caesar novus

Here is a heads up before they post the video on the page below, but some WW2 enthusiasts may want to check it out on the weekend TV broadcast times they indicate. The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War http://www.booktv.org/Program/12498/The+Storm+of+War+A+New+History+of+the+Second+World+War.aspx by Andrew Roberts who seems to be taking a fresh look at the whole war and reassigning blames and credits for various developments. Not just knee-jerk revisionism that you'd expect from modern monday morning quarterbacks, but pretty thoughtful. His conclusions almost seem disturbing (you're going to upset THOSE assumptions?) but they sound somewhat persuasive after getting over initial shocks. There is also an author broadcast on WW1 and other clashes this extended independence US holiday weekend. Both of the schedules near top of the first post may prove more fruitful to history buffs than last weekend due to this. These are usually about an hour long.

That WAS an unwatchable series. Jones' main reason for emerging from obscurity was by making a career out of knee-jerk irreverence in Monty Python. Wikipedia says he currently passes his time by demonizing in print the efforts to contain terror. I wonder if he was the "python" who John Cleese suggested as having had a distrustful childhood making him paranoid about any authority. He had a funny way of describing this, but only would criticize in name the "python" who died. About the same year, UC Berkeley held a class which is now downloadable that demonized the Romans in the same revisionist way, even within their borders. Also then, another "python" Micheal Palin did some present day travel documentaries pushing the victimology angle.

Applying for your own job throws up a scare, but may be less jeopardy for most than it appears. It could well be a veiled way to justify sacking specific people they have been unhappy with a long time, and may have repeatedly informed them of how to improve their status but with no cooperation. A bit brash for me to say though, having decided to early retire just before a re-app was sprung on our group. I think business exists for the customers and owners. If you hire a worker-bee plumber, is it acceptable if they can't make it but will charge you $500 per day for them doing training classes or back therapy or employee sleep in? The customer must be pleased with results, and the investor/owner/manager has to be pleased with the income or else should put their (sometimes considerable and essential) money elsewhere. Employees should find their profitable niche only by being as valuable or better than employees of competing companies, or else find a more productive niche (even self employment). I don't think the employee should be a charity or the whole transaction/responsiblity between owner and customer is perverted. For instance, gov't workers often don't give value to taxpayers because their management isn't answerable to taxpayers but rather to political factions like employee unions or voting freeloaders immune to the costs. That said, I did gravitate to a company famous for low employee turnover.

I thought I might prevent some grumpy meanderings in my forum entries if there was a place off to the side to unwind, such as here. And actually I feel guilty to not responding to a gun entry posted here somewhere months ago. Someone blogged about finding a really old family 10 gauge pump shotgun as I recall, and was thinking of testing it. At the time I remembered seeing such a thing in my dad's closet and him saying ammo is hard to get (and wondered why - huge 10ga was rare but legal). Later I heard some appraisal show saying these were mostly black powder guns and could not stand up to modern ammo. Well, it must be a testament to my values that alarm bells did not fully ring until I heard another appraisal show saying these were very valuable due to being the first pump/repeating shotguns. So while I didn't intervene then to try to save face wounds or loss of an eye (will heal by itself, or at least another eye is left), I now want to point out that sale of such a thing might help fund a visit to Roman sites! I also remember fiddling with 2 rifles from that closet. One was a WW1 gun which my dad had me convert to a "sport" rifle as a learning experience. It was still heavy for me as a kid so he used that and I got a modern semi auto. Having fiddled with bolt action, I could hardly imagine how it could repeat so took it all apart and reassembled - with one spring left over, to my horror. I didn't dare admit this, and went on a ritualistic deer hunt with my dad. I think we both had no interest in bloodsports, but it was a supposed to reveal it's value afterward according to myths of the time. After the unsuccessful hunt I emptied the gun, swung it vaguely towards a dirt pile by the car, and pulled the trigger to unspring the firing pin - BLAMMO! Maybe the missing spring would have revealed how there was still a round in the chamber. Anyway, it's good I always used the rule to point even unloaded guns away from people (many ignore this). And it's good I ran across a couple of poor squirrels before butchering any bambi, and got so sick at the sight of wounds that I eventually became vegetarian and save a chain of deaths that way. Not that I'm sentimental about it, I just don't want that vaguely unclean feeling.

