The Anglo-Moroccan connection originates in the quarrels between the two half-sisters Queen Elizabeth i and Queen Mary i. Elizabeth suspected that Mary's husband, Philip ii of Spain, had designs on England, and she was consequently interested in an ally who could join in attacking Spain. On the Moroccan side, there was considerable enthusiasm for expelling the Spanish and Portuguese from the several Moroccan coastal cities they had conquered. The Moroccans also wanted naval support in case of further encroachment by the Ottoman Turks, who were eager to extend their empire west from Algiers into Morocco. It was for this last reason that the Moroccan sultan Ahmad al-Mansur was unwilling to collaborate with the Ottomans despite Ottoman consideration of an invasion of Spain: He preferred instead an alliance with the English.
An 'Extreamly Civile' Diplomacy: a short history of early Anglo-Moroccan relations
via the always wonderful @bintbattuta
posted by timshel
on Jan 13, 2012 -
7 comments
Not content to keep funding expeditions of Westerners to learn about Tanna, in 2007 the National Geographic funded an expedition of five men from Tanna's
Prince Philip movement cargo cult to visit England, stay with families, and eventually meet Prince Philip himself whom they revere as the son of their God. Jimmy, who was a member of the expedition and the narrator for the film has posted the video on his
youtube account.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18
In 2009 the Travel Channel aired Meet the Natives: USA, which brought five men from
another group from Tanna to the United States. Their tribe within Tanna reveres Tom Navy, an American World War II sailor who generations ago had taught the inhabitants to live in peace. The Tanna ambassadors were taken across, visiting five states, and eventually meeting former United States Secretary of State Colin Powell and verifying with him that the spirit of peace taught by Tom Navy lives on in the current U.S. President, Barack Obama. While visiting with a family on Fort Stewart, a US Army Major-General conferred a World War II Victory Medal and an Asiatic-Pacific Campaign Medal upon the chief in representation of the contribution the people of Tanna in World War II.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 Be sure to look for Jimmy's responses to questions in the mercifully uncharacteristic youtube comments
[more inside]
posted by Blasdelb
on Oct 31, 2011 -
16 comments
My purpose here has been to inquire into mediated understandings of Hindley, and to question how popular texts delineate between the deeds of a human being and the way those deeds are culturally inscribed. The task is neither conclusive nor complete, for monsters are illusive. There is always some part of them that evades both enunciation and comprehension.
posted by Trurl
on Oct 30, 2011 -
15 comments
Britain's finest Baroque portraitist , on a par with Frans Hals, has been all but forgotten, but a new BBC documentary and associated website seek to address that. William Dobson, 1611-46, was painter to Charles I's court during the English Civil War, and the turmoil of the period meant that much of his biography and even the names of the subjects of his portraits were lost. But
many of his portraits have survived, and they're astonishing.
[more inside]
posted by rory
on Oct 1, 2011 -
18 comments
Philosophy fundraiser mountain walk-a-thon. Prominent philosophy professor Crispin Wright will walk the length of the
Pennine Way, a 250+ mile mountaintop trail in the UK, to raise funds to support his philosophy students. (The link on the Pennine Way is worth reading.) Along the way he'll stop each day to answer a philosophical question voted on by the people who contribute to the fund.
posted by LobsterMitten
on Jun 25, 2011 -
17 comments
Early 1940: British police listening for radio transmissions from German spies within the UK pick up weird signals, and pass them to
Bletchley Park, the United Kingdom's main decryption establishment in WWII. The source of these German messages is an unknown machine, which the Brits dub
Tunny (10 minute video with
Tony Sale describing the Tunny). August 30, 1941: German operators send two very similar messages with the same key, providing insight into the encryption scheme. By January 1942, British cryptographers deduced the workings of the German code machines, sight unseen. The British were able to create their own Tunny emulators to decrypt messages sent by German High Command. After the war, these and other British code-breaking and emulating machines were demolished and/or recycled for parts and their blueprints destroyed, leaving a hole in the history of the British WWII code breaking. Efforts to rebuild the British Tunny emulator started in the 1990s, and quite recently
a Tunny emulator replica was completed.
[more inside]
posted by filthy light thief
on May 30, 2011 -
12 comments
Dublin-raised photojournalist
Seamus Murphy has received six World Press Photo awards and won widespread acclaim for his work in Afghanistan and the Middle East, including a World Understanding Award in 2005. Recently, he created short films for all twelve of the songs on PJ Harvey’s new album,
Let England Shake, after a road trip across England during what he called “one of the worst winters in living memory.” The films have been released gradually since January (
previously) and now you may watch all of them:
1,
2,
3,
4,
5,
6,
7,
8,
9,
10,
11,
12.
posted by Houyhnhnm
on May 5, 2011 -
11 comments
How Soul Music Became "Soul Music."
