Some of those pictures made me remember the Sci-Fi Channel's Dune mini-series, which had some amazingly weird hats.
There are a couple of examples here -- see the Bene Gesserit pictures. Unfortunately, no pictures of the Spacing Guild, who had the wackiest hats.
Now I know what the costume designers from that show are up to these days....
Concerning the relative tolerance of pre-modern Christian and Islamic states: I think it may be significant that the two predominantly Muslim areas that came under permanent Christian rule in the Middle Ages -- Iberia and Sicily -- lost all their Muslim population within a few centuries, to emigration, deportation, or forced conversions. Yet there are still significant Christian communities in places like Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq, which were under Islamic rule more or less continuously from the 7th Century.
(There were periods of tolerance in Christian-conquered Spain/Portugal and in Sicily, immediately following the conquests. But these did not, alas, last.)
Clark Myers -- Actually, it looks like we do have some disagreements over facts on the ground, and also about terminology (e.g., "Spain", "Caliphate", "Andulasia", "local"), which are obscuring things. So, some background:
Iberia (I'll use that for the whole penninsula, since the modern Spain/Portugal distinction didn't emerge until later) was invaded and conquered by an Arab-led Berber army in 711; it became a remote province of the Umayyad Caliphate (whose capital was Damascus, and whose name I misspelled earlier). The immediate aftermath was a political disaster for the Christians, since they lost power, but significantly better conditions for the Jews, who were being actively persecuted by the Christians.
Around 750, the Umayyad dynasty was violently overthrown by the Abbasids (cue one of those "invite the enemy faction to dinner and slaughter them all" scenes), who became the new Caliphal dynasty and moved the capital to Baghdad. A surviving Umayyad prince managed to escape to Iberia and set up an independent, breakway state; he and his descendants called themselves Emirs (possibly to avoid overly provoking the Abbasids). This was the first genuine split in the original Caliphate, by the way.
As you mention, the Umayyad Emirs started calling themselves Caliphs in the early 900s. This lasted until just after 1000, when the Islamic state in Iberia (what I meant by "Caliphate") abruptly fell apart. This led to the balkanized "Taifa" states.
(Taifa is usually translated as "party", in the sense of "political faction"; and so one sees serious scholars referring to the "Party Kings" and their "Party Kingdoms" with perfectly straight faces. But I digress...)
The main point is this: Islamic Iberia -- which means basically the southern three-quarters of the penninsula -- was a unified entity from the original conquest (711) until just after 1000; from about 755 onward it was ruled by the Umayyads. The period from 929 till the political collapse is referred to as the "Caliphate", because, well, the rulers were calling themselves Caliphs.
And it's this whole period, plus the century or so afterwards (i.e., roughly 711 to 1100), before the Almoravids and Almohads invaded from Morocco, that was the period of (relative) tolerance. The fact that, as an act of self-aggrandizement, the Umayyad rulers called themselves Caliphs during the 10th Century, is irrelevant.
Granted, Lisa Goldstein's term "Spain under the Caliphate" is (in a picky, technical/historical sense) maybe a little confused; but I think she'd agree that "Iberia under Islamic rule" is basically what she meant. And she's right, in that for most of that period conditions for Jews (and Christians) under Muslim rule in Iberia were better, overall, than conditions for Jews and Muslims under Christian rule elsewhere.
"Andalusia", by the way, can be a confusing term, since it can refer, somewhat loosely, to the Islamic-ruled three-quarters of Iberia (more properly, "al-Andalus", the Arab name), later (shrunken) remnants thereof, or to the modern Spanish provice of Andalucia, which was basically the last region to fall to the Reconquista.
Clark Myers -- I think Lisa Goldstein is fairly correct, bearing in mind that tolerance by medieval standards isn't the same as tolerance by our standards.
You mentioned the Almohad dynasty in Spain; but they were puritanical outsiders from North Africa (like the Almoravid dynasty before them) with no link to the previous traditions of (relative) tolerance practiced by local Islamic leaders in Spain. Both the Almoravids and Almohads made things worse for non-Muslims under their rule; they're not really representative of the fractured/balkanized Taifa states they conquered, or of the Ummayad Emirate/Caliphate which came before.
I'd argue that the Islamic state or states in Spain, prior to about 1100, were more tolerant of Jews than just about any contemporary Christian state in Europe[*], and certainly more tolerant of both Jews and Christians than Christian Spain was of Jews and Muslims. Were there any medieval Christian kings who had Jewish ministers?
[*] The one exception might be Sicily after the Normans conquered it in the late 11th Century.
