Though the current project started as a series of posts charting my grief journey after the death of my mother, I am no longer actively grieving. Now, the blog charts a conversation in living, mainly whatever I want it to be. This is an activity that goes well with the theme of this blog (updated 2018). The Sense of Doubt blog is dedicated to my motto: EMBRACE UNCERTAINTY. I promote questioning everything because just when I think I know something is concrete, I find out that it’s not.
Hey, Mom! The Explanation.
Here's the permanent dedicated link to my first Hey, Mom! post and the explanation of the feature it contains.
A Sense of Doubt blog post #3574 - Understanding Crows
Following on yesterday's entry on writing and pencils, I found this one in the draft queue and since I am more or less in low power mode, I unearthed it for a quick entry today because I am buried in work, too much to get done, probably.
I learned of this from Warren Ellis, as I learn many things, which is why I devoted a whole category to this author who is one of my favorites.
Ellis himself drew this passage from a review in the London Review of Books, which I have reprinted below.
The main idea of the passage struck a chord.
Long ago, in college, I rewrote Sylvia Plath's "The Medallion," one of several poems I rewrote in an attempt to understand the original and also do my version of the idea, often just based on the title.
Maybe this is what I am doing with my new work. I am making talismans, amulets, charms, medallions, seeking protection through the power of the written word, its "mysterious efficacy."
I am solving a problem that I cannot name, that I did not know needed solving.
Though it would be very cool to imbue children with the ability to understand crows, I am unsure of what problem it solves, other than the belief that crows, who are very intelligent, have something important to share.
And yet, there's a reason that a group of them is known as a Murder of Crows.
Writing to protect against harm was common in medieval England. Written amulets like the girdle were a branch of charm magic, words and rituals that invoked supernatural power, whether divine or arcane, in order to gain protection, medicine and secret knowledge. Those seeking assistance wrote down holy verses, sacred names, symbols, runes and pure nonsense in the hope of harnessing the mysterious efficacy of the written word. Charms were used to confront every manner of problem, from life-threatening illness and terrible misfortune down to the very smallest inconvenience: to cure insomnia or soothe an abdominal stitch; to stop vermin from getting at grain; for the recovery of stolen goods or when someone accidently swallowed an insect. There were charms for problems that you never even knew needed solving. One promised to imbue children with the capacity to understand crows
Textual Magic: Charms and Written Amulets in Medieval
England
by Katherine
Storm Hindley.
Chicago, 299 pp., £36, August 2023, 978 0 226 82533 5
In the Wellcome Collection, there is a 15th-century
parchment roll that works as a kind of holy tape measure. Unfurled to its
fullest extent, the manuscript gauges the combined height of Jesus and the
Virgin Mary: about three and a half metres if they were standing one on top of
the other. On the dorse is a text promising that whoever carries ‘thys mesure’
around with them – rolled up it is quite small, fitting easily into a pouch or
a pocket – will receive divine protection from pestilence, wrongful judgment,
stormy weather, devils and fire, as well as protection during childbirth.
Historians have long suspected that the roll was used as a birth girdle. At
just ten centimetres wide, it resembles a very long belt, and would have been
wrapped (a few times over) around a woman’s waist during delivery for ritual
protection. Among the texts on the front of the roll are invocations of St
Julitta, the patron saint of family happiness, and her infant son St Cyricus,
patron of sickly children. Its images are heavily worn, a sign of frequent
touching, and they are covered in blotchy russet stains. In 2021 a team of
bioarchaeologists investigated the marks. They found residues of honey, broad
beans and sheep or goat’s milk – all used in obstetric medicine – as well as
proteins associated with human cervico-vaginal fluid. The roll promised that if
a pregnant woman ‘gyrde thys mesure abowte hyr wombe’, the baby would live to
his christening and the mother to her churching. That it was used and preserved
suggests it was thought to work, at least some of the time.
Writing to protect against harm was common in medieval
England. Written amulets like the girdle were a branch of charm magic, words
and rituals that invoked supernatural power, whether divine or arcane, in order
to gain protection, medicine and secret knowledge. Those seeking assistance
wrote down holy verses, sacred names, symbols, runes and pure nonsense in the
hope of harnessing the mysterious efficacy of the written word. Charms were
used to confront every manner of problem, from life-threatening illness and
terrible misfortune down to the very smallest inconvenience: to cure insomnia
or soothe an abdominal stitch; to stop vermin from getting at grain; for the
recovery of stolen goods or when someone accidently swallowed an insect. There
were charms for problems that you never even knew needed solving. One promised
to imbue children with the capacity to understand crows.
To make an amulet, it wasn’t enough to jot down a few
prayers on a spare piece of parchment. For text to be efficacious, it had to be
written in the right manner, on the right substance, and used in the right way.
Some amulet charms were simple, with incantations or prayers to be uttered.
Others recommended cryptic ceremonies: one charm for swellings instructed the
healer to take a stick of hazel, cut the patient’s name into it and fill each
of the incised letters with blood, throw it over their shoulder (or between
their thighs) into running water, stand over the patient, and then strike
through the inscription. ‘And do all that silently.’ Whether thrown into rivers
or simply carried on one’s person, most written amulets have long since worn
away. But there are many surviving manuscript books containing the recipes that
told people how to make and use such texts. Katherine Storm Hindley’s Textual
Magic rests on a catalogue of more than 1100 recipes (unfortunately
the link to its accompanying online database is currently broken – send prayers
to Isidore of Seville, patron saint of the internet). With this corpus of
evidence, Hindley reveals the ways medieval people imagined the possibilities
of writing, and the strange ways in which it might affect the world.
The mystical efficacy of text was essential to Christian
cosmology. In the beginning, the word was with God; at the end, a passage in
Revelation describes an angel appearing to St John holding an open book and
instructing him to eat it: ‘it will make your stomach bitter, but it will be as
sweet as honey in your mouth.’ In the 12th-century Glossa Ordinaria,
the standard set of medieval biblical commentaries, some passages of the Bible
were said to be like food, in need of chewing over, while others were like
drink, easily swigged down. The writers of charm recipes took the metaphor
literally. Holy texts for amulets could be written on bread or sage leaves,
sketched in chalk or daubed out in the blood of the person seeking protection;
they might be worn or wrapped about the body, but also eaten, mixed into a
potion or ritually destroyed. A recipe to protect chickens instructed the user
to write the Paternoster on a piece of parchment, wash the text with water, and
have the fowl drink the inky fluid. A whole subgenre of charms for fevers
involved writing magic words on communion wafers. Such prescriptions were part
of a worldview that understood matter – including human bodies, nothing but
ashes and clay – to be radically permeable. Pilgrims to Canterbury drank holy
water from St Thomas Becket’s shrine because it was thought to be mixed with
his blood; they chewed the melted wax or burnt wicks of the candles that lay
before the altar. St Hugh, bishop of Lincoln, was so holy that he took a bite
out of a relic: the arm bone of Mary Magdalene, kept at Fécamp Abbey in
Normandy. As he pointed out to the horrified onlookers, he consumed Christ’s
body every Sunday at Mass, so what was the problem?
Both spoken prayers and written charms drew on the same
logic of divine efficacy, teasing at the correspondences between holy words and
worldly ailments. The charm for a stitch instructed the sufferer to draw the
sign of the cross and sing incantations about Longinus, the soldier said to
have speared Christ in the Passion; the charm for insomnia drew on the
religious legend of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus, their names inscribed on
leek leaves to furnish a sleeping pill. Such invocations can seem too literal-minded,
even unimaginative. But this analogical reasoning revelled in the mystical
possibilities of language, the way that words can alter things. To mark matter
with meaning – a knife or a nib on a leek leaf, a piece of parchment – was to
change the world, to play God; writing made a physical impression on the great
waxen mass of Creation. To write a charm text was to sculpt a little bit of
reality for yourself.
