Néro the Assassin | Official Trailer | Netflix
Netflix
1504 in France and there is a drought. There was a big drought in Europe in 1540. You don't suppose they got the four and the zero transposed, do you? I do. Anyway, the situation is grim, but doesn't keep people from lusting after power and killing people to get their way. Matter of fact, it gives some people an opportunity to wreak havoc. We have a nutcase leading the pentitents who claims people have not been been penitent enough and that's why god is withholding the rain. The pentitents work to rectify this situation by cutting off people's noses, ears, fingers and even heads. Lovely bunch of folks.
That's the background. In the foreground we have a fat cat, his daughter, his number one assassin, the assassin's daughter, a one eyed witch, and a couple of dark skinned soldiers, one male and one female. All of these people change loyalties with every episode. It basically makes the story incoherent.
There is a bit of a love story and there is plenty of fighting, but the story is weak, weak, weak.
Castillo de La Calahorra is located in La Calahorra, in the province of Granada, Spain. It is situated in the Sierra Nevada foothills. Built between 1509 and 1512, it was one of the first Italian Renaissance castles to be built outside Italy. - Wikipedia
Netley Abbey is a ruined late medieval monastery in the village of Netley near Southampton in Hampshire, England. The abbey was founded in 1239 as a house for monks of the austere Cistercian order. Despite royal patronage, Netley was never rich, produced no influential scholars nor churchmen, and its nearly 300-year history was quiet. The monks were best known to their neighbours for the generous hospitality they offered to travellers on land and sea.
How an ingenious 400 year old drawing predicted the future
Machine Thinking
A zillion years ago Agostino Ramelli invents the swashplate water pump. The first half of the video is great, but the second half where he's fumbling with A/C compressor it a little slow. Got to give him credit for wandering into an unfamiliar area. Anyways, back to the swashplate. 60 years ago GM built a swash plate compressor that brought modern cold A/C to the car.
I think some hydrostatic drives, typically used in tractors, also use swashplates. I don't think I've ever used one, so I'm going to stop here. Before I turn into a pumpkin.
Update two days later replaced missing video with image.
This place is a hundred miles south of the Arctic Circle. In brief:
The Solovetsky Monastery is a fortified monastery located on the Solovetsky Islands in the White Sea in northern Russia. It was one of the largest Christian citadels in northern Russia before it was converted into a Soviet prison and labor camp in 1926 to 1939, and served as a prototype for the camps of the Gulag system. The monastery has experienced several major changes and military sieges. Its most important structures date from the 16th century, when Filip Kolychev was its hegumen (comparable to an abbot). - Wikipedia
P. S. Just figured this out, so I thought I would 'share'. Gawd, I hates that word 'share'. What's wrong with tell? Whatever, I'm a gonna tell y'all 'bout it. Google Maps won't display grid lines, but Google Earth will. You just have to enable them on the layers menu.
Six women telling their stories as wives of Henry VIII, King of England back in the 1500's. Well, that's what it was supposed to be, but I had a difficult time figuring out the words. I think I was only able to pick out one word out of a dozen. I blame the operatic production - loud music and loud singing - not the kind of sound you get from pop music where you can actually hear the words. Sub-titles would have helped. There wasn't much of a story, just a sequence of songs supposedly telling us something. All Musicals has the lyrics, if you are interested.
Most of Scotland's coal in the sixteenth century was mined close to the Firth of Forth and transported by sea. Shipping the coal from the Moat pit at Culross, Fife, was easy because one of its shafts emerged on an artificial island on the foreshore. Boats could come alongside to load directly from it.
This remarkable innovation was developed by Sir George Bruce of Carnock in 1590. Sea water, which leaked constantly into the pit, was drained by a horse-driven chain of buckets and emptied back into the sea. The pit was flooded in a violent storm in 1625 and abandoned.
I just finished reading The Verge by Patrick Wyman. The subtitle is Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook The World 1490-1530. It's about how Martin Luther, the printing press, firearms and financing all came together to launch Europe on a trajectory that would see them take over the world. He talks about some prominent people and all the goings-on, and the goings-on was basically war. It's basically a chronicle of the wars fought in Europe during this time period.
I'm reading this and I''m thinking this is exactly the same kind of shit we've got going on know. Fucking morons shooting off their mouths, throwing their weight around and going to war. We worship peace, or so we say, but we keep going to war. I'm beginning to think peace is an anomaly. Don't waste any time hoping for peace because it ain't gonna do any good. We're going to war whether we want to or not. I'm beginning to think it's congenital.
