Happy St. Patrick's Day 2022

Here we go again, my 97th St. Paddy's day, or thereabouts. At least it feels like it. Here I am at work, and in person, which is pretty cool, even occasionally rocking the bowler that Camille was totally interested in this morning:

"My hat, daddy! My hat, da-dee! MY hat, daddy!!"

It was a cute moment in the morning. Happy St. Patrick's Day! Maybe I'll have something interesting to say later.

Tomb Raiding

Corrie and I were watching a program about the excavations of ancient tombs in Egypt. It was a very good and interesting series of episodes, and they showed the wide variety of women involved in running dig sites in Egypt.

As something that makes sense, each and every site has an official of the Egyptian government on site. They are there to hear the news of whatever finds there are, and they make sure that the tight schedules are kept. And they are serious.

But the main theme of nearly every single site is the near total desecration and destruction of every tomb. Mummies broken and strewn everywhere in tiny sand- and rubble-filled dugouts fill most sites. It's quite remarkable, really. So many corpses, and so much desecration. And many of the corpses show the vast amounts of care that went into preserving them.

And something I didn't know was that mummification wasn't just for the ultra elites. Many affluent ancient Egyptians had themselves preserved through a pared down mummification process. If the tombs hadn't been destroyed, their preservation may not have been exactly as good as the pharaohs, but it would have likely done the trick, at least as far as some sense of "preservation" is concerned.

The tomb raiding aspect I couldn't help theorize about. Some of the site managers had their own ideas. Some didn't pass the sniff test, like one idea that was posited that tombs were raided by the next pharaoh or their vizier in an attempt to recoup some of the cost of burying their former boss/king.

I would never say this never happened, but it seemed unlikely that each vizier or pharaoh would go to lengths of destroying the newly embalmed and mummified occasional relative's corpse. Also, much of time the evidence showed that the raiding happened sometimes a thousand years after the burial.

When the seventh destroyed tomb out of seven showed up on the screen, I was like, "Well, that makes sense doesn't it? Bronze Age collapse right there." 

These rulers buried themselves in the ground with all of their wealth, and after the collapse of society at large (Egypt didn't fall as hard as most everywhere else, but still) that wealth needed to be flushed back into society somehow. So...makes sense that they fully wrecked the bodies, right?

And about those bodies...one of the, eh, pieces of a corpse was a remarkable find. It was also shown in close up in all its grisly details. In fact, here it is:

The only vagina on Disney+

This is, in fact, the closeup of a vagina, with the labia faintly visible near the center of the frame. What's remarkable is that the vagina is still in the unresolved gape of having just given birth. The new mom hadn't recovered yet before she died, which implies that she died somewhere in childbirth, possibly from hemorrhaging and blood loss.

Jeeze! This woman was pregnant, gave birth, died very quickly thereafter, was wealthy enough to have been mummified, had her tomb raided and remains shredded, and eventually had her vagina held up on camera for closeup. Oof. Respect and privacy in the age of ancient forensics and pathology, I guess, right?

This entire intellectual exercise (besides the presentation of the mummified vagina) seemed to me like an appendix to my thoughts on The Bronze Age Collapse and the bigger concept of Systems Collapse in general. It makes me a little curious about what may happen when/if we experience our own system collapse: since our own 'pharaohs' (see: obscenely wealthy individuals) won't be burying their wealth, because it is not physical items like gold, jewels, and ivory, it mostly gets represented as ones and zeroes. Sure there plenty jewels possessed by billionaires, especially in their mansions, and again, think about post-collapse: would those mansions be safe from looters?

And how would looters feel if they had access to, say, the Sacler's corpses, or the corpses of Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk?

The Varied City Halls of LA County

Before we absconded for South-East Asia on Christmas Eve of 2013 (and time warping over Christmas Day, not existing on Earth for that day that year), we stopped off at city hall in Pasadena, and if you follow that jump-link, you can see the magnificent building that acts as their city hall. If I said that the picture was the national capitol building in Montevideo, the capitol of Uruguay, any normal American would say, "Um, okay. If you say so," which is just to say that it wouldn't be shocking.

Last week I went with Corrie on an errand for her business to the city hall in West Covina, a city in the northeast of LA County. Outside it wasn't nearly as grandiose of that of Pasadena, but that's not exactly fair. Inside, on the main floor, the second, it had a series of planters that Corrie told me many buildings added in the '70s.

It also had curved rectilinear sconces and spherical light fixtures. It resembled an outdated mall. Every aspect of any city hall were here, and I imagined how weird it would be to work in a bureaucracy like this, in a city hall that reminded me of a mall.

Long Beach has replaced their city hall, or at least demolished the old one, scene in the opening scene in Battlestar Galactics (the original series), the complex known for its brutalist design philosophy. The new one may not be done. I may have to do a whole series of these, but with time like it is, I doubt it will happen anytime soon.

Coming Soon: World War III

(Sigh)

That was a good 75 years. Seven and a half decades without a land war in Europe. Plenty of prosperity and growth were had in the first few decades after the last enormous global conflict. And yet, here we are.

Prosperity for many most certainly doesn't mean for all, and even so, prosperity alone wouldn't deter the most belligerent of actors, and Vladimir Putin fills this role naturally.

What exactly the plan is, or was, starts to come into focus if we understand much of the past, er, 800 years of Kievan Rus diasporic history. The Kievan Rus Principality is claimed as the progenitor of the Muscovite branch (today's Russia), the Kievan branch (today's Ukraine) and the upper branch (today's Belarus) of that original Medieval empire. Ukraine isn't like Chechnya to Russia, a wayward former Soviet holding: Ukraine is the center of their origin story.

