While I was enjoying some unseasonably warm weather on Saturday by drinking beer outdoors with my friends — while wearing flip-flops and short sleeves — the Swedes burned the Gävle yule goat to the ground.
*Because everyone knows that alcohol tastes better when it’s drunk outside.
It’s probably not a secret, if you’ve been reading his blog for a while, that music is something that exists in my life in more than just a passing capacity.
So…Lucia Popp. She was a famous Slovak opera singer who played a whole slew of leading roles, including the Queen of the Night in Mozart’s The Magic Flute. Now, I’m sure you’ve heard the Queen of the Night’s aria before. Because you exist. But just in case you don’t exist, this is it. In fact, that is it sung by Lucia Popp.
Who was a natural mezzo-soprano.
A mezzo who hit an F6 with perfect clarity. In one of the most famous roles in opera. At the Met. At 28.
Learning things like this kind of makes me want to throw myself from the highest bridge I can find.
Anyway, here she is performing one of my favourite pieces of music, Solvejg’s Song from Grieg’s Peer Gynt. Which is much more mezzo.
Her obit (she died of brain cancer in 1993 at the age of 54) is here.
I was out running errands today and when I got back in the car after one of my stops, there was a radio report on from WWII, talking to people serving overseas who were from the city I live in and the surrounding areas. It was so, so odd to listen to, but kind of fascinating. From what I gather, this was done at a base in England on Christmas day, but I don’t know what year, and they couldn’t say what base.
Anyway, one of the women they interviewed was with the Red Cross and stated her position was, “I work the donut wagon.” I figured this was some sort of nickname for some vehicle, so came home and looked it up.
The donut wagon to which she was referring to is…a donut wagon.
Literally, a vehicle that women with the Red Cross drove around, delivering coffee and donuts to the troops.
Sometimes, a donut wagon is just a donut wagon.
There’s one “donut girl”‘s story here and some video from the Netherlands in 1944 here.
I love random traditions, mostly because they encourage fun. My undergraduate school had a Friday every spring where the administration rang the chapel bells at ten to signal the cancellation of classes and brought in carnival games and rides and pig races to encourage us to “get into” our college.* There’s a university in the midwest that spectates a basketball game in complete silence until their team scores 10 points and then it’s a student body/boosters dance party on the court for a few minutes. A village in Scotland plays a new year’s ballgame that doesn’t exist anywhere else.** And in Gävle, Sweden, they burn a 40-foot yule goat to the ground. Half the time.
The yule goat isn’t meant to be burned, but roughly half (26 or 28, depending on what you read) of the 57 total goats, which are built of straw, have been torched. One was hit by a car. Five more were vandalized. One was subject to a botched theft-by-helicopter attempt.
The first Gävle goat was erected in 1966, and, despite the frequent incineration, there has been a giant yule goat in Gävle every year since, with the exceptions of 1973, 1975, and 1977.
The yule goat is one of the oldest Scandinavian Christmas traditions, but its roots — and purpose — are somewhat hard to nail down. It’s likely origin is paganism — either Germanic or from the Norse God, Thor, whose sky chariot was drawn by a pair of goats. The yule goat’s purpose has changed drastically over the centuries. It was at one time an animal that traveled with carolers and demanded gifts at people’s homes. And it has been a figure to be hidden in one’s neighbour’s house without their noticing. And it has been a giver of gifts. These days, it’s mostly a tree ornament.
But it’s also a 40-foot straw figure in the centre of Gävle that often ends up a pile of ash before the new year.
As of this writing, the 2013 yule goat is unscathed; firemen doused it in fire-retardant chemicals before its December 1st unveiling.
For more information see here, here, and here.
*It was colloquially known as “get intoxicated.” It was also meant to be a surprise, but everyone always knew when it was going to be because it was a small school and everyone knew someone who sat in student government.
**The history of that game is cool. I thought I’d written about it here before, but it seems I didn’t. That’s a failure on my part. There’s a very, very good article about it here that you should take the time to read.
I mentioned in my last lesson that The Huron Carol is my favourite Christmas carol ever. Until just now, this was both true and untrue. Musically, I love it. But historically speaking, I had a bit of a hard time with it in that it’s a blatant attempt to subvert the native culture and religion and replace it with the western ideal of Christianity. But at the same time, it exists in three languages (English, French, and the Huron language of Wendat). So I was torn…
The Huron Carol is Canada’s — and, by extension, North America’s — oldest Christmas carol. Its lyrics were written in Wendat in 1642 or 1643 by the Jesuit missionary Jean de Brébeuf,* and are set to an adaptation of the traditional French tune of “Une jeune pucelle,”** (1557), which is itself an alteration of a slightly earlier folk song, “Une jeune fillette.”
