History like you've never seen it

For reasons which are no longer important, I recently found myself trying to remember whether St Thomas Aquinas was for or against free will.
It got me thinking:  If only someone could sum up the key points of St Thomas Aquinas's world view and set them to some sort of music....like, oh, I don't know, an iconic 80s pop classic, maybe.  

Well, OK, it's not exactly what I ended up thinking.  But even so, just imagine my joy when I found this early today:   





The good news is, that there is a whole channel on of these clips on YouTube.  Are you a  bit rusty on the French Revolution?  Here's some Lady Gaga.  Or maybe you need to know how to make an Egyptian mummy, in which case Green Day can help you out.

And look! Look! They have even done THE CANTERBURY TALES!!



It is a brilliant idea.  I am slowly making my way through all 47 of them, and am particularly looking forward to the story of Beowulf to the tune of 99 Luftballoons.  The Justin Timberlake / Sexyback take on William the Conqueror, also.

Those Crazy Russians

Sputnik I launched today.  I mean today in 1957, obviously.  I just thought I'd mention it, because no one else seems to have, and that surprises me a bit.  After all, it was a pretty big deal; first man-made object in space, start of the space race, contribution to rising cold-war tensions and all that.  Given that today has been a pretty slow news day* I thought someone might have picked up on it.

That's a picture.  It's a lot smaller (the size of a beach-ball, not counting those pointy bits) and faster than I realised; it took about an hour and a half to orbit the earth which, when you think about the maths, is crazy fast.

*So far.  If something really really important** turns out to have happened today, and you are reading this post with that knowledge, please assume it hasn't happened yet.

** Really important (in this context)  = more important than public outrage over choice of X-factor finalists, nasty tube-strike, and child-benefit cuts. Just to set some parameters.

An idealist who was misunderstood

Some things:

1.  Best line (in my opinion) in the LOST finale, which if you haven't watched it but plan to won't spoil anything, came from Miles: 

"I don't believe in a lot of things. But I believe in duct tape."

2. The Inuktitut word Katujjiqatigiittiarnirlu means "simplicity" (from @qikipedia on Twitter)

3. Today's birthdays:  Queen Victoria,  the woman who invented scavenger-hunts*, Bob Dylan, Kristen Scott-Thomas, Tommy Chong of "Cheech and" fame, actor-rapper Big Tyme** and the Brooklyn Bridge.  Also on this date, Bartok's opera "Bluebeard's Castle" premiered in Budapest.  According to the article I am looking at, "It was controversial, not only because the music was hard on the ears, but also because the Bartok version of the Bluebeard story made Bluebeard, a serial killer, out to be an idealist who was misunderstood". 

Aren't we all misunderstood idealists at heart?


*Elsa Maxwell, who sounds like quite a character.  She was born in a box at the opera (is it just me, or can this be said about a disproportionately large number of people?  Winston Churchill is the other one I thought I could think of off the top of my head, but a) I've just double checked and he wasn't and b) I'm sure I used to know about more.  I am going to have to investigate this further.) There's an interesting article about her here.  My favourite parts:

Not unmindful of science (she once devoted most of a column to the fact that she has never had to blow her nose)

and

Author-Actress Maxwell commutes frequently between her Waldorf apartment and Hollywood, where she lives with Evalyn Walsh McLean and the Hope diamond

 

** I didn't even have a favourite rapper name before today, but now Big Tyme is definitely it.  His real name is Jerod.

Quick history update

I conquered the Romans before breakfast this morning, and have spent the last hour or so knee-deep in Saxon drugs and rock'n'roll. (The second part of that sentence is not my joke, by the way, it's a chapter title in one of the books I'm reading, but I thought it was a particularly good one). Hagist and Horsta, the seven kingdoms, Roman v Celtic Christians, the Synod of Whitby, and that nasty old King Offa are just some of the things I know much more about now than I used to.  Bring on the Vikings.

The very crude, potted-history-of-Britain timeline I have constructed in my head, and which I'm working from, goes roughly like this:

Ancient times; Romans; Dark ages and Anglo Saxons;  Norman Conquests and 1066; Middle Ages (incl Black Death); Tudors and Stuarts; Golden Age aka Elizabethan times aka Renaissance; the next bit which  I don't have name for but quite a lot happened; Victorian Era; Twentieth Century

I think that covers it, speaking in the broadest sense.  Happy to be told otherwise.

"The Daily Mail, not usually noted for its coverage of archaeology..."

I am swotting up on English History at the moment, for reasons that I don't really have time to go into now because I need to be done by some time next week and so far I am only up to the Romans.

Growing up in Australia, I learned a lot about bushrangers, explorers and the Snowy Mountain Scheme in history lessons. We also did some bits about ancient Greece and Rome, and the Chinese got a look in, but as far as British history goes, what we learned about (and this seems odd, in hindsight) can be boiled down to three things:  Medieval crop rotation systems, the Battle of Hastings and World War II. Why only these three? Who knows. 

Over the years I've filled in quite a few of the gaps, but I have always meant to get around to trying to put the bits I do know into some kind of order and work out what is missing, which is what I'm finally doing now. One of the books I'm using is The Tribes of Britain by David Miles, who, today in particular, I am loving for no other reason than this:

The Daily Mail, not usually noted for its coverage of archaeology, asked "Is this the King of Stonehenge?"

(It's not all that relevant here, but for the record he is talking about the Amesbury Archer, who is a guy who was burried with lots of stuff, beakers* mainly, around the same time Stonehenge was constructed.)

I know the Daily Mail can be an easy target, but really, they do ask for it sometimes, and today is definitely one of those times.  (If you are reading this sometime in the future, or are not in the UK, or have just been under a rock today, by the way, they ran a spectacularly stupid smear story this morning which more or less called Nick Clegg a Nazi).

Nick Clegg, while I remember, was the punchline to the best election related joke I have seen so far (from Popbitch):  How do you make Heather Mills angry?

(It's wrong, I know.  But it's funny.)


*Beakers:  more significant than you might think in prehistoric Britain.  They are quite the bone of contention.