Saturday, January 28, 2017

Michael Wood, In Search of Athelstan, (son of Alfred the Great) founder of the first British Empire--

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wG7ar1FBfqY

In this segment, Athelstan, remnants of remains of St. Cuthbert, whom Athelstan worshipped--a comb (to comb the dead saint's hair) and remnants of ancient embroideries in gold and silk, made by a noblewoman, so fragile now they are kept in darkness.

More manuscripts and books, some burned, from the Middle Ages.

Wood walks the lines of an estate, with natural boundary markers still identifiable today, such as hedges and rivers, copses and pools.

It's amazing to me as a Burmese-born woman that so much remains, on the ground as well as in church vaults and libraries.

Excellent. as always, I highly recommend these documentaries.

If you took a Ph.D. or M.A. in history, it would take you years and tens of thousands of $$.

At least 10,000 $ in tuition alone, and now you get it free.

I wish I had the budget or could get funding to make something like this in search of Narasuan, but it does not seem likely.

Yesterday brought another literary agent rejection, but I am used to it.

I just got out to dinner or eat in, and plan my next book.

I like that Wood "pans" back and forth between the ancient past and the present, in 1981 when this was filmed.

In the small town of Stamford, he walks on a bridge that divides the English quarter from the Viking-Anglo-Saxon one, and at the end of this piece, he stresses how the British Empire was forged over 5000 years by the inclusion of different peoples or tribes.

Someone should send this to the d. t.

But he does not have the strength or wisdom,or raw courage of the old warrior kings.

It's a sad time we live in, very petty and small and ruled by a tweeting finger.

KMKaung
1-28-2017
Seal of a thegn or thane, c. 10th century, England,  From wikipedia.

Specialpost--Ellen Bernstein--expose of World Bank Rohingya project--

https://www.irrawaddy.com/culture/books/hellfire-and-damnation-in-myanmar-ex-world-bank-country-head-recounts-rohingya-catastrophe-response....