h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Zowee! Just saw the weather Xantief was talking about. Hyp, come on and reassure us that the library is still standing!

Where was the next stop on the Firecloud itinerary, btw?

I think the Phreds, Mr. amd Mrs., are still in the Carolinas.

I had hail and strong winds - straight winds, no tornados. The hail started just after I'd gone to bed. It scared Annie who scrambled under the covers and stayed there all night. I tried to stay awake most of the night, because if the storm sirens go off I have to go unlock the library since we're the only storm shelter in the downtown area.

March is too early for tornados. But we had one last November, which was really unusual for our area. Mother Nature is getting senile.

We had an actual tornado touch down close to Wackyville* a couple weeks ago, insignificant damage, but those weather patterns are highly unusual in CA. I got caught in a Texas-style cloudburst that day, during the commute. Like the proverbial cow p***ing on a flat rock...

There was snow and hail yesterday in Marin county, just north of the Golden Gate, and the highway there, thrilling even in dry weather, became one helluva ride. 2 deaths, I think, and a dozen-some injuries in a single 28-car pileup.

*Vacaville. Spanish for 'cow', French for 'town'. You figger it out.

Weather patterns are definitely unusual. It is clear that somethihg is going on. Whether it is some natural, recurring cycle or is man-made is up for debate, but I don't know how people can say that nothing is happening. They apparently aren't paying attention.

One thing I read several years ago said we have had unusually good weather for the last 100 years or so and that what we think of as normal weather patterns aren't normal at all.

Greetings earthlings:

The mothership is rolling West on I-40 at a steady 65, even as I type. This thread has turned deep and wide in my absence.

I am really addicted. I want an internet connection where I camp more than water, electricity or a dump site.

Roots:
Mrs. Phred...One grandfather (Zada) a Polish bomb-throwing anarchist. Exiled to America. Mrs. Phred has far-flung relatives (Tanta Manyia and Tanta Fagella) in places like Australia.

Me...One grandfather a cop. The other died of alcholism after being gassed in the Great War.

Pictures of Eastern Tiger Swallowtails coming up.

in places like Australia.

Morning, Afternoon, Evening, all.



Good to know that whatever happens, the library, seat of knowledge and all that, will still stand.

...oh, and Phred, you failed to acknowledge any women in your family tree. That's a physical impossibility, you know.

And one last bit of maundering:

I recall that it said in my high school global history book that Europe experienced warmer than normal temperatures during the 1400s (or 1500s?), leading to more successful crops, population explosion, blah blah. Always wondered how the history book could have known that. I mean, they weren't measuring back then or anything. *shrug* But that would be another hundred years of unnusually good weather.

<>

I wish that were the case, Leo. In May of 2003 we lost two area libraries the same evening. The Stockton library was so heavily damaged that it was a complete loss, and the Pierce City Library was simply blown away. There literally wasn't a brick or book left. That same storm system took out two schools, a fire station and nearly every business in the central shopping district in a town 4 miles from here called Carl Junction.

The other night there were 10 tornados on the ground in mostly rural areas just south of here.

I remember one torndo that hit Joplin when I was in college. It ripped down Range Line Rd. (Business 71)and through Forest Park Cemetery. The cemetery was an old one and had lots of mature trees. It uprooted the trees which in turn picked up and exposed a lot of the graves. The same tornado dropped down in a Joplin neighborhood where one of my friends lived. A group of us spent all night helping to move downed tree limbs and debris out of the streets and yards so the emergency crews could get through the streets.

Nasty things, tornados.

morning Ancestors .....

so I head out on the road in the early hours of Monday morning, with a roots-crisis, a sensitivity-crisis, a global crisis and an h2-habit, and I have returned a changed man. ...

good to see you still inhabit these plains and valleys -- I thought you would have moved on long ago, leaving nothing but mystical hieroglyphs in the ashes .... so I would have to find my own way home ..

shallow roots, deep roots -- I'm glad that I got all my wires crossed around all that, (even though it made me blush ) as it nudged me into many thoughts ---

interesting Hyp -- I didn't realise that America was considered a young country, history-wise, in relation to Europe ---not being an historian, I forget these things ----I have decided I am into the magic roots of art, and the magic roots of humans -- you people have all those Anasazi, Hopi, Navajo, rock paintings!!! and canyons and mountains and .... the roots of the best music in the world -- I always thought America was so much more ancient than England. I was on planet-pink-ice-cream-dream during history classes --- I can see Leo wincing, even as I do type ....

