Quotulatiousness

December 25, 2021

“Christmas Truce” – December 1914 – Sabaton History 107 [Official]

Filed under: Britain, France, Germany, History, Media, Military, WW1 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Sabaton History
Published 24 Dec 2021

You’ve all heard about it, but here are the nuts and bolts for why and how it happened — the Christmas Truce on the Western Front in December 1914, the first Christmas of the Great War.

Support Sabaton History on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/sabatonhistory

Listen to “Christmas Truce”: https://music.sabaton.net/ChristmasTruce

Watch the Official Music Video of “Christmas Truce” here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPdHk…

Listen to Sabaton on Spotify: http://smarturl.it/SabatonSpotify
Official Sabaton Merchandise Shop: http://bit.ly/SabatonOfficialShop

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Written by: Markus Linke and Indy Neidell
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Creative Producer: Maria Kyhle
Executive Producers: Pär Sundström, Joakim Brodén, Tomas Sunmo, Indy Neidell, Astrid Deinhard, and Spartacus Olsson
Community Manager: Maria Kyhle
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Editor: Iryna Dulka
Sound Editor: Marek Kaminski
Archive: Reuters/Screenocean – https://www.screenocean.com

Sources:
– IWM NTB 178-2, IWM 205, Q 86849, Q 57165, Q 53616, Q 56198, Q 50720, Q 65834, Q 50719, Q 50721, Q 31575, Q 32613, Q 57361, Q 11718, Q 31576, Q 49581, Q 64568, IWM 130-01
– Santa vector created by vectorpocket – www.freepik.com

All music by: Sabaton

An OnLion Entertainment GmbH and Raging Beaver Publishing AB co-Production.

© Raging Beaver Publishing AB, 2019 – all rights reserved.

Repost – “Fairytale of New York”

Filed under: Europe, Media, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Time:

“Fairytale of New York,” The Pogues featuring Kirsty MacColl

This song came into being after Elvis Costello bet The Pogues’ lead singer Shane MacGowan that he couldn’t write a decent Christmas duet. The outcome: a call-and-response between a bickering couple that’s just as sweet as it is salty.

QotD: Blackadder and Melchet exchange Christmas greetings

Filed under: Britain, Humour, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Lord Edmund Blackadder: I trust Christmas brings to you its traditional mix of good food and violent stomach cramp.
Lord Melchet: Greetings of the season to you, Blackadder! May the Yule log slip from your fire and burn your house down!

Blackadder’s Christmas Carol, 1988.

December 24, 2021

How Hitler, Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin Spent Christmas – WW2 Special

Filed under: Britain, Germany, History, Military, Russia, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

World War Two
Published 23 Dec 2021

They might be four of the most powerful politicians and/or military leaders on earth, but they are also citizens of their respective countries and today we take a look at what they do over the traditional Christmas holidays in 1942.
(more…)

How Soldiers and Civilians Celebrated Christmas During the Franco-Prussian War 1870

Filed under: France, Germany, History, Military — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Real Time History
Published 23 Dec 2021

Support us on Patreon: https://patreon.com/realtimehistory

Christmas 1870 reminded the German and French alike that the Franco-Prussian War was going on for far too long. Soldiers and civilians on both sides tried to make the best of the situation but the grim nature of the last weeks of fighting and the ongoing Siege of Paris made this a memorable Christmas for all the wrong reason.

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Arand, Tobias: 1870/71. Der Deutsch-Französische Krieg erzählt in Einzelschicksalen. Hamburg 2018

Gouttman, Alain: La grande défaite. 1870-1871. Paris 2015

Hahn, Joachim: Jüdisches Leben in Ludwigsburg. Geschichte, Quellen, Dokumentation. Karlsruhe 1998

» SOURCES
Allorant, Salomé u.a. (Hrsg.): La République au défi de la guerre. Lettres et carnet de l’Année terrible (1870-1871). Amiens 2015

Bernardt, Sarah: Ma double vie. Mémoires. Paris 1907

Fontane, Theodor: Der Krieg gegen Frankreich. Bd. 3. Berlin 1875

Fontane, Theodor: Kriegsgefangen. Erlebtes 1870. Briefe 1870/71. Berlin (Ost) 1984

Goncourt, Edmond de: Journals des Goncourt. Mémoires de la vie litteraire. Vol. 4. Paris 1890

