Jim Rittenhouse's semidaily journal of news, commentary and reports
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 [...]
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 [...]
Allons enfants de la Patrie, Le jour de gloire est arrivé ! To arms, to arms ye brave! The avenging sword unsheathe March on, march on All hearts resolved On victory or death!
Languages are a hot item of discussion at our house, because – well, there’s a big language gap here. Susan’s family is a mix of Norwegian, Danish and variations on British Isles, and there’s a little bit of the ‘Fargo’ Scandinavian-American accent there. Not much, mostly in word choice and the occasional ‘ya, sure‘ delivered [...]
Camembert fanciers have pushed back on laws that require it to be made with pasteurized milk only. Bristol Palin, teenaged mom, now says that abstinence-only sex-ed courses are not realistic at all…no kidding! The US Postmaster General, who says the US Post Office needs to cut services one day a week and raise prices for [...]
A French court has ruled that the Vichy government of France during World War II was instrumental in the handing over of Jews and others to the Nazis for extermination camps. Calling for a “formal admission of the state’s responsibility and of the prejudice collectively suffered”, the court said it had concluded that acts such [...]
Bush and Georgia U.S. credibility is again on the line as the Bush Administration stumbles to respond to the Russian invasion of Georgia. So far the Administration has been missing in action, to put it mildly. The strategic objective is twofold: to prevent Moscow from going further to topple Georgia’s democratic government in the coming [...]
At various times, I get into research projects; some simmer on for decades in various forms, and some break off and pick up speed because I happen to run into something that really fuels the fire, so to speak. My library here is largely one that I use for reference. I have a huge amount [...]
Cripes howdy, but I’m getting a lot of private mail on this one from that earlier post. Let me say that I was in a hurry to post, but that I had my own set of problems with all of those maps. Here’s some new maps that have been pointed out to me: This is [...]
…one of the odder bits of history I’ve run across recently was due to my old pal Rich Rostrom digging up an old docudrama called VENDETTA from 1942. I thought that the story sounded too hokey and decided to check it out…and so far, it’s generally checking out. The short version is that a family [...]
“What If France Had Not Fallen in 1940?”