Bizarre biwa instrument

The Japanese biwa is a lute derived from the Chinese pipa and earlier Asian lutes.  The Japanese film Kwaidan, based on Lafcadio Hearn’s book about ghosts, includes a story about Hoichi, the blind biwa player.  Traditionally,  biwa  music centers on the Tale of the Heike, a clan war of ancient times.  

Very eerie vocalization to be sure.

Here even a gaijin (foreigner) gets in on the action.

Here is the Chinese pipa instrument that preceded the biwa.

Anniversary of Hungarian Revolt of 1956

October 23, 1956 was the start of the Hungarian revolution against the puppet state set up by the Soviets.  This event followed smaller revolts in East Germany in 1953 and 1956, as well as Khrushchev's famous "secret speech" revealing Stalin's abominable reign as Soviet tyrant.  Up to that point Comrade Stalin had been thought of as stern but kind Uncle Joe, thanks to years of Soviet propaganda, swallowed wholeheartedly by the captives of his empire and free people alike.  Rumors emerged that some of Khrushchev's audience at the 20th Congress went home and had heart attacks or committed suicide, such was the shock of the small peek at the truth K allowed. 

This is the time when many communists left the party in Great Britain, US, Italy and France, for example, not being able to stomach the Russian medicine for Hungarian disobedience.  

 

When the Russian tanks and soldiers entered Budapest on Nov. 4, 1956 to reconquer the country as a subservient state, all pretense of  the fraternity of socialist states was shattered to all who chose not to delude themselves any longer. 

Roman Army

A few examples of Roman reenactments, the Germans and the British seem to be the most avid fans.

Marcus Aurelius - The Stoic Emperor

Today is not only St. Patrick's Day but the anniversary of the death of the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius, who died from the same plague that wiped out millions in the Empire at that time.  This was at Vindobono, modern day Vienna, on the Danube River, when he died in 180 AD after four years of holding back a Germanic incursion into the heart of the Empire.  Thus he kept the Roman Empire breathing room for a century before further problems developed, leaving the Empire vulnerable to outside incursions.

Rome had a running battle with barbarians almost from its start: the Gauls sacked Rome in 387 BC, they invaded in 225 BC, in 113 Germanic tribes defeated Roman armies and invaded Gaul and Spain, in 102 BC Marius defeated part of them, in 9 AD an entire legion was lost in the Teutoburg Forest, in the years up to 180 AD we have Aurelius preventing a breakthrough by Germanic tribes, in 255 Goths invade Macedonia and later Greece, in 378 Visigoths defeat the Eastern Emperor at Adrianople,in 410 they sack Rome. 

So aside from being a brilliant advocate of Stoicism in his Meditations, Aurelius sacrificed his comfort and life to preserve civilization from the recurrent barbarian incursions and thus kept the flame of Greco-Roman culture going longer than it might have.

Falchion sword

 

 

The falchion sword was popular in Europe between the 11th and 16th centuries.  At first modern historians thought it was a poor man's weapon, but later realized it was often used by knights as well.  Being a single-edged one handed weapon, yet not overly heavy, it could be wielded like a large meat cleaver with great effect.  It was primarily a cutting weapon, and could hack off limbs, but the sharp tip could penetrate chain mail as well.

More Moody Blues

From Lost Chord album in 1968, playful lyrics, video graphics very cuddly.  It reminds us how big a deal exploration was in previous centuries before anyplace on Earth could be photographed from space and one could zoom into anyplace on the planet with the Google Earth app.  Apparently this technology was originally funded by the CIA, just as the Internet helped get its start from Department of Defense funding. 

It is strange that the book that inspired the English to further explorations was Richard Hakluyt's The Principall Navigations, Voiages, and Discoveries of the English Nation, published in 1589, was chock full of baleful tales of shipwrecked sailors, cannibal-infested islands, sickened crew members, starving and sunburnt in windless latitudes, dying of thirst, tortured and killed by natives,  and so forth.  Yet his book inspired a great many to take to the mast and seek their fortune in foreign lands.  Thus we may conclude that the condition of daily life in England at the time was fairly miserable and visions of gold and glory overseas were enough to motivate a great many.

