Random bits + a recipe
Jun. 3rd, 2011 10:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
feuer_flammenlosI've been largely absent from here in the last ...uh...month.. due to things like work, and brain-deadness (the Zombie Apocalypse happened, just to my brain), and the beauty of all things sunny and summer-y and outdoors-ly, so abundant in this time of the year.
A link to an article about the awesome of the Night Witches, Soviet aviatrixes during WWII.marina , here, makes a few observations about how the choice of this subject for this article - part of a serie about "Unsung Heroes" (women who get ignored by the masses, despite having been several levels of Awesome) - is quite misleading, given that those women aren't so much ignored by/unknown to the masses as unknown to us because we're ignoring most of every culture/history beside the Western one.
The only mention of the Night Witches that I remember reading was in an Alternate History SF serie by Turtledove, who is pretty much a history buff, and given that 1)WWII history was covered very sketchily in my contemporary history courses, both in high school & at Uni; 2)the detail of which units did what are, as far as I'm concerned, not a very interesting issue unless you're focusing on strategy (or sociology); 3)English language sources are scarce; I think the subject fits very well into the "unsung" theme.
There's a redstart nestling in one of our buildings! The parents are frenetically catching insects, while the little ones chirp madly for MORE FOOD, NOW! I know it means nothing - the redstart isn't an endangered species and one nest means very little - but it's still an insectivore, living and (one hopes) prospering in the middle of very tended-to fields. It gives me hope that the biological diversity in my place isn't hopelessly lost.
This corroborated by a shock of fireflies under the olive trees, renewed presence of grey heron and talks about birds of prey nestling - about the latter, I can confirm that the ones I see more often (the ones that could be either common buzzards or black kites) seem to be ravenous All The Time, so maybe there is a little fuzzy ravenous chick in the nest, heh?
(mostly unrelated: I don't know what your experiences or living places are like, but there's something enchanting to an olive orchard filled with fireflies, at dusk. Colours have been dismissed like day-clothes and all that's left is the blue and black shadows - and before your eyes adjust and say "oh, boring!" the neon lights blink and make of blandness a romance.)
There are about a zillion things I'm excited about, but I have a feeling that most of them would fall right in the middle of the Too Gross To Read Where People Can See My Grossed-Out Face land, so I leave with a picture of a recipe to come soon and promises of garden pictures. :)
A link to an article about the awesome of the Night Witches, Soviet aviatrixes during WWII.
marina , here, makes a few observations about how the choice of this subject for this article - part of a serie about "Unsung Heroes" (women who get ignored by the masses, despite having been several levels of Awesome) - is quite misleading, given that those women aren't so much ignored by/unknown to the masses as unknown to us because we're ignoring most of every culture/history beside the Western one.The only mention of the Night Witches that I remember reading was in an Alternate History SF serie by Turtledove, who is pretty much a history buff, and given that 1)WWII history was covered very sketchily in my contemporary history courses, both in high school & at Uni; 2)the detail of which units did what are, as far as I'm concerned, not a very interesting issue unless you're focusing on strategy (or sociology); 3)English language sources are scarce; I think the subject fits very well into the "unsung" theme.
There's a redstart nestling in one of our buildings! The parents are frenetically catching insects, while the little ones chirp madly for MORE FOOD, NOW! I know it means nothing - the redstart isn't an endangered species and one nest means very little - but it's still an insectivore, living and (one hopes) prospering in the middle of very tended-to fields. It gives me hope that the biological diversity in my place isn't hopelessly lost.
This corroborated by a shock of fireflies under the olive trees, renewed presence of grey heron and talks about birds of prey nestling - about the latter, I can confirm that the ones I see more often (the ones that could be either common buzzards or black kites) seem to be ravenous All The Time, so maybe there is a little fuzzy ravenous chick in the nest, heh?
(mostly unrelated: I don't know what your experiences or living places are like, but there's something enchanting to an olive orchard filled with fireflies, at dusk. Colours have been dismissed like day-clothes and all that's left is the blue and black shadows - and before your eyes adjust and say "oh, boring!" the neon lights blink and make of blandness a romance.)
There are about a zillion things I'm excited about, but I have a feeling that most of them would fall right in the middle of the Too Gross To Read Where People Can See My Grossed-Out Face land, so I leave with a picture of a recipe to come soon and promises of garden pictures. :)