You can pray for peace. Praying is good, it helps get your mind right. But hoping, that is just a complete waste of time and energy. Instead, figure what you need to do in order to survive. I suspect for most people that means holding down a job and building up your bank account. I think this means becoming part of the mesh of society. It's like you are spread-eagled and hooked hand to hand and foot to foot with a whole wall of similarly arranged people. You are restrained by these links, but at the same time they make you much stronger because we are all working together. Things like fire protection, running water, power, automobiles are all very difficult to procure on your own, but we have all these things at our finger tips because we work together. Of course for most of us, our sole contribution to these things are the taxes and the monthly utility bills we pay.
Perhaps our continued entanglement with society causes a build up of frustration that has to be released and the way we do that is we go to war. I don't know that anyone is consciously controlling this. It might just be instinct. If it is instinct then that raises the question of how is this a survival skill? War kills a lot of people, job lots of people. So going to war means you've got a good chance of dying. Young men are famous for being careless of their lives. I suppose it's just an outgrowth of aggression and aggression comes from hunting. Kind of weird.
P.S. I'm not sure about the use of goings-on. Should it be hyphenated or not? Can you use it as a noun? Should be it be plural, goings-ons? Enquiring minds want to know.
Bayou Renaissance Man has a good post up about 16th century Basque sailors. Seems their beverage of choice was hard apple cider. The advantage it had over rum, which is what the British used, was you didn't need to add Vitamin-C, apple cider already has Vitamin-C. The Brits, you will recall, used limes.
Back in 1978, the wreck of the 16th century San Juan de Pasajes was found off the coast of Canada and they started an archaeological exploration of the site. The wreck was in such good shape it inspired some people in Pasaia, Spain to build a replica.
I'm looking at a map of this place, and I think 'wait a minute', we've been here before. Yes, with Captain Coignet and the Storks. Irun is Captain Coignet's town. Both Irun and Pasaia are on the north coast of Spain very near the border with France.
I always wondered where Hitler came up with the name for Operation Barbarossa. Today I'm reading about the Ottoman Empire in the The Vergeand he mentions the Barbarossa Brothers. These guys, Oruç and Hayreddin, were corsairs (pirates basically) raising hell in the Mediterranean on behalf of the Sultan. Barbarossa just means "red beard".
The Silver Mountain was mentioned in another video I posted last week, Why Is Latin America still Poor, and it got me curious, so this morning I did a little digging. This video covers it pretty well.
He doesn't mention the elevation of this place. The town of Potosi, Bolivia, is at 13,400 feet and the top of the mountain Cerro Rico is 15,689 feet, though it is steadily falling due to internal collapses of old mining galleries. As far as I am concerned air stops at 10,000 feet, so anyone living in this town must be a real life spaceman, a person who can survive where there isn't any air.
This showed up on YouTube and I thought 'cool, a sailing ship', then I started watching it and I realized that this Juan Sebastián de Elcano lived during the same time period covered by The Verge, the book I have been reading since Christmas. Yes, I'm a little slow.
Then I find that, once again, propaganda trumps reality. Magellan may have got his expedition going, but then he got killed. That often results in the expedition failing, but not this time. Our boy Juan managed to bring at least some of the crew and one of the ships back to Spain and in so doing completed the first circumnavigation of the world. Magellan started the expedition, but he wasn't attempting to sail around the world, he just wanted to get to the Spice Islands.
MORNING RUSH at the WORLD'S BUSIEST AIRPORT - Atlanta Hartsfield-Jackson Plane Spotting
Alex Praglowski Aviation
I watched another similar video not too long ago and it gave me a feel for just how massive the airline industry is. Normally all you or I hear about airlines is when one particular airplane has some kind of trouble, or about how many zillions of dollars a particular company made or lost, but neither of those things really gives me a feel for what's actually going on. One airliner, while large, complex and expensive is still just one airplane, and a zillion dollar profit or loss is just some abstract, imaginary number. But watching these big, expensive aircraft take off, one after another, endlessly, I start to get a feel for the situation.
I went on board the SS Great Britain once; beautifully restored, an old slave-trader ship harboured in Bristol UK. It has a steam engine too, a HUGE V2, the bore and stroke are each about 2 or 3 meters !!!
Right off the size of the engine grabs me. It's big, so I go looking for pictures. I'm finding all kinds of photos, but none that really show the whole engine and how big it is. That's because it's contained in a room just big enough to hold it, never mind that the room is big enough to contain a small office building. You can't get far enough away to get a view of the whole engine. Bah. Lots of models and mockups and such though. You work at it and you can build an image in your mind. Don't know if you can really get a 'feel' for the size of it without being there.
