Stepping Ahead into 1st Quarter of 21stCentury While Looking Back to the Goode Olde Days
STEPPING AHEAD INTO 1ST QUARTER OF 21ST CENTURY WHILE LOOKING BACK TO THE GOODE OLDE DAYS
BOOM! JAPAN EARTHQUAKE WAKES us CREATIVE-& not so INSECURE WRITERS as we EMERGE JANUARY 1st WEDNESDAY FROM our SUBTERRANEAN WRITERS‘ CAVE
Early 2024 Wake-up Call from Honshu Japan Mag.7.5 Earthquake
Western Hemisphere revellers had barely laid their weary firework-filled heads to rest in the early hours of New Year’s Day, (pix bottom rt. above) when BOOM! a mighty Mag.7.5 earthquake awoke the Pacific from Hawai’i &points West [over International Dateline] 2Honshu, Japan, heralding a New Year series of tsunami warnings unheard since Fukushima.
Another 21 quakes & aftershocks followed during subsequent 24 hours.
Almost 23 years to the date of Fukushima, March 11, 2011 nuclear plant explosion on Honshu’s Eastern shore 100mi N of capital Tokyo, at an equivalent distance W, the Shika nuclear power plant on the Noto peninsula of Ishikawa Prefecture (maps l. above) had received Pacific-wide quake warnings & shut the power off before first earthquake hit at 4:20. While fires broke out in nearby townships, thankfully no abnormalities were recorded on monitors. Water had spilled from a cooling pool for spent fuel rods, but officials had disconnected pumps used for cooling pools after the initial quake alarm, and power was restored less than an hour later, by 4:49 p.m. Japan is nine hours ahead of UHT/GMT.
While the Old World recovers from Hogmanay Antics…
New Year’s Eve, December 31st is celebrated everywhere round the world, but is especially marked in Scotland from ancient times: EVERYTHING allowed; anything goes—similar to Roman Saturnalia—with drinking, street parties & free-for-all visits between neighbors’ houses, especially in open countryside.
Hogmanay, aka Scots night before bringing in the New Year w/whisky, music & dance, is a festival celebrated December 31st from English Border thru ‘Central Belt’- towns of Glasgow & Edinburgh, to Stonehaven & ABD [#Fireballs swinging ceremony, left] to the Moray Coast [Burghead Burning Clavie on Jan.11th-11days later w/Julian calendar].
It even stretches to parts north, including Viking Orkney & polar Shetland [Ptolemy’s Ultima Thule].
Stonehaven pyrotechnics l. Hogmanay swinging fire-balls w/local Pipe Band & resident song/dance troupe
Celebrations throughout the North American continent encourage near-continuous feasting & festive events from Christmas Eve onward; through the (traditional) “Twelve Days of Christmas” of early Christian tradition—including multi-cultural events like Diwali, Hawai’ian Lantern-Lighting Ceremony—itself a Japanese spin-off subculture event in the Pacific Island chain; and including multiple strictly controlled city fireworks displays. But now there are legal limits.
Personal fireworks night parties are encouraged, but U.S. regulations have come down heavily on private firecracker & rocket-launch fun, with strict fines imposed on (often teenage) offenders; e.g. New Year’s Eve “celebrations” are only legal 5 p.m. on New Year’s Eve to 1 a.m. New Year’s Day!
Olde World ancestors are swinging while swilling chilled eggnogs in their waterlogged graves!
The Caledonian Connection to Olde Times
Many are familiar with Shakespeare’s play “Twelfth Night”, but fewer may be aware of its etymology.
The early Christian calendar-with focus on Christmas [birth of the Messiah] was Man’s ultimate aim for blessing from above in the ancient world. It came exactly 9 months after Annunciation March 25th/i.e. Mary’s pregnancy, aligned with [Julian calendar] Spring Equinox. December 25th in Roman calendar translates to winter solstice. 12 days thereafter calculates to Biblical “Epiphany”, January 6th [Gregorian].
A Puritan-led English Parliament in 1647 banned all celebration, pantomime, carol singing & feasting considering it “a popish festival with no biblical justification” and replaced it with a day of fasting. This ban was, e.g. Boston, Mass. 1659 to 1681, not recognized as a federal holiday again until reinstated 1870.
Pix rt. Caledonian festival in Moray, ABD Burning of the Clavie Jan.11th Pictish hillfort of Burghead where gifts of charred embers distributed to local dignitaries en route.
So it was not unusual on Hogmanay Olde World Scotland for neighbors to bravely tread through miles of snow to reach a friendly party upslope. I recall one year where my local GP, unphazed by Hogmanay snowdrifts, trudged five miles between his country town & my isolated hilltop abode to join the party!
