Tuesday, October 23, 2012

Inbox Clearing, Miscellaneous

Prepping Division:
History Division:
  • "In American history, the fight to make a holiday on Columbus Day actually had almost nothing to do with the actual arrival of Christopher Columbus in the western hemisphere. It wasn’t about celebrating the European conquest of the Americas or the extirpation of the native tribes. "The day was made a holiday after years of lobbying as a way of recognizing the contribution of Roman Catholics and immigrants generally to American life. It is a holiday to celebrate diversity, not to commemorate the imperial outreach of Ferdinand and Isabella, a deeply regrettable couple who were notorious oath breakers, inquisitors and anti-Semites."

Miscellaneous Miscellaneous Division:

2 comments:

DaddyBear said...

We do a lot of our landscaping with food. Strawberry beds instead of flower beds, raised garden beds used as retaining walls, dwarf fruit trees instead of ornamentals. It was a bit more expensive to start up, but the produce can't be beat.

Bear said...

"I recall what I would now call a team-building exercise we did in a junior high school science class, what to bring, what to leave behind when your rocket crashes on the moon. I was appalled at how little my classmates knew about the basics of science..."

Had the same stupid exercise in high school. Run through it solo, then run through with "group consensus". I was the sole survivor. When the dumbass teacher realized that, she was appalled and tried to get me to change my _solo_ choices to be more (dead!) like the group, so I didn't invalidate her little commie/group mind/ant colony ideas.

"But we _have_ to take the compass. Compasses work _everywhere_." HA! I still remember the day that Air Farce butterbar discovered that wasn't the case. (Yeah, LT; _tell_ me how I've got the antenna pointed the wrong way. But pick your frickin' transit up off that steel drum first.)

_Every_ time I've had to participate in team building variants on that, I've done better on my own. And every time, the clown in charge has been baffled and horrified by it.