In a 14th-century manuscript held in the Bodleian, one
recipe gives a charm to secure favours, promising that ‘you may have whatever
you want.’ It consists of a short prayer and a sequence of letters with no
recognisable meaning, separated by crosses. At some later date, a reader went
through the text with a needle, pricking pinholes through the letter shapes of
the magical phrase; they seem to have been employing the technique known as
‘pouncing’, in which chalk or charcoal was rubbed over the pricked surface to
transfer the image onto a new sheet underneath. Magic leached through the forms
of letters like water through limestone. As Hindley points out, amuletic texts
became like relics, held close to provide succour. A 15th-century ‘charm for
the toth ache’ told sufferers to write down the name of St Apollonia – the
patron saint of dentists, known to medieval Christians for having had her teeth
knocked out when she was martyred – and carry it around with them. To feed a woman
in childbirth little pieces of butter inscribed with prayers was to alter her
substance, to infuse her body with hopeful, holy presence.
But in the great wash of substances it was easy to confuse
the world with the word, mistake effect for cause, and place one’s faith in
idols. Theologians were often uneasy about amulets because they veered so close
to breaking the first commandment. In the eighth century, Alcuin of York
suggested it was ‘better to have gospel teachings written in the mind than to
wear them around the neck scribbled on scraps of parchment’. Thomas Aquinas
held that amulets were not inherently wrong, but no faith should be placed in
‘some irrelevance, for instance that the locket [containing the words] is
triangular and the like, which has no bearing on the reverence due to God and
the saints’. Though amulets were not prohibited in theory, in practice they
were associated with forms of lay superstition that Church authorities sought
to discourage. In 1448 John Dixson, a cook, was hauled before inquisitors of
the bishop of Lincoln ‘for invocations of malign spirits, in order to find
stolen goods’. He was said to have placed a key inside a psalter, along with ‘a
bill containing the names of those who were suspected’; if the identification
was correct, the book would tremble. This charm was at least more hygienic than
his backup plan, which involved the hand of a corpse.
Hindley is a sure-footed guide to this strange terrain; she
maintains scholarly solemnity while discussing elf hiccups and finds a way to
translate the phrase ‘I adjure you, egg, by the living God’ from encrypted
Latin. She traces the use of amulets across the whole span of the Middle Ages,
and the ways it was affected by linguistic change and the spread of literacy.
With charms, spoken and written language took different trajectories. Recipes
generally gave oral incantations in vernacular: Old English, in the period
before 1100; Anglo-Norman French in the 12th and 13th centuries; and
Middle English in the 14th and 15th. By contrast, the texts inscribed on
amulets were almost always written in Latin, the mysterious language of
official religion. Before the Norman Conquest, some efficacious words were
composed in Old English. But after 1100 only around 1 per cent of recipes
specified any English for amulets – all of them variations on the same charm to
prevent a haw in a horse’s eye. Even as vernacular writing in every genre (and
even translations of the Bible) became common in the later Middle Ages,
amuletic texts continued to reserve a special efficacy for Latin.
Yet these texts were far from conservative. The more obtuse
the language, the more magical it might be. Amulets made free use of Greek
letters, Hebrew, runes and all kinds of luxuriant gibberish: ‘Byrnice, byrnice,
lurlure iehe aius, aius, aius’ (this is the charm for elf hiccups). It is
pleasing to learn that even ‘abracadabra’ is a term of great antiquity. In the
third-century writings of Quintus Serenus Sammonicus, circulated in the later
Middle Ages, readers are told to write out the phrase like this:
abracadabra
bracadabra
racadabra
acadabra
cadabra
adabra
dabra
abra
bra
ra
a
This amuletic triangle was to be worn around the neck
suspended from a linen thread, to protect against dangerous illness.
Amulets also drew on sham alphabets, pseudo-writing and
non-signifying marks. In a manuscript of the physician John Bradmore, a charm
for spasms instructed that the magical phrase ‘Thebal Guthe Guthanay’ should be
‘written in Greek letters lest they should be seen easily by anyone’. Although
he made a stab at Hellenising a few of the symbols, most look like some kind of
alien semaphore, an alphabet having a bad dream. Bradmore is better known for
inventing a device that safely pulled an arrow from the face of the future
Henry V, wounded in battle. I wonder what kinds of words issued from the royal
tongue.
Hindley argues that the 14th and 15th centuries
saw greater concern with the secrecy of amuletic texts, a surprising side
effect of the spread of literacy: as more people came to be able to read,
particularly in English, it became harder to maintain the idea that writing
contained occult power. Without mystery, there could be no efficacy. Another
copy of Bradmore’s spasm charm put it bluntly: the words must be ‘kept secretly
to prevent everyone from learning the charm, in case by chance it should lose
its God-given power’. Keeping medicinal knowledge mysterious was also a means
of preventing folk healers from horning in on the work of physicians. In 1382,
Roger Clerk was prosecuted in London for impersonating a physician, after
prescribing ‘an old parchment ... a leaf of some book’ for fevers.
Asked what was written there, he recited some Latin. But when the aldermen came
to read it, none of what he said was in fact on the sheet. He was sentenced to
be ridden through the city carrying the illicit tools of his trade: urine
flasks, a whetstone and the amulet itself.
Concern about fraudsters was married to a greater anxiety
about the efficacy of charm magic. Even the recipes themselves begin to hint at
the existence of doubt, including a note after a charm: ‘it is proven.’
Although there was no concept of scientific experimentation as we would
recognise it, writers chose to anticipate readers’ scepticism with an appeal to
experience. An elaborate 15th-century charm for festering wounds claimed to be
‘an experiment I proved, though [it] ... seems more that it be
witchcraft than wellness’. In some parts of Europe, there was a swell of fear
in the later Middle Ages about occult magic, leading to a number of witch
trials. But in England authorities were more worried about heresy: the Lollard
movement, which spread from the writings of John Wycliffe, threatened the
fundamental tenets of ecclesiastical authority by perceiving a great deal of
‘superstition’ in traditional religion itself. Lollards condemned the many holy
relics, miraculous shrines and weeping images of late medieval Catholicism as
false idols, and even challenged the transubstantiation of the Eucharist – not
Christ’s body, but a metaphor. In this context, it became much harder for
ecclesiastical authorities to sustain the long-standing accord between
quasi-magical folk practices and official Church teaching; Lollards loved
nothing more than to point out the similarities. Among the ‘Twelve Conclusions
of the Lollards’, a list anonymously posted on the doors of Westminster Abbey
in 1395, was a condemnation of the blessings of bread, wax, water, salt and oil
in parish churches up and down the country – ‘the very practice of necromancy
rather than of the holy theology’.
Lollards sought to purify religion of magic, to denude all
supernatural power by pointing to the rotten earthiness of an unenchanted
world. Margery Baxter, tried for heresy in Norwich in 1429, reasoned with her
inquisitor that ‘a thousand priests and more every day make a thousand gods [in
the form of the Eucharist] and they eat such gods ... and emit them
from the rear into foul stinking privies, where you can find as many gods as
you want if you care to look.’ Elizabeth Sampson, hauled before the bishop of
London, put it more succinctly: Our Lady of Willesden ‘was a brent ars Elfe’.
But as bishops went hunting through parishes for heresy, they also found people
who held the old ways disturbingly close, with a fervent belief in the power of
ritual words. In 1520, Henry Lillyngstone was charged by a Church court for
using magic to heal people. Asked how his cures worked, he replied that he had
just one medicine, an English charm: ‘Jesus that savid bothe you and me from
all maner deseasses I aske for seynt cherite our lord iff it be your wille.’