First-footing & New Year Resolutions Get in Gear
As we step-“boldly go” courtesy Star Trek-into a year which will see us through one quarter of the 21st Century, we still make New Year Resolutions to try to keep ourselves true to our own nature—not under the influence of what society expects of us. Thus harkening back to Mediaeval festive rhymes still has a place in our hearts, if only to remind us that we were all once children & kids always have the most fun!
On the 12th day of Christmas my true love gave 2me: 12 pipers piping; 11 drummers drumming; 10 lords a-leaping; 9 ladies dancing; 8 maids a-milking; 7 swans a- swimming; 6 geese a-laying; 5g0-ld rings; 4 calling birds; 3 French hens, two turtle doves & a partridge in a pear tree
Alternatively, see Bulbasaur version here
January Lantern-floating ceremony prelude to Chinese Year of Dragon February 2024, l.
Looking Forward to 2024:Tall Ships Race, Wildlife/Forest & Nature Regeneration
Highlight of summer 2024 in Northern Europe will be the Baltic Tall Ships Race starting from Klaipeda, Lithuania June 27th, & racing via Helsinki, Finland[July], thru Baltic nations to Tallinn, Estonia, to Åland Is. port of Mariehamn, & end at Szczecin [Stetin] Poland on August 5th, 2024-total 1500 nautical miles.
Keeping Our Word & Heading Back Down to our Subterranean Writing Enclave, Clutching our Climate Change Notebook
Midsummer 2024’s Tall Ships Race is a legend in northern European nations since its beginnings 200 years ago in the quiet Northumbrian port of Blyth, near Newcastle-upon-Tyne. From its unassuming N.England base, some of the world’s most famous wooden Baltic Trader vessels were built, sailing to deliver coal to Baltic ports, including Russian trade with St. Petersburg.
The wooden schooner Williams, out of Blyth discovered the continent of Antarctica.
Its replica, 100-year old Baltic trader ‘Williams II’, above top l., is used as a training ship to school young people in oceangoing crafts including, rigging, sailing, navigation, hawser work, knitwork & stitchcraft. Its history is integral part of 2024 Tall Ships race which will sail to traditional Baltic ports this summer; pix above l. middle:Tall Ships 2024 route; top l. prow; rt. Rival Aberdeen-built Tall Ship Thermopylae, among others [including Cutty Sark & Cleopas] also navigated the fierce Baltic run.
Happy New Year, all! With them in spirit, we continue to press this New Year for the Paris Agreement goal of limiting increase in global average temperature to -2°C above pre-industrial levels.
We also wish to send congratulations to other youth organizations which are this New Year following through on Climate Change goals of replanting, rewilding & regenerating inner city—and ancient former-wild spaces: WWF, Trees for Life, Rewilding Scotland; Rewilding Europe & Rewilding Britain; not to mention similar Pacific NW & SoCal rewilding initiatives following the lead of COP26.
New Year resolution? Let’s grow our own veggies & plant more trees together in 2024. @siderealview ©2024MarianC.Youngblood
December: Season of Gratitude and Merlot-Fruitcake Thoughts
Quinquireme of Nineveh from distant Ophir,
Rowing home to haven in sunny Palestine,
With a cargo of ivory,
And apes and peacocks,
Sandalwood, cedarwood, and sweet white wine
John Masefield [1876-1967]
When it comes to love and war, give me an Egyptian Quinquereme manned by five rows of oarsmen, capable of outracing Greeks, Macedonians, Persians and Carthaginians—with a mermaid locker at the bottom of the deep blue sea.
My way of saying I retreat, like a lot of us writerly introverts, I suspect, into inner — #IamWriting— worlds, when real world conflict raises its warrior head.
The waters of the world begin in the dribble-drain down by the road and the tall ships, the galleons, the quinquiremes nudge on the hawthorn twig that goes swirling, seawards, there
Before she lost her arms, which have never been recovered, Nike’s right forearm is thought to have been raised, cupped around her mouth to revel in her shout of Victory. Her headless but otherwise ravishing beauty is considered to be the epitome of Hellenist art. She is flawless; inspired billions! Art historians are transfixed by her.
Her pose is symbolic of a place/moment where violent motion and sudden stillness collide. Her graceful balance and her figure’s draped garments ripple compellingly, as if in a strong sea breeze.
For me, she is true warrior goddess.
Wargames Ancient and Future
Ships ancient and modern have evoked images, ideals, dreams in the mind of Man since time immemorial. We are still better at dreaming victory in far-away lands by “imagining them distant” than in coming to terms with the reality of the killing fields.
It has not escaped our notice, however, that little by little our heart-centered family-and-community-oriented season of celebration may be marred by a reality check or two:
1. conflict in Ferguson, MO
2. conflict in Cradle of Civilization.
Neither conflict —in Ferguson, MO or Arabian Gulf—should have an immediate connection one with the other or each with us as individuals, I pray. But they are somebody’s sons and daughters out there, being told by a robot military machine to kill first, take prisoners second.
