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Open thread 4/12/21 — 32 Comments

  1. I must be getting really cynical in my old age ; it’s only a matter of time before some “woke” idiots will claim these sorts of videos are just another manifestation of white privilege, because everybody and every puppy dog in the video was “light” colored.

    Never in a billion years could I have believed I would say something this asinine.

  2. Our modern lives in 2021 are much better for everyone – especially the poor – than any time in the past.

    Yet left-wing Marxist inspired liars make big bucks pushing ‘The Politics of Envy’.

    No real ideological change from two millennia ago and the end of The Roman Republic.

    In some ways it is unsettling to be alive in ‘interesting times’.

  3. Golden Retriever puppies are persistance hunters. If the video had continued for another 2 hours, it would have been a bloody mess with a skeleton in the midst of it.

  4. Yancy Ward: “If the video had continued for another 2 hours, it would have been a bloody mess with a skeleton in the midst of it.”

    AppleBetty: unfriends Yancy. 😉

  5. Ah, yes, the famous death-by-puppies video. What an awful way to go. 🙂

    PA Cat, those jeans had better be pretty thick – else ouch, ouch, ouch.

    We now have a puppy-attack clip, a kitten-attack clip, and… I want to see if anyone has a gerbil-attack one. I guess that doesn’t work as well, since young gerbils are so small. Perhaps we could do ducklings….

    Tuvea, when I see you here, I always think of ophthalmology, but that’s the fovea. Still, I think of eyes all the same. Can’t help it.

    In an effort to be interesting, I’m checking the list of events in history on this date. April was a busy month for Civil War anniversaries, I see. Today was Fort Sumter; last Friday was Appomattox. Today was the anniversary of FDR’s passing as well as the (temporary) conquest and (unfortunately not as temporary) sack of Constantinople by the Franks in the Fourth Crusade.

    (Steph – before or after washing? 🙂 )

  6. Here you go, Richard.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p4wM5KvUGEc

    It was no tribble at all.

    My DiL the Quilter made me some stuffed Tribbles one year.
    Trivia: Tribbles are “borrowed” from Heinlein’s Martian flat cats in his “The Rolling Stones” juvenile space opera.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rolling_Stones_(novel)

    Heinlein later credited the 1905 Ellis Parker Butler short story “Pigs Is Pigs” with inspiring the flat cat incident. A similar concept and plotline appeared later in the Star Trek episode “The Trouble with Tribbles”. According to screenwriter David Gerrold, the show’s producers noticed similarities in the two stories and asked Heinlein for permission to use the idea.[2] Heinlein asked for an autographed copy of the script, but otherwise did not object, noting that both stories owed something to the Butler story “and possibly to Noah”.[3]

  7. AesopFan.
    Heinlein’s juries were his best work, up through Starship Troopers. And they were only juvies because the protagonists were young and there was no sex. Other than that, facing adult themes.
    Same-same Sutcliff’s YA hist fic. Some of it fleshing out Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill.

  8. I loved Sutcliff’s “Sword at Sunset” but I don’t remember reading any of her other books, so I may start checking on them, as the current crop of YA writers are (how do I put this gently?) seriously deficient.
    However, I lived-and-breathed Heinlein’s stories as a kid, and still enjoy most of them. His books after “The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress” were not to my taste.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosemary_Sutcliff
    Worth taking a look, if only to marvel at what she overcame to become not only a writer but a painter of miniatures.
    “She was affected by Still’s disease when she was very young, and used a wheelchair most of her life. … She did not learn to read until she was nine years of age…”

    Puts the Whiny Generation to shame.

  9. AesopFan
    Sword at Sunset is an adult novel following the YA “The Lantern Bearers”. She goes from the late Iron Age to about Henry VIII, clustering around Roman occupation, but some of her stuff–Sword Song and Shield Wall–are later than that and take place in the north.
    She also redid the Odyssey and the Iliad. Loved her take on the Iliad. Black Ships Before Troy. Cut out the rosy fingered dawn and aegis-bearing Zeus stuff.
    As I say, sometimes you can’t quite make out whether it’s her or Kipling. Flame Colored Taffeta is practically prose of his poem about the smugglers.

    Morris’ Age of Arthur looks for Arthur and finds not him but an Arthur-shaped hole in Brit history. Good read, good sourcing. Sword at Sunset seems to fit the hole while including some of the themes from Morte and Idylls. Closest I’ve found. Both Morris and Sutcliff muse about how Arthur’s fight delayed the Saxon move, allowing for integration instead of subjugation.
    She and Kipling both take their centurions from a version of late nineteenth century county society.
    Ruth Downie’s novels–Medicus series–have the centurions as hard-asssed noncoms coming up the hard way. Her protagonist is an army doctor in second century occupied Britain. There’s some contemporary medicine, intrigue, action. He has importunate relations on the continent and buys a slave who doesn’t work out. Trouble with the wild tribes.

    Youtube has lots of versions of the Ballad of Rodger Young.

  10. What?! There is crime in Laurium?!? Disappointing. I guess the cats of the Keweenaw are pretty special if they’re worth abducting.

  11. Made a decision today that I hope doesn’t come back to haunt me. They get $10 a month for probably the rest of my natural life.

    They can kiss my derriere!

  12. Eva Marie,

    That’s amazing and how neat the mom laughs once her son is out of harm’s way!

  13. The sea shanty – very funny. AesopFan + Richard Aubrey – thank you so much for Rosemary Sutcliff. What a remarkable writer. “She wrote incessantly throughout her life and was still doing so on the morning of her death in 1992.” I’ve started on Black Ships Before Troy.

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  15. }}} AesopFan

    You might check out Christopher Nuttall, who has at least two that qualify as “YA”, though adults can enjoy, too.

    One, for the more mature, is “Schooled In Magic”, which is up to about 22 books, ongoing. Think “Harriet Potter Goes to College… then Grad School”. That suggests it to be more derivative than it is, that’s just a context for you.It’s a semi-medaeval setting, so it does touch on adult themes, such as sexual harassment and the possibility of rape. Nothing sexual, overtly graphic, or erotic, but it does touch on such topics. So, later teens.

    https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07F7Q8LDF

    The other, The Zero Enigma series, 9 books ongoing, is more suitable for 11, 12, 13yos, and doesn’t really have anything quite so overt as SiM does.

    https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B077L7768D

    Both are fantasy with young people coming of age as their central characters, many of them females.

    Nuttall is very prolific, too. While his books are “easy reads” (they lack the prose density of a David Weber or GRR Martin), he writes very very quickly, almost Asimovian in his production levels.

    He also writes good adult fiction, with at least three “major” series — The Ark Royale series, the Empire Corps series, and the Angel in the Whirlwind series.

    All total, over 60 books atm.

  16. David Drake writes in a number of genres. Some of his books contain extraordinarily graphic scenes.

    His RCN-Republic of Cinnabar–series would be YA if not teen appropriate.

  17. Just for the record > ““The Cat Came Back.” Written in 1983,” – should be 1893.

    Thanks to all for the book recommendations.
    I’m regressing to YA so I can finish in one or two “sittings” instead of having to devote a week or more to the usual massive tomes (which are still only one volume out of a series!).

    Remember when Pocket Books were first produced, they were named that because they fit into a standard jacket pocket.

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