Cosmic Wheels

Finally decided to throw this one in here, graphics are so-so but better than I could do.  A little break from reading Cicero's speeches and bios of Roman generals.  The Romans would appreciate the astrological references in the song. 

The Roman Republic

Trying to sort through the chaotic maze of institutions that formed the Roman Republic up to its end with the civil war following Caesar's assassination, is not a task I  am finding easy.  Not only are there strange offices and institutions like the Centurial Assembly, the Tribal Assembly, the powerful Senate, tribunes, consules, procounsuls, censors, praetors, quaesters, aediles, patricians, equites and plebs, but all of these categories evolved and changed though the centuries in an ever-changing panorama of power politics. 

I am going through this self-imposed agony in order to unravel an historical question that I find keeps recurring every generation: that is, with regard to Julius Caesar, was he a good guy who cared for and sided with the common people against the autocracy of the Senators and aristocrats, or was he a bad guy who trampled the democratic traditions of the Republic in his quest for absolute power?  To answer such a question, of course one has to examine the nature of this supposed Republic and see how it functioned, both in theory and in real life.  Then one has to look at the period just previous to Caesar's career, for instance at the disturbances that occurred around the governance of the Gracchus brothers, and then the lives of Gaius Marius, Caesar's uncle, and seven-times consul,  who opposed the conservative faction, and finally Lucius Sulla, from whose name we get the word sullied, who reestablished in a bloodthirsty manner the authority of the aristocrats.  Not that Marius set a very good example himself in the way he treated suspected enemies. 

But as one can see, just to get a grip on the basic reality on the ground on which Caesar strode, one has to digest a lot of material and then try to make sense of it all, and decide which sources are more reliable than others, and which are useful as long as one takes into consideration that person's bias.   Anyway, this is the point at which I find myself, deeply immersed in the minutiae of a vast assembly of historical facts and fictions, not able to see any patterns or themes yet, much less make any evaluation of the main question.   But it is a worthwhile exercise, I believe, as this particular period in Western history has had many ramifications in later times, and so, to understand it gives one the ability to understand certain trends or ideologies that have shaped our own lives. 

Elizabeth Mackintosh

A Scottish novelist who passed away in 1952, her detective stories in particular were popular for the next twenty years, after which they became almost forgotten.  Writing under the name of Josephine Tey, she created the character of the detective Alan Grant.  Her most famous work is The Daughter of Time, which investigates the supposed wicked deeds of King Richard III.  She did not believe he was hunchbacked, thinking it was later Tutor propaganda.  However just a few days ago a hunchbacked skeleton was supposed to be scientifically proven to be that of Richard III. 

Kind of gruesome...Arguments claiming Richard III did not murder the two princes in the Tower of London are examined in her book.  However most historians follow the theory of foul play at the hands of R III, who had custody of the boys.

Treaty of Locarno

This agreement made in 1925 in Switzerland was supposed to prevent a recurrence of a war between France and Germany especially.  It was in hindsight obviously a total failure and helped cause World War II rather than prevent it.  This is because it achieved German acceptance of its western borders with Belgium and France but said nothing about its recently changed borders on the east with Poland and Czechoslovakia.   And World War II started because of German demands on Polish territory, i.e. Danzig. 

For various reasons, Great Britain refused to support France's desire to guarantee the borders of Poland and Czechoslovakia and thus the appeasement of Germany and the unraveling of the terms of the Versailles Treaty started.  And this was before the rise of Hitler and the Nazis.   France made token agreements with Poland and Czechoslovakia but her agreement in Locarno prevented it from attacking Germany across the Rhine, which would be the only way possible to come to the aid of her eastern allies.  Therefore her strategy of surrounding Germany with a strong alliance was reduced to nonsense. 

The British diplomats in particular showed incredible stupidity in losing sight of the destabilizing and and aggressive potential of Germany.  Because of fears of pushing Germany into the arms of the Soviet Union and of not appreciating France as a bulwark against a hostile Germany, the British virtually invited future German expansionism in the east.  This was only 6 years after they helped create these boundaries in the Treaty of Versailles.  In the new agreement  Germany voluntarily  agreed to the de-militarization of the Rhineland.  Of course when Hitler marched his soldiers back into that area in 1936, scrapping the Treaty of Locarno, the British and French did nothing.  So the Allied betrayal of Poland and Czechoslovakia in that treaty was for nothing. 

