The Xenophile Historian Newsletter, #16

Here is a copy of what I sent out to my e-mail list yesterday.

The Xenophile Historian Newsletter, #16
( http://xenohistorian.faithweb.com/ )

Greetings once again to all my loyal readers! Charles Kimball is here, to give you the latest news on my world history website. Well, it’s already December in the year 2009. It has been an interesting year, though maybe “interesting” in the Chinese sense of the word (remember the curse, “May you live in interesting times.”). End of the decade hype is starting to build, though not as much as I saw for the end of the 1960s, 70s, 80s, or 90s. Maybe it’s because 2009 was a year many people would like to forget. As I did ten years ago, I will point out to anyone who cares to listen that the decade ends with a year ending in a zero, not a year ending in a nine. After all, the beginning of the twentieth century was celebrated on the first day of 1901, not 1900; I don’t know when we got so impatient that we switched to years ending in zeroes.

Also, whether you believe the last year of this decade is 2009 or 2010, have you noticed that no one has given the decade a good name yet? We can say that someone grew up with “the 1960s generation,” or that obsolete technology is “so 1990s,” but what term will we use for someone or something associated with the first decade of the twenty-first century? Using a number for a name, like we did with previous decades, doesn’t seem to work when it starts with a zero. Take the computer you are using now, for instance. If you still have it in 2011, will you tell people you got it “back in the zeroes?” I think I will call this time “the millennial decade” until somebody comes up with a better name.

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As promised in my last newsletter, the main news is that my latest history paper is complete and uploaded at last. I worked on it for eleven months, from January to November of this year. Called “Chapter 5: The American Superpower,” this is my latest paper on North American History, covering the United States from 1933 to 2009. Because this is a period relevant to all of us, and I have lived through more than half of this period, I had plenty of books and memories to use as references. Thus, you can probably understand why it took so long to write.

Poul Anderson, one of my favorite authors, once said that an author hopes that the greatest book of his career is the one he happens to be working on now. Well, I’ve already written papers that I consider more important, so I don’t expect this one to become my magnum opus (greatest work), but it is one of the biggest; the original document, before I converted it to HTML, was 150 pages! To make it easier on browsers and the eyes of readers, I divided it into five parts, and added a sixth part for commentaries on where the United States is heading. The resulting URLs and topics are as follows:

Part I ( http://xenohistorian.faithweb.com/northam/na05a.html )

First, an Explanation of the Title
The New Deal
New Deal II
Getting Out of the Depression–The Hard Way
The Gathering Storm
Pearl Harbor
World War II

Part II ( http://xenohistorian.faithweb.com/northam/na05b.html )

The Country Boy From Missouri
Enter the Cold War
China, Korea, and the Pumpkin Papers
“I Like Ike”
Life in the 1950s

Part III ( http://xenohistorian.faithweb.com/northam/na05c.html )

The “New Frontier”
Who Really Killed JFK?
The “Great Society”
Nixon Returns
“All the President’s Men”

Part IV ( http://xenohistorian.faithweb.com/northam/na05d.html )

Years of “Malaise”
The Reagan Renaissance
George Bush the Elder
Clintonism

Part V ( http://xenohistorian.faithweb.com/northam/na05e.html )

The Clinton Scandals
Islamism on the Move
The Battle of the Ballots
George Bush the Younger
Angry Democrats, Drifting Republicans
An Election Like No Other

Part VI ( http://xenohistorian.faithweb.com/northam/na05f.html )

The American People Today
* Going South (and West)
* The Grey Generation
* The New Americans
* The Browning of America
The Incredible Expanding Government
* Federal Spending
* Federal Agencies
* Taxes and Regulation
* The Cabinet
From History to Current Events

And for those who missed my previous newsletters, here are the other history papers in this series:

Index Page

http://xenohistorian.faithweb.com/northam/index.html

Chapter 1: Pre-Columbian America and the Age of Exploration (USA & Canada, before 1607)

http://xenohistorian.faithweb.com/northam/na01.html

Chapter 2: Colonial America (USA & Canada, 1607 to 1783)

http://xenohistorian.faithweb.com/northam/na02a.html

Chapter 3: Pioneer America (USA from 1783 to 1861, Canada from 1783 to 1867)

http://xenohistorian.faithweb.com/northam/na03a.html

Chapter 4: Industrial America (USA, 1861 to 1933)

http://xenohistorian.faithweb.com/northam/na04a.html

A Guide to U.S. Presidential Elections

http://xenohistorian.faithweb.com/northam/elections.html

The Black Muslims: A Special Feature

http://xenohistorian.faithweb.com/northam/BLMuslim.html

All that’s left to do is write a paper on Canadian history since 1867. I am tentatively calling it Chapter 6: The Great Wide North.

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In other news, not much to report, because it has only been two months since my last newsletter. A new picture here, a footnote there–stuff I may report on my blog, but otherwise not a big deal. The largest addition is two new sections to my page on smart quotes: a list of erudite quotes and a list of history’s classiest insults. Here are the links to those:

http://xenohistorian.faithweb.com/holybook/kup1.html#Erudite

http://xenohistorian.faithweb.com/holybook/kup1.html#Insults

I also wrote a page with tips on how to protect your data, called “When In Doubt, Back It Up!”

http://xenohistorian.faithweb.com/holybook/articles/backup.html

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On a non-historical note, in September 2008, my wife and I became associates with Pre-Paid Legal Services. Over the past year that business has been good for me; I was promoted to the rank of Manager in May, and Director in August, meaning this is a more successful business opportunity than any other we have tried over the years. In the last newsletter I talked at length about the Blastoff Network, Pre-Paid Legal’s new partner, but I neglected to give you the address of my Pre-Paid Legal page, which we have had up for a few months, so here it is:

http://www.prepaidlegal.com/hub/charlesskimball

Do you need a lawyer? Do you need to write a will? Do you have a problem with traffic tickets? Have you been audited by the Internal Revenue Service? Are you concerned about identity theft? If you answered yes to any of those questions, we have a solution for you, and it costs a lot less than you think!

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And finally, an announcement that I was expecting to make a few years ago. On November 24, 2009, the counter for The Xenophile Historian passed the one million mark. One million hits (visits) in twelve years! With the first issues of this newsletter, I regularly talked about how many hits the site had received, up to that point. More recently I haven’t, though, because traffic to The Xenophile Historian peaked in 2003. From 1997 to 2003 it rose steadily each year, ultimately reaching 900 hits per day. However, after 2003 the visits declined, so that now I am only getting 100-200 hits per day. I blame it on Wikipedia. Don’t get me wrong, I still believe Wikipedia is a fine website, as long as you keep in mind that the articles are only as good as their authors. Also, I just checked, and currently seven Wikipedia articles include The Xenophile Historian in their footnotes or bibliographies, so I can’t complain about their sources! Still, they have taken 3/4 of the history-minded folks who used to come to me. Oh well, I’m glad to have reached the finish line, even if I did it slow and steady like the fabled tortoise. As they used to say on the old Bartles & Jaymes commercials, thank you for your support.

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And that’s what’s new for now. If you missed older issues of the newsletter and want to see them, they can be downloaded in a zip file from
http://xenohistorian.faithweb.com/download/index.html . And the links below go to things I mentioned in previous issues. Please visit them, if you haven’t already:

The Xenohistorian Weblog, this site’s official blog.

http://xenohistorian.wordpress.com

If you are looking for a history-related Christmas gift to give, here are two links to my world history textbook, “A Biblical Interpretation of World History.”

http://www.rosedogbookstore.com/biinofwohi.html

http://xenohistorian.faithweb.com/worldhis/index.html

Take Care and God Bless,

Charles Scott Kimball

When In Doubt, Back It Up!

