NTodd Has A Blog?

I Think He Wrote 'Hamlet Part VIII - The Revenge' Here

This has been stuck in my head for quite a while:

[T]his scepter'd isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise,
This fortress built by Nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war,
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in the silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall,
Or as a moat defensive to a house,
Against the envy of less happier lands,
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this Vashon...

There's someplace out there for everyone - even if you need a pickaxe, a compass, and night goggles to find it.

#throwbackthursday

11 years ago today, are you kidding me?!

a life consumed by slow decay

One of my new favorites: Grótti by SKÁLD.

I dig their covers, too, particularly Seven Nation Army.  And the track High Hopes hits me right in the gut:

There's a hunger still unsatisfied

Our weary eyes still stray to the horizon

Though down this road we've been so many times

Smell that salty sea air...

This Is How I Roll

Rudy Francisco:

I dig this guy: "I write poems and say them out loud...sometimes"

Cool pools drown your mind

I've been avoiding the Depp-Heard discourse for the most part.  It's all a bit triggering, as you might imagine.

That said, I do actually have a couple things to say.  First, I do not really know all the deets, nor do I care to.  Seems to me that both parties are pretty fucking toxic, so all the stans in either camp really should shut the fuck up.

Now, central to my point: our culture sucks at dealing with DV.  And part of that cultural failing is everybody weighing in on this case, particularly from ignorance about how survivors should act, who can be abusers, mental illness, etc.  Shut the fuck up, too.

Just shut the fuck up, all of you.

Розквітає поле, а вона сивіє

Just catching up on a bunch of things, including the greatest victory in Europe since Waterloo.

Blame It On The Mead

Back in '86, I spent several weeks in Scandanavia and the USSR through Putney Student Travel.  We started with a bike trip across Denmark, and one night we spent at a youth hostel in Hirtshals, where we met a lot of interesting folks whilst watching the World Cup between West Germany and the Maradona-led Argentines.

 

A Dutch guy passed around gin in a flask (yuck).  Another dude held dual Aussie-German citizenship, and regaled us with his thoughts on American entertainment and sports and booze and whatnot.  A joke he told me that I'll never forget: the Danish language was born when a drunk German and drunk Swede tried talking to each other.

 

As I've noted before, language is my love language.  I appreciate both the similarities between languages, as well as what makes them each unique.

 

There was no such thing as a Ukrainian major back in my day (is there such a thing now?), so I studied Russian, which my great-grandfather and his family spoke.  They of course didn't speak Ukrainian because the tongue was suppressed by tsars and commissars alike.  Also didn't speak Yiddish, which a lot of Jewkrainians did - an apparent sociolinguistic divide amongst different communities.

 

Anyway, I've been studying Ukrainian in DuoLingo.  It's been an interesting exercise, as Uke and Russian are so similar (hey, they only split from Proto-Slavic maybe 1000 years ago) that on the one hand, it's pretty easy to pick up, but then sometimes I get tripped up on something simple because I'm still thinking по-русски.  Their alphabets deviate slightly, grammar is very close, and a lot of shared vocab.

 

In some sense, it's like Jules and Vincent discussing the little differences between the US and Europe.  Probably my favorite example is the word for 'bear':

• Ukrainian: ведмідь (vedmid')
• Russian: медведь (medved')

Was the word invented by 2 drunk Slavs arguing about what to call the beast?  In the end, they appear to have swapped the syllables for what is essentially a descriptive name: "eater of honey" or "honey-eater".  

 

Speaking of which:

The Germanic speaking peoples, who inhabited and hunted in northern climes and were presumably in frequent contact with the bear, did not use its common name. Instead, they used a circumlocution: "the brown one", and this is reflected in the modern word for bear in all the Germanic languages. Linguists hypothesize that in old common Germanic, the true name of the bear was under a taboo -- not to be spoken directly.

The exact details of the taboo are not known. Did it apply to hunters who were hunting the bear and did not want to warn it? Or to hunters hunting other animals and did not wanting to rile up the bear and have it steal their prey? Or did it apply to anyone who did not want to summon the bear by its name and perhaps become its prey?
...

