History is Awesome!

Why did ancient people build massive, mysterious mounds in Louisiana?

Hunter-gatherers at Poverty Point may have built its massive earthworks not under the command of chiefs, but as part of a vast, temporary gathering of egalitarian communities seeking spiritual harmony in a volatile world. New radiocarbon data and reexamined artifacts suggest far-flung travelers met to trade, worship, and participate in rituals designed to appease the forces of nature.


Note that we already have extensive evidence that the trade network of Turtle Island spanned all four coasts. This makes large trading posts / events highly plausible.

Today is cloudy and chilly.

I fed the birds.  I haven't seen much activity yet.

I put out water for the birds.

EDIT 11/24/25 -- We spent about an hour breaking down brush to shove in the chipper.  I think we got through about half the big pile of brush. It  made a surprisingly small pile of splinters on the tarp.  Some of what's left has berries on it, so those will have to go in the firepit along with the thorns.  The bigger branches will need to be hacked into kindling.  But we made great progress. \o/

I'm making Crockpot Xawaash Chicken Stew today.  When I came back in, the whole house smelled of African spices.  :D

EDIT 11/24/25 -- We put away the equipment.

EDIT 11/24/25 -- I did a bit of work around the patio.

EDIT 11/24/25 -- I did more work around the patio.

As it is now dark, I am done for the night.

Some elders of the borderland still remember the months in 949 when Daxis's Border Port was crowded with war refugees, caused by the outbreak of war between Koretia and Emor.

For a place of somber history, Border Port is an exceptionally cheerful town. Border Port is the only port in the borderland, though you can easily journey to the borderland from points north and south. Disembarking at Border Port, however, places you immediately into one of the liveliest locations in the borderland.

"Lively" is a euphemism for "rowdy." Do not – I repeat, do not – wander here unescorted if you are a woman. Families with small children will probably want to pass through this town quickly, taking overnight accommodations elsewhere.

Unmarried men, however, are likely to enjoy their visit. Sailors have long made this town – one of the oldest ports in the Great Peninsula – their place for recreation. Daxions have happily met their needs. In this mild climate, entertainment is year-round and usually takes place on the streets. Daxion bards sing on every corner, Emorian jugglers stand in every doorway, and Koretian dagger-throwers lay claim over every handy wooden wall. Look out for the last; dagger-throwers don't offer warning before they throw.

Many of these entertainers will have bowls at their feet. These are for coins or – if you do not yet possess peninsularean coinage – for gifts of food. Be generous in your offerings; bards in particular are inclined to offer commentary on stingy listeners, in the form of excruciatingly derisive ballads.

"But what about the women?" Many a northern mainlander has asked me that question. Houses of prostitution are indeed abundant in the Border Port. I mention this, not in order to encourage this distasteful trade, but because these houses are often overlooked by mainlanders who come to the Great Peninsula in search of wives. See the section on courting for more information.

[Translator's note: Readers can take a trip to Border Port in Death Mask.]

While I was admiring the Habsburg women's hats a while back I noticed Elisabeth of Guelders, with her haute hat couture, and that she was described as an abbess. Long time readers might remember that I'm interested in the European "princess-abbesses" who held their religious offices heading various monastic institutions simultaneously with their secular lives and titles. AFAIK this Elisabeth with the good hat wasn't that sort of abbess, although wikipedia might know more than me, but plenty of her posh relatives were.

When you imagine a portrait of an abbess you might think of somebody like this lady, who wikipedia claims was an abbess from 1796 to 1808 (warning for skull as memento mori): Mother Abbess Kunigunde Schilling von Hintschingen.

You probably aren't thinking of Maria Elisabeth of Austria in this 1781 portrait specifically of her as a princess-abbess with crozier.

And you might not expect an abbess to have her official portrait for her religious office painted featuring an enslaved boy.

Here's another later official abbessly portrait with an enslaved (or ex-enslaved) man.

But all this must've stopped a long time ago and definitely wasn't still a thing in 1918, no? No.
Princess Abbess, 1918.

And I'm sure an abbess wouldn't find herself at a high society horse racing event.

In conclusion: Princess-abbess was a thing until surprisingly recently.... something something.... IDEK.

Note: (ex-)enslaved men, often used as subjects of social experiments, were also occasionally held in these courts as servants e.g. Mmadi Make / Angelo Soliman and Couchi / Gustav Badin. How "free" they actually were legally or in daily life is open to many unanswerable historical questions. And in a different court with differing customs Abram Petrovich Gannibal was the Ethiopian/Eritrean Russian ancestor of the current Duke of Westminster. And then there's Zamor whose evidence against his "owner" helped make the case for her legal execution.

Happy birthday, claudine and littlered2!