I just added this article on protecting your data to The Holy Book of Universal Truths, Chapter 7, where I talk about other ways to protect your computer and yourself online:

The loss of data may not be as great a tragedy as the death of a loved one or a financial disaster, but it can be pretty devastating nonetheless. If you’ve ever had a hard drive fail, you know what I mean; a stolen computer can have the same effect. I know because a few months after my daughter got married, her husband’s laptop was stolen, and it had most of their wedding pictures on it.

It was a similar case with the wedding of my wife’s niece, a year later. Most of the pictures the photographer took were put on a DVD, and that disk was ruined when it was left in a car on a 113^o day. Consequently the only pictures and videos they have from that memorable day were the ones that others took, especially those from my wife.

In my case, I’ve had computers fail on me more than once. It happened in 2005, for instance, when my PC’s motherboard got fried by too many thunderstorms. The good news is that I was expecting trouble, and had been backing up data on an external hard drive, up until the night before it happened; moreover, the hard drive itself was still good after I had it transferred to a new computer. Thus, the only files I lost for good were the e-mails in my inbox. That turned me into an evangelist for backing up data; hence, this essay.

I mentioned pictures, but they’re probably not the only thing you have to worry about. What about your music collection, downloaded videos, and e-mail correspondence? If you’re like me, a lot of your modern life is stored on a hard drive; you can think of it as a “second brain.” What about any work you did with the help of a computer? You probably have that on a hard drive, too. With all the drive failures I have experienced, I am thankful I never lost the manuscript for my history textbook; I probably would have “gone postal” if that had happened! And if the drive in question falls into the wrong hands, the problem of identity theft comes up. I am involved with a business that deals with identity theft, but that’s another story.

It’s a similar story, to a lesser extent, with whatever files you are working on now. I used to teach a computer course that required the use of Microsoft Word, PowerPoint and FrontPage, and when I taught the basics in those programs, I told the class that the time to save your work is whenever you think about saving it. Save early, save often, because you never know when your computer may lock up or crash, causing you to lose hours of work. Moreover, we no longer run software like the first word processor I had back in the 1980s, which required that everything else stop for as long as twenty minutes while it was saving a ten-page paper. Therefore you don’t have to plan your computer session around saving files; you can save them any time you want. Take advantage of that. Finally, it is dreadfully easy to delete or overwrite the wrong file by mistake; having backups for deleted/overwritten files can get you out of a tight spot.

Now we don’t have crash-proof drives, so the best way to protect your files is to make a backup copy and put it somewhere else, to use as a replacement should you lose the original. Do not keep the backup files on the same drive as the one with your operating system (the “C” drive on most PCs). That is the drive most likely to fail. As long as your files are somewhere else, even on another drive of the same computer (this includes network drives), your work is likely to be safe from local catastrophes, even if the drive with the operating system gets erased or reformatted.

For example, the main hard drive of my computer is partitioned into drives named “C” through “H,” with “H” being the emergency recovery drive to use if “C” fails. It goes on to call the DVD drive “I,” and when I had a second hard drive installed, it became “J.” Every other hard drive or thumb drive I have plugged in has taken on the letters “K” and above. Because of my experience with drive failures, I have learned to install programs on the “C” drive, but whenever possible, I put the pictures, music and everything else on “J” or an external drive. My files may start out being created or downloaded onto the “C” drive, and as soon as I’m done working with them, off to another drive they go.

You may want to burn your files onto a CD or DVD, to avoid cluttering up a hard drive or thumb drive with them. Just keep in mind that optical storage doesn’t appear to be any more reliable than electronic storage. I heard back when music CDs first came out that if you take good care of them, they will last as long as you do. That is why there is now an industry in converting photo albums, records and tapes into digital formats, so that you can someday share them with your grandchildren.