The judge asked him if he was literate; no, he said, ‘he had this knowledge
from the grace of God.’ He was told to hold the Book of Gospels and swear an
oath that he would stop.
As rates of literacy continued to rise, the use of charm
magic came to mark out people who remained at the margins of lettered society.
A manual for priests issued by Caxton in 1489 wearily addressed the continued
use of ‘wrytynges and bryvettes [letters] full of crosses and other wrytynges’
for protection against drowning, fire, sickness and general peril. People who
sold such amulets, or who refused to stop using them after being warned, should
be excommunicated. ‘But yf they be symple people and so ignoraunt ... they
[may] be excused.’
Through the Middle Ages spoken words had been granted a
special power in the fabric of social reality. They exercised a binding force
on people: marriage contracts, commercial bargains, formal accusations, oaths
of innocence. The social contract was not a metaphor – it consisted in the oral
promises that underlay almost every kind of relationship. Written charms could
stand enigmatically apart from this world, the magic of inscription efficacious
because it was distinctive. But the proliferation of writing in medieval
society unbalanced the ecology of the oral and the written. Increasingly,
everyday life was transcribed, registered and archived. In chanceries and
schoolrooms, in cabinets and deed chests, parchments and papers piled up like
some terrible curse run out of control; parishioners needed a certificate to
prove they had confessed before they took Easter communion, written
testimonials to prove they hadn’t been married before they took their vows. The
sorcery of writing had escaped the world of elves and begun to infuse the
enchantments of education and bureaucracy.
In an earlier era, it had been easier to maintain the holy
mysteries at the heart of inscription, to celebrate the strange relations of
meaning and reality. Thomas of Chobham, writing at the turn of the 13th century,
had it from the natural philosophers that ‘the force of nature is especially
placed in three things: in words, and herbs, and in stones. Although we know
something about the power of herbs and stones, about the power of words we have
known little or nothing.’ It’s a mystery we’re still unravelling.
- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2411.30 - 10:10
- Days ago: MOM = 3438 days ago & DAD = 094 days ago
- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.
A Sense of Doubt blog post #3573 - New Pencil & Eraser -Thank You to Adrian Tomine - Doing Some Writing
I have been doing some writing in the notebook seen above. I bought it and the two pens clipped to it in Iceland, in a shop in Reykjavik.
I have been trying to get the right mechanical pencil for my work. I don't draw. And I write in pen. The pencil is used mostly for making lists, though when I was studying math, I used the pencil quite a bit.
A Japanese student gave me a Captain America pencil that I like a lot, but it was out of commission for some time when it ran out of lead as I did not know what size it used. I like a thin lead, such as 0.5 mm. I am also on the lookout for erasers. The one pictured on the book above is nice and useful but the cheap construction often makes it flawed, the eraser won't stay in place, keeps retracting because the clip is not tight enough.
So, when Adrian Tomine -- one of my all-time favorite creators; I own ALL of this books and comics -- published Q&A pictured above, I bought it and was intrigued by the pencils and implements on the cover. Thankfully, i's not just an image, but he has a whole chapter on the gear he uses.
I purchased immediately.
The pencil on the left of the cover with mine sitting next to it is the
Muji Low Center of Gravity Mechanical Pencil [0.3mm] + MUJI Japan Mechanical Pencil Refill Leads [0.3mm - HB] 12pcs x 2 packs
Though I found that I liked the 0.5 mm leads, I may like the 0.3 lead even more. And the pencil is just fantastic. I can imagine that if I drew that the low center of gravity would be a huge bonus.
Not pictured on the cover is the eraser that I am showing in the package:
Tombow 57317 Mono Zero Eraser Value Pack, Rectangle 2.5mm. Precision Tip Pen-Style Eraser with Refill
I haven't tried it yet, but I expect that I will adore it.
I attended a lecture on Origami recently given by a friend, and in it, I started a poem, inspired by the visit of Kimberly King Parsons (KKP), our NW Voices author, and her description of a technique known as "consecution." I doubt I am applying consecution appropriately, but what little I learned of it, with an Internet search executed to learn more and share in a future blog post, I merged that method with a kind of Burroughs-Bowie cut and paste word salad method.
I am preparing a post about the poem and the entire writing process, but it's not done yet.
I am not sure the poem is done yet either.
However, the poem work started the creative juices flowing again and I have been noodling a novella I started two years ago.
I am also reading poetry and thinking about other explorations in which the order of the day is to "play," which was my main takeaway from KKP. I have lost a sense of play in my writing.
- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2411.29 - 10:10
- Days ago: MOM = 3437 days ago & DAD = 93 days ago
- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I post Hey Mom blog entries on special occasions. I post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day, and now I have a second count for Days since my Dad died on August 28, 2024. I am now in the same time zone as Google! So, when I post at 10:10 a.m. PDT to coincide with the time of Mom's death, I am now actually posting late, so it's really 1:10 p.m. EDT. But I will continue to use the time stamp of 10:10 a.m. to remember the time of her death and sometimes 13:40 EDT for the time of Dad's death. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.
A Sense of Doubt blog post #3572 - THANKSGIVING 2024 - DAD: Three Months Ago - Reprints and Happy Wishes
Happy Thanksgiving to any one who clicks into here.
Thank you. I am grateful to you.
Since when is Thanksgiving this late in the month?
Why is Thanksgiving on the 28th in 2024 in the USA?
In 2024, Thanksgiving will be observed on Thursday, November 28. Thanksgiving has been held on the fourth Thursday in November since 1941, which means that the date of the holiday shifts each year. The earliest Thanksgiving can occur is November 22; the latest is November 28.
The universe once again aligned for Thanksgiving to be today, 11/28, as my Dad died on August 28th, just three months ago to the day, ninety-two days.
I was going to be sad and thinking of my parents today anyway, but to have Thanksgiving fall on THE day of Dad's death this year seems significant, like so many of the significant date and number things surrounding his death.
I am planning a more extensive reflection on the 100th day, which will be Friday December Sixth.
Last year, I actually published this blog entry linked below ON Thanksgiving and the Arlo Guthrie post the next day.
I have collected reprints here. I have last year's post as well as the one from 2022 that collects all the HEY MOM Thanksgiving posts from 2015 to 2021.
These reprints are linked and copied below.
The Lions game starts in a couple of hours from when I type these words, though it's in session when this blog entry publishes.
I am NOT working today.
I am not DOING ANY WORK today.
This is a rarity.
I do have three in box messages from students, but I am NOT ANSWERING THEM until tomorrow.
But, grad school...
And even though I have an assignment due for grad school, I might wait and do it tomorrow and take the late penalty if the instructor has the temerity to apply it when the assignment is due ON THANKSGIVING. If it was my class, I would have made clear that I would not apply the late penalty OR just moved the due date. I am really offended that Walden will be in session through the Christmas and New Year's holidays. All the schools I work for are in session during Thanksgiving, but there's usually a recess of some kind and leniency.
Decided. Unless I have a surge of guilt and/or the energy and wherewithal to do it, then I am doing it tomorrow.
Though I will always remember Thanksgiving 1981. I was going to school in the same town where I lived. But instead of going home, I stayed at school. My paper on Moby Dick was late. I got up at 5:30 in the morning to start reading. That is normal for me now, but back then, it was UNHEARD OF.
I read Moby Dick all day and at some point started working on the paper.
I ate cold pizza that they served in the President's Dining Room.
I wrote a good sized essay on the music of David Bowie as a prologue to my Moby Dick essay that was mostly about the album Scary Monsters and Super Creeps even though I called the essay "Yassassin" from Lodger (which I had just bought), which is Turkish for "Long Live."
