Archive: Posts about History
June 20th, 2007, 2 Comments »
To understand the last forty years in the Middle East, you need to understand the Six-Day War of 1967. That’s one of the messages of a fascinating, enlightening four-part BBC radio documentary about those formative days in June:
After the founding of the state of Israel in 1948, there was a sense of unfinished business in the region.
On the eve of war, Arab civilians believed propaganda broadcasts from Gamal Abdel-Nasser’s Egypt promising an easy victory over Israel; for Israeli citizens there was the feeling of anticipation of terrible defeat.
But the Israeli capability was underestimated – and Arab generals thought so too.
I’ve only listened to the first two parts, but it does a fantastic job of blending historical recordings with new interviews with those decision-makers and innocent bystanders who are still around. I’ve only ever had the vaguest grasp of Middle Eastern politics and history, and it’s a longterm project improve. This series has certainly helped in that regard.
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May 22nd, 2007, 8 Comments »
On June 10, 1940, Italy declared war on Britain. On the following morning, Italian bombers attacked Malta (then a British colony). Lonely Planet Malta picks up our story:
The only aircraft available on the islands on June 11 were three Gloster Gladiator biplanes–quickly named Faith, Hope and Charity–whose pilots fought with such skill and tenacity that Italian pilots estimated the strength of the Maltese squadron to be in the region of 25 aircraft!
Did the Italians ever acquit themselves well during World War II? I only ever seem to hear about Italian defeats.
Anyway, the story of Malta during World War II is fascinating, and I’d love to read a book length account (the aforementioned Lonely Planet recommends Siege: Malta, 1940 – 1943) of that period.
If you think the London Blitz was bad news for the British, consider that in 1942 the island suffer ed154 days and nights of continuous bombing. That compares with 57 days at the height of the aerial attacks on London.
Though the island was constantly attacked for three years, they never surrendered, and provided a critical tactical advantage for the allies in the Mediterrenean.
As you may have guessed, I visited Malta’s National War Museum today. They still have the remains of Faith on display. You can see a photo on this site.
8 Comments »
May 12th, 2007, 1 Comment »
This morning we went into Gozo’s main city of Rabat and paid our first visit to the citadel, which has been a fortress of one kind or another since 1500 BC. The current incarnation dates from the early 17th century, and was built by the Knights of St. John to defend the locals from raiding by French and Turkish privateers.
There’s an excellent baroque (and I mean baroque) cathedral just inside the citadel’s gates. We had a chat with a very cordial padre (you can seem him here busting out some more decorations), who pointed out the trompe-l’Å“il painting on the ceiling above the main dais. Apparently they ran out of money and couldn’t afford to build the cathedral’s dome, so they just painted it (with amazing effectiveness) on a round sheet of canvas above the altar. I don’t like taking photos inside churches, and it kind of has to be seen to be believed, anyway.
You’re able to walk all the way around the battlements of the citadel, and it affords an awesome view of the entire island. I took this photo looking down into the rooftops of the city below. After messing around with it in Photoshop, I’m pretty happy with the result. Maybe the treatment is a bit brash–you can decide (click for larger version):
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May 7th, 2007, 1 Comment »
Because I’m living in his neck of the woods (more or less), I’ve been reading some of The Histories of Herodotus of Halicarnassus. Today I ran into an interesting couple of paragraphs (mine is a different translation, but the gist is the same) about the Scythians and their affection for the ganja:
Now they have a wild hemp in their country like flax, except that the hemp grows taller and stouter by far [goes on to explain how it makes good cloth].
The Scythians, then, take the seed of this hemp, and creeping under the felt covering of the tent they throw the seed on the stones glowing with the heat from the fire, and there it smoulders and makes usch a steam as no vapour-bath in Greece could surpass, and the steam makes the Scythians howl for joy. And hungry for hummus and pita.
All right, I added that last bit about the hummus, but the rest is pure Herodotus.
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April 28th, 2007, 2 Comments »
Dublin’s Landsdowne Road is the oldest rugby ground in the world that hosts international matches. They also have international soccer/football matches there–I saw Ireland beat Russia there in a friendly back in 2002. It’s currently undergoing a €365 million renovation, and due to be reopened in 2009.
In the meantime, the Irish Rugby Foorball Union is holding a massive auction of the stadium’s ‘assets’. It’s running online this weekend, and you can get yourself any number of bits of memorabilia: seats, coat hooks (?) and even sections of the turf. Highest priced item at the moment? A Scotland vs. Ireland ‘touch judge flag’ (is that the thing that sits in the corner of the field, like where they take corner kicks from?) from 1924, currently going for €1.626,00.
2 Comments »
April 26th, 2007, 1 Comment »
Over the past week or so, I’ve taken a few random photos which each merited commentary, if not their own blog post. In all cases, click the images for larger sizes.
We visited Minerve, which is a charming hilltop medieval town. Beside the church, there was a little museum of archeaology and paleontology. There were a series of, well, high-school quality dioramas inside, including this awesome one. The context, I think, is fairly obvious:
There was another diorama of the Siege of Minerve in 1210. The Cathars, a religious group declared heretics by the church, had been mostly slaughtered by Crusade armies at Beziers. A couple of hundred escaped to Minerve, where they were besieged and eventually burned alive:
I turned on the TV in our Dublin hotel, and surfed to a new (to me, at least) channel called Setanta Sports (man, that URL ought to be a lot shorter). Low and behold, there was ice hockey on TV. And it was those embattled giants of the frozen game, Ireland vs. Luxembourg.