We know a little more now, that some deterioration of optical disks can take place over a few years, causing loss of data. If they are music CDs, it may not be enough for your ears to notice a difference, and it’s not as bad as tape deterioration, but computers will pick it up. Therefore, take good care of your disks, whatever you do! For a start, don’t store them where drastic changes in temperature and humidity are likely to happen (remember the wedding DVD mentioned at the beginning of this essay). Also consider making new copies of your CDs/DVDs every four years or so, especially if they are cheap disks.

If you are backing up your data to the drives and disks mentioned above, you are doing well, but your data is still in one location, either your home or your workplace. While you are now protected from drive failures, you still have to deal with the prospect of robbers stealing them, or a fire or natural disaster wiping out the whole property, God forbid. Where I live we don’t have to worry much about hurricanes, earthquakes or volcanoes, but lightning, floods, tornadoes and ice storms are a real danger. I once heard that no place in the United States is totally safe from natural disasters; the safest state is Utah, but even they get thunderstorms from time to time.

The answer to that is to add one more layer of safety, by backing up data to another site. The same calamity is not likely to hit both sites, so if you lose your computer or data at one, you’ve still got the other. In fact, that was the logic behind the creation of the Internet (then called ARPANET) back in the 1960s; the government figured that in the event of nuclear war, the bombs weren’t likely to hit all the computers on a network, so those that survived would be available to help rebuild civilization afterwards.

Recently some off-site storage services have become available. I chose Carbonite, which backs up my data to a server located in Massachusetts. Carbonite works by running a utility program on your computer, and backed-up files are encrypted and zipped up, so I’m not too concerned about hackers getting them. Overall I have been pleased with the service, and have used it to recover lost files a couple of times already. Recently I read that their encryption program can cause a loss of data, and that is a real concern, if true. Thus, I may come back in the future to update this article, by adding yet another way to back up your files.

The Obsolescence Factor

Finally, I’ll give you one more reason to protect your data, and it’s something I learned because of my background in history:

Today it is easier than ever to store and spread information, but it is also easier than ever to lose it.

The reason is rapidly changing technology. Let’s go back to the beginning, to understand how our ability to handle information has developed. A picture of an animal on a stone or the wall of a cave does not tell you much, but it will last thousands of years after the caveman paints or carves it, and makes sense no matter what language you speak. Then came the invention of writing. Written words can convey many times as much information as pictures, but now the person looking at them has to understand the language, and know how to read, to use them.

In the ancient Middle East, writing was done on clay tablets for two to three thousand years. While clay tablets were nearly as durable as stones, they were also quite heavy. One thing is for sure; after lugging baskets of clay tablets around, those Sumerian, Babylonian, Hittite and Assyrian scribes weren’t be wimps! The weight problem was solved with the invention of papyrus and paper, but that added a new problem: the price of portability was a loss of durability. Paper is ruined when not kept dry, it rots over time, and is so easy to burn. Libraries of clay tablets in ancient cities like Ebla were fire hardened when those cities were burned, so their tablets survived until today’s archaeologists found them, but if you expose a library of paper, papyrus or wood to fire, the whole thing will be reduced to ash. See Chapter 9 of The Genesis Chronicles for a partial list of great libraries that fell victim to fires. Who knows where we would be today, if all that literature and knowledge had survived?

Now we have electronic media. Just as the invention of paper made it easier to transport information, so have the invention of e-mail, the Internet, etc. The drawback is that information stored on computers and their peripherals is even more volatile than information on paper. Besides older hazards like fire, hard drives can be demagnetized, fall victim to storm surges, etc. But the newest hazard is obsolescence. If you had a computer twenty years ago, I bet you are no longer running the same programs you used back then. And while I can read a hundred-year-old book and understand most of it without a problem, will anybody be able to read your current e-mails, documents, spreadsheets and pictures and recordings, twenty years from now?