There's a very nice summary of the context for Tiktaalik -- what we knew about tetrapods before, and where the new beastie fits into things -- in science writer Carl Zimmer's blog, here: Walking Towards Land.
So why is Tiktaalik big news and not news at all? It is big news because it blurs the distinction between fish and tetrapod more spectacularly than ever before. It is no news at all, because it is just the sort of creature that one would predict from previously discovered fossils. Its place on our family tree has been cleared and waiting for some time now. And now it's filled.
I also like his (slightly melancholic) comment on being a science writer:
Writing books about science is massive fun, but it is always followed by an unpleasant aftertaste, as you watch all your work become quaint and dated.
Oliver, thank you for the link to Dr. Gee's magnificant response. I love it when someone can answer back with the original Hebrew (actually Aramaic, I believe) and point out that the G-d in the original writing is quite different from their petty notions of Him.
Since it's Genesis Henry Gee is quoting from, it would be Hebrew rather than Aramaic.
Also quite interesting is a link that Gee provided to a short essay of his, here, where he argues that there's commonality and sometimes cooperation between Christian Creationists and similar anti-science fundamentalists in Judaism and Islam.
I'm not certain how widespread the latter really might be, since he only discusses one (Turkish) group -- are they really influential? Are there other such groups in other Islamic nations? (He does point out that some American Creationists have attended conferences organized by the Turkish group, and that the latter's mission statements sound a lot like the Discovery Institute's "wedge document").
This article discusses "Vedic Creationism", though apparently it's mainly active in the US, via US-based Hare Krishnas, hardly an orthodox Hindu group.
Dave -- you seem to be painting Augustine as some kind of inquisitor or enforcer for the Roman Church, sent to Britain to bring the deviant Celtic Church to heel, but that's really not what his mission was, and not what he did. He was sent because Rome was under the impression that the Anglo-Saxons were unregenerate pagans (as indeed they were) in need of conversion.
Did Augustine bring Christianity to "Britain" (i.e., the entire island of Great Britain)? No. Did he bring Christianity to England, or to the "English"? Arguably, yes.[*] The Anglo-Saxons were mostly not Christian in 600 AD.
As it happens, missionary efforts from Ireland and the Irish parts of Scotland (the "Celtic Church" if you like) started only a few decades later (e.g., Aidan of Iona came to Northumbria in the 630s), and it's no accident that the Synod of Whitby was held in northern England, where the two missions overlapped. (The king of Northumbria -- brother, in fact, of the man who'd invited St. Aidan to Northumbria -- followed Celtic practices, while his queen, from southern England, followed Roman practices; this made disagreements over the timing of Lent and Easter a matter of very personal interest to the royal family!)
[*] Glossing over the role of Bertha, the Frankish princess who married the king of Kent and brought at least some Christians with her from France -- and who probably helped Augustine a great deal in his mission.
Dave Luckett:
*ahem* ajay, Augustine did not bring Christianity to Britain. It was already there, and well-established. What he did do was convince local rulers that it was in their interest to make nice to the Roman church, because it was one of the major temporal powers on the Continent. This meant falling into line over such matters as the way to do your hair and the date of Easter.
I thought it was the Synod of Whitby (664) that brought about a general agreement on Easter, etc. within Britain.
St. Augustine was earlier (died 604), and was involved in converting the Angles, Saxons, etc. of (southern) England, who were pagan. (Yes, Britain had become Christian when conversion swept the Roman Empire, but the various Germanic invaders of the 5th and 6th Centuries were not, and so most of what's now England was no longer Christian by the end of the 6th Century.)
Serge: Ivanhoe is actually the only Walter Scott novel I've read. Unfortunately, I read it fifteen years ago, so my memories of it are minimal. I do remember that I found it a bit tedious, and that the anti-Semitism was disturbing -- Scott was clearly down on people who persecuted Jews, but Rebecca's father was, as I recall, a fairly blatant stereotype in the Shylock mold. Rowena was pretty much a non-entity: a virtuous, dull wallflower. Rebecca was also terribly virtuous, but more interesting; at the very least, she got to demonstrate some intelligence and a lot of courage. Elements of romance between Ivanhoe and Rebecca were either barely hinted at or pretty much nonexistent.
I've never seen the Robert Taylor version you mention, but I had previously seen a TV movie version (from 1982) with Anthony Andrews and Olivia Hussey (with, I think, Sam Neil and James Mason as well). As in your Robert Taylor version, Ivanhoe comes off as a bit of a fool for ending up with Rowena when Rebecca was far more interesting (the fact that I had a bit of a thing for Oliva Hussey had, of course, no bearing on this artistic judgment whatsoever). They did at least kiss in that version.
