The Memorial Day > Independence Day transition is seriously the greatest thing ever. It makes both holidays feel so much more meaningful.
Obviously you do not live in my neighborhood. That 30~40 days sees increasing ordnance testing by the local morons. Add to that it often tends to be somewhat drier than the preceding months – luckily, we have not had wildfires raging through here because of it. Yet.
I meant in Israel, where Memorial Day is incredibly somber and independence day is the next day. Not in the US where they are two unrelated car-sale-and-BBQ days.
Being Dutch, the only person I know who celebrates Thanksgiving is a US expat friend. Most Dutch have no clue about Thanksgiving AFAIK. Now, Black Friday gets shoved down our throats.
Make of that what you want.
The nearest we in the UK would come to it* used to be Harvest Festival in churches and schools. Though I think I have recently noticed some hints (no more) that there may be some commercial promotion of some of the American-style Thanksgiving food and trimmings.
*Apart from those jokers who think we should have a Thanksgiving on 4th July.
When I was in grad school, I mostly hung out with the international students. We’d all do Thanksgiving together. They all knew that Thanksgiving was basically a harvest festival; that, like most harvest festivals, it was traditionally celebrated with way too much food; and that the traditional main course was turkey. And that was all they knew. So everyone brought whatever the dish was in their culture that you’d serve at a big, festive meal. Mmm.
Me, I brought pies, because I take it as axiomatic that there’s not enough pie.
When come back, bring pie.
I was watching an episode of a late-50s show, and at the end, they showed a field littered with dead men and horses, upon which the guy proclaimed “There is your 7th Cavalry.” Something seemed not quite right.
In fact, Reno and Benteen were commanding several divisions of the 7th, and Custer only had 3. Less than a third of the soldiers involved in the overall kerfuffle were killed that day.
This amuses me.
There is a branch of science called dendrochronology. IOW, dating wooden objects by the tree ring pattern in them.
And of course there has to be a conspiracy theory that says the scientists are wrong about something. In this case, there’s a period of time when there aren’t many objects available to date. Therefore that span of time must not exist, and therefore, the powers that be must have jiggled the calendar for reasons. Obviously
What is the safest mode of transportation? Deaths in the US in a recent year:
AIr: 444.
Road: 35,092.
Rail: 749 (60% were trespassers, so 40% - or about 300 - were actually on board a train).
Boat: 692 (90% were recreational fatalities).
City bus/metro/subway: 30.
Elevator: 27 (about half were workers). US elevators travel about 1.5 billion miles annually.
Escalator: 3.
Stairs: 2,000.
I wonder how many of those were murder.
Which falls apart when European chronology is cross-referenced with independent sources such as Islamic history.
In the case of vehicles those are measured by passenger-miles, which I wonder if that exaggerates the safety record of airliners because they fly so far and so fast. I think if you measured by passenger-hours, the average death rate per hour in the vehicle, if planes would be less impressive, if still much better than automobiles.
You expect conspiracy theorists to be rational?
And how would a decree from the Pope have changed which wooden objects have what ring patterns?
As I understand it, there’s few if any wooden objects from the era to check ring patterns.
Which is what led to the conspiracy theory.
I would ask them to show a piece of wood that has before and after rings, but none in the “missing years”. But that’s probably the same as asking a flat earther to explain time zones
TIL that the “Pinball Number Count” song on Sesame Street was performed by the Pointer Sisters.
Found out when I was watching this guy analyze the composition of the song. 16 minutes long, but maybe interesting if you’re into music.
That was really interesting. I’m not a video-watching guy, as a rule, but I remembered the song, and the analysis was fascinating enough to keep me watching for about 11 minutes… couldn’t quite finish, though.
My grandpa used to say: “I only like two kinds of pie . . . hot pie and cold pie.”
A couple of examples of unions of Arabic royalty with Jewish women:
Silly playboy King of Egypt, Farouk, was forced to abdicate in favor of his six month old son Fuad, who was himself deposed ten months later. Fuad eventually married Dominique-France Loeb-Picard, PhD. Their son, Muhammed Ali, is married to the granddaughter of the last king of Afghanistan. All very nice people, although the the wackiness of Farouk is legendary.
Not at all wacky but bizarrely tragic was the fate of Harriet Pearl Shapiro, who endured an abusive childhood yet prevailed and became Susan Cabot; star of several early Roger Corman movies. A long involvement with King Hussein of Jordan produced one son, afflicted with dwarfism. At age 22, son Timothy Scott Roman beat his mother to death with a barbell handle and was found guilty of manslaughter.
What moral do I draw from these stories? That insanity is amply occurring in its natural state, and the need to manufacture it over religion is literal overkill.
Whenever I saw film or pictures of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech at the 1963 March on Washington, I was puzzled by the men behind him wearing white caps. Were they kitchen workers? Members of some religious order? Now I know.
I just watched Rustin, a Netflix film about civil rights activist Bayard Rustin, who organized the march. The men wearing those caps were “guardians,” off-duty Black NYC police officers. One thousand of them were specially trained in de-escalation techniques and went to Washington in white uniforms to provide security for the marchers, and quell disruptions from any source.
I highly recommend the film.