Afghanada

When Canada was supporting the "Coalition" war in Afghanistan, there was very little effort to bring the reality of that war, from any perspective, to the public. Canadians were shooting, getting shot, bombing and getting blown up. However there were no presentations to speak of what this conflict might mean to a real or even a fictional Canadian or Afghan.
Except Afghanada.
Afghanada was a radio drama series, part of a long tradition at the CBC. That tradition was being eroded by funding cuts. But somebody took a chance and commissioned a four-episode series about the war.
It took off. In the end, the CBC made 103 episodes. One hundred and three.
I am relistening to the series and it is, just as I remember, very down to earth and focused on Canadian soldiers, Canadian medics, Afghan civilians, casualties of all sorts.
You can go here and buy the majority of these episodes.
Image: The LAV III, practically a character itself.
By Allied Joint Force Command Brunssum - Exercise TRIDENT JUNCTURE, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=44818654

Mohenjo Daro hits the big screen!

Mohenjo Daro is one of the sites associated with the very ancient Indus Valley Civilization, which is roughly contemporaneous with the earliest Mesopotamian civilizations. They had writing but we can't read it. Thus when somebody decided to produce a movie, named Mohenjo Daro, about this long-ago era, they had to make just about everything up.

The news here is that they seem to have done a good job! At least according to AE Larsen, a scholar who runs a historical movie blog An Historian Goes to the Movies . Have a look at the trailer above. It's gorgeous! Oh, yes, Larsen reminds me that the remake of Ben Hur is imminent. It looks good, too.

Socotra Island: The Most Alien-Looking Place on Earth

Well, I just discovered this on another blog: Dark Roasted Blend. It's been around for a long time, and I suspect that it's a treasure house.

Here's some of the "alien" landscape of Socotra Island:

Not quite so welcome

Canada has got a lot of praise recently for its generous attitude towards admitting Syrian refugees. And rightfully so.

But Canadians are not so keen on another group: rich, mainly Chinese immigrants who have been moving into the Vancouver area for years and driving up real estate prices to a more than merely remarkable extent. That real estate boom (and a somewhat different boom in places like Toronto) has a major effect on the national economy as a whole. And it makes it easy to blame foreigners for this unbalanced, potentially perilous situation.

Of course, the word racism comes up, in part because British Columbia has a history of excluding Asian immigrants.

But it's not a simple situation. A recent article in the Globe and Mail discussed at length the fact that different groups of Chinese immigrants don't get along with each other; older immigrants and their children and grandchildren don't feel any great solidarity with new immigrants from other regions.
Here is one Globe and Mail article. There are plenty more. Like this one about the not exactly rich, not necessarily immigrant.

The Loeb Classical Library saves civilization

The Loeb Classical Library is a bit over one hundred years old. It was meant to be useful to a wide group of readers -- each volume has not just the original text but also a facing translation into English. As you can imagine many people who had an excellent classical education scorned the project. The poet John Talbot is one of the defenders of the LCL:

I have a little apocalyptic fantasy that involves the collection of Loebs in my local library. It’s a complete set, from Homer’s rosy-fingered dawn to the twilight of Ammianus Marcellinus. The very sight of it is reassuringly tidy: all the sprawling energies of a thousand years of Greek and Roman thought and song, distilled and compacted into these snug matching volumes, the Greek bound in olive drab, the Latin in scarlet. Run your fingers over the spines. Here are The Classics.
Then comes a nuclear holocaust. My local library, like others around the world, is mostly pulverized, but an accident involving molten rubber preserves the case of Loebs intact within a sealed airtight cavity beneath the rubble. Centuries elapse and deposit their layers of sediment. Above ground, the descendants of the survivors plod on, speaking a crude version of English, and when their vestigial civilization is at last stable enough to permit cultivation of the liberal arts, their curiosity turns to the prior civilization, ours, whose evident sophistication is attested only in the occasionally exposed ruin, or in fragments of excavated texts. Of this second category, a half-page of Danielle Steele, the corner of a Dunkin’ Donuts advert, and the odd shred of Paradise Regained are all scrutinized, edited, and interpreted with equal zeal. The fragments are exasperating: they imply a vast literature, and behind it a teeming culture, all tantalizingly out of reach.
Until one day when excavation unseals that underground cavity, and for the first time in so many centuries, sunlight falls on those green and red spines. The whole Loeb Classical Library, dedicated to preserving whatever could be salvaged from an even earlier lost civilization, has itself survived intact. The excavators fall upon the cache and discover not only the English (which they can mostly make out, though it appears to them as remote as Chaucer to us) but also, to their astonishment, on the facing pages, two strange, even more ancient languages, one with an unfamiliar alphabet. Amid a storm of speculations it is posited that the English is the key to the other two tongues, and in time a latter-day Champollion steps forward and reconstructs the grammar of Latin and Greek. His successors, pioneer scholars of the recovered ancient languages, are at first awestruck—what are these voices speaking out of the dust?—and then electrified, as they begin to read and assimilate Homer and Sophocles and Lucretius and Augustine. These voices must be emulated; the standards are daunting but stimulating; though ancient, they point the way to something new. Academies are organized for teaching the new languages; young souls (they will become poets and historians and scientists) are once again smitten by the songs of Sappho and Catullus, the grave brilliance of Thucydides and Tacitus, the searching effervescence of Plato’s Socrates and Aristotle’s dogged earthbound inquisitiveness. The post-apocalyptic world shrugs off its torpor, hums with ideas and energy and hope. I suppose what I mean by all this is that it is good to know that the Loeb Classical Library is there, patiently waiting, in case any civilization (not least our own present one) should require a renaissance.

Kyrgyzstan: horses, camels and traditional costumes

Go see Oodarysh (or horse fighting).
I was wondering whether Oodarysh players or jousters would feel they owned the macho high ground, should they meet. But then I realized that if the jousters I know are typical, they would all want to try the other sport, as soon as anyone would give them 30 seconds of instruction.
Courtesy of the Globe and Mail.