A similar taboo also operated in the Slavic languages, but a different circumlocution was used. The word for bear in Russian is "medved", and the same in Czech. In Polish, bear is a similar word "niedzwiedz", and in Old Church Slavonic, bear is "medvedi". All of these words mean something like "honey-eater" and are derived from the common Slavic words "medu" = "honey" (PIE *medhu-, from which we also get the English word "mead") plus "ed-" = "eat".

A Twitter prompt come to life: your Slavic name is "eater of" and the last food you ate.  Hmm.  My nickname in grade school was Pretzel (because I was scrawny like Mr Pretzel, and I often had pretzels in my lunch).

 

Well, this is all making me thirsty, albeit not for mead...

#throwbacksunday

Near Bethlehem in '09.  Simply to be Palestinian, or Ukrainian, or Trans...is revolutionary.

O pointy birds, o pointy pointy

Watched one of my favorite comfort movies.  Wish I could change the weather, and other things.

Mindless Entertainment Therapy

Þat mælti mín móðir,

at mér skyldi kaupa

fley ok fagrar árar

 

- Old Viking chant

In mourning over my Guardians hat, lost last night on the ferry like a paratrooper's leg bag on D-Day.  So naturally I took today off.

Okay, well, actually...I *am* on PTO, but not because of my ball cap (although I am still pissed about it).  I'm just taking time for self care, as I am pretty functionally broken in physical, emotional, and spiritual terms, and this turns out to be the perfect day to deal with some of that.

So today's plan is basically lounging around, eating bon bons, binge watching silly things.  And I figured I might as well share some of the stuff I've been consuming up to this point.  

Imma take a step back a few months to when I finished up season 5 of The Last Kingdom (which I really have loved since the beginning).  Casting about for something in a similar vein, I decided to take a chance on Britannia, which had come up in recommendations.

I was a bit unsure about it, but the cast included Emperor Palpatine and Kelly Reilly from Yellowstone/Sherlock Holmes (Guy Ritchie's), so why the hell not?  Started out pretty much as I expected, with a druid doing druid-y things, then Romans doing Roman-y things, followed by opening credits with...Hurdy Gurdy Man by Donovan?! 

Trippy shit all the way down, and I cranked through all 3 seasons (even doing a free 7-day trial of Epix to watch the last one).  Truly ridiculous, wicked fun.

Vikings: Valhalla came up next in the recs (oddly enough, there are a few actors who played minor characters in Antoine Fuqua's King Arthur, which is another silly pleasure).  Just one season released earlier this year, and absent anything else compelling, I gave it a whirl.  Enjoyed it so much that I immediately continued to the original Vikings show.

Now, of course none of these shows are super married to historical accuracy.  Ain't the point, and I scoff heartily at folks who have bitched about various liberties taken.  It's a big multiverse, people, so just lie back and think of England.

One thing I particularly liked about Vikings: how they handled language, including even pronouncing Kyiv correctly when eyes turned to the East.  It also weirdly gave me plenty of fodder in class, and not just for one of my military cohorts who chose the name "Cloud Vikings".

Sadly, I closed out the show this week, and am considering whether I should shift gears a bit to watch something like OFMD.  I know I'll like it, just not sure if I'm ready for the departure from my current thematic universe.

This morning I've been listening to the soundtrack for King Arthur: Legend of the Sword.  I really dig the music of this absolutely bonkers Arthurian interpretation from Guy Ritchie.  In fact, I've watched the flick 4 times this month.

It's got typical Ritchie camera work (e.g., over-the-shoulder GoPro feel of panicked running that he used in Sherlock Holmes: Game of Shadows), over the top banter, interesting compression/splicing of timelines, nonsensical magic, all the hallmarks of quality entertainment.

An exchange that cracks my shit up probably more than it ought:

Arthur [about to be bitten by a snake for magical protection]: I don't like snakes.
Mage [deadpan whilst conjuring said snake]: noone likes snakes.

Short of finding a swift ship with pretty oar to journey away, it is the perfect escape from these, my days of drear.

Is there anything else good I should consider watching?