Wow, I would love to be a WW2 archeologist. But the neutrality of Republic of Ireland was a sordid affair, indirectly stemming from a secret WW1 sabotage mission ordered there by the Kaiser. He also had some responsibility for the cold war, due to his secret WW1 support of Lenin's re-entry to Russia. He even affected my Norway holidays, by paying to rebuild Alesund (destroyed by fire) in a uniform art deco style. All by an oldtimer titled like Julius, who wore a pickle spike on his head. So this nonsense gets past BBC editors now? Maybe the Spitfire was marginally best on it's introduction, but even the later enhanced versions probably ranked below the top all time 5. Even Nazi top aces can be seen in documentaries giving a nod to that tiresome candidate, P51. The new generation of BBC editors no longer seem to know history or their heritage of understatement. (A Korean war documentary relates that a British tank group was not rescued due to the commander reporting to a UN coordinator only that things were "a bit sticky" when they were totally engulfed with enemy even atop their tanks)

I just went Trondheim->Bergen as a non stateroom passenger in 2003. Staterooms were chronically sold out even one could cope with their cost. My trick was to stop overnight in pretty Alesund and catch the opposite direction Hurtigruten which went into Geirangerfjord (maybe over rated in spite of Unesco listing), then catching the next southbound ferry continuing to Bergen. From this documentary, I feel I missed the best scenery that was north of Trondheim. But this documentary is even better because the northern towns were breaking out into festivities. I really like how this captures the feel of the voyage, including the soothing hours of how the hull just rhythmically hisses thru the swells. Reminds how I watched bronze summer sunrises among still snowy peaks from a deck vacated by people more interested in breakfast. How it feels to see deep blue sky and green coast after umpteen hours of grey drizzle... wouldn't it be nice to have this constantly running as a screen saver or on a tablet device on a bedstand to lull you to sleep. I think it will be a couple of years for hardware to be capable of handling the size/complexity of these files, or for Norway to condense them. P.S. In some lectures tracing Norwegians before vikings, I seem to recall the only early written record was of a Greek traveler reporting to Rome. I cannot find more mention of this, and anyway they couldn't tell at all how far along the fjord coast he got.

Some further thoughts after reading the scholars epilogue and forward and such: I didn't see any mention of disease notoriety, although the next expedition by DeSoto seems famous for that, along with brutality. Cabeza's trip thru the SE US actually had quite rare interactions with inhabitants. He probably would have led the DeSoto expedition (with very different legacy?) if not being delayed getting back to Spain by weather, a sinking ship and French pirates. Contrast that with Cabeza's later stranding in Texas and Mexico where the inhabitants took them as shamans to treat the sick (and made him breathe over each of the well as a protection). At least in the short term, all "patients" got better (psychosomatic?) including one who was thought to be dead. The half of a village that I mentioned dying on his arrival seemed to expire due to dysentery which I think is passed locally and not via Europe. Cabeza supposed he was leaving a trail of peace because he insisted in neighboring tribes stopping hostilities before he would treat them. He was horrified by Spanish slavers, and seemed to have a vision of how the Americas could be a symbiotic paradise once friction among the indians and with the Spanish could be turned positive. If that sounds delusional, you would have to read his account to see how his self-deprecating style seduces you into believing it. I guess he went on to an ill fated South American quest: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/

Norwegian TV provides free coverage of their most famous scenic sea and rail journeys in http://www.nrk.no/hurtigruten/?lang=en and http://nrkbeta.no/2009/12/18/bergensbanen-eng/ which you can download instead of traveling there. They are 134 and 7.5 hours long respectively, and have the creative commons share alike license. Maybe you know of some similar offerings? The rail trip over the glacier is most manageable as a 22gb download, in reduced 720 resolution which they offer thru a torrent as well as a huge 245gb version. I found only the latest VLC tool will render the dark tunnels right - quicktime makes a blocky mess. It is a bit unfortunate the trip was made in bleak late November, and that only the train front camera scenes could be offered free. The coastal ferry trip just ended but the full delightful version can be accessed via a map or random toggling within the link above. I think their server is quite confused and will jump you around randomly, but take a peek into the little towns they hit near the end and the very festive reception they give the camera folks with dancing and such. You can pipe this into a high def TV and get full resolution of fjords under midnight sun, etc. Click on the downloads button, and you are offered a list of ship front camera segments which unfortunately are in full resolution and not only will comprise maybe 3 terrabytes but may drive your pc to about melt down just in the process of rendering. I hope they offer a lower resolution or better hardware becomes available soon. P.S. They have "cultural" encounters with reconstructed viking ships and chats with Saami representatives, etc.

