The Quiet Man retweeted
'The Norman and the Saxon' by Rudyard Kipling.
"My son," said the Norman Baron, "I am dying, and you will be heir
To all the broad acres in England that William gave me for share
When he conquered the Saxon at Hastings, and a nice little handful it is.
But before you go over to rule it I want you to understand this:–
"The Saxon is not like us Normans. His manners are not so polite.
But he never means anything serious till he talks about justice and right.
When he stands like an ox in the furrow – with his sullen set eyes on your own,
And grumbles, 'This isn't fair dealing,' my son, leave the Saxon alone.
"You can horsewhip your Gascony archers, or torture your Picardy spears;
But don't try that game on the Saxon; you'll have the whole brood round your ears.
From the richest old Thane in the county to the poorest chained serf in the field,
They'll be at you and on you like hornets, and, if you are wise, you will yield.
"But first you must master their language, their dialect, proverbs and songs.
Don't trust any clerk to interpret when they come with the tale of their wrongs.
Let them know that you know what they're saying; let them feel that you know what to say.
Yes, even when you want to go hunting, hear 'em out if it takes you all day.
"They'll drink every hour of the daylight and poach every hour of the dark.
It's the sport not the rabbits they're after (we've plenty of game in the park).
Don't hang them or cut off their fingers. That's wasteful as well as unkind,
For a hard-bitten, South-country poacher makes the best man-at-arms you can find.
"Appear with your wife and the children at their weddings and funerals and feasts.
Be polite but not friendly to Bishops; be good to all poor parish priests.
Say 'we,' 'us' and 'ours' when you're talking, instead of 'you fellows' and 'I.'
Don't ride over seeds; keep your temper; and never you tell 'em a lie!"
The Quiet Man retweeted
625 seats.
$20 million each.
Just outside Washington, D.C.
Who gets the other 8 billion?
That’s one seat for every 13 million people on Earth.
It’s called Aerie. An eagle’s nest. Built underground.
Pools. Fine dining. AI-run medical suites. Shielding against nuclear fallout and EMP.
The top membership tier is invitation-only. Its name is “Asylum.”
They plan 1,000 locations worldwide. Even if every one held 625 people, that’s 0.008% of humanity.
The founder isn’t mainly worried about war. Earlier this year he said:
“The real threat is something that we can’t imagine.”
He has also warned of a solar storm strong enough to knock out the global power grid.
Earth’s magnetic field is weakening. The ultra-rich are digging.
The Quiet Man retweeted
Jefferson and the boys sailing back to America with the recipe for Mac and Cheese 🇺🇸
The Quiet Man retweeted
Lewis would’ve kiIIed these people with hammers btw. He wrote a whole book about it.
C.S. Lewis’ family has issued an official statement supporting Greta Gerwig’s Narnia and praising her lifelong passion for the books. bit.ly/4Buu39d
ALT C.S. Lewis’ Family Officially Addresses Greta Gerwig’s ‘Narnia’ Movie
The Quiet Man retweeted
The man who found out what happened to the Franklin expedition was a Scottish doctor who walked 6,500 miles across the Arctic on foot, lived off what he shot, and never lost a man. The Royal Navy never forgave him for it.
John Rae was born in Orkney in 1813 and went to the Hudson's Bay Company as a surgeon. He learned to hunt, to snowshoe, to build a snow house and to sleep in it, from the Cree and the Inuit, and he saw no reason to carry a year of salt pork when the country was full of food. On his first survey he took 12 men 1,200 miles with provisions for 4 months and fed them for 15 on caribou, fish and seal.
The Admiralty's expeditions went the other way. Franklin sailed in 1845 with 129 men, 2 ships, a library, silver cutlery and 8,000 tins of meat and soup, and died with every one of them. In 1854 Rae met Inuit on the Boothia Peninsula who had seen the last of the sailors, 40 men dragging a boat south, starving, and who had found the bodies after. Some had been eaten by the others.
Rae reported it as he was told it. London was outraged. Charles Dickens wrote that no Englishman would do such a thing and that the natives were lying. Lady Franklin saw to it that Rae never received the knighthood every other Arctic explorer of his rank was given, and the memorial in Westminster Abbey names Franklin as the discoverer of the passage Rae had actually found.
