I‘m back from the depths of flu-dom and ready to take on the world, or at least some of its most terrible and ridiculous aspects. I’m not quite at full strength yet, so posting may be a bit light for a few more days. But the flu is definitely on the way out. Thanks for your patience and support!
So does anyone want to discuss that picture up there at the top of the post? Everyone else is. Is Kellyanne Conway being weird and disrespectful to the oval office visitors, a delegation from historically black colleges and universities? Or is everybody being mean to her because OMG she was just trying to take a picture with her phone?
I’m going to go with “weird and disrespectful” but what do I know.
@DanHolme
I realise that I’m jumping at least two levels into the subjunctive not-universe here but really? Magic should be guarded jealously and regulated by one rich man? People should only practice magic according to one man’s decree? You’d destroy the books and reputation of people who don’t agree with you?
Or should magic be *enjoyed*? By *everyone*?
If magic existed then I’d definitely be a Strangite rather than a Norrellite and you’re definitely the first person I’ve ever come across who thinks Norrell is the hero. He’s a moral coward and narcissist. Strange is only a little better, his cowardice is of a different nature but still evident. But he’s less of a miser of magic.
FUN FACT: I read the novel we’re talking about while being detained by pre-9/11 airport officials for absolutely nothing. It’s quite a big book.
@Kat
She’s dressed as Supergirl and standing next to Trump. She might as well stand next to Lex Luthor while smilling.
@Alan can’t help but think of this:
https://vheyblog.wordpress.com/2013/09/29/historic-east-yorkshire-the-screaming-skull-of-burton-agnes/
@ danholme
I got intrigued about what might be buried under the White House; turns out there’s a quite a mystery surrounding that.
All the other Federal buildings of the time had foundation rituals that are well documented. So the Capitol for example has offerings of corn, flax and oil; and a silver plaque saying how great George Washington is. A poor ox was sacrificed (but then they cooked and ate it; so I think that’s technically a barbecue.)
But supposedly the White House doesn’t have anything special. There was no cornerstone ceremony, and it was explicitly stated that there were no foundation objects placed. That of course has lead to all sorts of conspiracy theories about what they really left there.
@makroth
Mystery solved! Thanks.
@occasional reader
I see this trend isn’t confined to the USA! Apparently, logic is beneath the dignity of extremists these days. It certainly is easier not to have to be logical. No time-consuming research or pesky fact-checking — just wing it with some bullshit that occurred to you that very moment. When your lack of consistency is challenged, deflect, ignore the critique, or deny you ever said it.
@ guest
Heh, I’ve now just invited myself to some friends’ in Driffield. Funny though that that’s such a common folk tale. Wonder what the origin is?
On a related note, just been reading about the new European Central Bank HQ. That’s got buried; a newspaper from each of the EU member states, a complete set of all the various Euro notes and coins, and the plans for the building. They’ll probably kick themselves when they need some repair work doing and it turns out that was the only copy.
Alan, I’m guessing you’ve read Peter Ackroyd’s Hawksmoor? If not, I think you’d enjoy it.
@ moggie
No; but having googled I want to.
I love all the occult history of London. You probably know London also a foundation stone. Weirdly, just the top bit is in an unimpressive niche in a wall and the bulk of it is under Cannon Street. They’ve always known where it is; just nobody’s been arsed to pick it out of the ground. That’s a bit disappointing for a stone that’s supposedly been brought all the way from Troy. There’s another stone at Totnes that’s also meant to be from Troy. It would be interesting to do a mineralogical comparison..
@Alan Burton Agnes is actually one of my very favourite stately homes (along with Sledmere, if you’re already up there and haven’t been yet)–and I highly second Hawksmoor. And combining the two, if you’ve got the time and inclination you may be able to blag your way into a visit to the Castle Howard mausoleum if you haven’t seen it yet. You can really see the Vanbrugh/Hawksmoor tug of war all over the house and grounds, but comparing the mausoleum to the Temple of the Four Winds makes the distinction very clear.
@AlanRobertshaw
That is interesting, and probably a very old tradition indeed. I don’t know if you (or any other readers) know of Flag Fen near Peterborough, but there’s a Bronze Age causeway there whose main purpose seems to have been to be full of offerings. Really good stuff, like swords and expensive household items and lots of other goodies, deliberately damaged and left for whatever they were left for – ancestors/spirits/Gods/demons/nature/any other alternative (delete as based on your favourite theory!). From there to here is not such a stretch. I’d rather sacrifice my sword than my cat, as a rule!
I tend to leave on offering if I happen to be passing ancient wells and springs, or a chambered tomb – a five pence coin usually does it, I like to think it’s a full moon/Goddess sort of symbol. I’ve been to one too many Wells Dressings…
I’ve just had a bit of a google session (not getting a huge amount of work done today) and it turns out they have done mineralogical analyses of the two stones. The London one is a type of sandstone that the Romans commonly used for buildings, and the Totnes one is a local granite. Still, that’s what the Illuminati want you to believe.