I did go home the next year but I also spent time on campus because then I was dating someone amazing.
I wish I had more pictures of my Dad.
GO LIONS!
Happy Thanksgiving!
Thanks for tuning in.
LOW POWER MODE: I sometimes put the blog in what I call LOW POWER MODE. If you see this note, the blog is operating like a sleeping computer, maintaining static memory, but making no new computations. If I am in low power mode, it's because I do not have time to do much that's inventive, original, or even substantive on the blog. This means I am posting straight shares, limited content posts, reprints, often something qualifying for the THAT ONE THING category and other easy to make posts to keep me daily. That's the deal. Thanks for reading.
This is the original 1967 full/album version of the song, so enjoy!
Alice’s Restaurant. It’s now a Thanksgiving classic, and something of a tradition around here. Recorded in 1967, the 18+ minute counterculture song recounts Arlo Guthrie’s real encounter with the law, starting on Thanksgiving Day 1965. As the long song unfolds, we hear all about how a hippie-baiting police officer, by the name of William “Obie” Obanhein, arrested Arlo for littering. (Cultural footnote: Obie previously posed for several Norman Rockwell paintings, including the well-known painting, “The Runaway,” that graced a 1958 cover of The Saturday Evening Post.) In fairly short order, Arlo pleads guilty to a misdemeanor charge, pays a $25 fine, and cleans up the trash. But the story isn’t over. Not by a long shot. Later, when Arlo (son of Woody Guthrie) gets called up for the draft, the petty crime ironically becomes a basis for disqualifying him from military service in the Vietnam War. Guthrie recounts this with some bitterness as the song builds into a satirical protest against the war: “I’m sittin’ here on the Group W bench ’cause you want to know if I’m moral enough to join the Army, burn women, kids, houses and villages after bein’ a litterbug.” And then we’re back to the cheery chorus again: “You can get anything you want, at Alice’s Restaurant.”
We have featured Guthrie’s classic during past years. But, for this Thanksgiving, we give you the illustrated version. Happy Thanksgiving to everyone who plans to celebrate the holiday today.
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+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ - Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2311.24 - 10:10 - Days ago = 3066 days ago +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
A Sense of Doubt blog post #2837 - Thanksgiving 2022 - Sense of Doubt and Hey Mom Reprints 2015-2021
Nearly caught up.
The photo above shows the Buffalo Bills who just narrowly beat my Detroit Lions gorging on turkey at Ford Field.
If I actually published this post at 10:10 a.m. on 11/24 what is depicted in that photo had not happened yet.
But I can dilate time when I am behind on posting daily blogs.
Here's my annual series of reprints from Thanksgiving posts in the past, featuring my original gratitude post because I am grateful for so many things, to many to list though I have reflected on all.
Happy Thanksgiving for what it has come to mean not the lie on which it is based.
LOW POWER MODE: I sometimes put the blog in what I call LOW POWER MODE. If you see this note, the blog is operating like a sleeping computer, maintaining static memory, but making no new computations. If I am in low power mode, it's because I do not have time to do much that's inventive, original, or even substantive on the blog. This means I am posting straight shares, limited content posts, reprints, often something qualifying for the THAT ONE THING category and other easy to make posts to keep me daily. That's the deal. Thanks for reading.
A Sense of Doubt blog post #2473 - Thanksgiving 2021 Stormbreaker and reprint of 2020
I gave Rebecca Watson's spiel on Thanksgiving below in class Tuesday, and I cried. The tears came when I embellished talking about missing my Dad and kids and telling loved ones how you feel about them and stories about my mother. The rush of emotion was intense.
Anyway, see that below.
Today is a reprint.
Oh, and I won this Stormbreaker axe, replica of Thor's weapon from Avengers 3: Infinity War.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ - Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2111.25 - 10:10 - Days ago = 2337 days ago +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #1216 (SoD #2109) - Thanksgiving 2020
I have been thinking a lot about you lately. I miss you a great deal right now. I think a lot about how you would cope with this whole dumpster fire of a year we're having. There were times when something like the coronavirus would have made you VERY VERY nervous. It makes me nervous and my health is not really compromised.
But there are many good things along with the challenges, and I am most thankful not only to be taking the day off work (and then another day Sunday) but also that I am ahead on my blog creation that this post will go up around the time the time stamp says it did and that I have a restful day planned of cooking, eating, and relaxing to books and TV shows or movies.
I pitched a great deal of the content of the video below, written by Rebecca Watson, to my students earlier this week, and thought I got through comments about telling family we love and appreciate them because there will come a day when we cannot, I got really overwhelmed with emotion the third time I said it and had to pause to collect myself. I will include those comments below, just above the video. Watson captured much of what I wanted to say anyway, and so I modified her comments slightly and praised her for such wisdom and fine writing on her Patreon page.
I am thankful for so many things, especially this year with all the struggles we have faced to quarantine, shelter in place. I know in the last fifteen years of your life that this would not have been a problem for you, Mom, though you would have missed the mall.
To all my readers, all two of you, thanks for tuning in. Stay for the videos and the history lesson below.
and...
HAPPY THANKSGIVING (if that's your thing)!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
ON GRATITUDE (modified slightly but written by Rebecca Watson as seen in the video below):
I’ve always loved Thanksgiving as a holiday for, in a way, checking your privilege. The way Thanksgiving started, as a myth meant to whitewash the European treatment of indigenous people, is complete and utter bullshit but honestly that’s true of most holidays.
While it’s important to call that out and put an end to the outright lies, it’s also worth hanging on to what the holiday has come to mean: taking a moment to think of all the things in your life that are good, and just sitting with that and being grateful for a minute.
For instance, 2020 sucks ass but I’m extremely privileged to be able to still have a job, to have a partner who also still has a job, to have the two most beautiful dogs in the world, to have a warm home and a pantry full of food, to have friends who are always just a text or a zoom call away.
Thanksgiving is a great reminder to think of all that, and to realize that other people aren’t so lucky, and to reflect on how I might be able to help those other people have those things for next Thanksgiving.
That’s the cool thing about holidays, in general -- the ones that catch on do so not because of the reason they started, but because over time humans tend to find nearly universal good things to celebrate.
Some people celebrate Christmas as a religious holiday, but the reason why it’s popular is because of pretty lights, a spirit of giving, and delicious food. Mother’s Day has roots in the Church making everyone travel back to their birthplace to go to church and give them money, but now it’s about making our moms feel appreciated. Way better!
Every “religious” holiday eventually becomes secular, because people attach meaning to it that transcends religious beliefs and divisions.
And so it’s true of Thanksgiving. It started as a lie, but ultimately it will persist because people like to eat good food, connect with family and friends, and reflect on what they have that makes life worth living. Unfortunately, one of those things should be skipped this year, at least in person. But if people think that the only thing worthwhile about Thanksgiving is getting to sit around a table with your family in person, then they have missed the reason why I and so many others love it. Be thankful for what you have. Tell your family and friends how much you appreciate them and love them because there will come a day when you won't be able to. And then demonstrate that appreciation by keeping them safe. Stay home, stay alive, stay thankful until next year.
Pocahontas’ (Melissa Villaseñor) boyfriend, John Smith (Beck Bennett), comes over for Thanksgiving dinner with her family (Will Ferrell, Maya Rudolph, Fred Armisen).
6 Ridiculous Lies You Believe About the Founding of America
When it comes to the birth of America, most of us are working from a stew of elementary school history lessons, Westerns and vague Thanksgiving mythology. And while it's not surprising those sources might biff a couple details, what's shocking is how much less interesting the version we learned was. It turns out our teachers, Hollywood and whoever we got our Thanksgiving mythology from (Big Turkey?) all made America's origin story far more boring than it actually was for some very disturbing reasons. For instance ...