These are some posts from the later part of last week in case you missed them:
Poem: "A Sanctuary for the Homeless"
Poem: "Worthy of Love and Belonging"
Poem: "Indicative of the Extent"
Space Exploration
Birdfeeding
Bird Apocalypse
Birdfeeding
Philosophical Questions: Morals
Today's Smoothie
Science
Birdfeeding
Follow Friday 11-21-25: Knitting
Poem: "Trying to Be Better"
Poem: "Set on Continuous Improvement"
Science
Birdfeeding
Hobbies: Quilting
Self-Care
Today's Adventures
Birdfeeding
Good News

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"An Inkling of Things to Come" belongs to Polychrome: Shiv and needs $191 to be complete. Maiara and Arthur discuss taking notes.


The weather has been variable here. Seen at the birdfeeders this week: a large mixed flock of sparrows and house finches, at least 3 goldfinches, a male cardinal, and two fox squirrels.

These are the notes for "A Sanctuary for the Homeless."

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This poem is spillover from the February 4, 2025 Poetry Fishbowl. It was inspired by prompts from dialecticdreamer, kellan_the_tabby, rix_scaedu, and alchemicink. It also fills the "changes over time" square in my 2-1-25 card for the Valentines Bingo fest. This poem has been sponsored by a pool with fuzzyred and librarygeek. It belongs to the Big One thread of the Polychrome Heroics series. It follows "When You're Lost, You Question Everything," so read that first or this won't make much sense.

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Does anyone here know enough about Greek patronymics and ancient Greek names to help to give a reasonable pseudonym to a character from about 300 BCE? I keep looking up lists of names and I am not sure how to get the result I want. And this after a year of college-level Ancient Greek -- we didn't do much that I remember on the nature of ancient Greek names. Also, the textbook was by Liddell and Scott, and while I don't recall who Scott was, Liddell was the real Alice in Wonderland's father.

Help me find the right name for this character, please?

These are the notes for "Worthy of Love and Belonging."

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This poem is spillover from the June 3, 2025 Poetry Fishbowl. It was inspired by a prompt from rix_scaedu. It also fills the "Belonging" square in my 6-2-25 card for the Pride Fest Bingo. This poem has been sponsored by a pool with fuzzyred and librarygeek. It belongs to the Big One thread of the Polychrome Heroics series.

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These are the notes for "Indicative of the Extent."

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This poem is spillover from the July 15, 2025 Poetry Fishbowl. It was inspired by a prompt from librarygeek. It also fills the "WILD CARD: Clean Up the Town" square in my 7-1-25 card for the Western Bingo fest. This poem has been sponsored by a pool with fuzzyred and librarygeek. It belongs to the Big One thread of the Polychrome Heroics series. It follows "The Choices Humans Make" so read that first or this won't make much sense.

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Nearby super-Earth emerges as a top target in the search for life

Researchers found that the planet may have liquid water on its surface – a necessary ingredient for life.

Researchers have pinpointed a super-Earth in the habitable zone of a nearby M-dwarf star only 18 light-years away. Sophisticated instruments detected the planet’s gentle tug on its star, hinting at a rocky world that could hold liquid water. Future mega-telescopes may be able to directly image it—something impossible today.


This is so awesome. :D

Today is partly sunny and cool, a beautiful fall day.

I fed the birds.  I've seen several sparrows and house finches plus at least 3 goldfinches.

I put out water for the birds.

EDIT 11/23/25 -- We spent an exasperating amount of time trying to set up for chipping the brush pile from the parking lot.

EDIT 11/23/25 -- We spent a bunch more time hassling around with the chipper.  We did get it going!  It produces quite small shreds.  They land right under the chipper.  We figure that putting a tarp underneath will be the best way to move the chips to an actual pile.  Hopefully tomorrow the weather will be clement enough to do actual chipping.

I am done for the night.

I checked out the Death of Stalin comic when I saw it on my way from the DVDs but will I read it? Maybe. It felt very graphicnovely when I peeked inside.

Still in the middle of Game of Thrones book 1 and Tyrion Lannister just got himself arrested.

I watched O. Henry's Full House, but the end of the first chapter was broken and I left the fifth when I realized I knew this one from my school books, and I decided against replacing the memory with a movie. They sure tried to make it look like a Marilyn Monroe movie for all that she walked through a scene once.

Also watched Dogman, and I enjoyed it though it's more of a freak show a la Silence of the Lambs rather than representation, and maybe Luc Besson believes a little too much in the cinematic power of people standing up from their wheelchairs but oh well. They didn't even try developing the villains.

I wanted to post separately about the flight out to Australia, which involved an almost comedically bad sequence of virtually everything that could go wrong on a plane journey going wrong one after another, to the point that it felt almost ridiculous.

My preferred airline and route to Australia is Singapore Airlines and Heathrow-Singapore-Sydney, because the former is just far and away the best of all available airlines flying from Europe to Australia, and the latter breaks up the journey in a way that suits me (plus Changi airport is just about the only major international airport in which it feels almost enjoyable to spend a few hours when you're sleep-deprived, dazed, and in physical pain from spending 10 or more hours sitting down). However, due to a variety of factors, this time around Matthias and I went with Emirates, with the stopover in Dubai. (The deciding factor was that Emirates fly some flights out of/into Standsted airport, which is only 45 minutes away from us by train, whereas Heathrow and Gatwick involve a long time on public transport getting into London, then another hour and twenty minutes on the train back to Ely on a train line that frequently has rail replacement buses for some or all of the line on weekends, and we knew that we would appreciate a quicker and easier return home after the long flight.)