I thought I might post some video links of nonfiction author talks from cspan tv that seemed unexpectedly good. Anyone can cherry pick ones with promising sounding titles using the weekend schedules at http://www.booktv.org/Schedule.aspx and http://www.c-spanvideo.org/videoLibrary/print-schedule.php (latter only shows same day shows). But others may promise to be boring but I happened to find favorable by channel surfing, then scramble to catch up online. For example: The Civil War of 1812 http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/Warof1 was a little US/UK sideshow war to UK's war with Napoleon. The UK mostly thought the US should cooperate with them fighting the Hitler of the time, but instead is outraged the US fights UK when it is down. Well, sometimes it wanted to vandalize and threaten the US. But it gets stranger. Many battles occurred in British Canada. Most Canadian combatants happened to be recent emigrants from US! Most combatants on both sides were Irish born! The American Irish were fighting the British with an eye to eventually liberating Ireland, and were subject to hanging as a traitor if captured. In fact any UK born American was considered returnable to the UK military. NE US leaned toward the UK partly because there had been nothing but rural minded Virginians as presidents, alienated to their trader interests... Mastermind: The Many Faces of the 9/11 Architect KSM http://www.booktv.org/Program/12550/Mastermind+The+Many+Faces+of+the+911+Architect+Khalid+Shaikh+Mohammed.aspx covers the endless failed opportunities to stop KSM, who was sort of a scatterbrained but ghastly terror idea-man that even drove Bin Laden up the wall. What hooked me was the author first hinting at then pretty much spilling the beans of the aggressive interrogation techniques that the CIA used against him and 2 others. Apparently misunderstood by news reports (and wikipedia I see) yet hushed due to lawsuits, their ultimate escalation sounds bearable and was even mocked in the process by KSM. Some point out the alternate interrogation under military rules gave great success in WW2 where Japanese and Nazi prisoners were coddled and spilled a lot of stuff to hidden mikes. But this approach was used anyway in most cases by CIA, yet it outlaws key modern police techniques due to dating to 1940 before they were understood. Much CIA success apparently came from subtle Pavlovian dog type stuff, like imperceptibly rewarding truth tellers with more comfortable environment (and v. versa).

TV documentaries of Rome seem to have dried up, but I caught a great repeat from Smithsonian channel I missed the first time http://www.smithsonianchannel.com/site/sn/show.do?episode=137533#video that made gladiators seem more interesting than ever before. Let's see, I heard some terrible Roman podcast that made me swear off amateur historians. Longer ago viewed the Yale course on Roman Architecture (search for OYC or open yale course) which dwelled a bit much on terminology, but can't complain about free..

Aha! I thought there were irrational assumptions in the common migration path explanation. Click thru some steps on the world migration map here and see if you think it looked a little gimmicky http://www.bradshawfoundation.com/journey/ The last interpretation I heard of DNA "breadcrumbs" left behind in migration paths left me with the idea that nothing proves that Africa was the origin; rather someplace on the arc from Africa to Australia could give the same DNA trail. I think the main issue to me was the Aussie aborigine DNA trail from Africa was entirely missing. Therefore between Africa and Australia there could be an origin that fed into Africa as well as Australia. It probably would be closer to Africa than Australia to account for missing fanout, and could be now submerged.

