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

Why thank you, dear. What a lovely way to end the evening.

The Rugrat is only 6. Lately, she's taken to growling at me when thwarted in her desires. I told her it was much too early to start acting like a teenager, but I don't think it helped. She's very determined, is Rugrat. Very determined indeed.

And I don't think I would trade her for anything, either, although sometimes I think an hour of silence would be lovely, particularly now, after three full weeks of full-time mommying. She's got more energy than I can keep up with, and it's just hard to find things other than the television to occupy her all day. I'm just not that creative!

Although today we did manage to make it to the store. My sister in her infinite wisdom, has taken to giving me a department store gift card for Christmas every year, figuring I can either buy stuff we need, or stuff we want, and it will always be perfect. We ran around the store, being silly, and I think a few folk thought I was mad. It's fun sometimes to mess with people's heads. We also discovered a new chocolate addiction, which we have both agreed will be a VERY special treat...chocolate covered chocolate chip cookie dough. Oh, my. Extremely dangerous.

But I avoided the tea party with a trip to a real mexican restaurant, where they actually make things by hand. Rugrat was impressed, and even practiced her spanish. It was quite an adventure. I need to do things like that more often with her. She sees life as one big adventure, and frankly, I need more adventure in my life.

Tomorrow we might venture down to the beach and see if we can't find a tidal pool to stare into. Or perhaps we'll take a "get lost" walk, wherein we just start to randomly walk, and hopefully, get lost enough to make it interesting getting home (hard to do in Southern California, but we do try).

You know, MR, that sounds a great life to me.
Tidal pools. We can only do it in summertime in the UK, and then only where the coast has some rock about it.
I now live almost as far from the coast as its possible to be in Britain .
I was brought up a bit closer (about 50 miles away) but even then the adjacent coast was all sandbars and saltmarsh. At certain times of year, the tide comes in at a brisk walking pace - quite exciting (and dangerous) in its way, but absolutely no use for rock-pooling.
In Cornwall and Pembrokeshire (ie deep South-West of England and Wales respectively) there are authentic rock-pools, inhabited by weird fish, about 3 inches long, we variously call Blenny or Shanny. They look prehistoric, bulgy eyes and horny frills, dorsal fins the full length of their spines, mottled brown and gold. You got them?
Anyway, as a kid on holiday, I used to spend whole days catching them on tiny loops of line tied round a finger, No. 16 hooks baited with bits of smashed-up limpet. You could put them back, and catch them again and again. Idyllic. Wonderful.
You know, I'd really give anything to capture those summers back. You treasure them, whatever equivalewnt you're living with the Rugrat.
And Mexican food's too.
Pin
* wanders back off to the MathLab, where they're making a delicious b***ocks of a puzzle I suggested! *

We never made it to the beach, as we decided to adventure into the interior instead. We went and visited the snow. Made snow angels, a snowman, and had a snowball fight and came home to high winds and hot weather. Lovely.

* could definitely get jealous of someone who can choose on the day between rockpools and snow-angels *

Hmm...life is a bit too hectic all of a sudden. Not much time for Hootoo, a few quick lurks here and there, several of them seemingly offending people. Is it just me, or are newbies getting more bolshy these days?

North Korea's not getting any better, is it? Please let Your Mr Shrub know that his new strategy of Interventionist Isolationism is not going down well in Europe. I can't really believe that being rude to foreigners while never intending to actually do anything plays too well with home voters either.

Next week I'll be planet-hopping a little. I'll try send you a line or two from alternative continents. (Just to make YOU jealous, you snow-angel-person, you...)

Pin * sighing, and feeling like 2003's growing old already *

Yes, North Korea is ugly. I don't know that Shrub should have opened *that* particular can of worms.

I, too, am starting to lack for time. Grad school is just huge. I have something due next week, but for the life of me cannot remember what it is. That's never good.

Oh, well, drop me a line from exotic locales. Me, I'll be sticking close to home for a bit.

As promised, a quick message from elsewhere, South Africa in fact.
I'm here because the company is showing off a reference and I worked on the original project.
So for about a day's real work, I get a chance to meet old friends plus a chance to do some sight-seeing on the back of client entertainment.
Except for the fact that the Weddell is on her own, getting the kids back to school in a Yorkshire January, I'd say this is the life I deserve.
Yesterday, I saw giraffe, zebra, a white rhino, more kinds of antelope than you could shake a stick at, all under a blazing African sun with alcohol in close proximity. Other than the urge to shoot 'em, Hemingway had it about right.
That do you? Don't be jealous, I'm just trying to even the account with a mountain-hopping Californian beachbabe.
Back home, and cheaper internet access, in a couple of days. See you then!
Your Pin

Me, a mountain-hopping California beachbabe?!?!?!?!??!

Are you NUTS?!?!

Okay, I admit to the mountain hopping, but in no way shape or form am I a beach babe. I'm a redhead...we burn!