On 22 December, she rescued the crew of the British brig Druid, which had been abandoned in the Atlantic Ocean.
Well, that's cool. That ought to be a pretty good story behind that. Let's see what we can find. Hmm, seems there were several HMS Druids over the centuries, but none that fit the bill, so maybe it was a commercial ship, so I do some more looking and I find this incident mentioned in a List of shipwrecks in December 1872. WTF? There's like 600 of them, that's 20 a day. Can you imagine if we had 20 airliners crashing every day, day in, day out? That is roughly equivalent to what was happening. Okay, most of them were probably cargo ships, but sailing cargo ships carried a crew of a dozen or so, and the cargo and ship had substantial value.
As for slave ships, slaving was big business back in the middle ages. Britain outlawed slave trading in 1807. The SS Great Britain (1845–1886), after being rebuilt and refitted a couple of times, spent 30 years transporting colonists to Australia. Australia was started as a penal colony, but that was back in 1788, but fifteen years later there was a real colony.
Meanwhile, I've started reading The Verge, a history of European exploration from 1490 to 1530. The book starts talking about Columbus and his voyages to the new world. I heard all about this when I was a kid, but my teachers didn't talk very much about how his expeditions were financed. The Verge attempts to correct this oversight. The money men got together and financed these expeditions because they wanted to make more money. They had seen the stuff coming from the Far East and knew there was a boatload of money to be made if they could just get around the middle men in the Mid-East. So they started sending ships to look for opportunities. In Africa they found gold and slaves. In North America they didn't find much except people they could enslave, at least at first. Eventually after the pushed further in Mexico and South America they found huge quantities of gold and silver, but that was later. At first there was nothing but a bunch of natives fishing from canoes.
Age of Uprising: The Legend of Michael Kohlhaas Official UK Trailer (2014) - Mads Mikkelsen Movie HD
Not the greatest movie in the world. Very slow moving and it was very dark on the screen. In many scenes half of the screen was pitch black. Still, we stuck it out till the end. The story was pretty good and the scenes that weren't pitch black were impressive.
One thing that was a little odd is that the movie is in French (with English subtitles, natch) even though it is set in Germany. Doesn't matter, there isn't a whole lot of dialog. There is some violence, but it is done in almost complete silence, none of the heart pounding music you get with modern action movies. It's a little hard to follow the action, there aren't a lot of clues, and sometimes you have to reorder things in your mind as new information appears.
The movie is based on a book published in 1810 that chronicles a dispute between a merchant and royalty in 16th century Saxony (Saxony is now part of Germany). The story is mostly famous because of its modern literary style.
The Vasari Corridor: The World's Least Secret Secret Passageway
What do you do if you're the 16th-Century Duke of Florence and you need a way of getting between your two palaces without being seen by anyone? You build a 1km passageway 3 floors up in the air, of course... - YouTube blurb
I just came across Tim, The Tim(e) Traveler, and he's pretty entertaining. His specialty seems to be going to strange, obscure places and giving us a bit of history.
Tim's route starts at the Palazzo Vecchio on the left and follows the corridor along to the Palazzo Pitti on the right.
You can sort of see the corridor on Google Maps, but all the roofs on all the buildings in Florence are red tile, so it can be a little difficult to pick out.
Rumor has it that some people use the names of historical figures as pseudonyms on the internet. James Rivington is one such figure.
James appeared to be the most loyal supporter of Kind George during the American Revolution. He was actually a spy working for George Washington. (Hey! George versus George, never noticed that before.) The role he played as a loyalist generated a great deal of antipathy amongst the American patriots.
The reminds me of a movie we saw about a French woman cozying up a Nazi officer in Paris during WW2. She was in fact a member of the resistance, but she played her role as a friend to the Nazis so well that when Paris was finally liberated, the locals ganged up on her and killed her.
Back in colonial Spain, King Carlos made an ironic decision in his war against non-Christians: he banned slaves from Muslim areas of Africa in the new territory of Cuba. So the peoples of northern Africa were sent to other European colonies including the U.S., where their stringed instruments may have helped give rise to the musical tradition of the blues; while many of the first slaves who wound up in Cuba came from the forested regions of southern Africa, where the drum was, and still is, king. - Britt Basel
While former [Spanish] colonies gradually abolished chattel slavery after independence in the 1830's, the Cuban pro-slavery lobby succeeded in delaying abolition in Puerto Rico, and Cuba, the two remaining American possessions, until nearly the end of the 19th century. - Slavery in the Spanish New World colonies
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