(via juliassundial)
Tags:
#Richard III #joke #*snort*
history
Aotearoa/New Zealand, 1280.
The maritime plan of most of human civilization during our period went as follows:
- Get boats.
- Put weapons on boats.
- Conquer neighboring countries either by military force or by overwhelming trade dominance.
- Instagram shots of you in front of London/Indrapura/Mogadishu.
- Go home.
The Polynesians, on the other hand, appeared to have a different plan:
- Build canoes.
- Sail out into the open ocean for four thousand miles.
- ???
- Sweet, Hawai’i!
As the world looked on in tolerant, baffled wonder for thousands of years [sidebar on Vikings], Polynesians repeated steps 1-4, especially step 3, which when you peeled off the little sticker with the question marks turned out to be “employ an array of sophisticated navigational techniques which remain in cultural transmission and even active use today. Also, when you reach an island, use an equally sophisticated array of terraforming techniques to make an unfamiliar landscape ecologically viable for human life. Also, eat a balanced diet, because scurvy is for white people.”
The Polynesians did their eastern Pacific exploration around our period, and may have settled Easter Island and Hawai’i around then, too, if not a little earlier. Polynesian colonies were set up on little stubs of volcanic rock, hideously isolated archipelagos, even sub-polar islands. They probably hung out with medieval Peruvians, or at least, they made enough American contact to get ahold of sweet potatoes. [Sidebar on sweet potatoes.] And they found New Zealand, and settled in, and those who stuck around became the Māori.
And then hundreds of years later the islands of the Polynesian triangle were conquered by Europeans and the Europeans did their damndest to put that little ??? sticker back on the four-part plan, because, you know, people without shirts could not possibly be world explorers. But we do not have to listen to them. When I said those navigational techniques are still in use today, I mean literally, today, because in August of this year a group of Maori sailors took off from New Zealand for Rapa Nui, the last leg of the Polynesian triangle that no one’s completed in the modern era, and according to their website they should be landing, in, like, twelve hours, if they haven’t already.
???
oh my goddddd WHAT
I mean, not the navigational techniques and awesome canoes, I knew about those, I mean THIS AUGUST WHAT RIGHT NOW WHAT how come nobody TOLD ME?????
Stupid mainstream media: get your heads out of your asses. Now. I WANTED TO HEAR ABOUT THIS DAILY THANKYOUVERY.
Now there’s a good point. Why haven’t we heard about this? It seems like exactly the sort of thing Daily Planet would cover, yet I don’t think they’ve mentioned it. (Maybe somebody with a Twitter should ask @dailyplanetshow if they’re getting on this.)
(Also, the most recent news update on that page (December 1st, because time zones) says the current ETA is sometime next week.)
Tags:
#awesome #(except for the not having heard about it sooner)
“Think of the phrase ‘The ripping of the fabric of time and space’. I wanted to get that ‘tearing’ sound. So I went to a piano that had all its front taken off and it was just a frame with the strings. I took a key, my front door key and scraped it down one of the strings. That gave the ‘rippy’ sort of sound. We then took that and changed the speed of it so we could get different pitches. We cut those together, literally cutting the tape with a razor blade and sticking it together. We played it through feedback machines and you play the sound back upon itself as it’s recording so you get this ripple effect of the echo. And if you do that when the sound is being played backwards, the echo appears to come towards you. If you then turn it around so that the sound is going forwards, it appears to be going away from you. I wanted to get that ‘coming and going’ sound, the rising and falling.”
-Brian Hodgson, describing how he created the materialisation/de-materialisation sound of the TARDIS. A sound that is of course still used today. (Taken from the DW origins Documentary)
Tags:
#Doctor Who #TARDIS #vworp #awesome
Genuinely one of the coolest projects we have ever seen
Places in time where the TARDIS has landed
Ghosts of the Tardis
Retronaut has an amazing series of photo compositions by Mark Dando depicting vintage TARDIS photographs (Police Boxes, actually) over the Google Street View locations of where they once stood.
(via Retronaut with a hat tip to Kasterborous)
Tags:
#Doctor Who
Five Things You Should Know About Fred Shuttlesworth
When legendary civil rights activist Reverend Fred L. Shuttlesworth died today, many Americans had no idea who he was or what he’d accomplished in his 89 years on earth. It’s an unfortunate reality that people often think Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X were the beginning and end of black activism in the Civil Rights era. In fact, nothing could be more wrong. From the 1950s onward, Shuttlesworth was a major factor in ending Jim Crow laws in the South, and many other oppressive forces throughout the United States. Here are the top five things you should know about him.
1. From the start of his career, Shuttlesworth, who was raised poor in Alabama, was fiery and obstinate. After Alabama officially banned the NAACP from operating within the state in 1956, Shuttlesworth, then a pastor, founded the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights. The ACMHR’s first major order of business was a Birmingham bus sit-in, during which Shuttlesworth and others boarded city buses and sat in the “whites only” sections. The ACMHR would eventually become charter member organization in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
2. He lived nearly nine decades, but many people tried to kill Shuttlesworth much earlier for his outspokenness. He was the target of two bomb attacks, one on his home and one on his church. And when Shuttlesworth tried to enroll his daughters in an all-white Birmingham school in 1957, an armed mob attacked him, beating him unconscious and stabbing his wife. The couple survived, and when a doctor remarked that Shuttlesworth was lucky to have avoided a concussion,Shuttlesworth said, “Doctor, the Lord knew I lived in a hard town, so he gave me a hard head.”
3. Though he worked closely with King, Shuttlesworth’s style was decidedly different. “Among the youthful ‘elders’ of the movement,” historian Diane McWhorter told The New York Times, “he was Martin Luther King’s most effective and insistent foil: blunt where King was soothing, driven where King was leisurely, and most important, confrontational where King was conciliatory—meaning, critically, that he was more upsetting than King in the eyes of the white public.” Despite their differences, King once called Shuttlesworth ”the most courageous civil rights fighter in the South.”
4. Shuttlesworth’s fiercest enemy in Birmingham was infamous public safety commissioner Bull Connor. Connor’s violent responses—attack dogs, fire hoses, billy clubs—to Shuttlesworth’s peaceful demonstrations were integral in changing America’s attitude about Jim Crow. “The televised images of Connor directing handlers of police dogs to attack unarmed demonstrators and firefighters’ using hoses to knock down children had a profound effect on American citizens’ view of the civil rights struggle,” says the Shuttlesworth Foundation’s website.
5. After his actions helped spawn the passage of the federal Civil Rights Act in 1964, Shuttlesworth continued fighting for justice in realms both racial and economic. In 1988 he founded the Shuttlesworth Housing Foundation to help low-income families own their own homes, and in 2004 he became president of the SCLC. A firebrand to the end, he resigned from the SCLC within months, saying “deceit, mistrust and a lack of spiritual discipline and truth have eaten at the core of this once-hallowed organization.” Three years ago, the city of Birmingham named its airport after Shuttlesworth. There are still no monuments named after Bull Connor.
Tags:
#Fred Shuttlesworth #Civil Rights #History #Racism
Brinens and Things 