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| Happy New Year |
New Year's Eve is upon us so 2025 is disappearing over the horizon. It wasn't a bad year for me, but it was expensive. A lot of home maintenance costs tried their best to drain my wallet. I hope your year was fine as well.
And here's hoping 2026 works out for all of us. Enjoy any parties to attend and fireworks you may see, and enjoy your misplaced optimism while making New Year resolutions. You probably won't keep them anyway, but hope springs eternal.
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Nikolay Dubovskoy (1859-1918) was a Russian romantic landscape painter. He traveled extensively and painted landscapes of different regions. He also was active in artist salons and academia. While well known in his day, the Soviets ignored him and his works were forgotten for a period.
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| Portrait of Nikolay Dubovskoy by Vladimir Makovsky |
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During Easter I frequently post Victorian Easter cards which are, to put it mildly, rather bizarre. I decided to see what Victorian Christmas cards were like. Uhhh... that may have been a bad decision.
Above we have a young lad in a teapot, presumably the adults are brewing some ankle-biter tea. Below we have snowman's ghost with a club getting ready to waylay a pedestrian, and then Santa Claus is committing armed robbery -- I suppose that is either commentary on Christmas commercialism, or perhaps Santa raising funds to pay his elves' salary.
From there on the cards continue to be strange. I assume the cards are meant to be jokes, but, like a Hieronymus Bosch painting, time has stripped the visuals of their meaning leaving only oddity behind. At any rate, if you get one of these cards this Christmas, will it be from friend or foe?
Well, another odd TGIF post. During the Christmas season, figuring we've all heard traditional Western Christmas songs over and over by now, I always change things up by posting some Japanese Christmas songs.
While not an official Japanese holiday, Christmas is still quite popular and celebrated. Not being a Christian nation, the Japanese have jettisoned the religious elements of the holiday. However, they embrace the secular trappings: Christmas trees, Santa Claus, decorations and so forth.
On Christmas families will gather for a meal, often, and oddly enough, a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken. Meanwhile Christmas Eve has morphed into a couple's holiday akin to Valentines Day.
That explains Japanese Christmas music. They are either parties, lovey-dovey couple stuff, or, like the above video, both mixed together (while the band members are dancing about doing J-Pop girl group sort of stuff -- bouncing on couches, acting cute, and giggling a lot -- the singer is happy she has a boyfriend now so she doesn't have another lonely Christmas). In the video immediately below, they've changed 'jingle bells' into 'single hell', and we have the travails of a dateless salaryman.
The rest are a sampling of other J-pop Christmas tunes, with my favorite being the last which has a level of frantic insanity that is very J-Poppy in its weirdness.
In 1893 Fridtjof Nansen set out on an expedition to reach the north pole. His plan was unique; after studying arctic currents, he decided to intentionally get a boat icebound where it would then get carried by the ocean currents to the pole. He had a boat, the Fram, specially built to withstand the pressures of the ice and the cold.
They spent a long time in the ice pack but eventually determined that they would not drift to the pole. In 1895, after reaching as far north as they thought the ship would, Nansen and Hjalmar Johansen decided they would try to reach the pole on skis. They fell short (by about 170 miles), but at the time it was the farthest north reached to date.
Because the ship was drifting and would be hard to locate, the two proceeded to Franz Josef Land. It was a long trek south, and they had to build a cabin to winter in. Eventually they encountered another polar expedition and were taken the others' base camp.
Meanwhile the Fram continued to drift for months, eventually clearing the ice pack and making it to Spitsbergen where they encountered yet another polar explorer -- this one trying to reach the north pole via balloon.
Remarkably there were no casualties during the years long expedition. It was judged a success, even though it fell short of the pole. The Fram is now a museum ship.
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Technically speaking, the title of this post should be paintings of cattle since bulls and water buffaloes are included. Regardless, in spite of any distress it may cause pedants, I'm sticking with cows.
In general, to me cows seem to be one of the more dimwitted of nature's creations. All they do is stand around fields eating grass, although they do have the saving grace of providing us with steaks, hamburger, milk, and leather. So, there is that.
Still, some people seem to be fond of the grazing lunkheads, so for those misguided souls I present these pictures.
No, this post isn't about Tchaikovsky's ballet, nor is it about young ladies that majored in 'Womyn's Studies' at one of our fine universities, rather it is about the decorative Christmas nutcracker that is ubiquitous during the holidays.
The above video gives a historical overview of its evolution from a tool for cracking nuts to its current form as a colorful staple of Christmas decor. Below is a video of a German factory that produces them.
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On this anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor I offer a small collection of paintings picturing the event.
YESTERDAY, December 7, 1941 a date which will live in infamy the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.
The United States was at peace with that Nation and, at the solicitation of Japan, was still in conversation with its Government and its Emperor looking toward the maintenance of peace in the Pacific. Indeed, one hour after Japanese air squadrons had commenced bombing in the American Island of Oahu, the Japanese Ambassador to the United States and his colleague delivered to our Secretary of State a formal reply to a recent American message. And while this reply stated that it seemed useless to continue the existing diplomatic negotiations, it contained no threat or hint of war or of armed attack.
It will be recorded that the distance of Hawaii from Japan makes it obvious that the attack was deliberately planned many days or even weeks ago. During the intervening time the Japanese Government has deliberately sought to deceive the United States by false statements and expressions of hope for continued peace.
The attack yesterday on the Hawaiian Islands has caused severe damage to American naval and military forces. I regret to tell you that very many American lives have been lost. In addition American ships have been reported torpedoed on the high seas between San Francisco and Honolulu.