Giraffe are widely claimed to decapitate lions with their kick - I even heard this from guides in Kenya. So I googled for confirmation, and poked around just enough to be sickened by a bunch of youtube scenes of lions battling with various animals with various degrees of success and failure. Some have the air of artificial herding together combatants in some perverse revival of Roman setups (no stage or anything, just suspicious). Anyway, what I gather is small giraffe are brutally dominated by a lion looking for food. Medium size giraffe can be killed by a pack of lions, but risking injuries. A large (bull) giraffe utterly dominates even a pack of lions and some are gonna die. I never saw a forward kick, which I thought would be so effective with that long leverage over a heavy hoof. There were vicious rearward kicks, but the intent seemed to be to fling the lunging lion away. The most aggressive was a weird high stomping action with giraffe front legs, which terrorized even packs of lions. I think it was aiming at the backbone which is right near the lion skin on the top, with all the protective muscle on sides or bottom. The term decapitation refers to the way giraffes seperate the lion skull from the backbone. I don't know if they ever snap off soft tissue. Now I see thru giraffe eyes (one who has been terrorized by lions while growing up) that the lions backbone looks like a fragile cantilever (protruding, actually), hung off it's front haunches... just asking to be snapped. P.S. on animal kicks and linguistics: I heard that the slow drawl way of speaking in Texas, the midwest, and parts of northeast US come from working close to large cattle and milkcows and reassuring them so they don't kick or stomp you. Just yesterday I was smiling at a newsclip of a Texan cop who was somehow putting across urgency but in a voice that was very monotone and exactly steady in volume. It's a type of voice that is taken as slow witted, but might have hidden wisdom even when around people that might act like animals.

There have been some scare stories about Roman sites in the Libya war in http://edition.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/africa/06/14/libya.war/ But NATO condemned the use of these sites to store weapons, and I'm sure they left it open whether to be bombed (which they did more explicitly than above) for secrecy and as a deterrent against more abuse. I have seen a ww2 video of Churchill making a speech before thousands of troops in what appears to be Leptis Magna - I bet the site was a bit worse for wear after that

OK, I can empathize with some skepticism about my, err, APPLE GARUM. On reflection I may have been inspired by drinking pulque in Mexico, which I had assumed was a fermented cactus slurry and byproduct of tequila production. Bubbly and almost gelatinous... but http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulque gives it a bit different and historically fascinating origin. Final production thoughts: I guess best to do a single container at a time, and put aside a quarter of it to give headroom for the rest to expand. Hit it hard with yeast for a fast bubbly ferment, using a fun flavor of fruit juice to help dissolve the yeast (berry juices do better than citrus, which ferments with odd tastes). Every hour or two, open the container (with a towel or paper in case of spray) and be prepared to spoon some out to make room for more expansion. When it is at a peak (4 hrs on a warm day?), eat all you want and refrigerate the rest (beware of storing more than a day or so). This may be illegal in some countries like Norway where homebrewing is considered a sin. And where I live carbonation is practically a sin, with container recycle taxes, threat of sugar drink taxes, and transportation restrictions of CO2 tanks. But at least a small amount of alcohol is important for foods because certain flavors are primarily soluable in alcohol, like vanilla beans flavors. Hmm, I have a cheap bulk source of that, so will have to try chucking it into the sauce...

What I learned now is to not recycle old yeasty applesauce like you would sourdough starter. It works ok, but the highly fermented pulp has an off taste which was masked by it's higher alcohol content in it's original situation. Also fermenting too slow in a cool environment leads to more alcohol than bubbles which is boring. The bubbles are the thing - to hold them to your tongue in a thick paste is a revolutionary sensation! Sez http://sciblog.marylandsciencecenter.org/2010/01/what-do-bubbles-taste-like/ : person

Oops, I skipped the simple approach to get yourself calibrated without mess or fuss. You can check progress hourly the first time, which will relieve pressure and prevent spraying. Also gives you the feel of how much yeast is needed and what stage you like best. You should spoon some out each time you open it to give room for expansion. It will start off pretty bland, then should take off in 3 or 4 hours. If you eventually move it to a fridge, don't let it sit too many hours without checking it I use about a coin size dollop of active dry yeast, as in for baking bread. I long ago tried special champagne yeast for fermenting, but it didn't seem so special. A medium to large coin size seems to work for most any size batch - the main thing is big enough to prevent some other microorganism from dominating, but not so big as to rupture your container before you notice it. Once you get calibrated for the timing, etc it will ferment better and more pure when you don't open it in the meantime. Any competing organisms (such as the kind that makes smelly cheese) would come from the air, assuming your applesauce was pasteurized at the factory.