Flag Fen, and similar sites, are amazing. I’m intrigued by water offerings (and I too always end up making them). What’s particularly interesting is how valuable a lot of the offerings were, and the fact they were deliberately made useless. As has been pointed out, breaking a new sword as an offering is literally the monetary equivalent of buying a new Porsche and driving it into a river. Sacrifices indeed.
Since we’re talking about magic anyway, it’s typical for animal sacrifices in magical or religious rituals to be cooked and eaten afterward. It’s more unusual when this does not occur. Since the sacrificial act is generally pretty humanely done – often more humane than what happens in slaughterhouses – it makes the persecution of animal sacrifice really hypocritical and reveals that it’s driven entirely by animus toward non-Christian or heterodox sects rather than some kind of real critique of the act. See also Church of the Lukumi Babalu Aye, Inc. v. City of Hialeah in the US.
WRT KAC on the furniture: it’s about respect for the people in the room with her, specifically the presidents of the HBCUs who were present. Our culture has certain signifiers of respect, and yes, those are totally arbitrary, but in the way that language is arbitrary. It’s a convention that is agreed upon by most people in the United States, a way of signalling that one takes the people in one’s company seriously. Disrespecting African Americans is almost a way of life in the US, and her actions signal that she doesn’t take these folks seriously in the slightest. She feels perfectly comfortable crawling on the furniture to take a photo on her phone for some reason in the presence of people who have earned respect, and in the presence of professional photographers who were going to take better pics than anything she could produce on her phone anyway. She looks like she’s treating the event like a meeting with zoo animals, to be honest, and that is profoundly offensive.
Women’s actions and body posture – and bodies period – are criticized illegitimately all the time, but that doesn’t mean that the reverse extreme of never criticizing a woman’s physical behavior is the correct thing to do. Her body language is disrespectful, and the company that she is disrespecting is politically important. Her being female doesn’t exempt her from feminist criticism.
I don’t understand what’s so remarkable about this photo other than a woman is daring to look slightly informal in a formal setting. If it were a man chilling on the couch with his phone, there would be no fuss. I’m pretty sure the only reason she needs to tuck her feet under like that is because she’s wearing a short skirt. Those things make normal sitting nigh impossible without showing off your bits, in my experience.
While Rach is a bit over the top, they make a good point. I feel like David doesn’t always seem to get women’s experiences and I feel like he’s ignored a lot of woman-centric things recently. I felt like he plugged the general March on 1/20 a lot which I felt was trying to take focus away from the already well-established women’s march on 1/21. I feel like a lot of the misogyny from the shit-gibbon is being ignored in favor of bullshit like picking apart this woman for her body looking awkward for a single moment. There are plenty of real things to pick her apart for, but instead we’re focused on appearances. Those are just a couple of examples.
This is David’s blog and he can write what he wants. I’m not going to accuse him of not being a feminist because I know that’s not true. But when feminists engage in misogyny or grey area behavior like this example, we shouldn’t call people trolls for calling them out on it.
@ guest
I’m ashamed to say I’ve never even been to Castle Howard (been meaning to ever since Brideshead Revisited). For me though history pretty much stops at AD410. I love rummaging around places ranging from the Neolithic to the end of the Roman occupation; then it all sort of blurs into ‘new stuff’.
ETA: admittedly Jorvik is pretty cool.
@ POM
Thanks for that; you know I love a court case. It was interesting reading and you’re very right about the arbitrariness of animal welfare stuff (I keep restraining myself whenever people use ‘puppy eating’ as a condemnation from pointing out we’re happy to eat other baby animals).
There was a sort of similar case here about air burials as a funeral practice. That was another situation where it was more about ‘distaste of the other’ rather than logic. Luckily the court held they were lawful. So that ties in with my wishes to just be left for the Badgers (and any of my vegan friends who want a guilt free nibble).
ETA: and yeah, a lot of the time temple sacrifices were just how the priests got lunch.
@ Alan I think for the most part Castle Howard is dull, ugly and poorly designed (and Vanbrugh was an atrocious architect–he knew about stage sets, but had no clue about how people lived in buildings); I wouldn’t ordinarily suggest a visit except for the Hawksmoor connection.
I once took a Roman cooking class with Sally Grainger (world’s foremost expert on garum) who told us that in contrast to what we might think ordinary Roman folk actually ate a lot of meat, as they got it from sacrifices. Interestingly, knowing this (partially) explains the class distinctions we still make with respect to what kinds of meat we eat, e.g. cows, sheep and chickens were common sacrifices, but deer and boar and pheasant weren’t (I don’t remember now about where pigs fit into this).
Makroth:
I heard Trump took forty cakes!
I had typed up a comment about kellyannecouchgate, but then deleted it. As a guy, I think the best contribution I can make to a discussion about policing a woman’s appearance is to STFU and listen. But I will say that I hope we can get back to discussing something more substantial, such as Trump’s lie-filled Congress speech, and that awful “Victims Of Immigration Crime Engagement” initiative.
@ guest
Roman attitudes to meat eating were pretty complex. A lot of Romans were vegetarian for all sorts of reasons; health, religion, and my favourite (in the sense it’s interesting, not saying I approve), snobbery. There were certain middle class Romans who looked down on meat eating like some people today do on fast food.