Oh, yeah. I forgot.
Anyhow - I got home.
Does that mean you don't do surfing either?
(Ponders possibility of developing a surfing habit in Montana)
I haven't really thought this through, have I?
* brightens up *
You got onto Cromwell yet?

Stll on James I and the Millenarian Petition. Interesting...hello, I have the divine right to rule you all, but would you be interested in buying me out on that so I can pay my wife's shopping bills?

...I don't want to spoil the ending, but as you probably realise they inexplicably restore the monarchy...

Yes, well, that's because Richard Cromwell was a twit.

Good point.
Attempting to found a Cromwell Dynasty does seem kind of inconsistent with the general principles of what had gone before.
Maybe they fudged the count in the Fens, or something.
Still, faced with a choice between Dickie and Charles Two, it would have been perfectly sensible to have started another Revolution. We'd have got it right sooner or later.
Though, come to think of it, the French never did...

Anyhow, less of your ridicule, young lady. You are enjoying the privilege of studying the brief period of history from which your country's values and very liberties sprang.

* marches up and down, making unpleasant noises with a penny whistle *

Just don't expect me to substantiate that outrageous assertion, that's all...

P.

If you are implying that the puritans left there, came here, and created the sexually repressive (yet exploitive) bunch of compassionate conservatives we've got now, can I ask you kindly if they can come back now, please?

I rather think it came from the French Revolution (Jefferson was a huge fan), or at least, the French Revolution before they all got drunk on power and starting killing everyone in sight!

I think the word is probably incorrigible, except that I've never been 100% sure what it means.
Why do you always seem to define people (dead ones, anyway) by their religion, as if that was the most important aspect of their values?
Cromwell, in religious terms, was merely a product of his time. In political terms, he was among a vanguard of radical thinkers who changed the world. He was also a real man of action, one who turned moral and social principles into a working system that very nearly took root.
Lafayette and others may well have influenced the proto-US; so did Paine, Burke, countless others. But they all came a hundred years or more after the Commonwealth.
The Puritan cause was no more than a facet of the English Civil War.
Jefferson was an Episcopalian, yeah? So was that the most important thing about him?
Far more interesting than any legacy of Puritanism in the modern US is the melting-pit of ideas, social systems, challenges to all aspects of the established order that took place in the middle of the 17th Century. Cromwell and his kind viciously repressed some, just as the Crown had done. Others he adopted and exploited. But he couldn't put any of them back in the box that he'd opened. Self-determining society had started. The Right of Kings, and supreme power vested in dynasties, died on the scaffold along with Charles I.
If you look, you will find there the precursors of every modern way of living that the world has tried. Power to the People, 1774, 1789? For sure - but just reprises of this most significant time in the History of the World.
So...what do you want to talk about?
Pin

Now, now, the fact that puritans were religous dissenters is not at all what I meant. They were, however, a group of highly influential folk, who tried to create something akin to a theocracy, and they failed miserably. But the mindset has stayed with us.

Cromwell was, you are right, more of an opportunist than anything else. Funny how when the pandora's box is opened, it never turns out the way the opener planned...

Question for you...what is it about the Magna Carta that makes it more well-known/valid/important than Henry I's charter, or other charters of the time, such as Peter of Aragon's charter of rights for Sicily?

This is more like it!
I'll tell you what they teach in school here, as well as I remember it.
(About Peter of Aragon, I know nurr-thing. I'll have to read up on that). The realisation that the MC is seen as a foundation of US law and constitution, too, is new to me. I suppose it must be.
As you obviously know, Henry I's Charter of Liberties says very much the same thing as the Magna Carta; in fact it was the textual model for it. It was also (as far as is known) the first contract between King and Gentry, obliging the Monarch to acknowledge specific responsibilities and to accede to a model of stewardship rather than literal personal ownership of the country.
By John's time the pressure from the Gentry was rather intense. What's generally taught in British schools, though, is that the important legacy was not John's signature at all, but the denouncement and subsequent rebuttal by the Pope. The MC marks the beginnings of Britain's rift with Rome, and with it national independence and the beginnings of the other "freedoms" we've been referring to.
The Papacy, as far as I know, hadn't seen any threat in the Henry I version.
Summarising in simple terms : until the MC, there was effectively an acknowledgement all round that the King's obligations were to God (with the catch-all Corollary that, since he ruled according to the Will of God, he could do whatever he liked). The MC said - wrong, he rules on behalf of his people, and his first responsibility is to them. Since we (the Gentry) represent them, he'd better not do anything we don't like. The Pope then says - blasphemy, you're all excommunicated. And the Gentry say - so what? The Pope never carries much weight in these islands ever again. People 1, God 0.
Yes, I know that this really undermines my (continued) attempt to downplay the significance of religion in all these events and movements - probably your point, I guess.
Pin

...You , MR?

...Take care now

Pin

Sorry. Been a bit busy lately...