Maru's Mun Journal

Not just the war, the entire past was in colour...

Here those that might be interested find a review of a new biography on Niccolo Machiavelli, and how relevant he is for today's political discourse.

Excuse the rough machine translation; but actually, we have come far since the early days when Altavista's Babelfish was more of a joke than a tool. The neologism of the headline is somewhat lost, though -- that's 'de-networking'.

"Badly equipped fanatics seek holy places in some third-rate province and find heatstroke and new illnesses instead."


[[the blogger known as Don Alphonso, defining the Crusades, from here -- translated, source is in German]]

ceitfianna? This might be interesting for future Will plot.-

I don't think Hannibal was all that clever; I think he was f*cking paranoid! Some of his actions as described by Cornelius Nepos are utterly irrational and only show that he messed up his own life ultimately because he was full of conspiracy theories about the Romans.-


This random post was brought to you by the fact that the biographer's constant fanboying of his subject is starting to get on my nerves.

Only it's real, not something a retro joker thought of...

I was folding my laundry when a bloke walked in with a cannonball, in order to weigh it on the laundromat scales.



It weighed almost exactly 15 kg, hence a thirty-pounder, or rather, a 32-pounder, but they were called thirty-pounders, as Wikipedia has it. That's the name I knew as well. These things were shot from so-called demi-cannons.



It's greener on one side, and smoother, because it's been in the river; the paler, more pitted side was buried in the silt. The bloke has a blog (in German) where he goes on about it as well. It's apparently his hobby to fish historic munitions from the river, but mostly, he only gets WW II stuff.

OMG, Ashie, look at that!! The Night Witches on BBC! Just a trailer, but still.-

I seem to be talking entirely in exclamation marks; but that's not a problem as this road trip is worth it.

We spent all day today in Münster. My mother dragged me all through the city several times back and forth. Like in any old city the old part is sort of roundish, and we crossed the cathedral square in the middle about half a dozen times in our perambulations, and we saw about a dozen churches.
In addition, we saw the peace hall in the city hall, where in 1648 the 30-Years-War ended and Spain let the Netherlands go. Then, we had goat cheese cake in the Picasso Museum (made by that bakery the Nazgul recommended), and then we went and heard an organ-and-harp concert in the cathedral.

Then, we had a nice meal with a good burgundy, and took the rest of the bottle with us for tomorrow, when we'll be in a country inn by the old battle-field of 9 AD, where I would suspect wine, let alone decent one, will not be forthcoming...

I don't know if we will have internet; if so, I will be there and post more, if not, I'll be reading 'Abhorsen'.-

Since the Great LiveJournal Outage of August, I have been chewing on the lessons from that remarkable Saturday, and the fact that LJ can filter input.

By now, cyxymu's journal as been restored, and we're allowed to say 'Sukhumi' again. But things go much deeper; they reach into the early 1990s, all the way back to Stalin, Jason and the Golden Fleece, and in fact the Scythians, because these areas in the north and east of the Black Sea were where the ancient civilisations of the west (Greeks, mostly) traded with the Middle Asian Steppe Barbarians that in turn went all the way to China. In fact, you should very much not underestimate the role of the Middle Asian Steppe Barbarians* within the course of Old World history. Master Urban and I have long been theorising about the influence of Buddhist monks from Mongolia on the development of Western monasticism in Coptic Egypt and the Near East in the last years of the Roman empire, and the amazing similarities between Orthodox Christianity and the Tibeto-Mongolian branch of Buddhism. They came down the Silk Road, of course, and into the Late Classical world through Zeugma; but they came through the Scythian corridor just as much, and that is Georgia. The Georgians are Orthodox, in their own somewhat odd and immensely old-fashioned way, too.

But I digress. Let me put in a picture and then, a cut.



( History, theories, conspiracies, and historical conspiracy theories )