6
The Indians Weren't Defeated by White Settlers
The Myth:
Our history books don't really go into a ton of detail about how the Indians became an endangered species. Some warring, some smallpox blankets and ... death by broken heart?
When American Indians show up in movies made by conscientious white people like Oliver Stone, they usually lament having their land taken from them. The implication is that Native Americans died off like a species of tree-burrowing owl that couldn't hack it once their natural habitat was paved over.
But if we had to put the whole Cowboys and Indians battle in a Hollywood log line, we'd say the Indians put up a good fight, but were no match for the white man's superior technology. As surely as scissors cuts paper and rock smashes scissors, gun beats arrow. That's just how it works.
This is all the American history you'll ever need to know.
The Truth:
There's a pretty important detail our movies and textbooks left out of the handoff from Native Americans to white European settlers: It begins in the immediate aftermath of a full-blown apocalypse. In the decades between Columbus' discovery of America and the Mayflower landing at Plymouth Rock, the most devastating plague in human history raced up the East Coast of America. Just two years before the pilgrims started the tape recorder on New England's written history, the plague wiped out about 96 percent of the Indians in Massachusetts.
In the years before the plague turned America into The Stand, a sailor named Giovanni da Verrazzano sailed up the East Coast and described it as "densely populated" and so "smoky with Indian bonfires" that you could smell them burning hundreds of miles out at sea. Using your history books to understand what America was like in the 100 years after Columbus landed there is like trying to understand what modern day Manhattan is like based on the post-apocalyptic scenes from I Am Legend.
"They call it 'The city that never sleeps' because the only guy who lives there is a notoriously sarcastic rapper."
Historians estimate that before the plague, America's population was anywhere between 20 and 100 million (Europe's at the time was 70 million). The plague would eventually sweep West, killing at least 90 percent of the native population. For comparison's sake, the Black Plague killed off between 30 and 60 percent of Europe's population.
While this all might seem like some heavy shit to lay on a bunch of second graders, your high school and college history books weren't exactly in a hurry to tell you the full story. Which is strange, because many historians believe it is the single most important event in American history. But it's just more fun to believe that your ancestors won the land by being the superior culture.
Getty Yay for apocalypse profiteering!
European settlers had a hard enough time defeating the Mad Max-style stragglers of the once huge Native American population, even with superior technology. You have to assume that the Native Americans at full strength would have made shit powerfully real for any pale faces trying to settle the country they had already settled. Of course, we don't really need to assume anything about how real the American Indians kept it, thanks to the many people who came before the pilgrims. For instance, if you liked playing cowboys and Indians as a kid, you should know that you could have been playing vikings and Indians, because that shit actually happened. But before we get to how they kicked Viking ass, you probably need to know that ...
American Indians lived in balance with mother earth, father moon, brother coyote and sister ... bear? Does that just sound right because of the Berenstain Bears? Whichever animal they thought was their sister, the point is, the Indians were leaving behind a small carbon footprint before elements were wearing shoes. If the government was taken over by hippies tomorrow, the directionless, ecologically friendly society they'd institute is about what we picture the Native Americans as having lived like.
"Our foreign policy can be summed up with one word: peyote."
The Truth:
The Indians were so good at killing trees that a team of Stanford environmental scientists think they caused a mini ice age in Europe. When all of the tree-clearing Indians died in the plague, so many trees grew back that it had a reverse global warming effect. More carbon dioxide was sucked from the air, the Earth's atmosphere held on to less heat, and Al Gore cried a single tear of joy.
One of the best examples of how we got Native Americans all wrong is Cahokia, a massive Native American city located in modern day East St. Louis. In 1250, it was bigger than London, and featured a sophisticated society with an urban center, satellite villages and thatched-roof houses lining the central plazas. While the city was abandoned by the time white people got to it, the evidence they left behind suggests a complex economy with trade routes from the Great Lakes all the way down to the Gulf of Mexico.
Herb Roe Contrary to what museums told us, the loin cloth was not the most advanced Native American technology.
And that's not even mentioning America's version of the Great Pyramid: Monk's Mound. You know how people treat the very existence of the Great Pyramid in Egypt as one of history's most confounding mysteries? Well, Cahokia's pyramid dwarfs that one, both in size and in degree of difficulty. The mound contains more than 2.16 billion pounds of soil, some of which had to be carried from hundreds of miles away, to make sure the city's giant monument was vividly colored. To put that in perspective, all 13 million people who live in the state of Illinois today would have to carry three 50-pound baskets of soil from as far away as Indiana to construct another one.
"What if we built a middle finger large enough to flip off God?"
So why does Egypt get millions of dollars of tourism and Time Life documentaries dedicated to their boring old sand pyramids, while you didn't even know about the giant blue, red, white, black, gray, brown and orange testament to engineering and human willpower just outside of St. Louis? Well, because the Egyptians know how to treat one of the Eight Wonders of the World. America, on the other hand, appears to be trying to figure out how to turn it into a parking lot.
In the realm of personal hygiene, the Europeans out-hippied the Indians by a foul smelling mile. Europeans at the time thought baths attracted the black humors, or some such bullshit, because they never washed and were amazed by the Indians' interest in personal cleanliness. The natives, for their part, viewed Europeans as "just plain smelly" according to first hand records.
The Native Americans didn't hate Europeans just for the clouds of shit-smelling awfulness they dragged around behind them. Missionaries met Indians who thought Europeans were "physically weak, sexually untrustworthy, atrociously ugly" and "possessed little intelligence in comparison to themselves." The Europeans didn't do much to debunk the comparison in the physical beauty department. Verrazzano, the sailor who witnessed the densely populated East Coast, called a native who boarded his ship "as beautiful in stature and build as I can possibly describe," before presumably adding, "you know, for a dude." This man-crush wasn't an isolated incident. British fisherman William Wood described the Indians in New England as "more amiable to behold, though dressed only in Adam's finery, than ... an English dandy in the newest fashion." Or, with the bullshit removed, "Better looking than any of us, and they're not even fucking trying."
Getty "Oh yeah, this is just my walkin' around paint."
OK, now that we got that out of the way, we can tell you about the historical slash-fiction your history teacher forgot to tell you actually freaking happened.
4
Columbus Didn't Discover America: Vikings vs. Indians
The Myth:
America was discovered in 1492 because Europeans were starting to get curious about the outside world thanks to the Renaissance and Enlightenment and Europeans of the time just generally being the first smart people ever. Columbus named the people who already lived there Indians, presumably because he was being charmingly self-deprecating.
"I don't know what we'll call the people from actual India. That's the future's problem."
The Truth:
Here's what we know. A bunch of vikings set up a successful colony in Greenland that lasted for 518 years (982-1500). To put that into perspective, the white European settlement currently known as the United States will need to wait until the year 2125 to match that longevity. The vikings spent a good portion of that time sending expeditions down south to try to settle what they called Vineland -- which historians now believe was the East Coast of North America. Some place the vikings as far south as modern day North Carolina.
"The South will pillage again!"
After spending a couple decades sneaking ashore to raid Vineland of its ample wood pulp, the vikings made a go of settling North America in 1005. After landing there with livestock, supplies and between 100 and 300 settlers, they set up the first successful European American colony ... for two years. And then the Native Americans kicked their ass out of the country, shooting the head viking in the heart with an arrow.
