World War Two
Published 23 Dec 2023The German Ardennes Offensive, called by the Allies the Battle of the Bulge, is in full swing in Luxembourg and Belgium this week, and the Germans have the key junction town of Bastogne under siege. On the Allied side there comes a large American surrender, plans for counterattacks, and tension growing between British and American Commands. The fight in both Italy and the Philippines continues, and in Hungary the Soviets have nearly surrounded Budapest.
00:26 Intro
01:06 The Battle of the Bulge
03:54 The Malmedy Massacre
06:25 Bastogne
10:00 American Surrender on Schnee Eifel
12:06 Patton plans a counterattack
15:44 Bernard Montgomery and Omar Bradley
18:12 The Red Army advances around Budapest
21:39 Fighting in Italy and Greece
22:45 Leyte and Mindoro
25:07 Conclusion
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December 24, 2023
The Siege of Bastogne Begins – WW2 – Week 278 – December 23, 1944
Life-Changing Gift Wrapping Hacks
But First, Coffee
Published 3 Dec 2017Want some tips for wrapping your Christmas presents? Struggling to wrap all your gifts? My life hacks for wrapping are gunna change yo life! Learn how to use the diagonal wrapping method to use less wrapping paper, make a pillow box out of a toilet paper tube, and more!
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QotD: Dreaming of George Bailey’s world while living in Pottersville
George Bailey, the hero of It’s a Wonderful Life, missed the two events that made the ideal man of his time, place, and social class: going to college and serving (as an officer, of course) in the Second World War. Instead of doing those things, either of which would have sent him out into the world beyond the limits of Bedford Falls, he remained at home, taking care of his family, his business, and his community. In other words, the hero of America’s favorite exercise in Yuletide nostalgia epitomized a way of life that, in the season of the film’s cinematic debut (the summer of 1946), was already on its way to the dustbin of history.
This, the most enduring of the many works of Frank Capra, became the Atlantis myth of post-war America. That is, those who, over the course of the last half-century, saw It’s a Wonderful Life on television, knew well that the age of community and connection depicted on their screens had already passed into the realm of legend. Moreover, to add injury to insult, they also knew that, if they wished to enjoy the fruits of a middle-class existence, they would have to live in the manner of vagabonds.
In the movie, slum-lord Henry Potter tries, but fails, to turn the provincial paradise of Bedford Falls into a run-down haunt of spinsters, drunks, and floozies. In the real world, it was Franklin D. Roosevelt who put the kibosh on the original Main Street, USA. To be more precise, the principal achievements of America’s greatest tyrant, the Great Depression and the Second World War, undermined the financial, legal, and cultural foundations of the “wonderful life”. Thus, by the time this process had run its course, inflation had made a fool’s game of simple thrift, the replacement of law with regulation had hobbled private enterprise, and people who had left home for the sake of college, work, or military service found themselves lost in a sea of strangers.
In response to these changes, colleges and universities stepped up to the proverbial plate, happy to offer substitutes for the things that had been lost. They gave young people a chance to obtain certificates that would attest to both their suitability for service in the ranks of corporate minions and their social respectability. At the same time, these institutions gave older people a way to convert their value-losing cash into an asset that promised to pay dividends that would benefit their children (and, indeed, their grandchildren) for decades to come.
Thus arose the people I have come to call the MICE (Mobile, Individualistic, College Educated) people. Bereft of regional accents, productive property, and deep connections to friends and relations, they wandered the world, building networks, acquiring degrees, and padding resumés. However, after two generations of such peripatetic solipsism, the age of the MICE people is coming to an end.
Young men of parts, who realize that college has nothing to do with either liberal learning or vocational training, are simultaneously taking up skilled trades and stocking their MP3 players with learned podcasts. At the same time, young women of quality are beginning to think that the traditional troika of Kirche, Küche, und Kinder offers better odds of deep satisfaction than life as a hormone-hobbled, Starbucks swilling, girl boss.
So, if you know young people like the ones I’ve just described, do posterity a favor, and put them in contact with each other. After all, they deserve a life as wonderful as that of George and Mary Bailey.
