Let your humble scribe assert the facts.
Actually the "Kentucky breakfast" post seemed to be quite popular with folks from South Canada, so Conrad went though Websters to see if there was anything quite like it.
:( there isn't.
One of the few mentions about South Canada that's present is that for Florida, where Ponce de Leon came to establish Landing Rights, as of 1512. The city of St Augustine, est. 1565, is the oldest European settlement on the shores of South Canada. Named after "Pascua Florida", or "Flowery Easter".
So now you know.
"Gravity's Rainbow" By Thomas Pynchon
You may rest assured that your humble scribe is now half-way through this novel. However long you may have been pestered about it, you cannot be pestered for more than an equivalent half in future*!
Tom would probably put it in another, more literary allegory. "We are now at the cusp of the A4 parabola, the equivalent behind as to before - ".
Yes, Tom. But - what do we have here?
"Rozhdestvensky"
What? As a mention I know what this means - you, not so much.
This chap is the admiral who managed to get the Russian Baltic fleet 18,000 miles from Saint Petersburg to the Tsumisha Straits, whereupon the Russian's bottom was handed to them by the Japanese.
The Russo-Japanese War
I felt like adding this in as the only other persons familiar are going to be either Russian or Japanese military scholars.
For your information this was an extremely big war fought between the two parties above, between 1904 and 1905, over in Korea. It was one of the twentieth century's first conflicts. There were no heavier-than-air craft, wireless, armoured fighting vehicles or chemical weapons, but they did have the first encounter of Battleships En Masse -
They did have trenches, blockhouses, barbed wire and massed artillery bombardments - so not entirely C21.
A Little Re-cycling
Well well well here we go. Normally BOOJUM! is one for attending to the foremost e-mails that arrive here, yet let us look at what arrived here two years ago:
Neptune's New Moon
"S/2004 N 1" doesn't exactly dance off the tongue. However, that marvel of design the Hubble Space Telescope spotted this traveller in orbit around Neptune. Over two and a half billion miles away.
Now, that's a long spot. Plus, S/2004N1 is only twelve miles across. Or, to put it another way, spotting it is the equivalent of spotting a football five hundred thousand miles away.
You young whippersnappers are probably too young to recall, but back when the HST got launched, it had severe technical troubles that comedians the world over fell over themselves to scorn. Where are the jokes now?
The Gene Roddenbery allusion is a quote of his I've always liked: "Did aliens build the pyramids? No! Human beings did, because they're clever and they work hard." Likewise S/2004N1 didn't leap up and shout hello!, it was tracked down via human ingenuity and ability.
We may not be very space-mobile ourselves, yet our constructs and instrumenalities* do the job for us.
- And Today's Coincidence -
I did post earlier this week about how the Zombie Apocalypse would be heralded by a wave of Officially Sanctioned Descriptions - "Revenants" instead of "Zombies"
Anthony, easily the best-read member at work, had to look up what this word meant.
* For this novel. Just wait until "A Dance To The Music Of Time"
No comments:
Post a Comment