He died in 1893 at 79, still fit, still walking.
The Navy's men had the best provisions in Europe and died of scurvy in a land full of game. The Orkneyman ate what the Inuit ate, walked further than any of them, and was punished for coming home with the truth.
The Quiet Man retweeted
Why “The King and I” was banned in Thailand
Remembering King Mongkut of Siam on his birthday. If his name means little to you, it will when I point out that he was the monarch in the “The King and I,” starring Yul Brynner and Deborah Kerr. Unfortunately, nearly everything in the film was fiction. Mongkut, who was born in 1804, was diametrically opposed to Brynner’s temperamental, half naked and romantically inclined ruler, though he did, for dynastic reasons, have a great many children. Long before the arrival of any English governess (who I will talk about later), his reign was marked by social and cultural reforms that played a pivotal role in Siam's progress towards becoming a modern nation, with excellent relations with the West. Mongkut introduced European practices, wore formal European clothing on most occasions, and ensured that Siamese men covered their upper bodies. The British went as far as to say that he was “just like us”. What he was not was a pantaloon wearing, chest-bearing, semi-barbarian who beat female slaves. Mongkut introduced laws that gave women rights, and, unlike his fictional incarnation, never kept concubines against their will. The King was a quiet, scholarly man who was given the posthumous title of "the Father of Science and Technology", and his accurate prediction of the total solar eclipse of 18 August 1868 demonstrated his expertise. The problem lay with Anna Leonowens. Leonowens, a well known truth bender who was as plain as a pike staff, was asked by the court of Siam to tutor some of the royal children in 1862. Leonowens had little to do with the king, did not engage in serious conversation with him, or organise a party for Western diplomats. Nor, sadly for romantics, did they ever dance together. The falsehoods started with her memoir “The English Governess at the Siamese Court”, which was deeply problematic for the reasons stated above. Unfortunately, author Margaret Langdon took the work at face value and in 1944 created an even more nonsensical account, “Anna and the King of Siam”, which was adapted into the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical. The inaccurate and disrespectful portrayal of poor Mongkut led to furious missives from the Thai Government and the movie was temporally banned. Leonowens also claimed that her conversations with Mongkut’s heir, Prince Chulalongkorn, about the importance of human freedom, along with her alleged gift of a copy of “Uncle Tom's Cabin”, led him to abolish slavery almost 40 years later. Slavery in Thailand, however, was often a voluntary choice for individuals who wished to be free of their social and financial obligations (which included a number of unhappily married men). Moreover, maltreating slaves was a punishable offence, and many were given the opportunity to buy their freedom, leading British observers to remark that they were “better treated than English servants.” King Mongkut was a remarkable and enlightened man, and wherever he is, I wish him a very Happy Birthday.
The Quiet Man retweeted
In 1893 a Norwegian scientist deliberately froze his ship into the Arctic ice, let it drift for three years, and lost not a single man to scurvy or anything else. Then he walked off it and spent nine months in a hole in the ground eating bear.
Fridtjof Nansen was thirty-two, a zoologist with a doctorate on the nervous system of a worm. His theory was that the polar current would carry a ship across the top of the world if the ship was built not to be crushed. He built one. He called it the Fram, took twelve men, and sailed into the pack.
For three years they lived in the dark and the cold with no fresh food arriving from anywhere. On every previous expedition that had meant scurvy, the disease that had killed more sailors than the sea. Nansen's crew had none. They shot polar bear and seal, and ate the meat fresh and barely cooked, as the Inuit did. The doctor on board had almost nothing to do.
In 1895 Nansen and one companion left the ship on skis to make for the Pole. They got further north than any human had been, turned back, and were caught by winter on an empty island. They built a hut of stones and walrus hide, and for nine months they ate bear meat and walrus blubber and nothing else. No vegetable, no grain, no fruit. They came out in the spring fatter than they went in.
Then they walked home.
Nansen went on to win the Nobel Peace Prize, and lived to 68.
Every schoolchild is taught that a diet without vegetables will rot you from the inside. Two men spent a winter underground on nothing but fat and meat and came out fit to walk across the Arctic, and that was 130 years ago.