The flight from Stansted to Dubai is only 6.5 hours, and it was completely uneventful. It was only when we moved on to the connecting flight to Sydney that the troubles began.

This started with an announcement on the plane that three passengers had checked in to the flight, but not boarded, so their luggage was going to have to be removed, and we'd need to wait fifteen minutes while this happens. This sort of thing is par for the course on long-haul international flights, so I wasn't too concerned at that point. But then fifteen minutes passed, and another announcement came: there was a big cloud of sand all over Dubai (I'd noticed this as we'd flown in on the preceding flight), and air traffic control were spacing out departures and arrivals for safety reasons, so we'd have to wait another 45 minutes.

The 45 minutes passed (indeed an hour passed), and then another apologetic announcement was made: they'd discovered a leak in one of the galleys, and so engineers needed to come in and fix it, or we might run out of water somewhere over the Indian Ocean. A gaggle of guys in high viz vests trooped in to solve the problem. By this stage I, and a handful of other passengers had moved to stand at the front of the plane, so that we could hear what the flight attendants were saying (delays don't bother me, but being kept in the dark as to the cause and length of the delay really does). They were telling me that these kinds of problems came up fairly regularly on flights, but they'd never experienced them all at once!

After some time, the high viz guys left the plane, and I noticed the flight attendants were having whispered, stressed-looking conversations. The source of their stress was soon revealed: two separate passengers were having medical emergencies (one of whom being a woman who had a milk allergy who had for some inexplicable reason requested and drunk a cup of tea with milk in it!), and a doctor would need to be called. This happened swiftly, and thankfully both sick passengers were checked, treated, and deemed safe enough to fly, so the doctors departed, we were all sent back to our seats, and the flight left, three hours late.

I fell asleep, and woke up somewhere over Western Australia. Normally this means another four hours or so, flying in a straight line across the middle of Australia until Sydney. However, after a little while, there was an announcement over the plane intercom: were there any passengers who spoke French, and if so, could they make themselves known? A couple of older French guys appeared, and were whisked away. A further announcement was made: was there a medical doctor on the plane? Another passenger emerged, and he and the two French guys were moved away to deal with yet another medical emergency! This was a third woman (different to the two previous passengers who had had medical emergencies at the gate in Dubai), and the French passengers were needed in order to translate for her.

At this point, I'd been watching the onboard flight tracker, and had noticed with some concern that it had suddenly switched from saying 'Dubai-Sydney, 2.5 hours remaining' to 'Dubai-Adelaide, 1.5 hours remaining'! I could actually feel that the plane shifted course and turned south, rather than keeping its course flying in a straight line from west to east along the middle of the country. If you look at a map of Australia, Adelaide is in the middle of the country on the southern coast. Sydney is on the middle of Australia's eastern coast, and a flight from the UAE to Sydney should not even pass over Adelaide, as it is too far south.

I asked a passing flight attendant about this change, and whether we were making an emergency landing in Adelaide to get medical care for the sick passenger. He said that it was a possibility, but the captain hadn't yet made up his mind whether this was necessary! For about an hour, the flight tracker definitely thought we were going to Adelaide, and both my brother-in-law and mother (who were tracking the flight online) told us later that online tracking websites had definitely said that our flight was going to land in Adelaide, but thankfully after about an hour heading south, the pilot shifted the plane's course north, the onboard tracker started saying 'Dubai-Sydney' again, and we landed in Sydney as intended, only two hours late. Ambulance workers met us at the gate, the sick passenger was taken off to get medical care, and all was well.

I have actually had much worse flights (including one back from Sydney where we had to make an emergency landing in Kuala Lumpur due to a failure of the plane's computer system, and knowing of the existence of this failure while we were flying over open ocean for several hours, which was absolutely terrifying), but all these things going wrong in succession was something else! The flight itself was actually calm and peaceful (other than the woman with the medical emergency and the possible diversion to Adelaide), and the airline staff handled everything with incredible poise and professionalism; I mean to write to Emirates and compliment their handling of the situation, since it can't have been much fun for them. I'm actually terrified of flying, but I was so busy worrying that we might have to divert to Adelaide that I forgot to be afraid for the entire waking duration of that flight!

The only eventful thing about the return journey was that 10 hours out of the 14 from Sydney-Dubai were so turbulent that the pilots kept the fasten-seatbelt sign on, and at times required the cabin crew to sit in their own seats with seatbelts on as well. This was extremely unpleasant and scary, but — as I kept reminding myself — not on the level of the equivalent flight I'd taken in reverse two weeks earlier!

Happy birthday, carenejeans!