Obsolescence is a problem with hardware as well as software. While punch cards (see above) were essential for programming computers before 1980, nobody uses them anymore. Then came floppy disks, but when was the last time you used one? Back in the 1980s and 1990s, floppies (first 5 ½”, then 3 1/4″) were all over the place, but now you are probably using a computer that doesn’t have any sort of floppy drive. The computer I bought in 2005, for instance, was my first without a floppy drive, and I bought an external floppy drive just in case my students turned in any work on floppies. Now, more than four years later, I still have that drive, but I don’t expect to use it again any time soon. Likewise, today’s Blu-Ray players can handle older DVDs, but how long will that compatibility last? And while the storage capacity of today’s hard drives is unbelievable, compared with what twentieth century computers could handle, someday they too will go out of date.

Will any of your hard work be lost, simply because your computer no longer has the hardware and software to handle it? For that reason alone, I recommend backing up your data to another place, when you sense that the medium it is on won’t be in use much longer. For example, I’m no longer using the external floppy drive I mentioned in the previous paragraph because the data on my floppies has been copied to hard drives and CDs. And if the program you use to access that data is about to disappear, consider converting it to a format that will let it run with another program (e.g., convert WordPerfect documents to MS Word ones).

Objects created out of real-world materials, like paper and wood, tend to rot or wear out; it’s the Second Law of Thermodynamics in action. On the other hand if you digitize your music, photos, art and compositions (convert them to numbers so a computer can store and manipulate them), time does not have to be your enemy. Take the steps mentioned above to protect them, and keep them compatible with your hardware and software, and your masterpieces stand a good chance of outlasting you. Here’s hoping I gave you the tips to make that possible. Happy archiving!

“Thou shalt back up everything, for thou knowest not when the Apocalypse may come upon thee.” — from Chapter 1

© Copyright 2009 Charles Kimball

David Rohl Weighs In On The Lost Army

Last month I saw a report of two Italian archaeologists, Angelo and Alfredo Castiglioni, claiming that they had found bones, armor and weapons in Egypt’s western desert, which they believed came from the “lost army of Cambyses.”  According to the ancient historian Herodotus, after conquering Egypt in 525 B.C., the Persian king Cambyses II sent an army into the western desert, to conquer the import oasis of Siwa, but they never made it; a sandstorm overwhelmed them first.  More recently, we hear every few years about somebody finding remains of the lost army; according to Wikipedia, there were also reports of the discovery in 1977, 1983, and 2000.  In each of these cases it either turned out to be a hoax, or the Egyptian government decided it wasn’t worth financing an archaeological expedition to go into the desert between Siwa and the Nile valley.

I didn’t have any comments to add to this story, but now I have been informed that one of my regular readers, David Rohl, made a comment on another blog about it.  This was a bit unexpected, because in his books he finishes the “New Chronology” at 664 B.C., when the Assyrians destroyed Thebes; he feels that after 664 the conventional chronology you see in history books can be trusted.  However, David also takes tourists into the Egyptian desert to look at rock art, and the blogger said that tourism could damage sites of archaeological value, so David argued that with a little bit of training, the tourists are just as good as the students a university might send with an archaeologist.  Check out their exchange at the link below.

Lost Army and the sites mentioned in the SCA press release

First Snow of the 2009-2010 Season

Just a dusting, and it will probably melt in the middle of the day.  Still, I can understand why Leive didn’t want to go out last night.  When she sees this, she will probably wish she was back in the Philippines, or at least Florida.

In other family news, do you remember our microwave oven burning out last August?  The cheap one I bought at Wal-Mart kept us going, but it didn’t do as good a job.  It wasn’t as powerful when it came to heating, it couldn’t be mounted over the range like the old one, and it was so light that it moved every time I touched it.  Well, our in-law Gene King told us that Lowe’s would be running a special on microwaves on the day after Thanksgiving, marked down from $178 to $99.  Thus, for the first time, I participated in a “Black Friday” sale.  I went to Lowe’s expecting the worst in crowds, but surprisingly, they weren’t any busier than they are on a normal day.  It only took me a few minutes to find the microwave, pick up some poinsettias that were also on special, and head to the cash register.  The hardest part was getting the microwave into the car; I needed some help for that part.