Rome vs. the Samnites

The ancient Romans were not exactly good neighbors, supposedly every year about March they would meet together just to decide which neighboring tribe or colony to conquer during the seven-month war season when food was more abundant.  As the Italian peninsula in the times of the founding of Rome consisted of many small Italic states, some Greek colonies, the Samnites in the central highlands, the Etruscans to the north and the Goths further north, there was a lot of pushing and shoving amongst them all. 

One neighbor the Romans especially feared were the warrior herdsmen Samnites, and they waged three wars against them ending in 290 BC, and eventually won of course.  One of the stranger battles of those wars occurred when a Roman legion was tricked (again by enemy agents) into taking a short cut through the mountains where they discovered the way forward barricaded and the way back occupied by their enemies.  With no way in, out or over this area, called the Caudine Forks, without water they would soon perish.  The Samnite leader Gaius Pontius apparently had not thought what to do if his plan worked, for he decided send for advice to his father as to what to do next.  His father  told him to quickly let the Romans go.  Pontius thought this was too lenient, and sent another message.  This time the answer was to kill them all.  Pontius thought this was too cruel, and went to his dad for an explanation.

His father said if they let the Romans go without harm, they had a great opportunity to end the conflict and become friends with Rome.  On the other hand, if this was not done, then they should kill every one of the trapped soldiers, which would so damage Rome's war-making ability as to make the Samnites free of their incursions.   However Pontius did not like either alternative and thought a middle way between them was best, that of humiliating the Romans by having them bend down under a symbolic ox yoke made of their own spears and after taking 600 hostages, forcing them to accept an unfavorable five year peace treaty.  This may not sound like a big deal to us today, but apparently in those days honor was everything and a humiliating surrender was worse then dying on the battlefield.  

The upshot of it was that the Samnites achieved neither peace nor victory by this decision, and after the five year term was up the Romans went after them with renewed vigor, and eventually defeated them despite the intervention of the Etruscans and Gauls on the Samnite side.  The Romans borrowed the Samnite battle formation called the manipular system, replacing the phalanx formation they previously utilized, and used it with great effect throughout the days of the Republic and Empire.

Comparisons have been made with this kind of compromised peace agreement with the end of World War I and the Versailles Treaty, which started out being harsh on defeated Germany but then was abrogated piece by piece in the coming years, leaving the Germans so humiliated that the Nazis were to ride to power on these feelings.  Wilson's original 14 points did not contemplate harsh reparations imposed upon Germany, and had such a huge debt not been imposed, perhaps the Weimar Republic could have survived challenges by the extremists of the right and left.   But there are many variables that made such a forgiving plan difficult, mainly having to do with finding a way to compensate France for the incredible destruction of its farms and factories by the Germans, not to mention loss of blood and treasure.  I believe it was certain the German and Austrian high command used the excuse of the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand to start a preemptive war against  France and Russia, so forcing them to accept responsibility for the war was not unreasonable.  Unfortunately, since Allied armies did not fight their way into Germany and prove to the German public that they had utterly lost fair and square, the Armistice allowed the false impression to grow that they had been somehow created of victory and this lead to the rise of Hitler.   

Ancient Roman defeats

Reading Plutarch's account of the battle of Carrhae in 53 BC when Crassus led his legions into a trap, is like watching a slow train wreck.  Aside from bad military decisions, he followed the advice of a local Arab who was obviously working for the Parthian king.  This pattern of an elder political general who falls under the spell of an enemy agent was repeated in 9 AD when Publius Quinctilius Varus, aged 55, marched his 3 legions into an obvious German barbarian trap in the Teutoburg Forest.  A later imperial power saw a similar calamity when British troops in Kabal, Afghanistan were ordered to retreat by their 60 year old General Elphinstone, who kept believing the promise of safe conduct made by the Afgan leader, resulting in the massacre of his troops in 1842.

