Lawnmower Boy

Although we often assume that "nomadic" peoples moving from water hole to water hole are the natural and immemorial mode of desert life, before there were "water holes" there were "wetlands," (cienfuegas in the American West) which supported relatively immobile populations. "Nomads" with large herds emerged in the Sahara along with the trans-Saharan caravan trade in the late Medieval period. Well, actually, it is a bit more complicated than that, as this mode of life emerged in the Fezzan at the beginning of the Iron Age, linked with Egypt's trade with the Sudan and the Maghreb, and only spread to Algeria and Morocco after the 1200s. Most of the actual trade was infra-Saharan, and was linked to the transformation of the wetlands by focussed, oasis agriculture, a highly capital and labour-intensive practice. Caravan trade can be seen as an extension of transhumant livestock management. The "tribes" would winter in the central Saharan uplands, then travel in the spring through the oasis country to the Maghrebi pre-Sahara, or alternatively south to the Lake Chad Basin and the Senegal, with a tribally-controlled winter market to exchange northern and southern goods. I think --I'm honestly not an expert, and historians don't pay nearly enough attention to the economic and social side of Saharan history.

" Koy is a smaller city located 160 km north and east of Aerelios on the banks of the Lost River. Its actual location is actually about 300 km inland up river. The reason for this placement is that it is right next to one of the passes that lead into Kerq through the Shattered Hills. Both the river and the hills start north in the Wyrmian Mountains. As such it makes an ideal spot to get items from the mountains and the hills as well as trade goods from Kerq. Most of its items are shipped overland (200 km) to Aerelios for refinement and distribution. " This is far too great a distance for an economical point-to-point trade with medieval technology. It is perfectly practical, but implies the transhumant herding of livestock, usually sheep. This further implies a textile industry, a seasonality of pasture, and an order of political organisation to make these transhumant movements safe and stable. (That is, no-one squats your pastures while you're on the other end of your range. It isn't much consolation that you can kick them out when you return if the grass is already gone.) I'm having difficulty visualising the geography, but transhumant movements often link uplands with lowlands subject to seasonal flooding. The mountain pastures are green in the summer, while the flooding has to recede in the winter.

Eastern Woodlands culture was matrilineal rather than matriarchal. I'm having an attack of the lazies, so I won't do a text search through The Deerslayer to find Natty Bumpo's and Chingachgook's thoroughly patriarchal discussion of matrilineal property, but the gist of it is that cabins and gardens and settlements are domestic, womanly things, beneath men, whose job is to hunt and make war and order women around. I'd add that there are hints of this kind of thinking in the earliest stages of settled agriculture in the Eastern Hemisphere, too. Notably, locations and places take the feminine gender in Afro-Asiatic languages. [Takes a moment to don tinfoil hat] And the feminine gender was linguistically innovated in putatively Indo-European areas at the beginning of the Iron Age, when and where we see the first sign of city states, or at least, oppida.

On a more serious note, thanks to Marvel for dropping this in time for the day when I was stoning my third Covid booster and wasn't much good for anything else. And thanks even more for adding some super fun characters. We're one step closer to broccoli men!

Why would anyone think that when everything sucks? I grant that not all you people are cool enough to have noticed that, but I can explain at some length on request.

I am disappoint

Yeah, let's talk about the new female ruler of that offshore western island. Is she going to reduce the VAT, cap energy bills, or invade the Undying Lands?

Hey! Take it to the Political Discussion Thread! This is the Forever-Merry-Go-Round-of-Guns Thread. Apparently.

It's honestly funny that Bruce has the answer teed up. It's, like, people have had this conversation before, and can you imagine how much alcohol was consumed before that information was shared?

Point of order: It was 1953, they were Jewish Communists, and the prosecutor swears up and down that they were just trying to get Ethel to roll over. I mean, the 83rd Congress and the CNO were trying to start a war with freaking England in 1953. (While simultaneously going halfers on Indo-China.) These were, uhm, vigorous people. Now, I'm not saying that, in comparison, the Preznit should get a medal, as such, but he totally should.

[Line from Firefly]

Still waiting for Hermit to come down on this whole smegging thread!

https://www.aol.com/news/flooding-central-appalachia-kills-least-032600943-133954575.html I increasingly don't get it: "We are the party that supports minimising this stuff and not doing anything about it as it keeps happening and gets worse and worse." How is this a viable political position going forward?

Hot.

I see no fracking merit to this conversation.