So to recap, the vikings discovered America. They were camping off the coast of America, and had every reason to settle America for about 500 years. Despite being the biggest badasses in European history, one tangle with the natives was enough to convince the vikings that settling America wasn't worth the trouble. If you think the pilgrims would have fared any better than the vikings against an East Coast chock-full of Native Americans, you either don't know what a viking is or you're placing entirely too much stock in the strategic importance of having belt buckles on your shoes.
If the Indians had been at full strength in 1640, white people might still be sneaking onto the East Coast to steal wood pulp. That's as far as the vikings got in 500 years, and they were sailing from much closer than Europe and desperately needed the resources -- the two competing theories for why the viking settlements on Greenland eventually died out are lack of resources and getting killed by natives -- and, perhaps most importantly, they were goddamned vikings.
So why did your history teachers lie? This should have been history teachers' version of dinosaurs: a mostly unknown period of violent awesomeness they nevertheless told you about because they knew it would hook every male between the ages of 5 and 12 forever.
Consider this one a freebie, Hollywood.
It turns out that many of the awesomest stories had to be paved over by the bullshit you memorized in order to protect your teachers and parents from awkward conversations. Like the one about how ...
3
Everything You Know About Columbus Is a Calculated Lie
The Myth:
Columbus discovered America thanks to a daring journey across the Atlantic. His crew was about to throw him overboard when land was spotted. Even after he landed in America, Columbus didn't realize he'd discovered an entire continent because maps of America were far less reliable back then. In one of the great tragedies of history, Columbus went to his grave poor, believing he'd merely discovered India. Nobody really "got" America's potential until the pilgrims showed up and successfully settled the country for the first time. Nearly 150 years might seem like a long time between trips, but boats were really slow back in those days, and they'd just learned that the Atlantic Ocean went that far.
"Pile into a tiny boat with dozens of filthy people for months on end" isn't the world's most attractive sales pitch.
The Truth:
First of all, Columbus wasn't the first to cross the Atlantic. Nor were the vikings. Two Native Americans landed in Holland in 60 B.C. and were promptly not given a national holiday by anyone. Columbus didn't see the enormous significance of his ability to cross the Atlantic because it wasn't especially significant. His voyage wasn't particularly difficult. They enjoyed smooth sailing, and nobody was threatening to throw him overboard. Despite what history books tell kids (and the Internet apparently believes), Columbus died wealthy, and with a pretty good idea of what he'd found -- on his third voyage to America, he wrote in his journal, "I have come to believe that this is a mighty continent which was hitherto unknown."
"Unknown" in this context means "inhabited by tens of millions."
The myths surrounding him cover up the fact that Columbus was calculating, shrewd and as hungry for gold as the voice over guy in the Cash4Gold ads. When he couldn't find enough of the yellow stuff to make his voyage profitable, he focused on enslaving Native Americans for profit. That's how efficient Columbus was -- he discovered America and invented American slavery in the same 15-year span.
There were plenty of unsuccessful, mostly horrible attempts to settle America between Columbus' discovery and the pilgrims' arrival. We only hear these two "settling of America" stories because history books and movies aren't huge fans of what white people got up to between 1492 and 1620 in America -- mostly digging for gold and eating each other.
Getty When people talk about traditional American values, this is what they mean.
They also show us white Europeans being unable to easily defeat a native population that hadn't yet been ravaged by plague. It wasn't coincidence that the pilgrims settled America two years after New England was emptied of 96 percent of the Indians who lived there. According to James W. Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me, that's generally how the settling process went: The plague acted as a lead blocker for white European settlers, clearing the land of all the natives. The Europeans had superior weapons, but they also had superior guns when they tried to colonize China, India, Africa and basically every other region on the planet. When you picture Chinese or Indian or African people today, they're not white because those lands were already inhabited when the Europeans showed up. And so was America.
American history goes to almost comical lengths to ignore that fact. For instance, if your reading comprehension was strong in middle school, you might remember the lost colony of Roanoke, where the people mysteriously disappeared, leaving behind only one cryptic clue: the word "Croatan" carved into the town post. As we've covered before, this is only a mystery if you are the worst detective ever. Croatan was the name of a nearby island populated by friendly Native Americans. In the years after the people of Roanoke "disappeared," genetically impossible Native Americans with gray eyes and an "astounding" familiarity with distinctly European customs began to pop up in the tribes that moved between Croatan and Roanoke islands.
"It must be written in a cypher of some sort. Let's just go ahead and call it alien abduction."
2
White Settlers Did Not Carve America Out of the Untamed Wilderness
The Myth:
The pilgrims were the first in a parade of brave settlers who pushed civilization westward along the frontier with elbow grease and sheer grizzled-old-man strength.
The Truth:
In written records from early colonial times, you constantly come across "settlers" being shocked at how convenient the American wilderness made things for them. The eastern forests, generally portrayed by great American writers as a "thick, unbroken snarl of trees" no longer existed by the time the white European settlers actually showed up. The pilgrims couldn't believe their luck when they found that American forests just naturally contained "an ecological kaleidosocope of garden plots, blackberry rambles, pine barrens and spacious groves of chestnut, hickory and oak."
Getty "We have hours of weeding ahead of us, but by the grace of God, we will persevere."
The puzzlingly obedient wilderness didn't stop in New England. Frontiersmen who settled what is today Ohio were psyched to find that the forest there naturally grew in a way that "resembled English parks." You could drive carriages through the untamed frontier without burning a single calorie clearing rocks, trees and shrubbery.
Whether they honestly believed they'd lucked into the 17th century equivalent of Candyland or were being willfully ignorant about how the land got so tamed, the truth about the presettled wilderness didn't make it into the official account. It's the same reason every extraordinarily lucky CEO of the past 100 years has written a book about leadership. It's always a better idea to credit hard work and intelligence than to acknowledge that you just got luckier than any group of people has ever gotten in the history of the world.
"Holy crap, it's already wired for Wi-Fi!"
Nobody's role in settling America has been quite as overplayed as the pilgrims'. Despite famous sermons with titles like "Into the Wilderness," the pilgrims cherry-picked Plymouth specifically because it was a recently abandoned town. After sailing up and down the coast of Cape Cod, they chose Plymouth Rock because of "its beautiful cleared fields, recently planted in corn, and its useful harbor."
We're always told that the pilgrims were helped by an Indian named Squanto who spoke English. How the hell did that happen? Had he taken AP English in high school? The answer to that question is the greatest story your history teachers didn't bother to teach you. Squanto was from the town that would become Plymouth, but between being born there and the pilgrims' arrival, he'd undergone an epic journey that puts Homer's Odyssey to shame.
And at the end, instead of bangin' his hot wife, he had to teach white people how to bury dead fish with corn kernels.
Squanto had been kidnapped from Cape Cod as a child and sold into slavery in Spain. He escaped like the boy Maximus he was, and spent his better years hoofing it west until he hit the Atlantic Ocean. Deciding that swimming back to America would take too much time, he learned enough English to convince someone to let him hitch a ride to "the New World." When he finally got back home, he found his town deserted. The plague had swept through two years before, taking everyone but him with it.
when the pilgrims showed up, instead of being pissed at the people from the Continent who had stolen his ability to grow up with his family, he decided that since nobody else was using it, he might as well show them how to make his town work.
Getty "And this is the sea. I'd recommend bathing in it, because you people smell like the inside of my asshole."
This is especially charitable of him when you realize that, while the pilgrims were nicer than past settlers, they weren't exactly sensitive to Squanto's plight. According to a pilgrim journal from the days immediately after they arrived, they raided Indian graves for "bowls, trays, dishes and things like that. We took several of the prettiest things to carry away with us, and covered the body up again." And yet Squanto taught them how to make it through a winter without turning to cannibalism -- a landmark accomplishment for the British to that point.