When they elected pro-Western leaders in 2014, Putin said eff that. When they started taking down the monuments erected during the Soviet era, Putin said, 'Oh really? Well, we'll help you out with all that.' That's when they took back the Crimea and started funding the separatists in the east of Ukraine.

Now all it takes for us to get SUPER involved would be an attack on Poland, which is already bordering with Ukraine and happy to let the white, Slavic speaking refugees stream across the border into their white, Slavic speaking country, as well as being the first European country to boycott sporting events with Russia (rightfully) and trying to push FIFA and the IOC to join suit. Good for them.

A young person asked me yesterday if I was ready for WWIII. I said, well, YOU better be, since it'll be you sent off to Eastern Europe to help push back the tide. 

Why would Putin just stop with Ukraine? Maybe Ukraine really is the goal, full stop. What if Ping and Putin team up and come after us? Is the probability of that zero?

I'm not particularly nervous of that scenario, but yikes, this is what we're talking about? And what if our former president won reelection in 2020? Would he have sent troops to help his boy Vladdy?

Continuing global pandemic and ongoing global climate crisis aren't enough for us? 

When we were young!

Getting old is a funny thing.  Necessary thing, but funny. Sleep funny and your neck hurts for a whole week. For someone like me who's worked on my feet for decades, put me at my dinner table talking into my laptop for a year for work, and my leg nerves act up.

For a different aspect of work, I went digging up old pictures from the Italian village of Pisa back when we visited in 2005. I started looking through the various other folders when I eventually found them (since I have too many laptops):

Three are not shown; that makes 8

What I found that I'd like to share today were some pics of me and Corrie getting dressed up (for a couple of heads on month two of backpacking through Europe), and heading to dinner in Paris:

In my one button up shirt, but it seemed like it had warmed up finally on the trip.

And Corrie, looking smashing in a shirt she bought in Venice:

I'm not one to wistfully pine for my youth. On some days I feel like that trip, now seventeen (!!!) years back, was no more than just a few spots ago, whatever "spots" may mean.

Paris is one of the places, man, one of the special cities in the world. And you're never too old to experience it, or again for some of us. 

Getting old doesn't have to be a fight. Sometimes it's nice to reminisce. Just to take stock of where we've been. Maybe appreciate it all someday

Happy Two-sday!

As a math nerd I couldn't miss the opportunity to mention the rarity that today brings us from the world of numerical observation.

I understand that it is just a random confluence of things, but it's kinda cool anyway: in this country we'll write the date as 2/22/22 or 2/22/2022, depending on your preferences on the year.

In most other countries (that regularly use the Gregorian calendar like us), the date is written as day.month.year, and as so, with full dd.mm.yyyy format, today's date would be written as: 22.02.2022.

That's a palindrome and an octuple like this may be never be seen again. Even switching to the MHs calendar wouldn't make it any easier (this is 22.07.5203 MHs).

And it's the day of the week that in English makes the sound of the number. Definitely better than a few years back when Cinco de Mayo was on Taco Tuesday but everything was shut down because of  a corona virus pandemic.

Birthday Snow Trip (With Little Snow)

With my February girls' birthdays on consecutive days, we decided to head to the snow. As much as people may not like being freezing cold, we get a little too bored with (looks over shoulder) our very pretty weather...?

Cassius had wanted to go to the snow over Winter Break, but that morphed into a rainy hike last December because of noncompliant weather. We decided to take a drive to Big Bear during the birthday weekend of my February girls. We figured there would be more snow, or at least some snow.

We rented a VRBO place, a large-ish 3 bedroom cabin on a steeply raked piece of mountain side, and were joined by Cass's friend and his mom, so there were six of us. From the bottom of the backyard looking up at the place:

The bank of windows on what looks like an upper floor was the living room, and it was actually below the street level. The driveway was a terrifying nearly vertical drop from the roadway that eventually evened up to horizontal. With no room to turn around, backing out was always an adventure since you were 1) ass up, feeling like you were about to smack your forehead on the windshield; and 2) couldn't see if anyone was zooming up the residential street (which was more often than you'd ever like).

Instead of heading to a bank or ATM to get a few hundred bucks in cash for a snow/inner-tube experience, we opted for the less-than twenty-buck plastic toboggan and opted to drive and look for some mild hills.

We found a little road that was blocked by a gate and signs that said "DO NOT BLOCK FIRE ROAD." We parked there, only blocking half of the drive, but everything on the other side was covered in ice or snow, so we felt comfortable to leave our cars there for nearly an hour.

And while neither Corrie nor I brought out phones on the caper, we don't have the photographic evidence of the excitement, I will attest to excitement being had. I think Cass went down the most times, taking at least six runs with the biggest shard of the plastic toboggan after it splintered and came apart (as these essentially disposable toys tend to do).

We went to Lake Arrowhead a number of times i the three days we were there, to either eat at restaurants in the village or do some grocery shopping:

The view from along the ridge on the roads between these alpine villages are spectacular, but I'm not sure this picture can do justice, or is from the best spot.

From some positions, one can actually see the Pacific Ocean. Remarkable.

The evenings were spent watching Encanto or the Olympics, or. both, and hanging out by the fire. It may have only been a few days worth of time, but it was a nice little Winter Vacation, with capital letters and everything.