through the rude wind's wild lament and the bitter weather

Precipitation in the form of snow can be quite the contrarian for the weatherman. I suppose it seems to buck the forecast in part because it lingers and the upbuilding of the flurries, not like rain that's an event, welcome or unwelcome, that is mostly obligingly soaked up or siphoned off. Snow transfigures the landscape and the view from one's windows like quite nothing else, dark of night nor lushness of Spring in full bloom.

 It is quieting, calming with its insistence, mounting and enduring, that invites one to consider all the millions, billions of particles of it, flakes buffeted and flocked or bullet-like projectiles something more cardinal than a cloud suspended or the water of rain drops, and something that seems just a bit outside of nature's cycle.

Torquemada oder keiner erwartet die spanische Inquisition

It is remarkable how the disclosure of a few uncomfortable realities, suspending plausible deniability, can spark even more surrounding an unlikely target of vitriol and sympathy. Though this lowest form of McCarthyism is left in the public’s eye to judge but certainly not to prosecute regardless of opinion and colourfastness of the case, the current theatre is by far mild compared to the private, invisible punishment that the known informants are enduring, and considering all the wrath and ire it seems that this taunt, venture, duty would have been undertaken with more contingencies.

It might be preferable to remain an inmate in some Tower of London, or suspended in some legal limbo on a warrant with the force of the very same deficiencies and unscrupulous dealings and poor taste of statecraft revealed, rather than being extradited, disappeared to face all the dirty loopholes of law and sore egos. That there is little remaining, in terms of financial institutions, jurisprudence, that cannot be easily converted into extensions of US foreign policy is disturbing. At least one is more or less guaranteed a pulpit in certain venues. Maybe the threat or bluff to release more embarrassing dispatches was sufficient, though I bet a good portion of zealots, one way or another, would like to see those revelations cascade down for the opportunity to use their full quivers of weapons.

what can you do with a vuvuzela, what can you do with a vuvuzela, what can you do with a vuvuzela

Early in the morning?  It is not so remarkable how fads come and go but I think it is seldom that a musical instrument, the shofar, the octarimba, the orcana endears itself to international language only to be quickly forgotten and neglected.  I could never quite master the embouchure to get a good, steady sound, but it was fun to try.  Repeatedly.  Since this summer's World Cup, I am sure that they are all hidden away in cupboards, but maybe the vuvuzela could make a come-back--for New Year's, for instance. 

antediluvian

Archeological researchers in the UK and the Czech Republic, and most archeological digging is done in the library or the mind, theorize that a large flood plain near the Fertile Crescent, now submerged in the shallows of the Persian Gulf since about eight thousand years, could have once supported an advanced Dreamtime civilization, whose ancient and half-remembered existence could be the stuff of legends, like Atlantis, and time before the biblical floods. Conventional wisdom holds that human progress is pretty much a closed-account, a straight trajectory from the Egyptians, to the Greeks, Romans through European enlightenment with the details still be worked out, but a lot of new discoveries, which were always there waiting to be noticed, suggests that the human world is much, much older and development has sometimes been retrograde.

The tribes of the remote Andaman Islands have been living in virtual isolation for the past sixty thousand years and probably represent one of the first migrations out of the African continent, and recent excavations in South Africa reveal a sophisticated coastal society using tools and agriculture possibly for some eighty thousand years, working metal tens of thousands of years before the process was supposedly invented in Europe. The lost civilization of the Persian Gulf could have also been highly advanced. Much can happen, unrecorded and with no recoverable trace, during these intervening ages and in the billions of unpeopled years before. Just coming to terms with the shrinking of the unexplored world and the implications of the scientifically-accepted age of the Earth and the universe, science-fiction writers of the Cthulhu mythos cycle invite readers to reconsider the prevailing arrogance that nothing much was happening in the meantime, except mechanical evolution. The world’s unimaginable age could accommodate the rise and fall of countless societies, in addition to the Sea Monkey Kingdom and the Utopia of the Dinosaurs. Not all the hidden places have been tilled and there may yet be a renaissance in exploration that is not led by how far or deep or close we can look.

advents calendar

Mentally preparing myself for the challenge of the snowy roads crunchy with ice--they are even colour-coded apparently but are not red or amber but decidedly white, I took the time to collect some of the infinite wonderful vignettes associated with Christmas--the Nativity scenes, suites of Nutcrackers, Santa Clauses and Snowmen without end, moose, reindeer, and the trees. 
Sometimes I feel that capturing the moment is not quite within photographic prowess, but decorating and the general background festoonery are great things, and the detail on mantle tops, showcased or otherwised shoe-horned into every free space is fantastic and brings the holidays into a brighter, sharper focus, like concerted dioramas every where one looks.