Not my idea of mellow fruitfulness.
My moan, therefore, Alex—forgive me—is less of a writerly struggle—more a prayer of gratitude: Thanks to you and our little community for holding each others’ hands thru close on forty months. We love you.
And——
May we all survive the commerciality of Christmas, the nuances of New Year’s, Jewish 5775, Nassim Haramein’s Non-Time, and arrive safely in 2015.
©2014 Marian Youngblood
Space Weather 30-year Storm: Earth fights back
I need hardly remind residents of Scotland that we have only just weathered the thirty-year storm. Most households living through four solid weeks of sub-zero temperatures in an Atlantic weather zone (even with the miracle of central heating) will remember this winter (and last month especially) for many years to come.Fortunately our civilization has advanced enough so that we experienced minimum electrical ‘outages’, despite heavy snow, icicles and ice on power lines. There were, however, multiple power ‘surges’ and computers countrywide were frozen in mid surge. Mac and pc-owners and related computer businesses are still counting the cost. Curry’s have been doing a roaring trade in replacement laptops!
It seems to have hit a lot of young ones harder than they might have thought: not that closing schools and cancelling bus and train services are a hazard; more time to make snowmen, play and enjoy winter sports, you might think. Lack of reliable public transportation, however – counting on any public services, in fact – four weeks without refuse collection borders on neglect, were commuters’ and householders’ concerns. Abandonment, remoteness and surprise at being cut off suddenly are what hit the teens hardest, I think because they are unaccustomed to having their social life curtailed by ‘weather’ and few had experienced conditions such as these in their young lives.
Some of us older oldies remember the winter of 1981/2 with shivering empathy; electrical failure, power cuts, snow drifts higher than houses; evacuating and rescuing neighbours, birds frozen overnight in trees. But that was back in the Thatcherite era, before the internet, when we didn’t EXPECT everything to run on time, snow ploughs to get through, petrol in cars not to freeze.
Human culture has changed in nearly 30 years: Even in the modern backwater of Aberdeenshire, the County of no motorways, the self-styled Oil Capital of Europe.
For those unfamiliar with our ways, this corner of Scotland – the Northeast triangle between Rivers Don and Dee and the balmy Moray Firth – has always flourished, but more than that, it looks after its own. Rather, I suppose, like Geordies idolizing their working-class heroes that went ‘down the pits’ or Scousers joking ‘don’t bomb Iraq; nuke Manchester’. Parochial in the extreme.Unlike some other lesser-urban metropolises, however, (Dundee, Perth, Stranraer), Aberdeen has always pulled through its hardest times: Dundee used to be known (an age ago, when the world was young) for its Jute, Jam and Journalism. Now it is home to none of these; but it has Robert Scott’s ‘Discovery‘, the Tay Bridge and it’s on the way to St. Andrews, which every golfer in the world has heard of; i.e. it participates peripherally in tourism, but some of its poorer districts are in appalling shape.
Perth floods every year and millions of national money poured in to rescue low-level housing has been a nightmare. Stranraer we won’t go into. It’s no longer on the way to anywhere.
Then there’s Aberdeen.
Perched on the westernmost limb of the North Sea’s mild Gulf Stream current, its dry climate (usually, rain from the west is captured by the Grampian mountains before it reaches the plain) and its remarkable latitude (57ºN2ºW ), akin to central Alaska, give it a climatic anomaly. Its farming hinterland was rich in Neolithic times and has grown richer.
A century and a half ago the city was hub to a thriving fishing industry; its harbours built, housed and skippered trawlers, tall clipper ships, deep sea schooners and whaling vessels. Thermopylae and Elissa were built here. Names like Alexander Hall & Sons, John Lewis and Sons, the Devanha Fishing Company sprang from everyone’s lips. As a merchant marine capital it was second only to Glasgow in Scotland and Liverpool south of the border.
Aberdeen, however, was never one to have only one egg in one basket: it was also the sole exporter of granite to needy growing urban centres: London streets were indeed paved with (Aberdeen granite) gold. Craigenlow quarry at Dunecht supplied the English capital with tons of its ‘cassies’ or granite sets – hand-cut granite blocks the size of a gingerbread loaf – to meet the demands of a city experiencing growing Victorian traffic problems. If they had but known…
At the height of Georgian expansion, Aberdeen city burghers were so wealthy, their coffers overflowing from the ocean tea trade, the Baltic route, their fishing ports supplying Europe’s tables (nowadays it’s the other way around), their granite exported the world over; that they chose to beautify: and the mile-long boulevard known as Union Street was built in 1801-05. This grandiose gesture – a feat of engineering which levelled St. Catherine’s Hill and carried the extra-wide thoroughfare across arches built over the previous lower Denburn and ancient market Green – almost bankcrupted the burghers, but brought the city fame to add to its already growing fortune.
