in 1893.

I wished they had told me about that in high school. It really made me feel how slanted everything I had learned had been. The things I considered important were invisible to the people who wrote the books for those classes.

To plug my book, Courtney Hodges was a much better general and person than patton, but he ignored the press. So an insane egotist is the very paragon of American Military might, and Hodges is forgotten... It's like Custer and Reno..

Awesome! I recall sitting through a lengthy Patton film once at a friend of my father's house and thinking, "This is a great man? This is a nutfucker. And his relationship with his little dog is very creepy." So, I'd love to hear about a genuinely great WWII general. What's the title of your book? Where can it be bought?

Book is "Courtney Hicks Hodges" by macfarland, auth; stephan Wishnevsky,, yr.hmbl. obt. srvt.

Amazon has it.

Winston Churchill, another dip, said; "I know history will be kind to us, because i plan to write it"..That's the deal. Kings and governments paid to have history written, and it was written to please them. Historians have to eat, maintain tenure, kiss up to the powerful, etc.

PAtton knew this, and left volumious (50 filing cabinets)
records... I have read everything Hodges left, and it took three days.. Historians love patton because he left so much crap.. It's a lot like palentology, or bank robbing. You go where the money is.

Nowadays, Barbra Tuchman Lyn MacDonald, George Macdonald Frazer, and lots more write for the truth of it, and that's a lot of fun.. I could give you a reading list.

But, my point, which i keep sliding past, is that classical hard SF is concerned with innocvation and tech's impact on history.. That's whay i like it


btw, PAttons relationship to his wife was even creepier.

Book is "Courtney Hicks Hodges" by macfarland, auth; stephan Wishnevsky,, yr.hmbl. obt. srvt.

Amazon has it.

Found it there. Wishlisted it. Thank you.

Nowadays, Barbra Tuchman Lyn MacDonald, George Macdonald Frazer, and lots more write for the truth of it, and that's a lot of fun.. I could give you a reading list.

I would appreciate that. Lyn MacDonald appears to have a couple books at my library.

Maybe i shouldn't waste too much of Matociquala's space, but here are a few i like.. Barbara Tuchman, "A Distant Mirror" (13th century) "The Proud Tower" (Pre WWI Europe) and "Sillwell and the American Experience in China"

Thor Hyerdahl "Kon Tiki"

John Mosier "The Myth Of the Great War"

G.J .Meyer "A World Undone" (lots of WWI, i guess i'm on a kick)

Lyn MacDonald does WWI oral history of the British Forces.

George Macdonald Fraser "The Steel Bonnets" (Scots Borderers)

Harrison Salisbury "The 900 Days" (Siege of Leningrad)

And one by a woman (sorry, i've not got much women's studies) "Sagebrush Bohemian" ( a hippie eye view of Mark Twain)


And if anybody wants a project, Barbara Tuchman, and Margret Bourke White (the Photographer), Somebody famous whose name escapes me, and a few other powerful women ran away to join the Spanish Civil War in the 1930's... A book there for sure.

Finally got a chance to check my email. I've added these to my book list, thank you so much!

My pleasure... I've edited this conversation, and put it on my journal. I feel and essay coming on.

::sympathizes::

I'm liking my current bout of research for the bedamned and bedratted pirate novel: in two weekends, I will have visited the fishing schooner LA Dunton, the whaler Charles W. Morgan, the training ship Joseph Conrad, and the schooner Virginia. At least this research involves touching actual objects.

I even got a photo of the Morgan's captain's loo. *g*

Now if I could summon up a desire to make words on the story....

You know the Morgan is haunted, yes?

Yep. That's actually what drew our attention to it: I was researching ships, and came across an article in the Boston Globe (I think it was the Globe) about this haunted ship in Mystic. Then, when it turned out we'd be meeting this year in Connecticut instead of San Jose, I remembered and told my host and crit partner, who's working on a ghost hunter story. She said belowdecks on the Morgan felt "oogie." As I appear not to be sensitive, I'll take her word for it. *g*

Hee.

I don't suppose I can talk into reading this pretentious piece of tripe for me when I'm done with it, as apparently you know something about the politics?

The thing about history is that it actually makes no sense. Until somebody comes along and imposes a narrative on it.

But there's always something that makes the narrative go kerflooey.


This is pretty much the principle that underlies my entire dissertation, really.

Doubly so for the Elizabethan period.