Oh, and, Hyp, the Sussex Long Man of Wilmington says hi and knows you have many friends on the road home ---- I asked him about his origins, and he went all shamanistic and mysterious ...and offered me a root-beer.

tornadoes -- this is one weird Mother-Nature we have to live with -- I didn't think there was any weirder mother than my own mother, but Mrs. Nature tops the bill. I'm not sure about her at all. When people talk of tornadoes all I can think of is getting a knock on the head, and running into the Munchkins and the Tin Man. ....

Follow the Yellow Brick Road -- family trees are strange. My kid brother did some research when he contracted Addisons Disease, as it can be hereditary and he wanted to see if he had a way-back rogue gene. Also, having three kids, he is into heritage etc. He realised that finding a normal gene was far more difficult!!

I like the stories and the characters, but I don't really feel any particular soul-connection with my ancestors -- I feel more of a soul-connection with you folks and my other friends. Spirit-family for me I think. .. but there's an incredibly eccentric 95 year old novelist wandering around New York, Leo. to whom I'm related, so 'if you see her, say hullo, she might be in Tangiers...' OK,OK, quoting Dylan is so old, its ancestral ......

the h2 habit is a bit worrying --have to come and go to Sussex quite a lot in the next few years, with elderly parents etc --- we will have to communicate telepathically -- I think we do anyway -- never even seen your faces or heard your voices, yet we make sense over the psychic airwaves --- ?? discuss

Ron - I promise not to do myself down, except on Sundays and Bank Holidays. Its a defence. Bit annoying I know -- got so used to feeling different and therefore wrong -- playground stuff, but I need to drop it -- especially around people I can trust.

Done some great writings on the road -- I have taken to writing in purple and green crayon --- good for the h2 withdrawal sweats, while sitting in Costa coffeshops.

gotta go ....

wackyville, vacas ... ville ... cow ... town .. california,, City Lights bookshop .... (damn -- you got Anasazi rockpaintings and City Lights) cow ... town ... what? give up, X.

talking of CA --- we're going to hear Jackson Browne and David Lindley soon! Playing live in Bristol, UK. yes!!!

Helen

Deep roots.....shallow roots.....of course America has history that goes back thousands of years to warnering nomadic tribes making their way southward from Asia across the Bering Strait to Tierra del Fuego - at least that's the theory. But there's history and then there's history.

The Anasazi ruins in the Southwest are marvellous. (The people who actually built the settlements we ooooh and ahhhhhh over didn't call themselves Anasazi, by the way - that's a Navaho word I believe.) And there are bits and pieces of Native American culture that still remain or have been recreated. But for the most part this broad and beautiful land is a blank page until the Europeans arrived and began 'civilizing' the place. Not blank perhaps as much as speculative.

Farther south there are some ancient monuments sufficient to awe and amaze. Where the natives built in stone. I have a photograph of myself in my younger days seated on a Mayan throne. I have never gotten as far as Peru, but that is on my list of must places to visit. When we had the time and means to go to Peru the state department was discouraging people from doing so due to the Shining Path situation. Made it a bit dicey for tourists.

On the other hand, if you want scenery this is the country to visit. Boy do we have scenery. America is a gorgeous place. We have natural features that take your breath away. Makes me feel a bit better about Mother Nature.

Nope, to me history is the Parthenon and Egyptian mummies and Assyrian palaces and medieval tapestries and Roman mosaics and bronze shivas, and heiroglyphs and viking ships and.......all of which can be found in London in the British Museum. You guys sure are overachievers in the collecting business. If you can't afford to tour the world, then all you have to do is go to England.

And can you imagine what it's like for a librarian from the middle of nowhere to be at the British Library with the Diamond Sutra and the Lindisfarne Gospels and the Magna Carta and the Kelmscott Chaucer and the Codex Sinaiticus and , and, and.......there are so many absolutely priceless manuscripts there that you go numb. After the first hour I was a bit dazed....Shakespeare first folio, you say....perhaps if I have time, right now I'm looking at Sultan Baybar's Qur'an....Good grief! Charlotte Bronte certainly had poor handwriting and look at that smudge - it looks like Mozart was eating bread and jam that morning.....oh, look here, a da Vinci notebook ....those stamps don't look particularly impressive, what are they? caused the American Revolution, you say?