Until 1926, there were no English lyrics to this carol, which I actually find very, very interesting. How did it take nearly 300 years to record this? And…it turns out that the English version of the lyrics that are at the root of my “subversion of the Huron culture” qualms about this hymn aren’t even remotely close to the literal translation from the Wendat. The literal translation are far less “ACCEPT JESUS AS YOUR LORD AND SAVIOUR!” than the lyrics I know. Which makes me happy.*** I can (mostly) appreciate that the missionaries who were immersed in the culture were able to compose lyrics that maintained a connection with the culture the Hurons knew while simultaneously weaving in the Christian narrative we all know. It’s an impressive skill to have, being able to merge cultures without seeming like a condescending douche.
Musically, I find the piece interesting in that it’s not interesting at all; its range is only an octave. I imagine it’s the simplicity that attracts me, and I find that kind of funny given my great love of Wagner. It amuses me that I can simultaneously have a deep love something as simple as this carol and something as complex as Wagner, but I suppose those two things are ingrained in different parts of my psyche. It’s okay for Christmas to be simple, but opera is much less forgiving.
For more information, see here, here (this link has the literal translation of the Wendat lyrics), here, and here.
*who is, incidentally, one of the eight Canadian martyrs. That there are eight Canadian martyrs — all of whom were Jesuits working among the Huron who were tortured and killed by the Iroquois in the Huron-Iroquois war in the mid 17th century — is a piece of information I’ve been carrying in my pocket for ages. It is one of the literal handful of parts of my poor grasp of Canadian history. But I can’t tell you why I know anything about the Huron-Iroquois war at all. I probably picked up a thread of related information years ago and followed it until I wound up with a relatively deep knowledge thereof. That seems like my style. Honestly, I’d be hard pressed to name you someone I know other than my mother — with whom I like to share random information because I didn’t just wake up one day with a thirst for random knowledge — who knows that there ever was a war between the Huron and the Iroquois.
**There’s a recording here.
***I grew up Anglican, and Anglicans are poor prosthelytizers. For more on this, see Eddie Izzard’s brilliant take on Anglicanism. Bonus points to Izzard for addressing the fact that the Anglicans are part of the Catholic church, not the Protestant movement. When this routine was released, I was 19 or 20 and just out from under living with my parents — and therefore being forced to attend church — and his take on “Oh God Our Help in Ages Past” had me howling. Cake or death is phenomenal. The whole routine is gold, but the religious aspects are absolutely brilliant.
I have headed a couple hours north to visit a friend for his annual side dish holiday party and, more importantly, to watch the Liverpool/Spurs match with him tomorrow morning.
Before he moved away, we used to spend our weekend mornings at the pub watching the footie, but since he’s left, I don’t bother to go anymore. It’s way cheaper and way less douche-y at my house. And my house doesn’t require pants. Or getting out of bed. Technology!
But I really miss watching with my friend, so the fact that his party is tonight and our teams are playing each other tomorrow morning is just perfect timing.
I’ll be back with a new lesson on Monday.
There are times I learn something and feel I should already have known it. This is one of those times.
I’m a notorious night owl, so there it is, 3:30 in the morning, and I have managed to get myself from an a cappella rendition of Life is a Highway in which the bass blew my mind* to a bunch of English choir boys singing Christmas carols. In four perfectly logical steps.**
Anyway, for those of you who didn’t grow up in the Anglican/Catholic tradition, there are two different versions of In the Bleak Midwinter. There’s the one I like and the one I don’t. Not that that’s particularly helpful to anyone. It’s not even particularly helpful to me. But…I do know which one I like when I hear it. I particularly like the tenor line. It turns out, the tune to the one I like was written by Gustav Holst. I really feel like at some point in my a. years of singing in the church choir when I was a kid and b. years of music education as a whole, I should have learned that.
Then again, the first time I heard the German national anthem, I was completely baffled because the tune is also the tune to the hymn Glorious Things of Thee Are Spoken. At least that gap in my knowledge made some sense. And besides that, Haydn composed the tune to back a poem written to rival England’s God Save the King not to be an Anglican hymn.
