taking the waters or four freedoms

While visiting my parents in the state of Georgia, H and I saw Franklin D. Roosevelt’s retreat in Warm Springs, called the Little White House, though not a place for politicking per se and constructed at the beginning of FDR’s political career in 1921 when New York governor Roosevelt was stricken with polio and almost saw his prospects cut-short, whether or not the presidency a decade later was included in his aspirations. Local luminaries and physicians (possibly mistresses as well) gathered at the Little White House but politicians and dignitaries were mostly feted at either Camp David, the big White House or stately Hyde Park. FDR sought out a thermal spa treatment and the clean air of this town, building his private residence and going on the found an institute to try and cure other polio sufferers.
Of course FDR was wheel-chair bound and kept that from public-attention and appropriately, the grounds are handicapped-accessible but I thought it was quite upsetting and telling that there was a fleet of mobility-scooters available that otherwise able-bodied visitors used pretty shamelessly and rather gratuitously. The tour was pretty interesting and engaging but the experience was made even more so by a pair of strange coincidences. First, to the day, our visit fell on the seventieth anniversary of FDR’s death from a stroke suffered while sitting for his official presidential portrait in his study there, which remained unfinished—and that made the experience more poignant.
Second, I happened to be reading the brilliant alternate history novel by Phillip K. Dick set in a present (1960s) where a protracted World War II was won by the Axis Powers.
In this parallel reality, Nazi engineering has continued a pace and there are regular excursions to Venus and Mars and one character took a commercial Lufthansa flight (as we did) that took a mere three-quarters of an hour to fly from Scandinavia to San Francisco in the Pacific States of America and it took more time to collect one’s luggage at the baggage claim, but The Man in the High Castle, named after a reclusive author who’s penned a naturally contraband book that wonders how the world might have turned out if the Allies had been victorious, portrays a nasty and brutish dystopia.  The Earth has been divided from east of the Caucasus to the western seaboard of America under the control of the Empire of Japan, Europe and the East Coast under control of the Great Nazi Reich—the Mediterranean was drained for reclamation of agricultural land, the Holy Land under Italian control, and most of Africa depopulated—with lesser races enslaved or eliminated.  A nominally independent Finland, Canada and the Midwestern states offer some pockets of resistance and neutrality.
Terrible and inverted as it is, it is affecting how some of the same geopolitical prejudices and sentiments, with a few substitute words, are still common-parlance and the world is still a hostile and polarised place.
Though there was a line or two that identified the point-of-departure, the hinge-event that diverged into the present of the story, I don’t think I would have picked up on it without the visit to Warm Springs. There was a time-line of FDR on one of the displays that mentioned the assassination attempt, just months into his first term, at the hand of one Giuseppe Zangara, who missed and killed the mayor of Miami at a speech. In the novel, the assassin’s aim was truer and as a result, there was no New Deal, no economic recovery from the Great Depression that allowed America to bolster its manufacturing capacity, no Lend-Lease policy that allowed a tenaciously isolationist America to undermine the German and Japanese advance while still begging neutrality. Seeing FDR’s achievements and artefacts really made the contributions he was able to impart and his legacy even more extraordinary and made the wonder of how things might have been (and how things become the same) all the more disquieting.

deus ex machina

A Jonbar Hinge or a change-point is a literary trope that refers to seemingly inconsequential events whose influences and repercussions are greatly magnified through time-travel. This bone of speculation is introduced in the science-fiction series Legion of Time by Jack Stuart Williamson when the protagonist’s simple choice leads to two very different futures and he gets to witness both outcomes. Alien Space Bats, on the other hand, are counterfactual gremlins that are invoked as sort of a supernatural agent to bridge gaps in a plot, especially when one has painted oneself in a corner in terms of a far-fetched storyline or a spindly scientific explanation. Black holes are portals to the soul or we can mess with the time continuum, because… you know ASBs.

