History! 5/26

Its been quite a while since the last time I did History! at all you poor people. As such, because I'll be dealing with courtrooms and bailiffs for the remainder of the day and into the night I thought it best to do one early so it didn't seem wasted. So, lets get on with it then shall we?

1293 AD, In Kamakura Japan an earthquake struck. Now this happens a lot, like all the time, however what made this one so special is that it killed 30,000 people! Seriously, the Japanese at he time were living in single story shacks, so the likelihood of them being completely unable to flee outside is slightly incredible. Thus I am forced to to picture the ground literally opening up and swallowing a whole city. When I did a quick google search for 'Japanese Earthquake" this is on the first page! My guess is that the Japanese have a long standing tradition of rescue cats, dating back to this terrible disaster, when bands of cats would roam the rubble looking for survivors and demanding treats until rescuers could arrive.
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1538, Man, John Calvin, founder of Calvinism is just cold hated by everybody. On this day he was kicked out of Geneva and told to go cause dissent someplace else. Naturally he picked Strasbourg, because when I think of places to hide from the Catholic church I think of Strasbourg.

1637, Here is a big one for me, like epic! During the Pequot War in North America, noted douche bag John Mason, Bostonian General of a combined force of puritans and Mohegans attacked the seat of Pequot power in Connecticut. The Pequot had earned the ire of the local puritans and through some shady back room deal the puritans had gotten the Narragansett and Mohegan tribes to assist in a brutal war against the larger Pequot tribe. Well, Mason and the puritans were eager to attack the chief of the Pequot, but after a long days marching they opted instead to attack a nearby Pequot fort. This was also after encouragement from the Mohegans, under their equally douchey chief Uncas, who had found some Pequot on the way and decapitated them, showing the heads to Mason. So today Mason surrounds the fort in the dead of night, with his Mohegan and Narragansett allies (the Narragansett weren't all that bad actually, they were like a Native American Andorra, just cold stuck in the middle of all the big guys) and orders volleys to bie fired into the fort. At this point the Pequot awake and start moaning and shouting so pitifully that the English think for a moment that perhaps they should take pity on their opponants. At this point it is noted that they overcame their Christian charity when they remembered that the Pequot had cruelly slain a dude months before on his houseboat. Oh yeah, that dude that the Pequot killed, that kinda caused this war, he was a wife stealing, smuggler/pirate who had been asked to leave the puritans cities because he was a nuisance, but puritans have extremely short memories and extremely long grudges. Mason orders the group of puritans and indians to enter the fort and fight hand to hand, which then forces him to reconsider and instead he declares boldly, "We must burn them!" So Mason promptly lights a torch and sets a bark house on fire, to the complete shock of the Pequot. The fire is picked up by the wond and the whole fort is completely ablaze within thirty minutes. Now the English (who have suffered two casualties during this) block the two exits and proceed to keep the burning Pequot in the fort, stabbing or shooting anyone who came near, including women and children. Within an hour of the initial fighting close to 700 Pequot are dead. The Mohegan and Narragansett look at each other in complete horror at what they were party to, especially the usually chill Narragansett who had emphatically stated at the beginning that should any forts be captured that the women and children must be spared. As for the puritans, you know, the buckle shoe wearing thanksgiving fuckers, here is how they used the bible to explain why they had to burn every mother fucker in sight, including the women kids and babies.

"Should not Christians have more mercy and compassion? No. When a people is grown to such a height of blood and sin against God and man...there He hath no respect to persons, but harrows them and saws them and puts them to the sword and the most terriblest death that may be." as for the kids? The answer being totally! "Sometimes, the scripture declareth women and children must perish with their parents. We had sufficient light from the word of God for our proceedings."

That one siege effectively marked the end of Pequot resistance. Now long after the Mystic Fort Massacre as it is called a statue was erected on the site of John Mason drawing his sword. Thank heavens there were still some Pequot descendants who pointed out that putting up the statue was the equivalent of putting up a "monument at Auschwitz to Heinrich Himmler, architect of the Nazis' Final Solution." Thus the statue was moved to another site, though it was still met with protests for the fact that the man was hardly a hero. If you would like to know more about how terrible, and sometimes terribly humane the puritans were I recommend Sarah Vowell's 'The Wordy Shipmates'.

1647, ten years after the last blood letting, though the intervening years had plenty of blood shed, the puritans execute their first witch in the New World, Alse Young. Seriously guys, stop it.

1805, Napoleon is crowned king of Italy. You know what, I want to build a huge army, more advanced and better supplied than any other army in history and start conquering places, so I can declare myself 'King' of them. "Have you heard, General Trebaol has conquered the Starbucks on Main st. He is holding a coronation and will be declared 'King of Starbucks and Coffee'."

1830, man this is a bad day for Native Americans. So today the Indian Removal Act is passed by Congress and two days from now Andrew "Trail of Tears" Jackson signs it into law.


1868, Andrew Johnson narrowly misses getting impeached by a single vote. The reasons are a little complicated and extremely boring.

1894, Nicholas II becomes the Tzar of All Russia's! Did I neglect to point out he will also be the Last Tzar of All Russia's!

1938, The House Un-American Activities Committee has its first meeting, however they really don't become extremely interesting till the fifties so lets leave them there for now.

1940, The battle of Dunkirk! Or rather the important part of the battle, you know the part where against every possible expectation the British manage ti escape the huge Nazi war machine barreling towards them. Literally fishing boats crossed the channel so they could pick up five guys and take them back to England, while being shelled by 'Jerry'.

1983, a frikkin' 7.7 earthquake strikes Japan, but this time the method of execution is tsunami! 103 people are killed by the mammoth fuckin' wave. screw you plate tectonics!

