History Wars
31/01/2006 11:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
izmeinaWork so so sucks. The minute Izzie finally gets full time Portkey status for our Preciousss, we ends up with oodles of morning shifts - tomorrow being one such day. So, as the last few minutes of January tick away, instead of having a proper potter in Cyberia and squiggling a big long post about life, the universe and everything, we are limited to a couple of lines or so
The Iz discovered last week that one of our regular radio fixes at midday on Sundays has now gone podcast so is no longer repeated on Mondays at 4pm. So we could wait till Thursday or Friday to snatch the podcast and add it to our collection, knowing full well that we'd probably never get around to actually listening or we could set our alarm for 2am Sunday morning to listen to this tasty morsel. So that is exactly what we did.
Iz heard first from our favorite Aussie Spook that our Fearless Leader and Lying Rodent is looking for a Coalition of the Willing to teach history in a proper manner. But even without this tasty tidbit, the Iz would never miss a chance to hear the opinion of our favorite historian - one Inga Clendinnen. You see - Izzie simply loves stories and she is one of the best story tellers in the business (The American academic Thomas King is another of our favorites) Clendinnen is so good - from the Aztecs and Australian Aboriginal encounters with the British settlers to German troops occupying Poland - she has such a sense of 'being there' and making it present to the listener that we have the sneaking suspicion that she must be in possession of a Time Turner.
The Iz has been a bit of a closet history junkie ever since we first learned to read as an ickle flobberworm and most definitely since we had a crush on our history teacher in secondary school. A Professor Binns he certainly was not. As Bob Carr summed up so perfectly this evening on a most fascinating Late Night Live tonight - history is about what humans actually do when in stressful situations - no wooliness or wishful thinking like in philosophy or theology but cold hard facts. Most interesting he was indeed. No warm and fuzzy feel good civics class history for him but lots of blood and guts, conflict and argument. He made the interesting observation that about one third of the history shelves in main street book stores is devoted to the Third Reich because conflict is what most fascinates people about history. Also added that year seven students are often Roman empire junkies - not just for the gladiators but they are also intrigued by why empires fall. Oh yesss. So too is this serpent. Iz used to have a total aversion to anything Roman - especially the Latin language which the Iz finds especially ugly. But we seen some TV series some time ago about the Roman empire and was most intrigued indeed. Caligula and Nero are most definitely in the list of Izzie's all time interesting characters.
And when curious folks in D'land wanted to know why the Iz wanted to live and work there - could hardly tell them that the two characters that most fascinated the Iz were Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin and what better way was there to find out more about them than to live in one of their adopted lands. And yessss. We made it our business to visit just about every exhibition or museum show about life in the Third Reich - from exhibitions about law and medicine and even advertising. And then there was several visits to the Satanic City itself including the site of the Gestapo headquarters which while now is probably around the corner from the new Berlin Bundestag and Daniel Liebeskind memorial buildings - in those days was a derelict dementor infested dunghill with a couple of prefab sheds which were a museum of sorts and the spooky Martin Gropius Bau - all this a ten minute walk for so from the wastelands of Potsdammer Platz and the site of the 'Fuhrerbunker'
Ghenghis Khan was another historical figure that the Iz found utterly fascinating - much more so than the usual Greek and Roman generals. But strangely - our absolute favorite of all is a certain iconoclastic carpenter's son from Nazareth.
But it is already past the witching hour so will have to leave our musings for another day.
*slinks off to gobble the last dregs of izzie's stash of absinthe Cheers!
The Iz discovered last week that one of our regular radio fixes at midday on Sundays has now gone podcast so is no longer repeated on Mondays at 4pm. So we could wait till Thursday or Friday to snatch the podcast and add it to our collection, knowing full well that we'd probably never get around to actually listening or we could set our alarm for 2am Sunday morning to listen to this tasty morsel. So that is exactly what we did.
Iz heard first from our favorite Aussie Spook that our Fearless Leader and Lying Rodent is looking for a Coalition of the Willing to teach history in a proper manner. But even without this tasty tidbit, the Iz would never miss a chance to hear the opinion of our favorite historian - one Inga Clendinnen. You see - Izzie simply loves stories and she is one of the best story tellers in the business (The American academic Thomas King is another of our favorites) Clendinnen is so good - from the Aztecs and Australian Aboriginal encounters with the British settlers to German troops occupying Poland - she has such a sense of 'being there' and making it present to the listener that we have the sneaking suspicion that she must be in possession of a Time Turner.
The Iz has been a bit of a closet history junkie ever since we first learned to read as an ickle flobberworm and most definitely since we had a crush on our history teacher in secondary school. A Professor Binns he certainly was not. As Bob Carr summed up so perfectly this evening on a most fascinating Late Night Live tonight - history is about what humans actually do when in stressful situations - no wooliness or wishful thinking like in philosophy or theology but cold hard facts. Most interesting he was indeed. No warm and fuzzy feel good civics class history for him but lots of blood and guts, conflict and argument. He made the interesting observation that about one third of the history shelves in main street book stores is devoted to the Third Reich because conflict is what most fascinates people about history. Also added that year seven students are often Roman empire junkies - not just for the gladiators but they are also intrigued by why empires fall. Oh yesss. So too is this serpent. Iz used to have a total aversion to anything Roman - especially the Latin language which the Iz finds especially ugly. But we seen some TV series some time ago about the Roman empire and was most intrigued indeed. Caligula and Nero are most definitely in the list of Izzie's all time interesting characters.
And when curious folks in D'land wanted to know why the Iz wanted to live and work there - could hardly tell them that the two characters that most fascinated the Iz were Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin and what better way was there to find out more about them than to live in one of their adopted lands. And yessss. We made it our business to visit just about every exhibition or museum show about life in the Third Reich - from exhibitions about law and medicine and even advertising. And then there was several visits to the Satanic City itself including the site of the Gestapo headquarters which while now is probably around the corner from the new Berlin Bundestag and Daniel Liebeskind memorial buildings - in those days was a derelict dementor infested dunghill with a couple of prefab sheds which were a museum of sorts and the spooky Martin Gropius Bau - all this a ten minute walk for so from the wastelands of Potsdammer Platz and the site of the 'Fuhrerbunker'
Ghenghis Khan was another historical figure that the Iz found utterly fascinating - much more so than the usual Greek and Roman generals. But strangely - our absolute favorite of all is a certain iconoclastic carpenter's son from Nazareth.
But it is already past the witching hour so will have to leave our musings for another day.
*slinks off to gobble the last dregs of izzie's stash of absinthe Cheers!
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no subject
Date: 2006-01-31 08:09 pm (UTC)Culture Vulture
Date: 2006-02-02 03:24 pm (UTC)So, in future you intend to abide by Izzie's wish to always talk in Latin?
Izzie's knowledge of Latin is limited to what we can guess from English words - which of course does not include declensions of any variety so except in the most limited and obvious cases (The ugly 'us' ending) the Iz can barely distinguish between nouns and verbs. Though we do remember that the verb endings for the various persons seems suspiciously similar to the Russian ones.
*Just tried tossing the whole thing into the Oracle of Google but they won't let this serpent get away with such laziness. And a dictionary is no good when you don't know how to convert words to their generic form without the specific case or verb endings