Back to the topic at hand, I went and did some digging just to see what I could find, and it turns out that the hymn is a relatively new one. Holst composed the music in 1906 to accompany the 1872 poem In the Bleak Midwinter, which was written by Christina Rossetti. Her poem remains unchanged in the lyrics of the hymn.
For the record, my favourite Christmas carol is The Huron Carol, which really couldn’t be more Canadian of me.***
For more see here and here. To hear (the Holst version of) In the Bleak Midwinter sung by delightful English choir boys, see here — and see if you can pick out the tenor line…it’s the best part.
*see last night’s episode of The Sing-Off. Seriously, their bass hit a note I didn’t know was humanly possible (according to my piano, it’s a G#…two octaves below middle C) and turned me into a giggling pile of mush. Chicks dig the bass.
**I am nothing if not my mother’s daughter in my ability to get from one thing to another seemingly unrelated thing in fewer steps than should be possible. If you were wondering, it went: super bass, Avi Kaplan (who is amazing!), Pentatonix’s cover of O Holy Night, Cantique de Noel, In the Bleak Midwinter.
***In case you were wondering how a girl who has no faith (in the liturgical sense) can have favourite Christmas carols — or hymns/anthems at all — the Church has a lot of good music. And I’m partial to good music. Besides, you hear something for 18 years of your life, it tends to stick with you whether you believe the words or not. For example, John Rutter’s For the Beauty of the Earth is one of my favourite pieces of choral music ever, and I can still sing it by heart.
It’s not a huge secret that I think space is the coolest (no pun intended). In another life, with an infinitely better high school physics experience and far superior math skills, I would have been an astrophysicist. In a parallel dimension, where I’m a math whiz who had a great physics teacher, I probably am. Because space is effing awesome! One of my favourite things in the world is being alone in a vast open space where I can see more stars than I can even register. I’ve only experienced that twice in my life (once while doing off trail camping in the desert in Big Bend National Park in Texas* and once while camping in the Jordanian desert), but it’s such an exhilarating experience to look up and realize how vast space is and how small my existence is.
There is an exoplanet the size of Neptune that is covered in ice so hot it would make you bear a striking to resemblance to the Nazis at the end Raiders of the Lost Ark. Which is awesome! Discovered in 2004, Gliese 436 b is about 33 light years from earth and takes a surprisingly shot 2 days and 15.5 hours to complete its orbit around the red dwarf star Gliese 436. It also doesn’t have the atmospheric chemical composition (7000x too little methane, too much carbon dioxide) that science says it should, leading astronomers to conclude that Gliese 436b hosts hot water ice, which…what?
It turns out the exoplanet’s high gravity compresses water vapour into what we’d consider ice, but for the part where the temperature of this ice is roughly 400 degrees Celsius, which is, you know, not very cold. So it’s not really ice as we know it; it’s considered “exotic ice”, which is a fancy term for water in a solid state that is really freaking hot.
I have to admit that when I first read the words “burning ice” when I was reading up this morning, I imagined ice that was on fire, which would have been brilliant (and also made zero sense). But the reality isn’t so bad either…
More information here, here, here, and here.
*Autobiographical note: Camping in Big Bend was the only time I’ve been off-trail camping. Because we were quite literally out in the middle of nowhere, before the rangers would issue our permit, we were required to give impressions of our hiking boots and descriptions of our gear. We were also each required to let someone know when what day we were heading home and that if they didn’t hear from us by day X to call the park rangers to send a search team out. This led to the strangest message I’ve ever left anyone. My dad got a message that went something along the lines of, “if you don’t hear from me by X day, I’ve probably been eaten by a mountain lion. If that’s the case, call the park rangers to send out a search party.” Needless to say, neither of us were eaten by a mountain lion.
In general, I like Lifehacker’s website. It can be very useful sometimes.
But sometimes, it posts articles like this one that suggest running your paper through a plagiarism checker to find yourself more sources and/or catch a citation you may have missed. First off, if you’ve done your research properly, you shouldn’t need to find more sources. Secondly, how are you missing a citation at all?*
WHO TAUGHT THESE PEOPLE HOW TO WRITE A RESEARCH PAPER?!?
Either no one’s teaching proper research skills anymore or I’ve been doing it wrong for two decades.** (Hint: it’s the former.) When I write, I cite as I go. Because all the information is already right in front of me. This note is taken word for word from page 6 of the 43rd source. It’s word for word for two reasons: 1. so that if I need to, I can quote it directly without having to go back and look it up and, more importantly, 2. so I won’t inadvertently plagiarize the author when writing about this note. And of course, the source card with the number 43 on it has all the title/author/publisher information (in this case, the source is Chalmers Johnson’s Revolutionary Change). It’s not rocket science.
