What I’m Blogging

The rain in Spain stays mainly on the plain, or so it is postulated by Henry Higgins et al. This also happens to be an apt description of my experience of the past year. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

…and something like happiness will shine through…

Last year saw the end of the tyranny of the beloved one at the evil empire of International Greed Enablement. It has been replaced by indentured servitude employment at Gigantic Concrete, and the key difference is merely the lack of a narrow minded myopic twit of a manager directly above me. The stress remains. The insanity of Information Technology (IT)(Idiotic Tasks)(Itinerant Travel) remains. The emptiness remains. After almost a year of freedom, I realise that I am just as un-free, and working in a field I just don’t like anymore.

This has to stop. So my goal this year is to find something I really want to do, and start doing it. If I can do this, then perhaps my melancholy disposition will abate and something like happiness will shine through. This would certainly make my family much happier, and in the end, isn’t that what really matters? There will be consequences for sure, but the consequences of doing this for another year will likely be costlier still.

Today is New Year’s Eve. Tonight there will be parties all across the country in celebration of the coming new year, and at the stroke of midnight, millions of people will sing “Auld Lang Syne.” The lyrics to the song were first written down by the poet Robert Burns, but the song actually comes from Scottish oral tradition. The Scottish title can be translated to mean “old long ago” or “time long past” or simply “the good old days.”

Alfred, Lord Tennyson wrote, “The year is going, let him go; ring out the false, ring in the true.”

Today is the anniversary of the massacre at Wounded Knee which took place on this day in 1891.

…about 90 Indian warriors and 200 women and children were killed….

Twenty-two years before that, the tribes in what became South Dakota had signed a treaty with the United States of America which guaranteed them, “absolute and undisturbed use of the Great Sioux Reservation (that part of South Dakota west of the Missouri River)… No persons… shall ever be permitted to pass over, settle upon, or reside in territory described in this article, or without consent of the Indians pass through the same.”

The treaty gave the Indians control over the Black Hills which they considered a sacred place. But when gold was discovered in the Black Hills that treaty was broken. In December of 1875, the Federal Indian Bureau ordered all Indians to report to their agencies by January 31, 1876. Many could not comply with such an order in winter. Some never received it. Only one band came in. All the others were classified as “hostile” and therefore subject to attack.

That summer, General Custer led an attacking force on Little Big Horn but his entire company of soldiers was surrounded and decimated by the Indian warriors. The federal government responded by sending in more troops, taking the Black Hills by force.

One band of Indians chose to flee the arrival of new troops. For four days and nights they marched through the cold trying to reach a rendezvous point with another tribe. But they were surprised by federal soldiers and ordered into the army camp at Wounded Knee. The next morning, federal soldiers went through the camp to confiscate weapons. A scuffle broke out between a soldier and an Indian warrior and a rifle was discharged. Suddenly, the federal soldiers opened fire on all the Indians in the camp. The gunfire was so haphazard that more than twenty-five federal soldiers were killed in the crossfire. About 90 Indian warriors and 200 women and children were killed.

It was on this day in 1895 that Auguste and Louis Lumiere opened the first movie theater at the Grand Café in Paris. Other inventors, including Thomas Edison, were working on various moving picture devices at the time. But most of those other devices could only be viewed by one person at a time. The Lumieres were the first to project moving pictures on a screen, so that they could be viewed by a large audience.

…it wasn’t a movie in the modern sense…

The first film they showed to a paying audience was called Workers Leaving the Lumiere Factory. It was a short, single shot with an immobile camera and it showed a concierge opening the factory gates from which dozens of workers walked and bicycled into the street. It ended with the concierge closing the gates again.

It wasn’t a movie in the modern sense. It had no characters, no storyline. It was just an animated photograph. The Lumiere brothers went on to make more than 2,000 films like this, each one less than a minute long depicting various scenes of human activity with titles like The Arrival of a Train, Boat Leaving the Harbor, and Baby’s First Steps. They didn’t call these “movies” or “films,” they called them “views.”

It took other filmmakers to turn movies into a medium for storytelling. The Lumieres were primarily documentary filmmakers. But in their film Demolition of a Wall they added a reverse loop to the film so that after the wall falls to the ground it miraculously picks itself back up. It was the first special effect ever uses in the history of motion pictures.

The Lumieres’ movie house was a big success. Within a few months of its opening, more than 2,000 people lined up every night to buy tickets. But the Lumieres themselves thought that movies would be a passing fad. They told their cinematographers not to expect work for more than six months. Auguste went on to become a medical scientist and Louis went back to working on still photographs.

It’s Christmas Eve, and it was on this day in 1914 that the last known Christmas truce occurred, during World War I. German troops fighting in Belgium began decorating their trenches and singing Christmas carols. Their enemy, the British, soon joined in the caroling. The war was put on hold, and the soldiers greeted each other in “No Man’s Land,” exchanging gifts of whiskey and cigars. In many areas, the truce held until Christmas night, while in other places the truce did not end until New Year’s Day. In one area, the opposing sides played a soccer match together.

…a war tradition of the 19th century…

British commanders Sir John French and Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien disapproved of the truce, and they ordered artillery bombardments on Christmas Eve in the remaining years of the war. Troops were also rotated with regularity to keep them from growing too familiar with the enemy troops in the close quarters of trench warfare. The Christmas truce was a war tradition of the 19th century, and its disappearance marked the end of wartime protocols of that time.

It was on this day in 1823 that the famous poem “A Visit From St. Nicholas” was first published. It begins, “Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house / Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse.”

…new evidence has come out…

Fourteen years after its first publication, an editor attributed the poem to a wealthy professor of classical literature named Clement Clarke Moore. In the last few years, new evidence has come out that a Revolutionary War major named Henry Livingston Jr. may have been the actual author of “The Night Before Christmas.” His family has letters describing his recitation of the poem before it was originally published, and literary scholars have found many similarities between his work and “The Night Before Christmas.” He was also three quarters Dutch, and many of the details in the poem, including names of the reindeer, have Dutch origins.

In the northern hemisphere, today is the Winter Solstice, the shortest day of the year and the longest night. It’s officially the first day of winter and one of the oldest known holidays in human history. Anthropologists believe that solstice celebrations go back at least 30,000 years, before humans even began farming on a large scale. The stone circles of Stonehenge were arranged to receive the first rays of midwinter sun.

…officially the first day of winter…

Ancient peoples believed that because daylight was waning, it might go away forever, so they lit huge bonfires to tempt the sun to come back. The tradition of decorating our houses and our trees with lights at this time of year is passed down from those ancient bonfires.

In Ancient Rome, the winter solstice was celebrated with the festival of Saturnalia, during which all business transactions and even war were suspended, and slaves were waited upon by their masters.