Gladiators were famously veggie as were a lot of a legionaries. There’s surviving military correspondence regarding soldiers whinging about there not being a veggie option away from camp. Of course a lot of legionaries also swore by bacon and carried it as emergency rations. So all those Facebook arguments are nothing new.
You probably know about the class thing with meat and how the ‘live’ descriptions are Saxon (because that was the class that raised the animals) and the culinary words are Norman-French (because that’s the people who got to eat them)
So cow/beef; pig/pork; sheep/mutton etc.
Oh and I’ve had garum, tasted like Worcester Sauce crisps; quite liked it.
> Kat
Exactely. They use the same standards of false or misleading informations that US alt-right.
And the Front National had the same attitude toward justice that trump has with journalism and media, with the FN presidente which refuses to present herself at the court and does anything to slow legal procedures against her and her party, while slamming the same justice to be too slow and/or laxist when the procedures concern anything which is not linked to them.
If great minds think alike, it seems that petty minds too.
@Alan Interesting that vegetarianism seems like the ‘manly’ choice to the Romans…. I was in a restaurant in Ljubljana with my interpreter once and she was reading off the menu, which included ‘colt’ and ‘kid’; she asked me (in effect) what the culinary English words for these were and I said ‘um, we don’t have any because we don’t eat these’. I also told one of the people with us that if he ordered colt I was going to go eat at another table.
Cult-buster concern troll didn’t stick around ? My, what a surprise.
So this is my OT for today, and a video game recommendation.
I never buy my games full price – well, almost never. I usually wait for sales, second-hand deals and the like, because money’s tight and I don’t wanna spend 70€ on something that might not keep me busy more than 20 hours or worse, that might wear out my thin patience for bullshit in 2 hours. So that also means I never pre-order or buy on day one.
Well, I made an exception for something called Horizon Zero Dawn. Actually saved up toward buying it, and that was all based entirely on gut instinct about “it’s gon be gud”. ‘course I regretted that almost immediately after buying, ’cause it’s a dumb gamble.
Well I’m three hours into it, and all regret is gone.
So far it’s been a blast, and it does for me everything that Far Cry Primal didn’t (though I had pretty low expectations about FCP, and sure enough it didn’t surpass them), but more than that, I’ve spent those hours smiling at all the things that will make gators and the like go into full meltdown. For example, the world is a matriarchal society, and they couldn’t be more literal about it, given that the leaders are called Matriarchs. Not to mention, well, the whole basic premise of playing as a young woman who hunts giant-ass robot dinosaurs while on a quest to defy the society that made her an outcast at birth. The only thing more badass than that premise would be to drop from a cliff’s edge before throwing the rappel hook on it to slow the fall, and guess what, she does that too. It’s ridiculously unnecessary but necessarily awesome.
Long story short, as far as I can tell (bear in mind I’m only 3 hours into it, so keep that grain of salt ready) it succeeds at being a great game, and it succeeds at not serving the usual stupid shit. I’ll withdraw that if I come across anything deserving of a major side-eye, but for now it’s actually even better than I felt safe to expect. My only remaining doubt is about how big it actually is and how long it’s gonna hold up the fun. But so far, worth it.
@ guest
Yeah, meat eating was seen as a bit effete in some circles. Real manly men ate simple foods like grains and vegetables and drank only stream water. Same as how it was seen as admirable to eskew beds and just sleep on the floor in your cloak (there’s lots of accounts of military officers being highly regarded for that sort of thing.)
(There’s also a surviving record of a senate debate about food taxation where it’s being argued that the meat free diet is both better for you and more in keeping with Roman ‘virtues’)
You could by openly buy horsemeat in Yorkshire until quite recently. There was a butcher in Leeds selling it in the 60s. Interestingly (as the photo shows) there doesn’t seem to be an indigenous British word for it. In Yorkshire though it was colloquially known as ‘kicker’.
@latsot
That is a series of strong points you make there, I think I may need to reread the book – it’s been a decade and some of my memories of the plot have faded. I tend towards Norrellism simply because I think Strange would have been more insufferable company; the sort of person who can just move a Belgian city when they feel like it would become a bit wearing after a while, I suspect. Not that I consider Norrell the hero – John Uskglass is the character who sticks most in my mind (though I don’t think he’s actually IN it, much, is he?) – yes, I definitely need to reread it. Thanks for calling me on it, perhaps my Norrellism needs challenging.
@AlanRobertshaw
Just read your post about the White House, I’m going to mention this to my year 7 class and see what conspiracies they come up with, since they have something of a knack for that!
@guest
We’ve got two screaming skulls locally, the one at Flagg Hall and the more famous one from near Chapel-en-le-Frith, Dicky o’Tunstead. Dicky was particularly upset one time when the owners of his farm threw him into the local reservoir, so killed all the fish; and would interfere with the construction of the railway to Manchester being built near the farm. I hold Dick in particularly high esteem as it’s from his story, in a book of ghost stories I read when I was seven, I learnt the word ‘recalcitrant’ – which may be my favourite word.
@John
I’m considering purchasing a PS4 for that game.