But I’m also a girl who writes very quickly, so it doesn’t bother me to cite as I go. Really, once the research is done and organized, how long can the writing possibly take? By that point, you’ve done so much research, you know your subject and, presumably, how you’re going to present your argument. I wrote my entire master’s thesis (all 130 pages of it) in about 12 days. But I also spent the better part of five months doing research, so by the time I got around to writing, it practically wrote itself.
Ignoring the plagiarism aspect for a moment, on the flip side of all of this, I think there’s an element to it that I can’t see. Because research is something from which I take great enjoyment and at which I’m very, very good. I don’t find research difficult. Challenging, yes, — sometimes more so than others — but never difficult. So, no, I don’t get why this sort of a life hack would be necessary because I don’t see why anything should be poorly researched.
But I also think there’s a huge line to be drawn between poor research — against which I have railed on more than one occasion in this space — and flat out plagiarism. And I feel like this post willfully supports an unacceptable gaming of the system that pulls just back from the brink of plagiarism. But it also words it in such a way as to seem helpful: “you might miss a few if you’re not careful.”*** But I’d argue that if you’ve cited, say, 40 things in a 20-page paper and your professor finds something you didn’t cite, he’s not going to fail you on the paper, but rather suggest, “You missed a citation here. Be more careful next time.” If you’ve made that many other citations, obviously the missed one was an oversight, not an attempt to cheat.
For the record, good luck to the idiots who are going to use this to find other sources. I ran the first page of one of my dissertation papers through a couple of these. One of them told me that a not-insignificant portion of my paper was very similar to…the website for Seattle’s transportation system? Yes…my paper on a 36-hour event in Belfast in 1970 was lifted in large part from Seattle’s transportation website. That seems about right. Another told me that an entire sentence of directly quoted material was original. I don’t even know what to do with that.
Moral of the story, as always: do your research. Also, stop making more work for yourself, cite as you go.
*Reading down into the comments, I was baffled by the number of people who are apparently writing their entire paper and then going back and finding where they were supposed to cite things. Why?
**Then again, I’m the girl who still writes her research out on notecards because it’s a system that works for me and allows me to move things around when I’m organizing what information belongs in what chapter.
***This, again, comes down to the question of why aren’t you citing as you go, which, again, probably comes down to the fact that no one’s teaching proper research skills.
A word about my prolonged absence: I have no excuse, really, except that I’ve been focused on other, sometimes (but not always, unless you count plowing through all of Breaking Bad, Friday Night Lights, and Sons of Anarchy as more important) more important, things.
Also, I’ve had no word from Fulham. Evidently, they didn’t think I was being sincere, despite my best efforts at explanation. Anyway, Spurs have shown reasonably well, even without Gareth Bale, so that’s what’s important.*
Moving on…
There are many things I love about history. Not the history you learned about in school because school history — all memorized names, dates, and events to be forgotten as soon as the final has been taken — is the worst. I’m talking about the history that’s interesting.**
As we all know from our grade four history unit on Ancient Egypt, — we all had that, right? — the Egyptians believed in the sanctity of cats. They also lived in an era when there Persians were enjoying a delightful conquering romp through the better part of the known world. Enter Cambyses II, son of Cyrus the Great, who, five years after the epic death of his father, leads the Persian army on a little jaunt to make friends with Egypt.
There’s some pretty Game of Thrones-type political stuff involving powerful people, deposed monarchs, marriage of daughters, trickery, betrayal, and subversive doctors that leads up to the Battle of Pelusium*** in 525 BCE, but by May, Cambyses and the Egyptian Pharoah, Psamtik III, were at war over an insult to Cambyses’ pride (or honor…whatever, there was a slight, and Cambyses didn’t take it well). It turns out, though, that Cambyses was prepared to completely obliterate the Egyptian army. He brought cats.
Knowing the Egyptians’ veneration of cats, Cambyses had the image of Bastet, the cat goddess, painted on his army’s shields and sent cats (as well as other animals the Egyptians held sacred, including dogs, sheep, and ibexes) out to march ahead of the first wave of soldiers. The Egyptians decided it was better to run screaming to Memphis and hole up there than to anger the Gods by fighting and wound up victims of a vicious rout. According to the historian Ctesias, 50,000 Egyptians were killed.**** Cambyses then wandered on down to Memphis with his troops and laid siege to it until it fell, after which he executed 2,000 of the city’s more important citizens. Psamtik was captured in the aftermath and, by all accounts, treated well, living out his life in Memphis (or jailed in Susa, depending on what you read) under the watchful eye of the Persians — right up until the point where he decided to lead a revolt against his captors, which earned him an execution.