Kriegsgeschichtliche Abteilung des Großen Generalstabs (Hrsg.): Der deutsch-französische Krieg 1870-71. 2.2. Berlin 1880

Meisner, Heinrich Otto (Hrsg.): Kaiser Friedrich III. Das Kriegstagebuch von 1870/71. Berlin, Leipzig 1926

Plitt, Franz: Rückerinnerungen eines Dreiundachtzigers. Kassel 1903

Russell, William Howard: My diary during the last great war. London 1874

Schikorsky, Isa (Hrsg.): “Wenn doch dies Elend ein Ende hätte”. Ein Briefwechsel aus dem Deutsch-Französischen Krieg 1870/71. Köln, Weimar, Wien 1999

Schmidt, Erna (Hrsg.): Briefe aus den Feldzügen 1866 und 1870/71. Berlin 1908

Speisekarte des Café Voisin Paris vom 25.12.1870

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Repost – Hey Kids! Did you get your paperwork in on time?

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Humour — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 03:00

If you hurry, you can just get your Santa’s Visit Application in before the deadline tonight!

Repost – The Monkees – “Riu Chiu”

Filed under: Media, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Uploaded on 15 Dec 2015

The Monkees perform “Riu Chiu” from Episode 47, “The Monkees’ Christmas Show”.

H/T to Kathy Shaidle for the link.

QotD: Christmas nostalgia

Filed under: Humour, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

All Christmases refer back to the Christmases of your early childhood. That’s your baseline, your definition. Mine were warm and happy, which is a blessing and a curse — you love the season, but now you have an unreasonable standard. Everything falls short. It takes a long time to unlearn Christmas and reassemble it for your own — although having kids of your own accelerates the process, makes it easier. Forget your own unrealistic half-remembered expectations; let’s implant the same in the next crop! And when your toddler hugs your leg and says Oh Daddee it’s the best Christmas EVER you know you’re back in the groove.

James Lileks

December 23, 2021

Halifax and the Boston Christmas Tree

Filed under: Cancon, History, USA, WW1 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The History Guy: History Deserves to Be Remembered
Published 22 Dec 2021

One of America’s most famous Christmas trees is intimately linked to one of the most devastating explosions in human history. The story is one of great tragedy, great heroism, and human compassion, that goes to the heart of the true meaning of Christmas.

This is original content based on research by The History Guy. Images in the Public Domain are carefully selected and provide illustration. As very few images of the actual event are available in the Public Domain, images of similar objects and events are used for illustration.

You can purchase the bow tie worn in this episode at The Tie Bar:
https://www.thetiebar.com/?utm_campai…

All events are portrayed in historical context and for educational purposes. No images or content are primarily intended to shock and disgust. Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Non censuram.

Find The History Guy at:

Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TheHistoryGuy
Please send suggestions for future episodes: Suggestions@TheHistoryGuy.net

The History Guy: History Deserves to Be Remembered is the place to find short snippets of forgotten history from five to fifteen minutes long. If you like history too, this is the channel for you.

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Script by THG

#history #thehistoryguy #Halifax

Update: For more information on the explosion itself, I put together a post on that a few years back.

Repost — The lousy economics of gift-giving

Filed under: Economics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Tim Worstall explains why gift-giving at Christmas is so economically inefficient:

Christmas gifts under the tree.
Photo by Kelvin Kay via Wikimedia Commons.

The point being made is dual, that individuals have agency and that utility is entirely personal.

To unravel that jargon.

Individuals, peeps, are able to make choices. We delight in making choices in fact, “agency” is the opposite of “anomie”, that feeling that society determines what we may or can do that so depresses the human spirits. We get to choose to get up at 6 am or 8. Have coffee or tea when we do. Go buy the latest platters from the newly popular beat combo, pay the ‘leccie bill or have the coffee out at an emporium.

Having choices, making them, makes people happier.

Secondly, utility. The result of those choices, which of them will maximise happiness, is different for each and every individual. Sure, we can aggregate some of them – food is usually pretty high up everyones’ list, that first litre of water a day tops most. But the higher up Maslow’s Pyramid we go the more tastes – and thus happiness devoured – differ.

So, we make humans happier by their having the choice to do what they want, not what others think they should want or have.