Yesterday Gene (and Rezia) came over to change all the locks in our doors.  We loaned out a key a few months back (I won’t say to whom), and it was lost, so this was a precaution, in case that key falls into the wrong hands.  Yes, we have an attack parrot (see my message from January 15, 2009), but he should be our house’s second line of defense, not the first.  My part in the adventure was to take the new master key to the Lowe’s store mentioned above, and have copies of it made.  When he got done, Gene also removed the burned-out microwave over the range, and installed the new one.  I was clueless on how to do that, so once again I am glad to have a handyman for an in-law!

I was the first to try the new microwave.  It burned the bag of popcorn I put in it, so I know it’s stronger than the other one.  As for the light microwave that saw us through the past four months, Leive plans to put it in a box and keep it for emergencies.

Orlando Will Entertain You, Even If You Don’t Go There

I commented in the past about how Orlando seems stranger when it appears in the news, now that I’m no longer living there.  I guess that’s why outsiders think life there is unreal; it’s not just the theme parks, as I used to believe.  For the past week, much of the talk has been about Tiger Woods’ accident, how he hit first a fire hydrant, then a tree, after leaving home on a Friday morning.  When I saw it on TV, the footage came from WFTV, Orlando’s ABC station; boy, that brings back memories.

According to the police, they’re satisfied now that Tiger paid the traffic ticket they gave him, so officially the case is closed.  Meanwhile, the rest of us are wondering if he really had a fight with his wife.  After all, you don’t leave home at 2:30 AM just to get a jug of milk from the local 7-11 store.  Heck, he lives in Windermere, the fancy suburb that is also home to Orlando Magic players, so do they even have a 7-11 there?  Thus, I expect the controversy over this to continue for some time to come.

In other sports news, you probably heard that Florida State’s football coach, Bobby Bowden, is retiring when this season is over, after 38 years on the job.  Definitely the end of an era for FSU.  I’m paying more attention than I normally would, because of my brother’s contribution to this year’s FSU games (see my message from August 9).  Even this far away from Tallahassee, folks have talked about Bowden stepping down.  I guess that would be a headline around here, if Tiger Woods hadn’t beaten them to it.

Closer to home, it was announced this week that the University of Kentucky will be going to the Music City Bowl in Nashville again.  This isn’t generating as much excitement as it did in 2006 and 2007, but it is still an impressive achievement for a school that is known more for basketball than football.  If the Wildcats win, they will have won four bowl games in a row, and Rich Brooks will go down as the best football coach in UK history.  Even the legendary “Bear” Bryant only won three bowl games, when he was UK’s coach in the 1950s.

Gosh, Did I Do All That?

(Scratching my head in wonder)

Today I was going to talk a little about Tiger Woods and the crazy congressional races in my former Florida home, but the previous message has already gotten so much attention, that I have put it in the “Blogroll” category, just 24 hours after I posted it.  It has also spawned this thread on Free Republic, which at this time has almost 500 responses, and another thread from FR’s founder, Jim Robinson, who called me a “RINO blogger,” of all things!

What amazes me the most is that a lot of folks over there haven’t figured out which “Freeper” I am, though I left enough clues to be correctly “outed” by message #76.  If you accused Pissant, XenaLee, CharlesWayneCT, or HeartlandofAmerica of being me, I believe some apologies are in order.

The rest of what I have to say is in the comments I wrote on the December 1 message, so read them if you’re interested.  Have a good night.

Knock It Off, Free Republic!

I have been a minor participant at Free Republic, the Internet’s leading conservative forum, since September 2004.  An online friend referred me to a discussion where members of Free Republic were talking about the 1952 and 1956 presidential elections, and using my maps from this page to make a point.  I had to join FR to introduce myself to that group, and thank them for visiting.  Because that was right after the “Rathergate” scandal, I thus became one of the “Pajamahadeen” that had just brought down the Sauronic eye of CBS.