Cambyses defeat of Psamtik ushered in the 27th dynasty, which was overseen by the Persian Shahs from Cambyses’ takeover in 525 BCE and running through Darius II’s overthrow in 404 BCE.
For more information see here and here.
*I just need to record for posterity that during the Northern Ireland/Portugal qualifier in Belfast a few months back, fans chanted “you’re just a cheap Gareth Bale” at Cristiano Ronaldo (of whom I have many things to say, few of them nice), which made me giggle. And then he turned around a scored a hat trick, which did not make me giggle. Other Cristiano Ronaldo hat tricks that didn’t make me giggle include the one he scored in the second leg against Sweden in the World Cup qualifier playoff that knocked Sweden out of the tournament before it even started. Between me and The Swede, that didn’t go over well, though he took it much better than I did.
**To be fair, my version of interesting history and other people’s versions aren’t necessarily the same. I like the chaos, idealism, and aggression aspects. Other people like quilts.
***See Herodus’ The Histories, Volume I, Book II
****See Persica
My best friend is on a press tour in the Middle East right now, which is awesome for him (and for me because, ever since he went to war school a few years back, I’ve been dying for him to go be a war photographer so I can live vicariously through him — his wife is decidedly less enthusiastic about the whole thing). Combat photography is the job I most want to do that is outside of my skill set; I find it fascinating, which, if you’ve been paying attention at all, shouldn’t surprise you.
Anyway, he posted a bunch of photographs from Afghanistan this afternoon, including an image that immediately made me think of this photograph French photojournalist Henri Huet made in Vietnam:
From there, I wound up revisiting One Ride with Yankee Papa 13, the absolutely stunning photoessay Larry Burrows shot for LIFE magazine in March of 1965.*
At some point in my reading, I learned that Henri Huet was killed on the same chopper that killed Burrows (and two other photojournalists) when it went down over Laos in 1971. I have no idea how that piece of information slid through the cracks of my knowledge, but somehow it did. I knew Huet had been killed while working in Vietnam, but the how and where weren’t in my knowledge bank.
If you’re interested in checking out some of Huet’s photographs, see here. I’m quite fond of the shot of the soldiers holding their guns above the water to keep them from getting wet. In the rain. I find it interesting that none of the Guardian’s shots are of his (arguably) most famous subjects, medics James Callahan (left image) and Thomas Cole (right image with the eye patch).
*That essay includes among its shots an image that wasn’t published at the time (but obviously since has been) that is probably my favourite image of all time because it’s gorgeously composed and everything about its contents is wrong.
So…I appear to have been away for quite some time. I didn’t realize this much time had actually passed, but there it is.
In any event, I have learned all manner of interesting things in my absence from the blog including, but certainly not limited to, the Air Boss and the Skittles aboard a Navy aircraft carrier (courtesy of a new friend who did a stint working intelligence aboard an aircraft carrier…I totally want to be the Air Boss), how to play chess (courtesy of the same friend — I’m not very good), that Cristiano Ronaldo — of whom I have very little nice to say — is setting up a museum to himself in Portugal (because of course he is), that there’s a hexagonal storm going on over Saturn’s north pole, that Jared Leto can actually sing (I’ve known for years that he had a band, but until recently, I’d never heard them play), that the growl on the new Jaguar F-Type R is truly awesome, that Tom Hiddleston is pretty much the coolest (see here, here, here, and, oh God, here), that electrons are spherical, that an Italian guy had the most Oktoberfest experience of all Oktoberfest experiences when it took him five weeks to find his car, that Viking longships used a shield rack along the gunwales to provide extra protection from the wind and waves (which is a pretty brilliant storage solution), that, to put some numbers into perspective, for every American soldier killed in the Second World War, roughly 21(!) Soviet soldiers were killed, that the Pony Express only lasted a year and a half (how is this something everyone knows existed, but doesn’t realize was almost immediately replaced by telegraph wires?), and that Nelson Mandela was 95. Seriously, 95. Revolutionaries rarely live long enough to die of old age, so that’s quite something.
Anyway, I’ll probably be in and out until after the new year, but I’m going to try to get this going again…
And Everything In Between 