Thus, give people cash at Christmas not socks.

Balancing that is the obvious point that the care and attention with which a present is considered is part of that consumption of happiness. The boyfriend who actually listens to the type of clothing desired and goes gets it provides that joy that a bloke has, for once, been listening. Or the book that would never have been individually considered but was chosen because it might – and does.

Sure.

But the point isn’t about Christmas at all. That’s a way of wrapping the point so it can be left underneath the tree of knowledge.

If Delivery Companies Were Santa

Filed under: Humour, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

It’s a Southern Thing
Published 21 Dec 2021

Up on the housetop, click, click, click.
Down through the chimney comes UPS … and FedEx, USPS, and Amazon Prime.

QotD: Stupid Commercials

Filed under: Business, Humour, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

By the way, speaking of the counter culture, have you seen that iPod ad where everyone is walking around in the street in their own exclusionary poddy bubbles but singing the same Christmas carol. Oddly, none of them seem to get hit by cars and, laughingly, they all carry the tune. Has no one broken the news to these people that people singing with headphones in their ears sound like scalded but urgently amorous cats?

Alan McLeod, “1 + 0 = 2”, Gen X at 40, 2005-11-15.

December 22, 2021

Repost – “Merry Christmas” versus “Happy Holidays” versus “Happy Midwinter Break”

Filed under: Business, Government, Religion, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

L. Neil Smith on the joy-sucking use of terms like “Happy Midwinter Break” to avoid antagonizing the non-religious among us at this time of year:

Original infographic from Treetopia – https://www.treetopia.com/Merry-Christmas-vs-Happy-Holidays-a/304.htm

Conservatives have long whimpered about corporate and government policies forbidding employees who make contact with the public to wish said members “Merry Christmas!” at the appropriate time of the year, out of a moronic and purely irrational fear of offending members of the public who don’t happen to be Christian, but are Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh, Jain, Rastafarian, Ba’hai, Cthuluites, Wiccans, worshippers of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, or None of the Above. The politically correct benediction, these employees are instructed, is “Happy Holidays”.

Feh.

As a lifelong atheist, I never take “Merry Christmas” as anything but a cheerful and sincere desire to share the spirit of the happiest time of the year. I enjoy Christmas as the ultimate capitalist celebration. It’s a multiple-usage occasion and has been so since the dawn of history. I wish them “Merry Christmas” right back, and I mean it.

Unless I wish them a “Happy Zagmuk”, sharing the oldest midwinter festival in our culture I can find any trace of. It’s Babylonian, and celebrates the victory of the god-king Marduk over the forces of Chaos.

But as anybody with the merest understanding of history and human nature could have predicted, if you give the Political Correctness Zombies (Good King Marduk needs to get back to work again) an Angstrom unit, they’ll demand a parsec. It now appears that for the past couple of years, as soon as the Merry Christmases and Happy Holidayses start getting slung around, a certain professor (not of Liberal Arts, so he should know better) at a nearby university (to remain unnamed) sends out what he hopes are intimidating e-mails, scolding careless well-wishers, and asserting that these are not holidays (“holy days”) to everyone, and that the only politically acceptable greeting is “Happy Midwinter Break”. He signs this exercise in stupidity “A Jewish Faculty Member”.

Double feh.

Two responses come immediately to mind, both of them derived from good, basic Anglo-Saxon, which is not originally a Christian language. As soon as the almost overwhelming temptation to use them has been successfully resisted, there are some other matters for profound consideration…

Rum Balls Recipe – Christmas Cookie Special! Chocolate Rum Balls

Filed under: Food — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Food Wishes
Published 7 Dec 2011

Learn how to make a Chocolate Rum Balls 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 Cookie Special – Chocolate Rum Balls Recipe!

QotD: Sibling rivalry

Filed under: Food, Humour, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

It’s only natural to feel competitive with your siblings. I recall all of those Christmas mornings, as my brother and sister and I compared gifts to figure out which one of us was the least beloved. This was important information because we adjusted our levels of misbehavior to match the rewards. There’s no point in being extra good if the presents are just okay.

Mealtime was competitive too. The winner was the one who moved the greatest percentage of my father’s income through his or her digestive system. I was in my thirties before someone told me that eating is not a speed sport.

Scott Adams, Dilbert Newsletter 61.0, 2005-10-25.

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