The Romans suffered some other horrendous defeats, losing 50,000 to 75,000 men at Cannae in 216 BC against Hannibal, when they adhered to their crazy policy of alternating army commanders each day.  Earlier, in the First Punic War against Carthage, the Romans lost their entire newly built fleet and perhaps 90,000 men in a great storm in the Mediterranean Sea about 255 BC.  It is thought that the Roman vessels were top heavy due to the additional structure of a corvus or boarding bridge, thus making the ships unstable in heavy seas. But they just chopped down more trees and built another 140 ships and continued the fight.  

Many people think of the Roman Empire coming to an end with the fall of Rome in 476 AD but they forget the Empire had been partitioned into western and eastern territories, and the eastern part, becoming known as the Byzantine Empire, lasted almost another thousand years, falling to the Ottoman Turks in 1453.  This event precipitated the influx of scholars with their classical Roman and Greek texts to Italy and the West, giving a further stimulus to the nascent Renaissance which was to fundamentally transform and energize western Europe.  

 

Marcus Licinius Crassus

Portrayed as a lean mean fighting machine in Spartacus season 3, which is currently running, Crassus may have been much less an athletic figure.  Known as the richest man in the Roman world, he financed Julius Caesar and became co-ruler of the Republic with Caesar and Pompey later.  His victory over Spartacus' undisciplined slave army may have helped his career, but it gave him an unrealistic view of his military prowess. This brought him to grief later in life, at the age of 60 he set forth from Rome with plans to conquer Parthia in the Middle East, ignoring an extraordinary series of what an objective observer would recognize as really bad omens.

Two years later, ignoring the offered assistance of the allied Armenian army, which had experience dealing with the horse-riding Parthians armed with compound bows, Crassus made wrong decisions every step of the campaign, leading to his death and those of 20,000 Roman soldiers with an additional 10,000 captured.  This event and the loss of Legionary Eagle standards humiliated the Romans and ensured they would be back for vengence.  It also broke apart the delicate political alliance that held together the Republic, after this the antagonism between Caesar and Pompey could not be glossed over, and civil war and the end of the Republic was the result.  

This incredible loss against an inferior force showed the limitations of the Roman military technology and strategy in dealing with enemies on the eastern frontier.  It also showed the bad side of the Roman tendency to give military commands to influential politicians who had miminal or no army experience.  They continued to have problems with the Parthians for centuries and never fully conquered them or succeeding dynasties, thus creating the first solid boundary stopping their previous expansion.  

Eightfold Path

I was reading some online message board entries concerning the responses of the Roman and Chinese Empires to barbarian incursions and came across one that was a little strange.  It went on from the topic under discussion to proposing that while Christian belief in God became the hallmark of Western civilization, the Chinese were stuck with the Buddhist belief in the Eightfold Path, and wham! then they became vulnerable to Communism in the 20th century. Of course one could retort where did this Communism start from, but a solid Christian nation called Russia...

But the basic point of the guy is that non-theistic Buddhism does not provide the moral strength to resist the totalitarian viciousness of Marxism-Leninism.  That is to say, as with Dostoyevsky, if God did not exist, all things are permitted, and moral relativism and actual chaos will be the result.  If this were true, then the history of Buddhism should be strewn with colossal persecutions, wars and cultural degradation.   But that is not the case.  Dostoyevsky's mistake is like many theists, Christian, Jewish or Islamic, that they have the corner on the Absolute and non-believers or infidels are incapable of decent behavior because they have disconnected themselves from ultimate Being or the Godhead.  Of course the Communists use the same argument, substituting History for God.  

This is taking belief itself as the marker of morality, rather than evaluating action in the real world.  It also generates the dangerous proposition that  as long as we firmly believe in God we are unlikely to commit evil deeds, and encourages the smug feeling we don't have to do anything to change our life, no matter how many bad habits we have.  I think a more reasonable theistic approach would be to accept the proposition that the sacred can be experienced in many ways and manifest itself in many forms, and there are possibly many paths to heaven, enlightenment, or union with God.  Just because they are not familiar with other paths does not mean they are dead ends.  The history of fanaticism is, by the way, pretty much a theistic phenomenon, not non-theistic. The Eightfold Path, which we have entirely overlooked in this post, is a path of moderation, tolerance and sanity. 

