Who Gets the Dawn?

 This post will also be found in Tehachapi's The Loop Newspaper.  

In The Lion in Winter, the king and queen contest the succession to the throne of England. (I had to give a mention to the Tehachapi Community Theatre play that will still have a few shows when you read this.) And they bounce between a shortsighted “who's ahead now” and long term historical thinking. And we too, often think in the short term. Yet when we reach a point when our problems loom large, we wonder how we could have reached this point.

In Like a Lion

 This post will also be found in Tehachapi's The Loop Newspaper. 

Literature has loved the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries. And the people making up the English royal family. There are many stories of Robin Hood with the characters of Prince John and Richard the Lionhearted in the background as villain and savior respectively. Ivanhoe too, tells of this same time. Henry II's children have had a lasting impact on stories we read and see growing up here in America. We've had movies, plays and books about Richard and the Crusades. Cartoons about Robin Hood. The name “Prince John” brings up a very definite image.

Anachronistic

 This post will also be found in Tehachapi's The Loop Newspaper.  
  

When you treat history like a science, or when you're doing a historical science (like geology), things that are out of place in time are important pieces of data. Things that are out of place in time are known as anachronisms. This would be like finding fossil cows mixed in with a herd of dinosaurs. You just never find those things together at the same time. And you'd never find disco music in the soundtrack of a movie made in the 50s.

Historical

 This post will also be found in Tehachapi's The Loop Newspaper. 

Things have been happening here on Earth for around four billion years. Most of the things that have happened during that time were unobserved. And for most of the things that have happened that have been observed, no one has bothered to note them down.

Getting caught up

Between work and the play (The Lion in Winter) I've barely kept up with getting articles done. Let alone putting them here on the blog. So the next few entries are me getting caught up on those. I should be able to do better, and perhaps post more often now.