Having said that, I should mention that there was a superb miniseries done about nine years back, in which a combination of judicious rewriting and inspired casting (someone named Victoria Smurfit) remade Rowena into a feisty, spirited, living character, enough so that you could understand Ivanhoe being torn between her and Rebecca. Actually, all the casting was excellent: Ciaran Hinds as Brian de Bois-Guilbert, Christopher Lee as the Evil Templar (Lucas de Beaumanoir), even Sian Phillips (who played Livia in I, Claudius) in a wonderful cameo as Eleanor of Acquitaine. The length also allowed most or all of Scott's various subplots to unfold and several secondary characters (particularly Prince John) to become interesting. Highly recommended.
In the US's case, I can argue that avoiding taking explicit possession is a direct result of the Philippine adventure and wanting to make sure the enserfed local population didn't have any possibility of access to US courts. (That's why making everybody in the Roman Empire a Roman Citizen was a big deal -- suddenly, equal access to the courts.)
The US debate about possession of foreign conquests is older than that, actually. At the end of the Mexican-American War, there were Americans arguing for taking over all of Mexico, not just the thinly populated northern parts (Alta California, Nevada, Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico). This was opposed by (among others) Southern politicians, on two grounds: 1) basic racism (not wanting those brown Mexicans to become US citizens one day); and 2) fear of more free states in the future, since slavery was outlawed in Mexico.
Similarly, in a memoir, if you start off with "I was in a bar in New York that morning, getting drunk," and then start in on what's going on with the guy playing the piano, and the bartender giving you a look, and the weird little sounds you're hearing overhead, and all the verisimilitude stuff, your audience will get impatient with you. Of COURSE you were in a bar, now get to the point.
These are good points; on the other hand, there are species of nonfiction where that sort of scene-setting "verisimilitude stuff" is part of the appeal -- reportage, for example, or travel writing. (Or nature writing, if the "scene" is in the wilderness.)
(There are, as well, types of fiction where that sort of scene-setting would be a distraction from the story. I can certainly imagine stories where "I was in a bar in New York that morning, getting drunk" is all the scene-setting one needs -- the point is what happens next, what sudden realization the narrator has, who walks in to confront her, etc.)
I do agree that the truth or falsehood of books like those by, say, Diamond, de Tocqueville, von Daniken, or Velikovsky isn't relevant to whether or not they're "fiction" or "nonfiction." I'm happy with the idea that they're all nonfiction (the first two being truthful, the others being packs of lies) because they're not, well, fiction by Patrick's definition.
I'd like to suggest, though, that a fair chunk of what we consider "fiction" could be described as "Now I'm going to tell you a story about the lives of one or more people. I made this story up." (No, this isn't the totality of "fiction", but neither is it an edge case; I'd argue it's fairly central.) If I change the definition so that the second sentence is "This story is true", then it's no longer fiction -- it's reportage, or history, or memoir, or some similar nonfiction category.
The problem is that it seems like Frey's book falls right into the "Now I'm going to tell you a story about one or more people's lives" bin. Whether it's a novel (fiction) or a memoir (nonfiction) depends on whether it's true or not.
To my mind, the issue with Frey's book isn't the (wrong) idea that "not true = fiction"; it's the issue of narratives in the mode of novels which get put into into the (vast and motley) category of nonfiction solely because they're true. If it turns out that they are made up, are they still nonfiction?
(Although, having read Ariana Huffington's post, I do get the sense that her argument is more like "Wait -- this book isn't truthful, therefore it should be in the fiction list!" rather than "Hmm... this 'memoir' isn't actually a true story; shouldn't we call it a novel instead?")
bryan,
If it takes only three hours for the giant's projecticle to reach the Earth (given that the moon is about 380,000 km away, that's about 35 km/second!), then the combination of (a) the Moon's motion around the Earth and (b) the Earth's rotation will conspire to make very simple aiming almost work (for certain values of "almost").
The moon's motion around the Earth will give a sideways drift of about 1 km/s to the projectile, so in 3 hours it ends up about 11,000 km to the East. In the same 3 hours, the Earth's rotation will carry the target point about 5,000 km to the East. So your giant needs to aim a few thousand kilometers to the West....
This, of course, is ignoring all sorts of fun details like the effect of gravity from the Earth and the moon, the Earth's curvature, the fact that the moon doesn't orbit exactly in the plane of the Earth's equator, etc. -- but then you are talking about giants on the moon.
Question: If I'm launching something at the earth from the moon using a giant's arm as the propellant is there anything in the phases of the moon that would cause me problems? There are phases of the earth as well as phases of the moon right, if the giant is aiming by sight it would follow that the part aimed at should be visible. Anything else?