And that's just the British Library. Then there's the Bodleian and Queen's collection in the library at Windsor Castle. Helen, Ron, have you been to Windsor Castle? The largest occupied castle in the world. 300 rooms. 1500 acres of parkland. And Her Majesty is kind enough - for a modest fee - to let nosey tourists troop through her home and wonder what on earth it would be like to live in a place like that. Over a thousand years of continuous occupation by twenty some monarchs.

That settles it. I'm going to write up my grande Tour for the Post. I'm working myself up again just thinking about it. Must start saving my money for a return visit.

wow!! what?? you, my girl, are opening mine eyes -----British Library?

this piece of writing is something ---I never learned so much in all my life ----

takes an historian to open the magic doors of history -- a real historian --- this is like real history, with all its sparkly bits left in --

I think I had better visit England... I have never been to Windsor Castle, but I bet you Ron has --- Ron I do believe knows a lot about English history --- I just used to stare at Windsor Castle from the National Express bus at 6.00 a.m. --en route for London.

We quite often go to Glastonbury --- climb the Tor, get the Avalon-vibe --- and Stonehenge is good, but a bit sealed off these days. I want to go to Warminster on Salisbury Plain and wait for a UFO sighting --- and there's the crop circles ...

really I want to go to Tucson Arizona and have hotcakes in the Cup Cafe. and all those other things ... really I will end up in dark Beat coffeehouses writing incomprehensible utterings to Mexican saints ..

write on you muse! get that Grand Tour out there --

Helen

I hail from a patriarchy.

That IS an inspiring piece of writing...Dang! Have to add at least two more places to see before I die. At this rate I may have to extend my tour.

Welcome back, Cactus!

Really, Hypatia. I accuse you of lack of American-centrism!

History is cowboys and cattle drives, Oregon Trail, women with rifles, the Underground Railroad. History is Custer's last stand, Apaloosa horses, gold rushes, buffalo hunts. History is Roosevelt bouncing around the White House, Lincoln's top hat, Washington's false teeth, Taft's bathtub.
For that kind of stuff visit the Smithsonian.


The British Museum is cooler, though. It reminded me of the Museum of Natural History alot, but it was whiter, and it had the Rosetta stone. We kind of gaped at that a while. Pretty famous chunk of rock. Ogled the Parthenon marbles-- had to do a report on them for Art History class. Was able to identify all the elements of classical architecture--but hey, who were we impressing except ourselves?

And Windsor castle is beautiful. You ought to go, Cactus. Just to see the outside of those round turrets-- but I guess you get a lot of those in England anyway.

I'd love to meet your novelist friend, but NYC had a population of 8,008,278 for the 2000 census. I know around 100 of those people at least, probably more, but that still leaves 8,008,100. You see where this could get complicated?

Patriarchy. *indignant sniff* Male chauvinistic---

Hastings. Stirling Bridge. Stonehenge.

History.

I'm continually chagrined by the shortness of (Euro-)American history, rich as it is. And whether I personally agree with Tradition as applied in the UK, it exists with a power that Americans can only envy. Do many of us claim it? Hell yeah.

Perhaps my cavalier opinion of genealogy is a case of sour grapes.

Please consider that certain major Munich breweries are older than the US!

Geneology braggarts get on my nerves to. So yay, you descend from da Vinci. You have the creativity of a lump of carbon. It means nothing.

I just like the stories that go with the names.

As for the breweries, . Think they have anything that's been sitting in the barrels for that long?

The DAR bunch frost me. They're so arrogant. I always want to say, "Oh, so you're descended from convicts and indentured servants. Cool."

What's the DAR bunch?

You people have shiny brains. I wish I had known you all when I needed to learn things for my life. You could have made knowledge exciting. Mind you, I've learned things anyway today, except I also just ordered The Wizard of Oz on DVD after I remembered about it this morning.

Its good to be home.

Do we still eat veggie corndogs round this fire, now we are onto history?

I like the picture Leo --

Last summer, Chris made a mini stonehenge out of flat stones on the beach. It was great -- our own kind of history. We often do things like that. Never get to castles, but lurk naked on beaches (yes ... 'fraid so ...) and build dream sculptures.

Here's to knowledge and all things Holy ---

goodnight ancestors,

Helen