-- Franklin D. Roosevelt
This is a walk through Hanga Roa, the main town on Easter Island (Rapa Nui). The town, such as it is, is small, but very well-tended and attractive. The walk starts in a residential area, works its way down to the coast, and then returns. The island is very touristy, with snorkeling, and of course the giant Moai heads, being the primary attraction. Easter island has had troubles with Chinese fishing fleets illegally denuding their waters which has required Chilean coastguard intervention.
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Sydney Long (1871-1955) was an Australian painter. He started out as an impressionist and moved on to embrace the art nouveau style and pallet. Rather than showing the Australian bush as a brutal and stark location, he softened and romanticized it. He was a successful artist during his life.
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| Sydney Long |
Black Friday's TGIF music video is, since we're in the middle of a long weekend and it's a bit late to get ready for it, always a bit different. A few years ago, facing the coming onslaught of Christmas music, I decided to brace myself by playing some good ol' Thanksgiving music.
To my horror I discovered there was no such corpus of music, so, as a service to humanity, I decided to create it. My first choice for the genre was 'Thanks for the Memory'. Due to my exacting standards that was the only Thanksgiving song for several years, but after careful consideration this year I've added a second song!
So, I present below, 'Let's Turkey Trot'.
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| The first Thanksgiving football game |
The above image is swiped from a Dave Barry column. While it looks accurate to me, there is one detail I have a quibble with; why, unlike all the other Pilgrims, is the Pilgrim carrying the ball barefooted? Was he Plymouth colony's vagrant? Was he going native and soon to be living in a teepee in the woods? Was he America's first proto-hippie? Why? Why? Why? The questions abound, but there are no answers.
Anyway, enjoy your turkey and the football games (unless you're a Lions fan) and have a Happy Thanksgiving.
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| A Texas Thanksgiving |
The celebration of the 1621 Plymouth feast is commemorated, via Abraham Lincoln's proclamation, as the U.S.A.'s National Day of Thanksgiving. Naturally, much of the mythos surrounding such a symbolic event is bunkum, but the outline is accurate. The Pilgrims had migrated to Massachusetts seeking greater religious freedom. When there, they allied with the Wampanoag Indians who used the Pilgrims as trading partners and muscle to counter the Narragansett people who they were in conflict with.
The Pilgrims had endured a very hard year so, before the winter set in, they held an autumnal harvest feast to celebrate surviving their struggles. It is unclear why, but numbers of the Wampanoag joined in with the celebration and thus the outline of Thanksgiving was laid out: religious freedom, the difficulty settlers faced, complex relationships with the Indians, and the wild nature of the American wilderness.
Harvest feasts were common in the more aquarian older times. They marked bringing in the harvest and enjoying the last few days before the long, brutal winter arrived. As a result, harvest fests were held in many areas and, Americans being Americans, many of them have claimed the title of the 'first' Thanksgiving. Well, Lincoln put an end to that trivia, but any excuse for a fall festival, I guess.
By the way, the above picture is the Spanish/Texan entry into the First Thanksgiving derby. However, it is not a harvest festival. Instead, a number of Spanish colonists moved north from Mexico intending to settle near present day El Paso. They had a very difficult crossing of the Chihuahuan Desert and were greatly relieved when they finally got to the waters of the Rio Grande. After recovering from their ordeal, they held a feast. It was also attended by the local Manso people. What would they have eaten at that Thanksgiving meal? From the above linked article:
Waterfowl were plentiful in the area; an earlier explorer had noted that the Manso ate cranes, ducks and geese. Primarily foragers, the Manso ate “whatever was available,” Ortega says. “I mean anything. Turtles, cactus, deer, rabbit and probably snakes.” But they also cultivated corn, beans and squash in tiny fields along the river, she adds. It’s also possible that our favorite Thanksgiving poultry made an appearance. “The Manso would have been raising turkeys, and [the Europeans] would have taken them.”
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This post is full of wine images for my vast hoard of regulars who are drunken wine moms. At least I assume they are drunk, why else would they visit this idiotic blog? Anyway, enjoy the paintings as you get sloshed and bitch about the men in your life.
The video details the first attempt to climb Mt. Everest in 1922 following a 1921 expedition that surveyed the mountain to determine the best route for the climb.
While today climbing Everest is a bit of a rich man's tourist trap, in 1922 it was a challenge in largely unknown Himalayan territory. In 1922 they made three attempts to summit Everest, but each fell short, with their highest climb ending 2,000 feet below the summit. The last ended in an avalanche that killed nine porters. Still, they learned valuable lessons on the expedition, the most important being the value of bottled oxygen. It is a very interesting video.
This is all very foreign to me. As a Florida resident our tallest mountain range is located in Disney World and features such awesome peaks as Space Mountain, Thunder Mountain, Splash Mountain, The Matterhorn, and Expedition Everest. You 'climb' them by riding in little cars, which seems preferable to me than having to hack out ice steps on the side of a cliff, although you will encounter such perils as animatronic Yetis and the like.
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| Detail of a basilica in Malaga, Spain |
Well, I'm back from my vacation. My plan to bag a whale, get it stuffed, and hang it above my mantel fell short. And no, not by the interference of the wankers of Greenpeace, instead it was TSA that foiled me. Apparently, you're not allowed to board an airplane with a harpoon. Who knew? Stupid airlines and their draconian carry-on rules.
Anyway, I went to Spain, Gibraltar, Morocco and the Canary Islands. I met interesting people along the way and made some new friends. It was a good trip.
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Maxime Maufra (1861–1918) was a French impressionist painter. He primarily painted landscapes and the seaside. His use of color is quite striking.
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| Maxime Maufra |