I) Roger Scruton is absolutely a tinker. But not one of the good ones. The kind that gets your car torn half down and then spends four months "waiting for parts." Ii) i refuse to take seriously any evaluation of Truss vs Sunak that fails to take into account his brownness. Though, to be fair, that's what Bagehot means by "clever." Point is, there's sone deniability there

So here in the Pacific Northwest, we're going through a long La Nina, which for us means cool and rainy weather. It might have finally broken (we have "normal" summer heat warnings for the weekend), but it has been a very overcast, cool, rainy spring and summer so far. I know, I know, #humblebrag. The thing is, having settled into a low-stress, regular shift at work managing the produce wet rack, I get to talk to customers about fresh produce shortages a lot. And several times a day, I get to share the factoid, which may have been heard around here a few times, that we don't have corn-on-the-cob, and that the reason that we don't is, that our buyers haven't been able to source saleable quality green corn anywhere on the continent, and we won't have any in our logistics chain before August. THAT'S A CONTINENT-WIDE CROP FAILURE. (I thought I'd fiddle with adding some emphasis, because I kind of think it's a important thing for people to know about. You know, in case it happens again. Food is still important to everyone, right?)

The other country elects the class bully President. But you can do better! So you elect the class clown to be Prime Minister because you're jealous of all the attention. Anything that happens after that is on you.

Our chain had to dump the first major corn-on-the-cob sale of the summer last week because what with one crop failure or another, Vancouver buyers couldn't get corn anywhere on the continent. Meanwhile, here, our warehouse keeps dumping more cold crops (rappini, chard, kale; also broccoli and cauliflower, but people like those) on us because in this corner of the continent, it is so bizarrely cold and wet.

"The Constitution is totally a suicide pact!"

Wellactually a fax machine is a photostatic printer, hence "facsimile."

So pardon me for taking so long to respond. I'm on vacation and trying to break out of that whole "there's so many things I could do that I think I'll do nothing" thing. I understand that Aerelios is a metropole in a situation vaguely similar to Yellowknife, except that instead of being located on a tributary of the Great Slave equivalent, it is on the distributary. So unless the region is tropical, there's going to be a spring freshet proportional to the drainage basin. So the river will flood like nobody's business. For a premodern city, that means an elevated location. No ifs, ands or buts. The hidden advantage of this is that the city is like Vicksburg, Belgrade or Volgograd --a natural point at which to reach and cross the river without mucking through the swampy bottomlands. I'm attaching an illustration of the 1688 siege of Belgrade to get some sense of the layout of the old town, with the major part of the urban area on the bluff, and castles --heavily built up masonry structures-- at the foot of the hill facing the Danube and Sava. In peacetime these structures would be the point at which travellers caught ferry boats to cross the rivers, perhaps ascending or descending a considerable distance to find an appropriate landing point on the far side. structures built to withstand a Mackenzie-scale flood would be . . . impressive. One can readily imagine an arsenal to support the river fleet (and a permanent floating bridge, if one exists), and also mills. If the city has enough industry, mills on the bottomland would be paired with windmills on the bluffs, with water being pumped up to reservoirs in the city and then released to run mills on the slopes. The town proper would probably have a large marchfield, since farmers would be eager to move their flocks up to the heights during the flooding, and extensive granaries, for the same reason. So the town would have impressive walls on the landward side, both for defensive purposes and to keep the livestock out (and tax it if it is brought to market within the walls). The skyline of the city would be impressive; probably with impressive masonry structures --granaries, mills-- vying with temples/cathedrials to dominate the skyline. At the other extreme, shantytowns would likely form along the river banks during the dry season. Given the extensive, seasonally-flooded lowlands, pastoral agriculture would be a huge part of the town's economy. Cowboys would be a big part of its culture, and the low town would have tanneries, fulling mills, probably industrial-scale soap manufacturies. This would contribute to a truly glorious funk, especially in the summer. In the dry season, charcoal burners would be all over the flats, especially rises where the standing water lasts long enough to get alkaline. Swamp hay would be brought in in quantity. I can easily see flax or hemp being an important part of the local rural economy, with fields and retting ponds concentrated in areas where the rise slopes down into the flooding lands. The town's crafts might include leather dying (and therefore dyemaking), lacemaking, tapestry weaving, shoemaking, canvas spinning, ropemaking. The livestock-centric agriculture would also make tallow available in abundance, so maybe candlemaking?

Hey, hey, hey. Pacific Northwest weather isn't that bad. It's been summer for two days and it's been sunny both days! The air temperature is so warm there was only one person shopping in a fur coat this morning and I'm pretty sure it was fake.

This sounds like a description of Starfire, the other old Task Force Games tactical space combat game. (Because why not have two?)

As a lifelong dense square, I'm very disappointed that someone has one-upped me.