Compare that to Jamestown, the first successful settlement in American history. You don't know the name of the ship that landed there because the settlers antagonized the natives, just like the vikings who came before them. The Native Americans didn't have to actively kill them. They just sat back and laughed as the English spent the harvest seasons digging holes for gold. The first Virginians were so desperate without a Squanto that they went from taking Indian slaves to offering themselves up as slaves to the Indians in exchange for food. Enough English managed to survive there to make Jamestown the oldest successful colonial settlement in America. But it's hard to turn it into a religious allegory in which white people are the good guys, so we get the pilgrims instead.
Getty If this were accurate, the settlers would be shitting in bushes while the Indians told them which leaves were safe to wipe with.
1
How Indians Influenced Modern America
The Myth:
After the natives helped the pilgrims get through that first winter, all playing nice disappeared until Dances with Wolves. Even the movies that do portray white people going native portray it as a shocking exception to the rule. Otherwise, the only influence the natives seem to have on the New World and the frontiersmen is giving them moving targets to shoot at, and eventually a plot outline for Avatar.
Getty It's pretty much just this and Kevin Costner until Wounded Knee.
The Truth:
The fake mystery of Roanoke is a pretty good key for understanding the difference between how white settlers actually felt about American Indians and how hard your history books had to ignore that reality. Settlers defecting to join native society was so common that it became a major issue for colonial leaders -- think the modern immigration debate, except with all the white people risking their lives to get out of American society. According to Loewen, "Europeans were always trying to stop the outflow. Hernando De Soto had to post guards to keep his men and women from defecting to Native societies." Pilgrims were so scared of Indian influence that they outlawed the wearing of long hair.
Ben Franklin noted that, "No European who has tasted Savage Life can afterwards bear to live in our societies." While "always bet on black" might have been sound financial advice by the time Wesley Snipes offered it, Ben Franklin knew that for much of American history, it was equally advisable to bet on red.
Getty "It's this, or powdered wigs and sexual repression."
Franklin wasn't pointing this out as a critique of the settlers who defected -- he believed that Indian societies provided greater opportunities for happiness than European cultures -- and he wasn't the only Founding Father who thought settlers could learn a thing or two from them. They didn't dress up like Indians at the Boston Tea Party ironically. That was common protesting gear during the American revolutions.
For a hundred years after the American Revolution, none of this was a secret. Political cartoonists used Indians to represent the colonial side. Colonial soldiers dressed up like Indians when fighting the British. Documents from the time indicate that the design of the U.S. government was at least partially inspired by native tribal society. Historians think the Iroquois Confederacy had a direct influence on the U.S. Constitution, and the Senate even passed a resolution acknowledging that "the confederation of the original thirteen colonies into one republic was influenced ... by the Iroquois Confederacy, as were many of the democratic principles which were incorporated into the constitution itself."
If we'd incorporated their fashion sense, C-SPAN would be more interesting.
That wasn't just Congress trying to get some Indian casino money. The colonists came from European countries that had spent most of their time as monarchies and much of their resources fighting religious wars with each other. They initially tried to set up the colonies exactly like Western Europe -- a series of small, in-fighting nations stacked on top of each other. The idea of an overarching confederacy of different independent states was completely foreign to them. Or it would have been. But as Ben Franklin noted in a letter about the failure to integrate with one another:
"It would be a strange thing if six nations of ignorant savages should be capable of forming a scheme for such a union and be able to execute it in such a manner as that it has subsisted ages and appears insoluble; and yet that a like union should be impracticable for 10 or a dozen English colonies."
Join, or die (or plagiarize from the Indians).
In 1987, Cornell University held a conference on the link between the Iroquois' government and the U.S. Constitution. It was noted that the Iroquois Great Law of Peace "includes 'freedom of speech, freedom of religion ... separation of power in government and checks and balances."
Wow, checks and balances, freedom of speech and religion. Sounds awfully familiar.
One of the strangest legacies of America's founding is our national obsession with the apocalypse. There's a new JJ Abrams show coming this fall called The Revolution about a post-apocalyptic America, and of course The Hunger Games. We go to a gift shop in Arizona and see dug-up Indian arrowheads, and never think "this is the same thing as the stuff laying around in Terminator or The Road or that part in The Road Warrior where the feral kid finds a music box and doesn't know what it is."
We love the apocalypse as long as nobody acknowledges the truth: It's not a mythical event. We live on top of one.
Jack O'Brien is the Editor in Chief of Cracked.com. You can follow him on Twitter.
When he's not drinking and rethinking the decisions that led him to this point in his life, Elford is a regular contributor to the music blog Riffraf and can be found on Facebook and Twitter.
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We have some bad news: Ancient Egyptians didn't "worship" their pharaoh, you're picturing ancient Native Americans completely wrong and your favorite book sellers are now taking pre-orders for a text book written and illustrated entirely by the Cracked team! Hitting shelves in October, Cracked's De-Textbook is a fully-illustrated, systematic deconstruction of all of the bullshit you learned in school.
It's loaded with facts about history, your body, and the world around you that your teachers didn't want you to know. And as a bonus? We've also included the kinkiest sex acts ever described in the Bible.
Enjoy the content. I am going to have some SCOTCH WHISKEY!
GO LIONS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Reflect and connect. Have someone give you a kiss, and tell you that I love you, Mom. I miss you so very much, Mom. Talk to you soon, Mom. - Days ago = 1973 days ago - Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2011.26 - 10:10 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #1132 - Thanksgiving 2018 (and 2015-2017)
Hi Mom,
This one is full of gratitude and thanks, but also mindful of the genocide caused by the colonialism, imperialism, and "manifest destiny" of American HIStory. Also, I am clearly biased as I am reading A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES.
But I am also remembering you, Mom, and all the great feasts you made and how much you loved Thanksgiving. My wife loves it, too, and always cooks up a storm. Our turkey, which was not supposed to be frozen, was a little frozen, so we're cooking for eight hours. We'll see how that goes.
At least the Lions game is on nationally.
So, here. Mom, I continue my tradition of sharing the previous HEY MOM Thanksgiving posts.
Smaller table this year, but that's okay.
I have some work to do because I took off most of yesterday to be with Ivan (photo below).
I am missing you, today, Mom.
Enjoy the content. I am going to have some SCOTCH WHISKEY!
GO LIONS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
THE REPRINTS! I shared these next three before but they are worth sharing again
I love this song and video. I am just going to keep sharing it OVER AND OVER AND OVER!!
THE REPRINT BLOGS!
TITLES ARE LINKS TO ORIGINAL POSTS............
from Left: Piper, me, Liesel, Elizabeth, Rob, Will, Ivan, Adam, and Molly. John is taking the photo
Hi Mom, So we had a grand Thanksgiving dinner yesterday. I am a bit late posting this because, you know, as usual, grades.
The dinner was fantastic, due to the fantastic cooking of my wife, Liesel (turkey, stuffing, everything), Piper (pies, bread), Elizabeth (vegies), and Rob (mashed potatoes).
And we had such a large table with family and friends visiting. Ivan was visiting from Kalamazoo with his close friend and bandmate Will Moss. Adam's sister (Molly Hermiz formerly Kemp) and brother-in-law (John Hermiz) were visiting from San Diego. And then, our local family Liesel's step-father Robert (Rob) Allen and his wife Elizabeth were in attendance from nearby Brush Prairie.
As you can see, Mom, there was plenty of wine. The turkey was delicious and amazingly fed all these people with leftovers. There was also stuffing, sweet potatoes, cranberry, asparagus, a Brussels sprouts mixture with walnuts, mashed potatoes, cranberry, bread (Piper), and three pies: pumpkin (by Liesel), cherry/raspberry and apple (Piper). We also had a large salmon filet for John who does not eat other meats.