Fermented apple sauce! Once as a kid I opened a jar of applesauce and it gushed all over the table due to being full of bubbles - it had fermented into a tangy treat. So in the interest of creating a delicious homemade snack more healthy than chips or junk food, I have recreated this. Or I am perfecting it and maybe someone will have better ideas of how to do it. I don't generally even like alcohol and mainly focus on the bubbles, but the alcohol does give a good tang like a yogurt on steroids. The bubbles can give the sauce a thick consistency like moist bread for some reason - kind of like a rumcake. I saw some article saying bubbles tease your tastebuds due to some physics thing; not just due to their carbonic acid. I start with plastic bottles of pure applesauce, which are surprisingly cheap. Plastic won't shatter under pressure, and lets you feel the pressure so to prevent a rupture or too much sprayout when uncapping. Well, you can't really prevent a sprayout since the sauce can double it's volume due to trapped bubbles when uncapping, or at least fruit pulp near the cap threads will shoot out everywhere. But back to the start... You can open a fresh bottle of applesauce at room temperature, toss in some yeast, close it, shake it up and let it rest upside down. But the yeast I use won't find enough moisture to fully dissolve (maybe I should try another kind), so I have taken to spike it with a bit of a fruit juice chaser like cranberry. P.S. this may not work well with a previously opened bottle of applesauce because long contact with regular air brings in competing bacteria which can stink up the ferment. Wines can tolerate this because over time the good yeast wins, but we are doing this faster. Anyway in a few hours the bottle distorts under pressure and will open in a big mess but give heavenly sauce. I don't think it would have helped to loosely cap the sauce because the bubbles are entrapped and won't bubble up. You can put the remaining unused stuff in the fridge and it will slowly recharge but get increasingly alcoholic as it converts more sugar. It eventually loses the fun combination of sweetness to accompany tang, but change in itself is fun. What I am trying now is to cut back the messy sprayout without investing in bigger containers with the need to wash them and such. When the fermented bottle is down to 1/4 full, I partly refill it with fresh sauce. This is like reusing the "mother" yeast for sourdough bread and saves some money. But it referments kind of slow in the fridge - I will have to try at room temperature. And the freshly opened jar will need to be cooled... so you don't end up with a nice situation of warm sauce unexposed to air critters that gives optimum results - still perfecting the process!

Thanks all. The focus on sedentary peoples suggests non-foreign diseases were also at play. He spent some time as a trader between tribes going hundreds of miles inland, because only a neutral party could make contact across certain tribal borders. Therefore some sedentary tribes apparently weren't getting exposed to even nearby diseases. They defended their borders with effective bows and arrows that could even pierce spanish armor. The expedition was laid low in early stages by what scholars guessed was malaria and dysentery, which I read as local. No mention of syphilis but I think that is of new world origin. His first long term stay killed half of his indian hosts due to disease, but that was a year into the expedition and may have not been a european contagion still active. He didn't say if it looked like smallpox or whatever - just the regrettable fact that mourning rituals keep the survivors from needed food gathering work which killed a lot of them too.

I was recently startled to find my self immersed in a memoir by Cabeza de Vaca who was one of the 1% that survived a traverse of the rim of Gulf of Mexico starting 1527. <edit: can't seem to get below map img to display in browsers other than safari> There are short versions on the web, but I am reading the long version (with some confusing notes by scholars on how his short versions contradict various details). The fact that it was so extremely ill fated leads to all kinds of interesting glimpses, such as literally years spent going from one indian tribe to another begging them to take him up as a slave since he can't support himself. He has been called one of the first anthropologists based on resulting observations - some tribes he lived with seem almost pathologically generous vs. others killing their children based on dream interpretations etc. Contrast this to accounts of the "winners" like Columbus or Cortez and you don't learn much from their quick successes. I think Columbus was a genius in navigating and captaining ships (although a bad leader on land) and Cortez had luck and I forget if a lot of skill also. Cabeza had a nutcase boss and bad luck with health. I do think he was lucky with weather because a freak cold spell apparently kept alligators in hibernation while they spent early summer wading thru Florida swamps. Are there other such accounts? I also like the memoir "With Santa Ana in Texas" with is by another intelligent and skeptical observer under a doomed leader. The second half of it is controversial and possibly a fake, but not the first half leading up to the battles which gives great observations of Texas under contrasting ways of life by the sparse settlers. (This comes to mind because Cabeza was stranded for years in Texas which was hard scrabble and no paradise for hunter/gatherer types).

