Political TV ads get rough.

 The New Hampshire primary is Tuesday (the 13^th) only three days away.  Anyone who has a TV ad is running it now, before the primary.  Ads after the primary are wasted.  I had WMUR on this morning.  It was wall to wall political ads.  Some of them were attack ads, aimed at candidates some one did not like.  Accusations of corruption, ballot box tampering, pay offs, fingers in the till were right out there, front and center.  Tuesday’s results will be interesting. 

I am voting for Chuck Morse for Senate, Chris Sununu for governor, and I don’t know who for US rep.

Condolences on Queen Elizabeth's Death

 Condolences to the royal family, condolences to all the subjects of the queen, condolences to all who loved and admired her world wide.  I am old enough to remember when she ascended to the throne, and the impressive parade the British threw to commemorate the event.  I am extremely sorry to hear of her death. 

Sean Bean’s best role. Sharpe’s Rifles

The year is something like 1813, the place is Spain.  Sir Arthur Wellesley (later to become the Duke of Wellington) is leading a British army into Spain to drive out Napoleon’s army, and younger brother who has usurped the Spanish crown. Wellesley sets out for his morning exercise, a horse ride, with his dog coming along.  Suddenly troop of French cavalry appear and take after Wellesley.  At the last minute Sergeant Richard Sharpe appears on the scene, rifle in hand.  His first shot takes out the leading French rider, some quick hand-to-hand work rifle to sword takes care of the second, and a very quick reload takes out the last.  For saving his life, Wellesley promotes Sharpe to lieutenant on the spot.   

    Sean Bean is slender (something he lost by Game of Thrones years) in a snappy black rifleman’s uniform, a crack shot, a deadly fist fighter, an irrestible ladies man, just the right touch of a British accent.  It’s a series, 14 separate episodes, each episode an hour long.  Well filmed, excellent sound, all the dialog is understandable.  It’s been out for a while; I got it from the Melrose public library maybe 15 years ago. 

Peace and quiet in Fanconia Notch

 The rural quiet up here is broken by the roar of ride on mowers, gasoline powered leaf blowers, weed wackers, and for good measure, the roar of jet engines from low flying aircraft.  It gets really loud, especially when the land scape people are trying to catch up after two days of rain. 

Raking up old atrocities

 Beat the Press just spent their whole Sunday morning hour discussing some very very unfortunate cases from four years ago.  In both cases young black men were mistreated by white cops, in one case mistreatment so bad that the black victim died in police custody.  Horrible cases both.  I would be happy to let these cases die and move on to something a little more up to date.  Bringing these two cases up on TV just incites the defund the police people, and creates more hard feelings on the subject of race.  The past is past, talking about it on TV today won't change what happened.  And we have so many horrible cases, newer and better known, we don't need any more.  

Avengers Infinity War 2018

It came in from Netflix.  I put the DVD into my player and played it.  Sound track is terrible; I could not understand half the dialog.  Dialog from female characters was harder to understand than dialog from male characters, which is unusual.  Usually the higher pitched female voice is easier to understand.  The flick starts out with an (unnamed) ugly giant beating the stuffing out of Loki and then Thor.  Thor is so beat up I didn’t recognize him until the movie had been running for 10-15 minutes.  In an attempt to deal with the ugly giant they sic the Hulk on him.  The giant is tougher than the Hulk, and knocks the Hulk out, flat on the floor. The movie has Dr Strange, Ironman, an apprentice Spiderman, Bruce Banner, and the Guardians of the Galaxy crew, Rocket Raccoon, Groot, and the green girlfriend and a couple of guys whose names I don't remember.  There was no discernible plot, nothing that the good guys were supposed to accomplish.  I finally turned it off after an hour and watched Fox News.   

5000 years of horse breeding and inventing.

I was watching TV where they were showing clips from a racetrack, before the race.  I don’t remember, or perhaps I never did catch the name of the track or the race.  The shots of the horses were impressive.  Big, beautifully groomed, tight barrels, muscular haunches, I could tell these were a lot of good fast race horses. 

   Thinking about it, I realized that I was looking at the end results of at least 5000 years of horse breeding and inventions of tack.  The oldest horse pictures we have come from ancient Egypt around 3000 BC, where the artist shows us a two wheel chariot, a great noble (perhaps even Pharaoh) riding in the chariot, and a two horse team.  At this early date, horses had been domesticated, but they were small animals, too small to bear the weight of a grown man.  Hence the chariot. 

   It won’t be until around 1000 BC that the Medes will breed up a line of horses big enough for riding.  This should have made cavalry cheaper to field.  Surely the riding tack for a single man, and just a single horse was cheaper than a whole chariot, harnesses, two horses, and other stuff needed for chariots. 

   The next improvement was the invention of the stirrup some time in the 700-800 AD time frame.  The stirrup was invented somewhere out East, India perhaps, somewhere out on the steppes perhaps.  Stirrups got the France sometime in the 700s.  By the late 700’s all of Charlemagne’s cavalry was riding with stirrups. We know this from period illustrations. 

   Stirrups improved the effectiveness of cavalry a lot, so much so that the military history of Europe is dominated by cavalry (armored knights) from Charlemagne’s time (800 AD) down to the introduction of muskets for the infantry (1450-1500 AD).  Special large and strong breeds of horses to carry the knight, the armor, and a small armory of edged weapons were developed.  Today we use those breeds of horses to pull the Budweiser beer wagon.  The race horses are all breed from horses the Arabs had.  I don’t know the story of just how or when the Arabs came by the best horses, but they did somehow.  For a long time the Arabs refused to sell their good horses to the Western infidels.  There is a story behind getting Arab horses back the Europe and America, but I don’t know it.