We put the dogs in a kennel for the day and night just to make it a bit easier on all of us to cook, clean up, and have great dinner conversation without post-potty-outside dog cleaning or walking. We managed to get Rob discussing his PhD, Elizabeth joined in with her experiences (defending her PhD in Spanish) while discussing John's PhD work at UC San Diego. We all had a lengthy music discussion listing favorite songs and albums.
After dinner and some of the clean up (the rest happened Friday), we played some games from the Jack Box company (You Don't Know Jack etc.).
It's been a great week with these guests, members of our extended family. Will and Ivan played a lot of music. There was plenty of laughter and affection shared among everyone. The dogs were well loved, also, with John as well as Will and Ivan taking them for walks to spell me from those daily chores.
I am thankful for these people being in my life. Look at Piper in this picture below. She is beaming with happiness and joy. It's so great having her here with us. The look on Liesel's face shows how happy she is as well. In fact, doesn't everyone look pretty happy? And we haven't even eaten yet when those photos were taken.
I even carved the turkey (see photos below as I needed to photograph the carcass), and I really have no idea what I am doing in turkey carving.
My wife has made this new house a wonderful home, and I am so very grateful for that home and for these wonderful people and this shared meal.
I do wish you could have been here, Mom. I am sure you would have been impressed.
from Left: Liesel, Elizabeth, Rob, Will, Ivan, Adam, John, Molly, and Piper. I am taking the photo.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ - Days ago = 873 days ago - Bloggery committed by chris tower - 1711.24 - 10:10 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #870 - Thanksgiving 2016 and 2015 - again
Hi Mom,
Post within a post within a post.
Kind of like mirrors reflecting each other.
A chain of Thanksgiving posts.
The 2016 post re-posted the 2015 post, and now I am posting the 2017 post as those posts.
So, that's three Thanksgiving days without you, Mom.
That doesn't seem right. But for the first time in my life, I was not with Dad or Lori either. But that's okay. There was lost of family here.
I don't have the picture Liesel took of our Thanksgiving this year, and I did not take pictures.
Below is last year's Thanksgiving post, which I am managing to get posted exactly a week later, so I am catching up, though it may not seem that way.
I made mashed potatoes and an Asian slaw and ramen salad.
A week later, I am still eating up leftovers.
I peeled potatoes "yesterday" (the day before Thanksgiving) while annoying Satchel by singing along to Bruce Springsteen that was playing loudly on the stereo.
I could make this a really long entry. I am thinking a lot about you today.
The picture up top is from our first Thanksgiving in the St.Antoine house. The picture to the left of this text is from last year.
I am thankful for you, Mom. I am thankful for everything you gave me, taught me, showed me, and for your love, your appreciation, your show of pride, so much.
We enjoyed many Thanksgiving days together, and you were generally tolerant of my desire to keep football on TV.
I am thankful for my parents, my sister, my brother-in-law, my wife, my kids, my dog, my cat, so many things, people, and blessings.
I am thinking about how lucky I am, how grateful I am to the universe, to my wife, to you and Dad, Mom.
I wish you were here to kiss and show you how thankful I am.
I am missing you a lot this year.
I just want to wish you a Happy Thanksgiving.
And, no, I am not celebrating colonization and mass genocide. This holiday can also be just about family no matter what the original event.
I wish you were here, Mom.
Have someone give you a kiss, and tell you that I love you.
Talk to you tomorrow, Mom.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ - Days ago = 144 days ago - Bloggery committed by chris tower - 1511.26 - 10:49
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Reflect and connect.
Have someone give you a kiss, and tell you that I love you, Mom.
1. The List. I had forgotten that I promised to keep a tally. I may not include it every day, but I will share it at list once a week.
2. ALL THE ALBUMS: For the month, I am going to restrict myself to one song from one album at a time. By album, I mean the main, studio albums, not live albums or compilations or soundtracks. So far, each song came from a different album of the twenty-six albums in his career. This will be an interesting restriction given the songs I have selected so far. Once I have posted one song for each album, then I can return to previous albums and/or different versions of songs I have already posted. However, I am not restricting myself just to songs Bowie WROTE as today's song, come to find out, which I did not know, is not written by Bowie.
3. ONE PICTURE; ONE VIDEO (mostly): I will stick to the one video thing, but one picture? Yesterday, I posted two pictures. I will try to keep it simple, but there are SO MANY pictures.
4. BRIEF: This is one of the longer posts as I am sharing rules and the list. Mainly, I keep it brief.
THE DAILY BOWIE LIST The Daily Bowie #0 - "Space Oddity" - SPACE ODDITY - 1969 The Daily Bowie #1 - "Ashes to Ashes" - SCARY MONSTERS - 1980 The Daily Bowie #2 - "Cat People" - LET'S DANCE - 1983 The Daily Bowie #3 - "Sons of the Silent Age" - HEROES - 1977 The Daily Bowie #4 - "Running Gun Blues" - THE MAN WHO SOLD THE WORLD - 1970 The Daily Bowie #5 - "Sound and Vision" - LOW - 1977 The Daily Bowie #6 - "Fill Your Heart" - HUNKY DORY -1971
"FILL YOUR HEART"
"Fill Your Heart" is a song written by Biff Rose and Paul Williams and performed here by David Bowie. It is from the album Hunky Dory in the year 1971.
"Things that happened in the past only happened in your Mind..."
So, each morning, I run the list of things for which I am grateful. I am not always listing musical artists, like Suzanne Vega, because I focus mostly on my family and community. Though from time to time, musical artists will drift into my consciousness, and I will thank the universe for them, infuse the positive energy of my love into the fabric of the cosmos, because, after all, we are all connected.
LAST WORD ON THE GRATITUDE THING: I got the idea for the gratitude prayer (meditation, list, incantation, catalogue, rumination, reflection, or whatever you want to call it) from a movie called The Secret. I am not quite promoting the movie as a "true" exposure of an actual science. In fact, many of the stories in the film are a bit fatuous. However, I like watching it. I showed it to a class (my second viewing) about a month ago, and the idea of the daily gratitude thing struck me. In the movie, one of the interviewees (I forget which one and it's not important) explained how he had a rock in his pocket. At night, he would set it on his dresser with the other contents of his pockets. The next morning, he would retrieve it and remember to list the things for which he was grateful as a daily routine, like a prayer. He had a visitor from South Africa and told the man about his rock and gratitude practice. The man called it a "gratitude rock." After returning to South Africa, he wrote his American friend and asked for some gratitude rocks to be sent to him because one of his children was very sick, and he did not have the money to seek medical care for the child. The interviewee balked at sending "gratitude rocks" because, after all, "they are just rocks," he said. But he found three nice rocks and sent them to his South African friend. Months later, the South African wrote back. The rocks worked! His son was healed and recovered. They paid for his medical treatment by selling a hundred gratitude rocks. People believed in the power of the gratitude rocks.
I found this story inspirational. I do not use a rock, but every day, I make my gratitude list. I send energy into the universe. I focus on the positive and try to limit or dismiss the negative.
I think it's working.
Thank you, Mom.
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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2411.28 - 10:10
- Days ago: MOM = 3436 days ago & DAD = 092 days ago
- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I post Hey Mom blog entries on special occasions. I post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day, and now I have a second count for Days since my Dad died on August 28, 2024. I am now in the same time zone as Google! So, when I post at 10:10 a.m. PDT to coincide with the time of Mom's death, I am now actually posting late, so it's really 1:10 p.m. EDT. But I will continue to use the time stamp of 10:10 a.m. to remember the time of her death and sometimes 13:40 EDT for the time of Dad's death. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.