Bruce Ivar Gudmundsson, “College, Class, and Christmas”, Extra Muros, 2023-08-06.
December 23, 2023
DON’T GET SCREWED!!! Get the best deals on vintage handplanes
Rex Krueger
Published 22 Dec 2023When it comes to purchasing a piece of the past, a little knowledge goes a long way.
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Ribbon Candy for Christmas at Lofty Pursuits
Lofty Pursuits
Published 19 Dec 2016Public displays of Confection use a very old ribbon candy machine to finally make some nice ribbon candy just before Christmas 2016. This batch was cherry, but we’ve made tutti frutti, and peppermint too. Lofty Pursuits makes candy on equipment made from the late 1800’s until the modern day. We concentrate on finding and restoring old candy equipment and re-learning the dying art of hard candy making.
http://www.pd.net to see the candy we sell.
QotD: Multitasking
In short, we are all teenagers now. This was one of marketing research revelations of the 1990s: that teens could watch TV, take a phone call, do their home work, monitor a conversation in the other room, and ignore their parents all at the same time. But some 10 years later, it looks like kids were merely the early adopters.
Grant McCracken, “We are all teenagers now”, This Blog Sits at the, 2005-05-24.
December 22, 2023
Camouflage
World War Two
Published Dec 19, 2023Camouflage comes in many forms, shapes, disguises, and even processes, for there are indeed many ways to hide your soldiers, guns, tanks, and even ships at sea. Today we take a wee look at camouflage during the war.
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Roast Smoked Goose – A Christmas Goose Special
Food Wishes
Published 8 Dec 2011Learn how to make a Roast Smoked Goose Recipe!
Visit http://foodwishes.blogspot.com/2011/1… for the ingredients, more recipe information, and over 650 additional original video recipes! I hope you enjoy this Christmas Roast Smoked Goose Recipe!
QotD: Mathematically inclined people
Steve H., “Star Wars Still Sucks: ‘Quick, Someone Put More Minwax on Natalie'”, Hog on Ice, 2005-05-26.
December 21, 2023
The Battle of Ortona
Army University Press
Published 20 Dec 2023Between 20 and 28 December 1943, the idyllic Adriatic resort town of Ortona, Italy was the scene of some of the most intense urban combat in the Mediterranean Theater. Soldiers of the First Canadian Infantry Division fought German Falschirmjager for control of the city, the eastern anchor of the Gustav Line. The Army University Films Team is proud to present, The Battle of Ortona, as told by Major Jayson Geroux of the Canadian Armed Forces.
9 Ways to Slice a Pineapple
You Suck At Cooking
Published 6 Sept 2023There are many ways to cut a pineapple, but only nine of these are officially supported by the Pineapple Slicers Association of The World. None of those methods are depicted here.
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QotD: Wine bores
Pam Droog, letter to Vines magazine, May/June 2005.
December 20, 2023
Eat Like a Medieval Nun – Hildegard of Bingen’s Cookies of Joy
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 5 Sept 2023
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QotD: Washing the dog
“No, I can do those now, in ten minutes.”
“That’s okay. It will give me an excuse not to do it today.”
“Ha ha! I’ll be right back, just take ten minutes.”
“No really I’m serious I — ” but he was already on the job. Damned efficient conscientious local hardware store. I also exchanged a propane cylinder, even though it still had some gas in it. I can never tell. If I worked with these things every day I could tell by hoisting it, but it seemed light.
“Probably some in it,” I said to one of the 39 youths who work the store, “but if I can hoist it one hand it’s probably almost done.” To demonstrate my manliness I hoisted the cylinder chest high a few times. Ha! See! Am not old. Strong like bool!
I have a red line of pain running from my scapula to my kidney right now.