So there is fuckin' that! History for May 26th!

Wanderlust Kings

I have begun to feel that the adventurous mind is a diseased mind. The adventurer sacrifices safety and comfort for the perilous, often dangerous. They seek to pit themselves against odds stacked against them, they like to walk as close to death as possible and come back to share the story. How then can such people be thought of as reasonable, even cultured. Of course there are many types of adventurer, there are the mad, the vainglorious, the courageous, the list could go on and on. However it is the willingness in most to strive beyond normal goals that makes them so intriguing.

Of course fame and privilege is a powerful motivating factor in many such people, they will only leave their doorstep if it means they will come back with money in hand. I am more interested in the people who trek without expectation of reward or recognition, they plunge head first into the wild places to see them. Though now we live in a culture that thinks that adventuring is a cathartic process, meant to be an almost religious experience, a person communing with nature. I don't like that idea, when I explore a new place I look at it in wonderment, I marvel and consider who went before me. To hope for an afterlife for myself would be to surrender to the possibility that I can see all of this when I am dead, to put off what I should do in this life for another, to surrender to the fear of the unknown.

I am so badly inflicted with this disease, this need to explore I am certain it would be the death of me in any other time. If a person suggests that a passage is impossible I will be the first to volunteer to conquer it. Is it though, conquering, do I seek to subjugate, or control what is deemed beyond me? I think I want to show the limitless potential of humanity, a path deemed unworkable has its way, we need only apply ourselves to it. I burn with the desire to shuffle off the trappings of society, the pathetic joke that is 'modern life' for the places rarely seen, the mile just beyond the horizon.

Perhaps this isn't a disease, a corruption of thought. Perhaps the explorer isn't a vestigial part of society, in a world downloadable to a desk top. Perhaps we simply too keenly feel the need human urge to learn, to know. I want to see the world, but not as a tourist, I wish to see the peoples and culture, I wish to understand their society and their history, swim in their lives and envision their history. I am not the Victorian explorer, I can't judge the lives of those I meet by my own standards. We cannot discriminate against the cannibals and naked peoples of the Amazon or East Asia. We are only worthy of viewing it, containing our fear or misunderstanding and returning to the world and informing. I want to fill in the blank spaces on the map, though non are left, they are the holes in my map, my understanding of this world. I want to see the crown jewels of Europe, the seats of Empires long laid to waste by time and environment. I wish to pass through the deserts of Arabia, to feel the blistering heat of the Nefud, so I can understand what it meant to those who would dare to have done it. I wish to see the decadence of the oil barons, their poor hidden from the rich contractors, man made islands, like Ozymandias warning against the desire to be timeless. I want to see the spice markets of India, the open sewers, and the jungles in the north that hid the Thugee from British view. Nepal, Burma, Vietnam, Hong Kong and Ulanbatar. I want to ride a train into Siberia, and ponder on the Romanov's, visiting Moscow I would look for black cats and checkered suits. Africa, the jungles and gorillas, the booming diamond industry, the crushing debt and fear of witchcraft. Name the town and I wish to see it, no matter how small or far removed ask me to go there for a day and I will, so that I can tell the world what lies just outside their border.

The rainbow array of flags, tied to the mountains, when each one blows away a wish is granted. Gold hammered day and night into thin strips to be applied to statues of the Buddha. the bones of Saints and pieces of the 'true cross, in reliquaries, thousands passing by in reverence. Xingu tribesman, sitting in a canoe, fishing with a string and hook, a trick they learned from a dead Englishman eighty years ago, they store the catch in ceramic pots, identical to ones they made seven thousand years ago. I am desperate to not read these stories, you cannot hope to ever know it all, but knowing even a fraction of what it means to see the sun rising over Alexandria, Tokyo, Kinshasa or the Mato Grosso can sustain a soul their whole life. The search is endless, the empty space in a persons knowledge can never truly be filled, but it is the journey that makes it worthwhile.

I cannot be one of those who satisfies themselves with stories, with imagined empires, I cannot sustain my being with mere illusions as so many do, with games, movies, half hearted promises. I fear I will burst if contained too long without the road before me, locked in a job, locked in a life not even worth contemplating. I live only in fear that I will never leave these shores, or that if I do, I will never come back to tell my story to my close few friends who would care to hear it. i sit now, looking out the window at the trees, blowing in the wind. In my mind I am floating past them, over them, looking forward, traversing the miles in seconds. Rushing over everything, taking it in and I am seeing the world fly by, the people, the animals, the rugged mountains and soft green hills. Yet I am here, and must remain here, with this one tree. To me now, the rest of the world is as distant as the Moon, visible, but too far to touch, to see the powdery silt of its surface fall through my hand and fall like a microscopic snow. This is the anguish of an explorer, to know that there is a beyond, but to not have the means to attain it. It is what brought Walter Raleigh to the executioners block, it sent Magellan to his death at the hands of natives, it guided Percy Fawcett to his unmarked tomb in the Amazon. So it is for the explorer, let the mind perish with inactivity, or send the body to perish in pursuit of the next horizon.

I am not an ordinary man.

Deaths...

Today in history, 1,500 people died on the Titanic including her Captain Edward Smith.
Abraham Lincoln died across the street from Ford's Theatre in a boarding house bed.
Gaston Leroux, author of the Phantom of the Opera died from a urinary tract infection.
Jean Paul Sartre, famed French philosopher died from an oedema of the lung.
Pol Pot, feared Cambodian dictator died under house arrest.
Joey Ramone passed away from lymphatic cancer, at the hospital he listened to "In A Little While" by U2 before leaving.