Such small, nasty, devices are known from the ancient world but I believe that they were, in general, quite sharp and not so decorated! We use these in northern forested areas where the trails are narrow, and the spikey kinds would be walked away by the first barbarian in the group. These act more like ball bearings and the same ones will repeatedly work on the entire train coming thru. The knobs are needed to temporarily dig in and promote rolling; otherwise it could be walked upon like rocks. Knobs work particularly well on frozen ground, but it all sometimes melts/refreezes, and the holes permit sticking a shaft in to break it free from ice and reset. Also this makes it harder for the barbarians to hurl them back at us with their slings, because like a whiffle ball the drag is raised and the mass is low. The size of the ball is in proportion to the roughness of the ground - bigger ones roll over larger irregularities.

What my army uses them for is similar to police spike strips. Throw a bunch of them onto an oxcart or chariot path, and especially if on a hilly portion the hoofs will slip and slide. The balls dig in the hoof and ground just enough to promote a rolling action and the beasts slip and slide. Then our troops emerge from the trees and start hacking. Caput mundi!

The history channel is good for seeing visual artifacts and sites, although their dramatizations and narratives are fluffed up to attract eyeballs for advertisers. They can pose interesting questions though, that you can easily pursue in google for some pretty good summaries. Wikipedia is normally good, but for potentially ideological issues you have to take a grain of salt. I know of physicists and chemists who find there is a 24/7 monitoring of certain environmental articles in order to throw out corrections to false "green facts" (the new age religion). Anyway, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constantine_I#Religious_policy outlines Constantine somewhat weak devotion to Christianity until late, although "led an army of Christians against the Donatist Christians" before Nicaea. If I were to make a History Channel type documentary, it it might sensationalize that the Roman switch to Christianity was due to Constantine being a classic "momma's boy" (I actually heard a female Rome scholar claim this was generally the case in ancient Rome). The facts are fuzzy, but one might claim the mother Helena was originally a floozey trophy wife of a previous emperor, who then divorced her for a more politically acceptable one. Her susceptibility to unconventional new age religion brought her to Christianity which was the main way it slowly seeped into Constantine. He also fell under the spell of his wives, and killed his son by his first wife based on questionable accusations of second wife who wanted to get her own sons in better position to take over. Then Constantine killed the second wife under the rightious spell of his mother. Let's see, wasn't one of his wives a devoted Christian as well? I think he dealt with Christianity as an administrative tool, but didn't feel personally devoted to it until near end of life - seemed to passively let his womenfolk push him to it?

Italy seems to err way to much on the side of forecast believers: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=italian-seismologists-manslaughter-trial-bad-quake-prediction

More support of my favorite issue - Roman sculpture as not derivative from the Greek. I have only gotten polite skepticism on this point here, and I have only recently heard it supported from a set of lectures that I posted about earlier. They said that Roman sculpture derived from death mask practices, and this realism was followed regardless if a Greek was actually doing the sculpture for them. I think Roman sculpture is the hook to adoring Roman culture. Their engineering is impressive to ones intellect, but their reflective, nonchalant, non theatrical, non egoistic sculpture has soul and gravitas. All history's sculpture before and after seems to be false posing in comparison. Engineering and sculpture is all we concretely (!) know of the Romans - their writings may contain more or less fiction I think.

All the more reason for the British Museum not to return marbles to the new Parthenon Museum created for that. And for antiquities to stay distributed around the world instead of being repatriated. Hopefully the Piraeus museum has reopened, giving some crumbs for tourists to chase. Hopefully the museum island of Delos remains fully open. However B.M. also closes rooms due to guard shortages - especially on their Thursday night hours. There is one greco-roman room I don't think I have seen in a dozen visits - just peeked over a rope. Hard to complain due to no admission charge, but everyone has actually paid thru high hotel taxes and the like.