Went home, did not paint, because it was supposed to rain. It did not rain. Fixed a few things, napped hard — had got up early for the Roseville jaunt — then grilled kababs, wondering exactly what I was missing that would have added SHISH to the KEBABS. Helped Friend Wife give the dog a bath; it’s amazing how he knows a bath is imminent, and will brook no subterfuge. Anytime someone tries to get him upstairs with a treat, he’s suspicious. If you try to get him in the bathroom with a treat, he is convinced that this will end with humiliation and wetness for no good reason at all, I mean, c’mon, why? He just got to the point where he’s a walking embodiment of all the interesting things that have happened and the interesting places he has been, and we’re just going to erase that? A shower for a dog is like the little amnesia pens the Men in Black use.
James Lileks, The Bleat, 2019-09-16.
December 19, 2023
Behind enemy lines at the WPATH symposium
Eliza Mondegreen reports her experiences at the World Professional Association for Transgender Health gathering in Montreal last year:
This was no ordinary medical conference. Over the course of three days, I learned a great many things. That eunuchs are one of the world’s oldest gender identities and that doctors should not judge their strange desires for castration but fulfil them. That, “ideally, patients wouldn’t be actively psychotic” when they initiated testosterone, but that psychotic patients consent to take medication like stool softeners and statins all the time and “people don’t pay that much attention”. That it would be “ableist” to question an autistic girl’s insistence on a double mastectomy. That patients who claim to have multiple personalities that disagree about which irreversible steps to take toward transition can find consensus — or at least obtain a quorum — using a smartphone app.
It is hard to shock me these days — but as I moved around the World Professional Association for Transgender Health’s symposium in Montreal in September 2022, I often felt as if I’d slipped sideways into some strange universe that operated in accordance with other laws: where up is down and girls are boys and medicine has left its modest brief — healing — far behind in its breathless pursuit of transcendence.
I wasn’t really supposed to be there. I hadn’t misrepresented myself — I am what I claimed to be: a graduate student researching gender identity — but this was a convocation for believers and I’m a sceptic. When WPATH, the world’s most prestigious and influential gathering in transgender healthcare, came to Montreal, I couldn’t resist the opportunity to see up close the people and ideas I had pursued through so many articles and books.
[…]
It’s difficult to imagine clinicians practising in other areas of medicine not asking such basic questions, especially when the basis for treatment is so murky. But a good gender clinician, looking at a patient, does not see what non-believers like you or I might see. A good clinician falls under the sway of the same fantasy as the patient and conspires with her to bring her transgender self into existence. Under this framework, there is no “really trans” or not. There is only what the patient says and the readiness of the clinician to put herself at the service of the patient’s vision.
A bad gender clinician, by contrast, feels an “entitlement to know” why a patient feels the way she does or why she seeks a particular intervention. She clings to a traditional conception of her role as a “gatekeeper” who evaluates and prescribes. She thinks she can “discern a ‘true’ gender identity beyond what is articulated by the patient”. She may believe she can “identify the ‘root cause’ of a transgender identity”, which is seen as pathologising. She may try to leave the door open to desistance — the most common outcome before gender clinicians started interfering with normal development by deploying puberty-blocking drugs — in which case she is guilty of “valuing cis lives over trans lives”.
A bad gender clinician is easily “intimidated” by complicated patients, while a good gender clinician knows how to secure consent even in the trickiest cases. Mental health difficulties become “mental health differences”. Severe autism or thinking you have multiple personalities living inside your head become empowering forms of “neurodiversity”. When it comes to assessment, “careful” and “comprehensive” have become dirty words: “The answer always seems to be more assessment and more time. That’s gatekeeping.”
During the Denver conference, presenters role-played how to secure informed consent for a hysterectomy and phalloplasty in the case of a schizophrenic, borderline autistic, intellectually disabled “demiboy” with a recent psychiatric hospitalisation. At no point do the role-players encounter any real barriers. Instead, they persevere. At first, the patient struggled to understand why a phalloplasty might require multiple surgeries, but then the clinicians “explained everything” and the patient understood. This is called “lean[ing] into the nuance of capacity”.
The moral of this story is clear: failure to achieve informed consent is a failure on the part of the clinician, a failure of imagination and flexibility, not a recognition that some patients — whether because of age or mental illness or intellectual disability — will simply not be able to consent.