The Unknown Frances Trollope

This English writer who was famous in her day (1779-1863), especially for her travel books, is now relatively forgotten and only her most notorious book is still published, Domestic Manners of the Americans, which came out in 1832 and made her reputation.  She was forced to make a living at writing due to the incompetence of her husband who seemed to torment everyone.  It is a shame her books are pretty much unavailable now except a few in OCR versions that are full of mistakes.  She was quite the outspoken observer who knew how to write humorous stories that beguiled the public of her day.  However after her novelist son Anthony disparaged her output in his autobiography, her reputation sank as his continued to rise.

Aside from many true insights about American culture of the early 1830's, she also wrote a witty novel called The Widow Barnaby that combines comedy with realism.   It would make a great TV show or movie.  There is a careful analysis of it here.  Her novel about American slavery probably inspired Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin.  She wrote the first novel about child labor in the factories of England which caused an uproar leading to the Factories Act of 1844.  While personally pretty hard to get along with, she nevertheless saw though the absurdities of revivalism and slavery and could not make a living in Cincinnati because of that.  When she was on her way back to England through Virginia  she stayed with a slave-holding family.  When a black slave girl accidentally swallowed poison and was dying, Frances gave the girl mustard and water as an emetic saving her life, and then held the girl in her arms and tried to comfort her.  She noticed the white members of the household were amazed at her actions and even laughed at her concern.  Just goes to show how twisted cultures can become.

Jefferson's Anti-Slavery Views

While it is apparently the vogue among scholars to depreciate Thomas Jefferson's ambiguous stance towards slavery, there are many effective actions he took to ameliorate or abolish slavery.  First of all, history seems to have forgotten his anti-slavery language in the original draft of the Declaration of Independence.  It condemns the introduction of slavery to America by the British King as one of the grievances listed.  Here is the actual text:

he [the king of Britain] has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it’s most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. this piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the CHRISTIAN king of Great Britain. determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce: and that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them; thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.  

Now that is pretty strong language.  Unfortunately, due to the opposition of the South Carolina and Georgia delegations, it was removed.

Another concrete action he took to stop or slow down the spread of slavery was his drafting of the 1784 Territorial Governance Act which would have outlawed slavery in all of the territories between the Appalachian mountains and the Mississippi River.  However, this act was defeated by one vote.  It did give rise to the passage of the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which did outlaw slavery in Ohio and states to the north of it.  

Also as President he urged Congress to abolish the slave trade which imported slaves to the US, and in 1807 this was accomplished.   So even though Jefferson was a slave owner and may have shared the contemporary mindset about the inferiority of blacks, there is solid evidence he also considered slavery a great evil and did something about it.

The Birth of Plenty & Civilization, The West and the Rest

I read William Bernstein's The Birth of Plenty, How the Prosperity of the Modern World Was Created, a few years ago.  It was published in 2004.  He lists four conditions necessary for human progress to take off: property rights, scientific rationalism, capital markets and improvements in transportation and communication.  

These four conditions were obviously most likely to be found in a relatively free society, such as those he mentions, the Dutch Republic, England and the United States.  To the extent other societies adopt these principles, such as mainland China today, they loosen the bonds of tyranny somewhat, giving birth to a middle class that one day will become fed up with dictatorship.  

Along comes Niall Ferguson in 2011 with Civilization, The West and the Rest, with his take on how Western Europe came to dominate the world.  He lists six components: competition, science, property rights, medicine, the consumer society and the work ethic.  It seems to me he is restating in a slightly more elaborate manner Bernstein's list.  Yet among the hundreds of works and authors he cites, The Birth of Plenty or Bernstein do not appear.  Are we to believe he did not refer to this book at all?  I find that pretty hard to believe.  

Neither does he cite Hernando deSoto's The Mystery of Capital, which Bernstein does reference,  on the consequences of making the ownership and transfer of private property a bureaucratic nightmare, as it is in many Third World nations.  He does analyze the development of property relationships in South America, as does deSoto, but relying on different souces apparently.  Or perhaps avoiding an author Bernstein relied upon.  

