European word translator

This is clever!!! Someone has made a website called the European Word Translator which allows you to check the translation of any word into most of the common languages in Europe.

Religious Art

When I was living for a while near London in the 80's, I saw this painting in the National Gallery, called "Christ before the High Priests":

I particularly liked it, especially the faces on the people in the background. The effect of the light from the candle is remarkable and can't really be appreciated in a print or a photo. I bought a print of it, but the artist's name is not on the print and I didn't remember the name. Now, as a result of my cleanup at home, I discovered a photo slide with his name, Gerrit van Honthorst, a Dutch painter of the 17th Century.

Recently I was also shown a print of this painting of the Annunciation:

It is by a modern painter, Seiger Koder, a German priest and a prolific painter.

Rough seas

I've been going to the rubbish tip many times to make the house more tidy.

Someone at the tip has time for art, for example this boat on a sea of gravel.

History - Who knows?

This year is the Centenary of World War 1, starting on 2nd August 2014. There are many events planned, all around the world, in Flanders and other places.

I have a theory about these events and I will be watching them over the next few years to test this. My theory is that the most enthusiastic commemoration event in the world will be Gallipoli. There is a ballot for people from Australia to attend the ceremonies in Turkey. The enthusiasm for this is partly a spin off from the increasing crowds at the Anzac marches in Australia each year on 25th April, and partly because Gallipoli has become a secular holy day and is part of national identity, coming just 14 years after Federation of the states into the country Australia.

In contrast, I suspect that most of the other events around the world will be a little low key and will talk about individual sacrifice and the social attitudes of the day. I think the "accepted" opinion now is that World War 1 was caused by rigid national attitudes and was forced on the people of the world by a number of heartless and stupid rulers of the countries involved, who caused the death of millions of soldiers and civilians.

I am not convinced that this is the whole truth.

I can't claim to have studied this fully, but I have recently read a few books, and it seems to me that many citizens of the countries felt they were fighting for a good cause and showed great commitment to it. Some evidence for this is the large number of volunteers, even in Australia, where people walked from country towns in the so-called "cooee marches" to Sydney to enlist. In Europe, the governments assumed there would be a large number of deserters from the army and the various radical groups who were violently opposing their governments on other issues would now cause trouble for the war effort and would have to be resisted. This turned out not to be true. The number of deserters was small and many left wing groups became enthusiastic supporters of the war.

For example the suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst became a very public supporter of the war effort, although her daughter Sylvia opposed it. A possible cause of this type of support was the feeling that the war would force changes on society and advance their causes, which was probably true in some cases.

History is always written in hindsight, and it is easy to paint the politicians and generals as stupid and evil. No doubt there was some stupidity, but I doubt many of them realised the level of carnage that would come (although it was predicted by some people). Warfare was just at the point of changing from the colourful and "glorious" adventure of centuries past, into the ruthless killing fields of machine guns, rapid fire artillery, tanks, gas, aeroplanes, submarines etc. The unusual phenomenon caused by this technology is that in almost all battles in World War 1, the attacking side lost more men than the defenders.

Considering this, the Schlieffen plan used by Germany seems very foolish and was obviously likely to fail because it assumed a series of unlikely successes. However no-one else put forward another plan, so it was used.

It is also useful to remember that the Schlieffen plan had existed for about a decade before 1914. There were other events before the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand that could have triggered war, but did not. Why then? One theory is that Russia was getting better equipped, for example by building more railways, so Germany felt it would soon be a the mercy of an alliance between France, Britain and Russia and would be confronted by an impossible war on two fronts.

I just feel that the social and political causes of the war are complicated and were not just driven by evil politicians and generals.

There are also some interesting articles about this by Frank Furedi, here and here.

Sorting

I need to.go through piles of books to decide which to keep, which could be used by someone else and which to throw away.
Ita

First of January

I don't understand New Year's Eve. Most people want to have a good time on NYE, but they are not sure why, and they often have a very bad time. Yesterday I saw a young girl in her party clothes sitting on the grass at 7am drinking a bottle of beer. She did not look very happy at all.

First of all, what are we supposed to be celebrating?

We used to go to Mass on the first of January, which was a Holy Day of Obligation, but I was never sure why. For a while I thought we were celebrating the 3 Kings visiting the Holy Family, but that is the Epiphany on January 6th. Then I thought it was the commemoration of the circumcision of Jesus. This was true for a while, and it made sense since this was 8 days after Christmas. The feast of the Holy Name of Jesus was then celebrated on the following Sunday.

But then Pope Paul VI moved the Feast of the Divine Motherhood of Jesus from October 11 to January 1st. For a while the Feast of the Holy Name of Jesus was on January 3, but I think it is now also on January 1. In 1967, Pope Paul VI also introduced the World Day of Peace on January 1st.

Having said all of that, I think most of the people who go to church on January 1 just think of it as a good way to start the new year.

Then there is Hogmanay which is mostly celebrated in Scotland. This seems to have started as a Norse or Gaelic celebration of the winter solstice, though I thought that happens on December 21st. There are various customs involving food, fireworks and crossing the threshold of a friend. A more recent custom is the singing of the arrangement of Burn's poem Auld Lang Syne, though I can never understand why "may old acquaintance be forgot" is considered a good thing.

But those are traditional customs, today most people think of NYE as a way of starting a new year, and let's be honest, for young men to "get lucky".  The main custom is to drink a lot of alcohol, mostly cheap aerated wine or beer. Unfortunately, the modern NYE customs seem to lead to more misery than happiness.

In Australia, the hospitals are full of victims of NYE good cheer. In France, the custom is to burn cars. In the US, there have been a series of gun crimes on the night of NYE. There is of course no proof that this is caused by the NYE "revels",  but the alcohol and passions probably don't stop the crimes. There was also a trail of violence in the UK over the transition from 2013 to 2014.

What does all this mean? For myself, I would prefer to be asleep at midnight on Dec 31st, but the moral is probably that if you want a prosperous 365 days in the new year, first make sure you survive day 1.

2014

Good wishes for the next 365 days...