Being a “Freeper” has been an interesting and fun experience, but I am disturbed by a current trend on those boards.  For the past few weeks, at least since the latest fundraising drive ended, I have noticed that every new thread begins with a picture or video reminding us that Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor and presidential candidate, supports abortion.  It doesn’t matter what the topic is, the anti-Mitt material pops up.

Personally, I think our current priorities ought to be making sure President Obama and his leftist pals don’t force their health care plan down our throats, and defeating as many moonbats as possible in next year’s congressional and gubernatorial elections, especially Harry Reid, Barbara Boxer, Chris Dodd and Slobbering Barney Frank.  Then in 2011 or 2012 we can fight over who we want for the presidency.  Consequently, yesterday I posted the following on the Kentucky board:

Is anyone else getting sick and tired of the Mitt Romney bashing that goes on at the beginning of each new thread? Granted, he may not be conservative enough for most of us (my first choice for 2012 would probably be Sarah Palin or Duncan Hunter), but he just HAS to be better than the Chicago mob that rules Washington now. Somebody ought to tell Jim Robinson that BHO and his cabal are the real enemy, not Mitt. Sheesh, an outside observer looking at us now is probably getting the impression that Republicans eat their own. And as for Mitt Romney being a Mormon, well, I’m more concerned about Harry Reid’s Mormon faith. Does he HAVE any?

Four replies have appeared since then, and only one agrees with me.  The others just said we ought to do whatever we can to make Mitt Romney unelectable.  I guess I’m going to take a timeout from Free Republic.  Hopefully the Freepers will be acting more sensibly when I return.  ’Bye, see you guys next year.

The American Superpower, Part VI

Yes, the last part of Chapter 5 from my North American history series was uploaded yesterday, so the chapter is now complete.  This part is commentaries about where the United States is heading as a nation.  The whole list of URLs and topics is as follows:

 

Part I (1933-45)

http://xenohistorian.faithweb.com/northam/na05a.html

• First, an Explanation of the Title
• The New Deal
• New Deal II
• Getting Out of the Depression–The Hard Way
• The Gathering Storm
• Pearl Harbor
• World War II

Part II (1945-60)

http://xenohistorian.faithweb.com/northam/na05b.html

• The Country Boy From Missouri
• Enter the Cold War
• China, Korea, and the Pumpkin Papers
• “I Like Ike”
• Life in the 1950s

Part III (1960-74)

http://xenohistorian.faithweb.com/northam/na05c.html

• The “New Frontier”
• Who Really Killed JFK?
• The “Great Society”
• Nixon Returns
• “All the President’s Men”

Part IV (1974-96)

http://xenohistorian.faithweb.com/northam/na05d.html

• Years of “Malaise”
• The Reagan Renaissance
• George Bush the Elder
• Clintonism

Part V (1996-2009)

http://xenohistorian.faithweb.com/northam/na05e.html

• The Clinton Scandals
• Islamism on the Move
• The Battle of the Ballots
• George Bush the Younger
• Angry Democrats, Drifting Republicans
• An Election Like No Other

Part VI

http://xenohistorian.faithweb.com/northam/na05f.html

• The American People Today

1. Going South (and West)
2. The Grey Generation
3. The New Americans
4. The Browning of America

• The Incredible Expanding Government

1. Federal Spending
2. Federal Agencies
3. Taxes and Regulation
4. The Cabinet

• From History to Current Events

You can expect a newsletter announcing this to go out later this week.  Cheers!

 

Two Holidays in One Message

This month we’ve had two holidays where I took pictures, and I didn’t post them until now; sorry for making you wait.

First, Leive and I had our 24th anniversary on Sunday, November 15.  We celebrated it at our pastor’s house, because they host a prayer group for whole families on Sunday nights.  Leive had the urge to cook, so she did most of the cooking of a Thanksgiving-style dinner again, though she was one of the guests of honor.

