I suppose it's possible, if you're a Game of Thrones fan, that you enjoy these violent death scenes so much that you want to be able to see them all again. I barely made it through the first time.
Related posts and links (I haven't check all of the old links - apologies if any have died):
Very cool visual effects reel from season 5 of Game of Thrones: Mastering the Dragons
A romper featuring a gigantic image of Kim Jong-un's face is the latest sartorial trend to stir up men's fashion.
The bizarre onesie was unsurprisingly on sale for $79.99 – reduced from its original price of $99.99 - despite winning five star reviews on the website where it is advertised. Surprisingly, there are several other rompers on the website that are out-selling Kim (they have a LOT of them), although, actually, they all appear to be pre-orders.
This pineapple romper is their top-seller:
I like this one:
And this:
Bacon!:
And, if you're the patriotic type:
I'd tend to go a bit cheaper, assuming that this will, after all, be a joke gift - Amazon has these starting at $7.99, so you can get 10 of them for the price of one of those above:
ICYMI, Wednesday's links are here, and include Flag Day, how lemons gave rise to organized crime in Sicily, embarrassing landmarks by state, the ships buried below San Francisco, and works of art recreated using Marvel action figures.
ICYMI, Monday's links are here, and include Anne Frank's birthday, technologies that replace super powers, the finalists for Shed of the Year 2017, and a selection of Adam West's Batman fight scenes.
Flag Day commemorates the adoption of the flag of the United States (wiki) which happened on June 14, 1777 by resolution of the Second Continental Congress:
That the flag of the United States shall be of thirteen stripes of alternate red and white, with a union of thirteen stars of white in a blue field, representing the new constellation.
The resolution was made following the report of a special committee which had been assigned to suggest the flag’s design.
A flag of this design was first carried into battle on September 11, 1777, in the Battle of the Brandywine. The American flag was first saluted by foreign naval vessels on February 14, 1778, when the Ranger, bearing the Stars and Stripes and under the command of Captain Paul Jones, arrived in a French port. The flag first flew over a foreign territory in early 1778 at Nassau, Bahama Islands, where Americans captured a British fort.
Two years earlier, on June 14, 1775, Congress adopted "the American continental army", so today is also the Birthday of the U.S. Army. More detail here, at the Army's web site.
ICYMI, Friday's links are here, and include photos of earth from the International Space Station, knitting as an espionage tool, cooking literature's famous meals, and how falconry shaped the English language.
It is really a wonder that I haven't dropped all my ideals because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out. Yet, I keep them, because in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can't build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death. I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness. I hear the ever-approaching thunder, which will destroy us too, I can feel the sufferings of millions, and yet, if I look into the heavens, I think that it will all come right, that this cruelty too will end, and that peace and tranquility will return again.
When I write I can shake off all my cares. My sorrow disappears, my spirits are revived! But, and that's a big question, will I ever be able to write something great, will I ever become a journalist or a writer?
~ Frank (Ibid., 5 April 1944)
And finally, I twist my heart round again, so that the bad is on the outside and the good is on the inside, and keep on trying to find a way of becoming what I would so like to be, and could be, if... there weren't any other people living in tthe world.
~ Frank (Ibid., 1 August 1944)
How do you describe the sorting out on arriving at Auschwitz, the separation of children who see a father or mother going away, never to be seen again? How do you express the dumb grief of a little girl and the endless lines of women, children, and rabbis being driven across the Polish or Ukrainian landscapes to their deaths? No, I can't do it. And because I'm a writer and a teacher, I don't understand how Europe's most cultured nation could have done that. For these men who killed with submachine-guns in the Ukraine were university graduates. Afterwards they would go home and read a poem by Heine. So what happened?
~ Elie Wiesel (wiki) (b. 1928) (quoted in Le Monde, Paris, 4 June 1987)
The apartment block where the Frank family lived from 1934 until 1942
June 12 is the anniversary of the birth of German-Jewish refugee and diarist Anne Frank (wiki) (1929-1945) in Frankfurt-am-Main. With the seizure of power by Hitler and the Nazis in January 1933, Anne's businessman father relocated his company to Amsterdam, where he thought his family would be safe. After Germany occupied the Netherlands in 1940, the Franks went into hiding in a secret room in an annex to his former office, where they were sustained with the assistance of their Dutch friends. During this period, Anne Frank began the diary that would be rediscovered and published to world-wide acclaim in 1947.
In August 1944, however, two months after the Normandy invasion, the Frank's hiding place was revealed to the Germans by a Dutch collaborator, and the family was captured and deported to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp (wiki). Only her father survived, Anne having succumbed to mistreatment, malnutrition, and disease just a few weeks before the camp was liberated in April 1945.
Here's a video tour of the annex where the Frank family (along with others) lived from July 6, 1942 until their arrest on August 4, 1944:
N.B. For an exhaustive and comprehensive account of the Third Reich that explores in depth the questions raised by Elie Wiesel above, read Richard J. Evans' masterful three-volume history, completed in 2009 with The Third Reich at War. Be prepared for 2,000-plus pages - and it's a harrowing tale.