Things might be trickier near the time of full moon, since the Sun would be right next to the Earth in the sky, and you'd be looking at the nightside of the Earth (full moon seen from Earth means new Earth seen from moon, and vice versa). Best time is new moon, when you can see the entire daylight side of the Earth.
What's really tricky is figuring out the right angle so that you actually hit your target on the Earth, since you have to factor in the moon's orbital motion (as well as both lunar and terrestrial gravity's effects).
Unless your giant can throw things really, really fast, he or she is going to be annoyed by how they keep missing the target, no matter how carefully they aim...
As for the book's success, there are a lot of bestsellers that seem to get by on being a kind of Splenda-dusted nonfiction. Arthur Hailey stumbled into this formula with Hotel and refined it with Airport, and for the rest of his career the infodumps got denser as the characters went transparent. Michener's done much the same thing with history -- Centennial, Poland, and the like.
I think one reason is that a lot of affluent people feel a bit guilty about reading fiction. [...]
In a slightly less cynical mood -- I suspect there are also a lot of people who might like to know more about, say, Polish history, but are afraid an actual (non-fiction) book on the subject would be, well, boring, like those history textbooks they vaguely remember from school.
My husband is another military buff/gamer, and we were talking about Pearl Harbor last night. He mentioned (as best I can recall) Japan doing a similar naval wipe-out -- on the Russians, I think -- back in WWI, when they were "on our side," making Pearl Harbor just a repeat tactic in a different context (disastrously different, as it turned out for them). He also said Roosevelt had been giving covert support to the British Navy's war in the Atlantic and was looking for an excuse *not* to stay neutral and isolationist. And then there were those economic sanctions against Japan, mentioned above -- all the worse for a small country with no oil reserves and no readily available iron.
Before anyone goes off on a Roosevelt-conspiracy trip: yes, it's reasonable to say that Roosevelt was looking for excuses not to stay neutral and isolationist with respect to the European war. Getting into a fight with Japan wouldn't have helped at all. (The only reason the US did get into the European war is that Hitler foolishly declared war on the US several days after Pearl Harbor.)
As James pointed out above, Japan did carry out a successful surprise attack on the Russian base at Port Arthur, at the start of the Russo-Japanese War. The really spectacular victory, though, was the Battle of Tsushima, against the main Russian fleet, which had sailed all the way from Europe. No surprise attacks, just superior training, sailing, and tactics on the part of the Japanese.
So, if the war in Europe had ended with a negotiated peace in May of 1941, and Hitler invaded Russia on schedule, what do you think would have happened with Japan?
The tensions between the US and Japan would certainly still be there, though it's maybe worth noting that the proximate cause of the final US embargo of Japan -- which tilted the Japanese government towards an immediate war -- was Japanese occupation of bases in French Indochina. I have no idea if a "negotiated peace" would have affected this step or not.
Another point is if the European war became Germany-USSR only in late 1941, Britain would have been less distracted, and perhaps more able to respond in force to the Japanese invasion of Malaya and Singapore. Which might possibly have dissuaded the Japanese.
Serge said
Anyway, like I said, Japan seriously miscalculated the nature of its ennemy. Was it a case of not being reality-based, of not listening to those whose views didn't fit?
There definitely was a certain amount of the "Americans are rich but soft and lazy, unlike us tough, dedicated, warrior Japanese" attitude in Japan (and Hitler and some of the other Nazis seem to have had a similar attitude).
I'm inclined to think this is a result of the hyper-nationalist/racist ideology dominating Japan at the time, mixed in with the authoritarian/fascist belief that liberal democracy was an inherently weak and irresolute form of government.
Admiral Yamamoto, who was in charge of the Japanese Navy, had actually studied in the US as a graduate student, and did not have that attitude; he recommended not going to war with the US, because he believed that American industrial power meant Japan had very little chance of winning. But when he was ordered to go ahead, he swallowed his doubts and did so. (His prediction was that Japan would be able to "run wild" for about six months, perhaps a year at most; and as it happened, the Battle of Midway was almost exactly six months after Pearl Harbor....)
I feel really dumb, but doesn't me fecit mean "made in" or "I made it" or something like that? I'm not sure why that's inappropriate. Actually, it doesn't make a lot of sense to me at all... but Latin is not my forte.
The logo is actually -- if I'm reading the image correctly -- "me JMF fecit" (I think the curvy script is "JMF"), which would be "JMF made me." Which would look a bit, well, odd sitting on top of someone's breast.
(And for all I know, "me X fecit" might have had more salacious interpretations as well, just like the English word "make"... But my Latin is extremly rusty, and my high school class did not, alas, go into such details.)
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