Anyway, I think both books make a valuable contribution to the discussion of what role capitalism and freedom make to improving the lives of ordinary men and women.  They make it clear that socialist and ever-expanding government control of the economic lives of  citizens causes poverty and political subjugation to the all powerful State.
  

Pullo and Octavian play games

The new HBO series Rome has to be commended for its fidelity to history, as compared to the other cable series about the same epoch, called Empire. The latter was full of so many historical fantasies it should have been labeled alternative history. But this latest episode of Rome is a strange way to demonstrate Octavian's capacity for ruthlessness. He and Pullo decide on their own to find out what's what with Vorenus' wife and supposed former lover. This poor guy had made love to Niobe after the army told her her husband was dead and his salary stopped coming. So he has a pretty good excuse...but Octavian and Pullo, who should have known this, tell him they are going to kill him anyway, so why not talk before they torture him. Pullo, who doesn't know how, has to take suggestions from a kid. This is meant as humor I suppose.

And so Octavian instructs Pullo to cut off the guy's thumbs for starters...and so on, and after they find out the Niobe's grand-daughter is really her own daughter, then they see red and stab him and dump his body into the aqueduct...if this was a common method of murder, the Romans should have been all poisoned in no time at all from the polluted water supply.

I suppose this scene is to show us how common brutality was in Roman times, as well as giving us a clue to Octavian's nerves of steel, which would lead him to successfully climb the ladder of power to Emperorship. On the other hand, it strikes me as rather dumb....here are two guys butting their noses into someone else's business, they are bound to make Niobe unhappy, though Pullo likes her, they kill a totally innocent person who did nothing wrong under the circumstances, they contaminate their city's water supply without a thought, the list goes on.

I suppose this is part and parcel of the "Upstairs, Downstairs" soap opera motif in which we are alternately shown how the nobility conduct themselves in some particular fashion, and then how the riffraff do it their way. Except in this case one of the upper classes is slumming, "gaining experience" so to speak. Obviously none of this can be historically verified, the idea is to take what history tells us of the famous personages of the times, and flesh them out with dramatically interesting traits and intriguing plot twists. Nothing wrong with this I suppose, but this particular example is rather disgusting.

France owes more to Talleyrand than Napoleon

Former French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte -- Napoleon I -- in exile on Elba, blaming Talleyrand and Fouche for his predicament, said: "If I had hanged Talleyrand and Fouche, I would have been still today on the throne." When the news reached Talleyrand, he said: "Napoleon, instead of hanging me, should have listened to me."

But how could a megalomaniac listen to anyone else for advice? What Talleyrand said is true, if Old Nap had listened to him, Talleyrand could have kept him in power for decades in a Europe at peace. But as we all know, Napoleon constantly rejected Talleyrand's proposals for making peace with his defeated neighbors.

Talleyrand was ahead of his time regarding many European issues. At the Congress of Vienna he strived for the creation of a strong and independent Poland, although this was not to allowed at that time. He foresaw future Prussian aggression theatening European peace, and helped foster a German federation to counter Prussia's militancy. It was only the stupidity of yet another Napoleon who declared war on Prussia in 1870, that fatally weakened this effort to contain German aggression. Talleyrand felt France's natural ally in Europe was England and opposed the brutal policies of autocratic regimes like Russia and Austria. Compared to this, what did Napoleon stand for? Not much beyond self-glory.

Happy Birthday President U.S. Grant

U.S. Grant was one of the greatest American presidents, despite what propaganda you may read in the history books. It was Grant alone who made valient efforts to enforce black rights, after Johnson's failure to enforce the law. Despite the political unpopularity of such moves, he did not back down. It was Hayes who followed who made a deal with the Southern Democrats to violate black voting rights that overturned Grant's humane and constitutional policy.

Grant was the first modern president and made sure the US steadily advanced toward becoming a world power. After the chaos and destruction of the Civil War, Grant's careful managemant of domestic and foreign policy brought about a dramatic rise of America to the forefront of nations.

There is a great book on Grant by Frank J. Scaturro called President Grant Reconsidered. You can find Frank J. Scaturro's book here.

Because of the intellectuals' bias against him, they could not even see the humor behind a traveling Grant's remark about draining the Venetian canals; they could not imagine he had a subtle sense of humor. Does this remind us of current affairs or what??