The main thing that Leive didn’t make was this chocolate cake.  In normal light the orange icing looked more red, but no matter!

Here we are cutting it.

The dishes we brought were a turkey, Leive’s special mashed potato recipe, yellow rice, a green bean casserole and a garden salad.  Above you can see most of the side dishes.

Rezia was there, too.  In front of her you can see the salad, cranberry sauce and gravy.

Sally, the pastor’s wife, helped carve the turkey.

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And now here are the Thanksgiving pictures.  Thursday was a slow day for us; instead of the traditional feast, we ate lightly (I mainly had a salad).  We did that because Gene and Rezia were out of town, visiting Gene’s relatives in western Kentucky.  Without them it would only be the two of us (three, if you count the parrot).  On Friday they came back, so Leive prepared the food and we invited them over.  We also invited a friend from church, Sherrie Masters, because she invited us to her birthday party the previous Sunday.

Here Leive stands behind her creations.

This is the side view.  On the left, a garden salad and the turkey.  On the right, from front to back:  a bottle of water from Kroger, fried rice, mashed potatoes, green bean casserole, halang-halang.  The poinsettias in the extreme front and rear were decorations I found on special while shopping–marked down from $5.99 to 99 cents!

A closeup of the halang-halang and the rear poinsettia.  Because it was so good for Rezia the last time she made it, Leive added extra jalapenos to make it very halang!  The persimmons and pumelos (bo’ongon) by the sink were not part of the meal.

Another view of the mashed potatoes, green bean casserole, salad and turkey.

The water and the rice again, and don’t forget the pumpkin pie!

Our guests, from left to right:  Sherrie, Gene, and Rezia.  After the meal, Leive gave them some plates of food to take home.  I was impressed at how fast Sherrie’s mother called back to thank us.

Our parrot, Brin-Brin, was surprisingly quiet.  Throughout the whole meal he didn’t move or make a sound.  He has acted normally since then, though, so I know that wasn’t a fake or stuffed parrot in the cage.  Normally he snaps when Gene is here, and cries when Rezia is here.  Maybe Leive and Sherrie were calming influences, because both of them are all right in his book.  Or maybe he’s thankful again that he wasn’t one of the courses served!

Hope your Thanksgiving was a happy one, too.

Bohemian Rhapsody, Done by the Muppets

Of course I’ve heard this song; it is more than thirty years old, and has enjoyed more than one incarnation during that time.  First Queen did it in 1975, if I remember correctly.  Then it caught a second wind in the early 1990s, when the movie “Wayne’s World” made it popular again.  And for the 2004 election there was this parody:  Political Bohemian Rhapsody.  Now a Muppet rendition of it is spreading virally across the Internet.  Over the past week Neal Boortz, the talk show host, posted the video on his website, and my brother posted it on Facebook.  Because the Muppets are always entertaining, here it is:

All your favorites make their appearances here:  Gonzo and his chickens, Ralph the piano-playing dog, Fozzie Bear, Animal, Dr. Bunsen Honeyburner, the Swedish Chef, Miss Piggy, Animal, Dr. Teeth, Sam the Eagle, and even the guy who throws the boomerang fish.  And just when you think Kermit and Scooter aren’t there, they deliver the punch line.

Now I have two comments regarding this song:

1. Could somebody post a page or video on what the lyrics mean?  ”Bohemian Rhapsody” probably has the strangest lyrics of any popular song from my generation.  I’m figuring it succeeded because Queen is such a big-name band; anything they sing is bound to get attention.  Last year I saw a YouTube video that explained each line from another popular but puzzling song, “American Pie.”  It turns out all the words there are either references to the death of Buddy Holly, or talking about other stuff happening at that time.

2. On March 14, 2008, I posted a video from Gregorian, a band that does Gregorian chant versions of modern songs.  Since then I have discovered and downloaded Songs of Queen, an album where they got medieval on twelve Queen hits.  ”Bohemian Rhapsody” wasn’t one of them; do you think they might do it in the future?