mullets & barry

Although a lot of convenient and flattering myth-making goes into every nation’s founding fable—and America is certainly no exception ranging from the preternatural, the chimerical to Lincoln ate here, the incarnations and the avatars of the so called Continental Colours go through an interesting evolution to arrive at the archetypal flag that’s credited to seamstress Betsy Ross.
Early banners were mostly ravaged Union Jacks set on a barry (striped) background, captured during the US war for independence, cobbled together and something like the modern flag of the state of Hawaii—however, raising these improvised standards led the British to believe that the rebels were surrendering on more than one occasion. Statesman Benjamin Franklin, whom also nominated the turkey as the national bird though the bald eagle was more favoured, suggested the Don’t Tread on Me design but was not deemed dignified enough for the ages. A standised and recognisable symbol had to be decided on. And while it is debatable whether Miss Ross’ contribution to the complete achievement which was conceived by a professional armourer was limited to making the mullets (stars—which were not very popular heraldic devices at the time) five-pointed rather than the six-pointed variety the menfolk in conference believed to be easier to stitch, not being practised in the art apparently, or whether she took further liberties with the design, the national flag did become her exclusive bailiwick, holding a virtual monopoly on its production for the first decade of the fledging republic.

sugarbakers or mostly ghostley

While I fully agree that the world would be a richer place for having a Lego diorama set of the Golden Girls, there’s another television series that I’ve always associated with it, Designing Women—known as Sugarbakers: Mann muss nicht sein auf Deutsch and wasn’t aired until 1993 and for only a short time.
Maybe the show’s on my mind as we’re going to be flying into Atlanta soon, and though the sitcom-scenes are not a foremost connection, there was an element of Southernness portrayed and discussed that was not addressed elsewhere. And though it’s not quite of the same vintage as Golden Girls, it did have a lot of talent, sharp dialogue and memorable moments, but I certainly don’t feel it’s gotten its due of nostalgia and following.
The show deserves at least a cast of minifigs for the principles and for the recurring characters, like Suzanne’s housekeeper Consuela—who was never on camera expect when Anthony Bouvier in drag pretended to be her in order to take a citizenship test and avoid deportation, Aunt Bernice (Alice Ghostley), Mark Twain (Hal Holbrook) or maybe even Raydon Simpson, the relentless auditor that went after the Sugarbaker sisters for tax-evasion after Suzanne’s personal accountant, Reggie Mac Dawson, absconded with her funds, and tried to make it up to her with a fairy-tale princess parade with circus elephants. It would be fun to be able to recreate these scenes as well.

five-by-five

torsion: lovely mesmerizing animations from Big Blue Boo

menagerie: humourous dialectic creating a medieval bestiary

reaction faces: British Library exhibits Sino-Japanese war prints

neologism: a look at some of the unique vocabulary of Indian English

which anyone could whip up on a rainy day: nice remembrance of the biographical cookbook of Alice B. Toklas 

non-canon or occupational-hazard

Not until the year 1159 did the Papacy claim canonisation as its exclusive bailiwick and other bishops, besides the one of Rome, could bestow sainthood on individuals.

The practise of undermining papal authority was not widespread and the Church did not revoke any previous venerations, but the elevation of Saint Walter of Pontoise, a reluctant and rebellious abbot of a Parisian suburb by another unruly archbishop, Hugh of Amiens, struck the pope at the time, Adrian IV, the only English pope as something so improper—after all Walter had abandoned his post several times and tried to flee responsibility, being the whole system to be too corrupted to discipline and founding his own rebel monastery, and the Archbishop of Rouen had after all only made the nomination out of obstinacy, decreed that only the person of the pope could execute the process. Adrian also became known as an apostle to Norway and Sweden with his early missionary work, supported a second wave of the Norman invasion to pacify monastic Ireland and align it with the Church in Rome, and was also to excommunicate Frederich Barbarossa, over his disputed territories in Sicily, but the Pope choked on a fly in his wine before this could be arranged. Disinclined old St. Walter, whose feast day is celebrated 8 April, who caused all this controversy, is the patron of vintners, inmates and prisoners of war and the saint to call upon in duress over job-related stress—Walter having apparently suffered from burnout syndrome himself.

spermaceti

Reflecting on all the terror and ravages of petroleum and how we’d all like to make do with less providing that the industry take the commanding lead, I do suppose fossil-fuels are a better alternative than what sustained humans through the period of mechanisation and urbanisation, whale oil. Before advent of kerosene and the harnessing of vegetable oils, whale oil provided illumination in oil lamps and was a staple in cooking and the product of the waxworks organ in the heads of whales was used for candles and cosmetics. The animals were nearly hunted to extinction until substitute products became cheaper to obtain. And although the legacy of petroleum production and the rampant expansion it has enable probably will cast a longer shadow, at least the inhumanity with the slaughter has relented. We are still jerks but maybe a little more civilised about it.