By Canadian standards, it was amateur hour all around, from the on-ice play to the commentary to the charming scale of the Dundalk Ice Dome. Still, I was pleased to see that Ireland will be promoted from Division Three to Division Two after a shootout victory. The other teams in the tournament: New Zealand (who took home the gold), South Africa, Mongolia (they got their Yak-riding asses handed to them by everybody) and Luxembourg. Awesome:
1 Comment »
March 19th, 2007, 6 Comments »
The tech world is all excited about Twitter. I’ve managed to avoid the rage thus far, and am not very interested in hopping on board this particular train. I like what Kathy Sierra has to say about Twitter, and how we’ve possibly crossed a kind of attention event horizon.
Chris Pirillo solicited and recorded some reader feedback (MP3), which includes a mini-rant from me (just after the halfway mark, more or less) about the pridefulness of blogging, and the sheer hubris of Twitter.
Listening to it again, I sound like a Twitter hater, when really I’m currently Twitter ambiguous:
Twitter, it seems to me, is hubris of the highest order. Why would I think that anybody, even my friends and family, would want to read an unedited stream of the pitiful minutiae of my life? Isn’t that self-indulgence on a grand scale?
Beth has also gathered a bunch of opinions on Twitter, and its potential applications for non-profits.
Twitter is a Performance Medium
Today Tara Hunt drew some erudite connections between Twitter, Virginia Woolf and Shakespeare:
Many stories have been lost over the centuries because of assumptions, narrow ideals of what ‘genius’ is, and the very fact that ‘genius’, a relative term defined by a few, is the yard stick for recorded history.
She makes the case that a history of person’s Twitters is an important historical record. Kathy replies in the comments of Tara’s post, and Tara replies to that. They’re way more articulate than me, so go over there and read their debate. Regardless of whether or not we’ll ever have the technology to meaningfully sort through a lifetime of Twitter history, I do wonder whether we’ll have the brain capacity or interest to mull over the content.
The other aspect of Twitter that I haven’t seen discussed is that (like blogs) it’s not a diary, it’s a performance medium. We’re not recording our thoughts and feelings. We’re broadcasting the thoughts and feelings for others to hear. That’s a profound difference, and certainly changes the context for a schwack of historical Twitter data.
Shakespeare on Twitter
Tara’s post got me thinking about how that old dog Bill Shakespeare might have used Twitter:
4:47pm
Drinking Mead. Sweet, sweet mead.
5:03pm
Cavorting with maiden.
5:16pm
Methinks she doth protest too much.
5:34pm
Bollocks. Struck out with maiden.
6:01pm
Sketching out ending to R & J. Totally lifted ending from that cheeky Brooke.
6:03pm
Screw the sodding play. Checking out mop boy.
7:10pm
Making the beast with two back with the mop boy.
7:12pm
Done. Feeling guilty about Anne back in Stratford.
In truth, that’s one guy’s Twitter history that I’d really like to read.
6 Comments »
March 9th, 2007, 4 Comments »
“You are dead. Game Over. Congratulations! You’re the last Spartan to die, so you’ve successfully finished 300: Last Stand of the Spartans, the newest smash game from EA Games, Vivendi Universal and Vijay’s Game Development and Chutney Haus.”
300 is the latest, greatest example of the convergence of movies and video games. With its hyper-realism, generous slow-motion, muted colour palette, excessive narration, flying gibs and unrecognizable cast, it’s easy to imagine grabbing a gamepad and playing as Malthusis, Spartan #187, slayer of Persians.
Technically, the movie is incredible eye candy. Like Sin City (the graphic novels for both films were written by Frank Miller), it looks like no movie you’ve ever seen before. Writing about Sin City and The Incredibles, I said this:
[These] show us what comic book movies should aspire to. They should render imagined worlds, not follow around guys in rubber suits.
The script isn’t going to win any awards. The dialogue is mostly reduced to sloganeering, with King Leonidas gruffly yelling (in Gerard Butler’s Scottish brogue) things like “This is where we fight! This is where they die!” or “Enjoy your breakfast, for tonight we dine in Hell!” It sounds good in the trailer, but all that shouting can get a bit wearing.
300 is about as straight-ahead a movie as you can make. It’s not remotely historically accurate, but that doesn’t really matter. There’s a silly, entirely moot sub-plot which enables us to gawk at Lena Headey, but it’s basically the story of a long, bloody battle.
On a related note, some sensor in the my cerebral cortex went off while listening to some of the film’s narration. I can’t find the quote online yet, but the narrator says something like “numbers are for nothing”. It took me a while to make the connection, but it reminded me of a quote from “Powderfinger”, a Neil Young song about a last stand:
Daddy’s rifle in my hand felt reassurin’
He told me, Red means run, son, numbers add up to nothin’
But when the first shot hit the docks I saw it comin’
Raised my rifle to my eye
Never stopped to wonder why.
Then I saw black,
And my face splashed in the sky.
If you watch the film, please make a mental note of the quote and let me know what it is.
UPDATE: Tim sends along an answer to my Neil Young question. The phrase from the graphic novel, and presumably the movie, is “numbers count for nothing”. Close, but not exactly the same as “Powderfinger”. I wonder, is Frank Miller a Neil Young fan?
UPDATE #2: Monique sent along a link to some cool behind the scenes footage from 300. Her company is running a contest associated with the movie.
4 Comments »