 | ladybeams on Fair warning |
 | lola on Another snowstorm heaves into… |
 | monado on On to the next task |
 | Josh on Another snowstorm heaves into… |
 | Don Hutton on On to the next task |
|
In one of the toughest mountain stages of the 2009 Tour de France, Jens Voigt, of the Saxobank team, suffered a severe crash and was taken for medical treatment. He’s out of the tour. Here’s one of the less grisly pictures.
Stage 16, Martigny, Switzerland to Bourg-Saint-Maurice, had very long slopes, with climbs and descents more than 20 km long. That lets a rider get exhausted on the climbs and reach dangerous speeds on the descents.
The profile for Stage 16 looks like this:
The Scottish government has written a guide to cat care for the clueless. That’s a good idea, because when we are ignorant of something, we don’t know how ignorant we are.
When I was growing up, we “knew” that “cats drink milk,” so we never put out fresh water for our cat—and then were amused when it drank out of the aquarium. There are more books on cat care now, as well as the Internet, but I suppose it doesn’t hurt to have an official source telling people the basics.
Salamo Arouch, death camp survivor
Shlomo or Salamo Arouch (1923-2009) was an amateur boxer in the Balkans when the Nazis invaded. He and his family, along with thousands of other Greek Jews, were taken to Auschwitz-Birkenau. On the first day, his mother, sisters, and all the younger children were killed, leaving himself, his father, and his younger brother.
When the Nazis found out that he was a boxer, he was forced to fight for their entertainment while they bet on the outcome. The loser was executed and cremated. At some point he was transferred off the slave labour detail to office work. In two years, he won more than 100 fights, some of them with men who outweighed him by a hundred pounds.
By the time the camp was liberated, his father had died and his brother had been shot on the spot for refusing to pull gold teeth from the mouths of the dead. He was the only survivor from his family.
While searching for members of his family at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in April 1945, Arouch met 17-year-old Marta Yechiel, from his own home town. After their marriage later that year, in 1948 he emigrated to the fledgling state of Israel and served in the Israeli Army, where he continued to box. In civilian life he ran a successful shipping and moving business in Tel Aviv.
Salamo Arouch’s wife [, Marta,] and four children survive him.
You can read more about Salamo Arouch here.
One of the old agricultural holidays, Beltane is related to first flowering and spring. I’m stealing this from Erin, logo and all:
Historic Beltane
–by Heather ShawBeltane is an old Celtic Fire Ritual which celebrates, at the most fundamental level, the end of winter and the beginning of the warmer, lighter half of the year. It is the counterpart to Samhain, which marks the Pagan New Year and celebrates ancestors and the death of the crops (harvest). Beltane celebrates life. For the Celts, it was a festival that insured fertility and growth.
Beltane is one of the four major Sabbats in the Celtic tradition, the other three being Lammas, Samhain and Imbolc. Beltane’s traditional date, May 1st, was chosen as the midway point between the vernal equinox and summer solstice (two of the four minor Sabbats). Due to the change in the earth’s axis of rotation over time, this point is now closer to May 5th, and some pagans observe May 5th as “Old Beltane,” but the traditional date is still favored.
Traditionally, Beltane festivities began days before May 1st or “May Day,” when villagers traveled into the woods to gather the nine sacred woods needed to build the Beltane bonfires. The tradition of “May Boughing” or “May Birching” involved young men fastening garlands of greens and flowers on the windows and doors of their prospective ladyloves before the fires are lit Beltane night. As with many Celtic customs, the type of flowers or branches used carried symbolic meaning, and much negotiating and courting could be worked out ahead of time.
Many communities elected a virgin as their “May Queen” to lead marches or songs. To the Celts, she represented the virgin goddess on the eve of her transition from Maiden to Mother. Depending on the time and place, the consort might be named “Jack-in-the-Green” or “Green Man,” “May Groom” or “May King.” The union of the Queen and her consort symbolized the fertility and rebirth of the world.
Because the Celtic day started and ended at sundown, the Beltane celebration would begin at sundown on April 30th. After extinguishing all hearth fires in the village, two Beltane fires were lit on hilltops. The villagers would drive their livestock between the fires three times, to cleanse them and insure their fertility in the coming summer, and then put them to summer pasture. Then the human part of the fertility ritual would begin.
As dancing around the bonfires continued through the night, customary standards of social behavior were relaxed. It was expected that young couples would sneak off into a ditch, the woods or, better yet, a recently plowed field for a little testing of the fertility waters. Even after hand-fasting was replaced by the Christian tradition of monogamous marriage, the Beltane ritual continued with a new tradition: all marriage vows were temporarily suspended for the festival of Beltane. Many a priest would lament the number of virgins despoiled on this one night, but the tradition persevered. Babies born from a Beltane union were thought to be blessed by the Goddess herself.
Beltane, like Samhain, is a time when the veil between the worlds is thought to be thin, a time when magic is possible. Whereas Samhain revelers must look out for wandering souls of the dead, Beltane merrymakers must watch for Fairies. Beltane is the night when the queen of the fairies will ride out on her white steed to entice humans away to Faeryland. If you hear the bells of the Fairy Queen’s horse, you are advised to look away, so she will pass you by; look at the Queen and your sense alone will not hold you back! Bannocks were also sometimes left for the Fairies, in hopes of winning their favor on this night.
The maypole, which was either a permanent feature or cut in a ceremony during the gathering of the nine sacred woods, was a symbolic union of the God and Goddess. The maypole itself represented the male, a phallus thrust into mother earth, while the ribbons that were wound around it represent the enveloping nature of the woman and her womb. The maypole was usually danced after sunrise, when disheveled men and women would stagger back into town carrying flowers they picked in the forests or fields. The area around the maypole was decorated with the flowers, and then the winding of the ribbons would begin. Sometimes the flowers were put into baskets and left on the doorsteps of people who were too ill or old to attend the Beltane celebrations. In this way, the entire town could participate in the joys of the coming spring.
A homicidal maniac used an automobile in trying to ram the Dutch royal family in a procession on Queen’s Day in Apeldoorn. He burst through a crowd of onlookers, killing six people, before narrowly missing the royal bus and crashing against a stone monument. He died the next day. Before he died, he told police that he was trying to hit the royal family but not why.
A big thank you and hat tip to Girl in a Whirl—I needed that!
This is my favourite version of the old Scottish song, “Sir Patrick Spens,” probably because it’s the first one I heard. The accent is a bit thick, so it takes several listens to puzzle out most of the words. Fortunately, you’ll also find it in books of poetry under “Ballads.” Take it away, Buffy!
New evidence suggests that Jane Austen’s sister, Cassandra, interfered with Jane’s chances for a happy marriage.
Martin Rundkvist is clueing me in to a whole new genre of music: Swedish, fo9lk-influcenced rock(?) by Hedningarna. I wounder if he would like Steeleye Span.
Links: Hedningara’s site.
The Daily Dose of Imagery for 20 November 2007 is a low-level air race screaming through Budapest last summer. Go to the link for higher-resolution pictures.
