Jim Rittenhouse's semidaily journal of news, commentary and reports
If I’ve been quiet again, it’s because my main PC in my office downstairs (where I’m exiled to pending the doc saying I can go up and down stairs again) has been zapped by a nasty virus. It got past my Trend Micro antivirus, and started disconnecting various things on my PC (including the virus [...]
A young student from China is Ireland-bound, and runs into a problem..agus faigheann sé amach go bhfuil an nach labhraíonn Gaeilge i bhfad Gaelic! 10 minute YouTube video, very funny and sweet: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qA0a62wmd1A
“Oranje boven, oranje boven. leve the Koningin!”
In Northern Ireland (and I’m sure my readers will correct me), the political system is way unrelated to the rest of UK politics – its own microcosm. You have a multiple divide in politics there – ethnic, religious, class, minority/majority issues, republican versus monarchist, and who smote who first and last. When you get these [...]
Epidemic of something killing off a bunch of Portuguese octopi. “Twelve hundred pounds is a lot of dead cephalopod, especially when no one seems to know for sure what killed them.”
Partially for Da, partly for the historians in the audience. Feel free to whale away on it or suggest other things; I was having real problems with a non-scholarly-to-the-point-0f-boredom book on the German Diaspora, especially to America in the 1800s. I also skipped a lot of works on regions within Germany. Yes, I believe that [...]
Bulgarian newspaper reporting about Serbian anger over Bulgaria’s support of Kosovar independence: Radio Television Serbia said that the Serbian delegation at the ICJ, led by ambassador Dušan Bataković, “believes that Bulgaria, as many times in history so far, has stuck a knife in Serbia’s back, by defending the secession of Kosovo”. The idea that the [...]
Rampaging red squirrels in France Kashmiri militants, meet bear. Bear, eat militants. Dead bison stink really bad: South Dakota meat producer abandons meat storage locker full of 44 tons of kosher bison, and the power gets cut for nonpayment.
The lives and times of the Bosonid Dynasty in France, founded by the great Boso himself, with Bivin of Gorze, the fighting abbot Hucbert, Liegardis and Hugh the Black. They married into the Carolingians, and did VERY well for themselves as small-time local nobles who went right up the ladder through their connections (mostly through [...]
(taken from the teabagger protest in DC this weekend) Lesson #1: Anyone who is not a Republican is not a Marxist. Really. Lesson #2: The last Czar in Russia gave up the throne in 1917, and the Russian Communists took over Russia in 1918; I don’t think you understand that there were no Czars in [...]
I have been listening to enough rants, hate and nonsense in the last year and a half to last me a lifetime or more, and I’ve been more than fed up with it all. But I started realizing that this sort of crud is endemic; uninformed people who choke off their sources of information to [...]
Berlin TV tower – lift off from Fabian Tischer on Vimeo.
Coming Anarchy also highlights multiple historical places with the same name; Albania, Iberia, Alexandria, various African nations, and Guinea. They don’t have one for Galicia, but they ought to.
From the Coming Anarchy site: projected maps of Europe in the future and the former Yugoslav areas, along with their tag on microstates. Personally, I strongly doubt some of this; France has been doing a thorough stomp of its minority groups (linguistics-wise, especially) for the last 100+ years to Make Everyone Parisian, and the Bosniak [...]
New blasphemy criminalization law passed by the Irish Parliament. “Under the changes, the maximum fine for blasphemy will be cut from €100,000 to €25,000.” Gee, thanks.