Genetics and the Basque

I was always fascinated by the language and ethnic group isolates in Europe, the Basque.

Living in the Pyrenees straddling the borders of Spain and France, the Basque people boast an insular cultural identity, as well as a language that is neither Indo-European (like Germanic, Romance, Celtic, Slavic, or Baltic) nor Finno-Urgic (like Finn, Estonian, or Magyar). It has no known larger family or connection anywhere in the world.

Mysteries abounded about the people, and they had their own stories about where they came from, about how they were the original people in Europe, how they took over the caves from the Neanderthal. Maybe I made that last part up.

But a recent genomic study showed that a modern Basque person's genome, once sequenced, was indistinguishable from Iron Age remains from a nearby necropolis. Multiple thousands of years later, at least a hundred generations, and the genomes were the same. This was from before the Celtic, from before the Roman and Greek, and, apparently from before the Proto-Indo-Europeans arrived.

It looks like they were from the first Europeans...at least remnants from one of the earliest waves of human arrivals, which is pretty cool.

And then there's the language. So different than any Indo-European language, so different from Finno-Urgic...I'm not a linguist, but maybe I would have been if things broke differently (at least that's what I've been told), and how languages work in their own context I've always found interesting.

I snatched this visual for how the Euskara (the Basque language) works, and while it's different, it seems logical:

Now, like other languages that are tenseless (and I'm not sure Euskara is tenseless), they use verb aspect to delineate whether or not an action has completed (essentially past tense), as well as the regular use of the ergative case, one of the more confusing grammar-related concepts around (that a deep-dive doesn't clear up as much as show how many grammar rules one has forgotten in thirty years).

Nowadays, my interest in the mystery of where the Basque came from has fallen off in favor of a different mystery: how, over the course of five- to six-thousand years, were they able to keep to themselves so diligently?  Historically, mountains slow armies, not keep them out forever. The Celts, the Romans, the Germanic-tribes, the Moors, even Franco's bullying and murder only led to losing some of their language heritage, which they've since gained some of it back. It has to have been a conscious effort. 

Today, the people and language have given us names like the Bay of Biscay, as well as the city name of Bilbao.

Kinda makes me want to see what other languages trace back so far in specific places...I'm thinking the Amazon basin, Papua/New Guinea, or maybe even the aboriginal languages of the Americas or Australia...

Magic Kingdom First Timers

It has been a long week. It feels like months have gone by since last Saturday. But that's mostly because of taking the kids to the Happiest Place on Earth, and still recovering nearly a week later. And what a trip it was. It certainly spoiled them and will forever alter their perspective on the Disneyland theme park experience.

Where's Waldo at Big Thunder Mountain

When I say it will spoil my kids, what I mean is that this trip was NOT a representative experience of 'going to Disneyland.'

What's the main state of being on any trip to a Disney theme park? Why, waiting in line, of course. What happened on this trip?

Virtually no lines!

Have you ever gotten a terrible sunburn waiting out here on this sunny plateau in line for Space Mountain seen below?

Me too! Some of my worst (in memory) sunburns I got right there in the sunny switchbacking second floor waiting, but on this day with my own kids I had to slow down the speed-walking just to take the picture.

I joke, but Space Mountain was the only ride with more than a fifteen minute wait...at maybe 17 minutes. We finished eating around 1:30 pm and were done with the Space Mountain experience by 2. So surreal.

Besides the Matterhorn, this was the last ride we wanted to do, and we finished by 2 pm!

Let me start over. This trip had been in the works for a while, and cousins were coming in from far away, as well as elders coming from further afield.

We didn't tell our own kids until the night before, at dinner. Like, "So...do you wanna go to school tomorrow, or go to Disneyland?" The Boy didn't beloieve us while our daughter lost her mind.

When we arrived at the Park, we met up with everyone else in Fantasyland---through the big castle---and essentially walked onto the Mr. Toad ride. This ride is a cult classic, as it follows Mr. Toad as he steals a car, dies, goes to hell, and eventually escapes back to the land of the living.

Peter Pan had a bit of a wait, as it's one of the better rides in the area, behind Mr. Toad, so we walked right up to and on both Snow White and Pinocchio, with zero wait time. Next we did Big Thunder Mountain Railroad, one of the best rides in the park. We walked right up to it, waited for two trains, and got on. UNHEARD OF.

Camille, Lorenzo, and Luna liked it so much that we all rode it again, and Camille had her hands up the entire ride.

Then Pirate's of the Caribbean---again walked right onto a boat. WHAT? Then to the Haunted Mansion. Walked right into the big mustering room where the ride starts. WTF? We walked right onto the former Splash Mountain/current Tiana's Bayou ride. I remember waiting 150 minutes for that ride the year it debuted.

Like a fuzzy headed doofus I put Camille in the front and sat right behind her, and both of us were soaking wet for a few hours afterwards. Rookie move...she was in tears, but came out of a funk soon enough.

Seven minutes of walking the snaking path up to Indiana Jones. Walked right by and got onto the annoying It's a Small World ride. Came back by to do Peter Pan. Star Tours was a walk-on. The laser-gun Toy Story video game was a walk-on.

We did all of this BEFORE LUNCH. I can't stress this enough: that's easily an entire day's worth of time, and we were sitting down to eat around 1 pm.

After Space Mountain, my mom wanted Cass to drive her around in the Autopia ride, so Camille was my escort, while Corrie got a chance to ride the very exciting Bench ride.

Driving Mr. Daddy

Family was behind us, too, and we got some cool pics of them

Sometimes the fact that it was quiet meant we were going to ride the ride, like It's a Small World. Other times, like with the Matterhorn, or the Star Wars Land, we were determined to do it.

The Matterhorn, despite new bobsled cars that separate you from your partner, still acts like a kamikaze chiropractic visit.

Eventually we weaved our way to the Star Wars Land. This was after heading to Toon Town, riding the nifty track-less cartoon ride, then letting the kids play for nearly an hour at the playground and ride the kiddie Gadget's Roller Coaster.

After that, we split up with many of our party, as they moved onto California Adventure. We didn't opt for the park hopper passes, and instead went to Galaxy's Edge, a corner of Anaheim with a few billion dollars sunk into it:

It's super serious. There are nominally two rides here, but experiences is a better term. One has your group snaking through the inner bowels of a base, being assigned roles (pilots/gunners/engineers) and then have you act out those roles during a flying-the-Millenium-Falcon mission.

But that was noting compared to the las ride/experience, Rise of the Resistance. In this, er, ride, you're pushed into an escape bus/ship with everyone else in line for the ride (about 30 people deep). But the ship is intercepted by the Empire, riders are then captured by Stormtroopers and sent to interrogation rooms, where they eventually escape because the droids controlling their transports are repurposed by the resistance. It's a silly, rip-roaring sequence of a movie that you, as a rider, are in.

It was an exhausting end to a rich day. We went to dinner and then headed home. We told the kids, over and over, that the reason that the multi-day park hopper tickets are the best value for locals is because you never get to ride this many rides on a single day. I never understood it. The park was busy and full, but we barely waited for anything.

We might've walked ten miles. It felt like we walked ten miles.

Cass took the map he had been using to guide us around and marked with an "X" all the things we did.

I'm tired all over again just looking at it.

What a day!

Morning Light and Fog on the Coast

Sometimes the light in the mornings looks like its playing tricks on your eyes:

But then the picture turns out okay, and you tell yourself that here's another day where we can trust our eyes.