As early as the mid-18th century, Aberdeenshire’s famous Baltic merchants continued to bring their fortunes back home; so the county continually thrived, regardless of the ups and downs of a world economy. Robert Gordon (1688-1731), founder of the Robert Gordon Hospital, now RGU, was famous for lending money made in the Danzig trade to Aberdeen businessmen who needed large working capital at even larger rates of interest. ‘Danzig Willie’ Forbes ploughed his fortune from the Baltic trade into the building of exquisite Donside château Craigievar between 1610-1625 on the family estate of Corse, when he was already landowner of Menie estate on the Belhelvie coast north of Aberdeen. John Ramsay, an Aberdeen merchant in 1758 built his palladian mansion at Straloch. Others followed suit. The county is today littered with stately Renaissance piles and Georgian mansions more appropriate to the valley of the Loire, the home counties or the wilds of Gloucestershire.Within this mix stir a couple of ancient universities – one founded in 1495, the other in 1593, both fostered and supported through the centuries by Aberdonian merchant success.
The world joke about the Aberdonian who watches his pennies is not entirely untrue. And the tradition goes back farther than the fifteenth century.
Even more relevant to the characterization, perhaps, is the fact that Aberdeen Harbour (presently run by the independent entity Aberdeen Harbour Board) is in fact the oldest running business enterprise in the United Kingdom of Great Britain, having been founded by charter signed by King David I in 1136. The business head of the kingdom resides on the edge of the North Sea.But the bell tolled. The fishing industry worldwide killed its own small fry: when container ships and tankers beheaded sailing vessels, similarly Icelandic and Norwegian refrigerated freighters signalled the death knell for trawlers and owner-operated fishing boats; and Aberdeen’s shipbuilding days were over.
In the early 1970s, Britain was experiencing the three-day-week, unemployment stats for the country were the highest then known, and even the granite industry declined. Its clients metamorphosed from those who appreciated polished stone to faceless ‘councils’ and ‘road departments’ which required the precious quartz and gneiss resource to be ground into dust-like fragments which could be mixed with tar and spread in increasing quantities on the nation’s arteries.
It looked as if Aberdeen, like every other Scots city, might founder on the rocks of history.
Then, lo and behold, along came oil. Bubbling up from below the North Sea in 1971, another industry was born. And the ‘silver city with the golden sands’ was perched on the shoreline, ready to receive it.It is said that because of its very geographic isolation the county learned to take care of itself. And its humour has a lot to do with its character.
Now that there is talk of worldwide recession and dwindling of the oil resource, the current Aberdonian humorous response is ‘oil goes out, Donald Trump comes in’. This refers to the New York entrepreneur’s £1 billion golf course resort where sand dune reinforcing work has just begun on the very landholdings of Menie once owned by Danzig Willie. Aberdeenshire is not averse to turning full circle. It has so far weathered many storms through centuries of change.
So how did we fare in this last Great Storm? How did the planet fare?
Greece had 100ºF temperatures at Christmas and Abu Dhabi and Dubai had HAIL the day before the launch of the 2,717-feet Burj Khalifa tower in the first week of January.
Scotland and Aberdeenshire in particular were at the time experiencing the grip of an Arctic winter, with traffic on all roads down to minimum and gritting and snow-ploughing said by Council spokesmen to be ‘impossible’. While they reported worries that supplies of salt from the Cheshire salt mine might be exhausted, citrus orchards throughout the state of Florida were hit by snow and frost lingered long enough to decimate their total citrus crop for 2010.
At the same time Mount Nyamulagira in a sparsely populated area of the Democratic Republic of Congo erupted, threatening an enclave of rare chimpanzees.
Eureka and Haiti had 6.5 and 7.2 Richter earthquakes respectively, while inland Northern California and Southern Oregon, usually inundated with snow, received not one drop. States of emergency were declared for Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Francisco and Siskiyou counties and as the rainstorm headed east, floods swamped the Arizona desert, threatening homes and killing migrant birds. Las Vegas, Nevada had more rain in two days than for the total year of 2009 (1.69 inches). Alligators in the Everglades froze to death.
France’s Mistral blew early this year, wreaking havoc and damage to vines and vineyards in southern départements of Lyon and Provence; the Riviera harbours of St Tropez and Marseille suffered damage to private yachts.
Since the snowmelt arrived in Scotland in mid January, it is superfluous to mention that the resulting floods have routed gutters and drains in cities and country towns and overflowed ditches in outlying country areas. Perth (again) and Inverurie, Huntly and Kintore were unable to cope with the deluge. These levels of precipitation bring Aberdeen’s rainfall statistics for the year 2009 to mid January 2010 to 101.23 inches, for a county normally experiencing 33.6 inches per annum.
The Earth doesn’t like what we’ve been doing to her in the last thirty years. She’s beginning to fight back.