A writer takes the occasion of the release of
Adele's new album,
21, to explore the popularity and implications of the young British soul singers.
"Because if we're truly living in an age that defies stereotypes and explodes clichés, where distances of all kinds have been virtually obliterated, then everything—timbre, blue notes, pronunciation, timing, diction—is available as stylistic options." [more inside]
posted by beisny
on Mar 6, 2011 -
36 comments
History and mystery wonderfully blended. Although doubtless well-known to UK Mefites, I was only recently directed to this marvelous and engaging TV series featuring Michael Kitchen as Detective Chief Superintendent Christopher Foyle. It's a refreshing change from American fare, entirely adult, with crisp dialogue and meticulous attention to detail and historic accuracy. Speaking as a Yank weary of plasticity, it's also wonderful to see actors with real faces. The series can be seen on Youtube in pieces that can be viewed fairly seamlessly: Series One:
The German Woman,
The White Feather,
Lesson in Murder,
Eagle Day. Series Two:
Fifty Ships,
Among the Few,
War Games,
The Funk Hole. Series Three:
The French Drop,
Enemy Fire,
They Fought in the Fields,
War of Nerves. Series Four:
Invasion,
Bad Blood. Series Five:
Bleak Midwinter,
Casualties of War. Series Six:
Plan of Attack,
Broken Souls,
All Clear.
[more inside]
posted by kinnakeet
on Sep 19, 2010 -
25 comments
Journeyman Pictures has uploaded nearly 4000 videos to YouTube. Many of these are trailers for the documentaries they sell, but they have also posted hundreds of full-length videos. Most are for short documentarie, but there are a lot of features too. It's somewhat daunting to explore, but the
playlists are a good place to start, and so are the shows:
Features,
Shorts,
News and
Savouring Europe, a European travelogue series. Here's a few interesting ones:
Gastronauts, about French culinary students working to make astronaut food more palatable,
Demon Drummers, about student Kodo drummers,
India's Free Lunch, about the effects of free school lunches on Indian society,
The Twitter Revolution, about YouTube and Twitter's role in the 2009 Iranian uprising,
Europe's Black Hole, about Transnistria, the breakaway region of Moldova,
Small Town Boy, about a gay male carnival queen in a small town in England,
The Vertigo of Lists, Umberto Eco talks about the ubiquity of lists in modern culture and
Monsters from the Id, about scientists in the science fiction films of the Fifties.
posted by Kattullus
on Aug 24, 2010 -
10 comments
The Age of Uncertainty is my new favorite blog. It's by a gentleman bookseller who works in a warehouse in Sussex processing lorryfuls of used books. He shares the most interesting things he finds, commenting with wit and sensitivity. He also writes entertainingly about his everyday life. Let me point you towards his series of extracts from a diary that came to his warehouse, detailing the life of Derek, an employee of the government who converted to Mormonism. It was a fairly normal life, but the excerpts are fascinating. Here are the entries in order:
1,
2,
3,
4,
5 and
6. He also posts beautiful images he finds, such as Victorian color plates:
1 and
2. Still, it is the remains of ordinary lives washing up on his shores that most enthralls me, such as
this tear-inducing post about a family photo album which was sent to his used books warehouse.
posted by Kattullus
on Aug 13, 2010 -
27 comments
Yesterday was the birthday of
Dr. John Dee (1527-1609) (
wiki). This
extraordinary and brilliant man was a
mathematician,
astrologer, astronomer, navigator, map maker, alchemist, hermetic philosopher,
and adviser in matters practical
and arcane to Queen
Elizabeth 1st.
History has sometimes
been unkind to him because he
embraced science and mysticism together (
previously), believing both to be facets of the same universal thing. His unfortunate
experiments in conjuring angels
with the alchemist
Edward Kelley are probably to blame. Kelley
asserted that the angel Uriel had instructed him to swap or share wives with Dr. Dee. This, unsurprisingly, led to the end of their association.
16th century celestial wife-swapping was going too far.
However, Dr. Dee was a
true Renaissance man and a
gifted scholar. You can visit his black obsidian
magic Aztec mirror at the British Museum.
posted by infini
on Jul 14, 2010 -
50 comments
Educational gamesmaker Preloaded has recently made two strategy games for English TV station Channel 4.
1066 is a mix of tactics, insult-typing, bowmanship, rhythm-game and narration by Ian Holm.
Trafalgar Origins is all Napoleonic high seas derringdo all the time, as you sail your English ship in real time against the damnable French and Spanish. Whether you want to hoist the sails or call your opponent a stench weasel, they are fun little games which have the added bonus of teaching you about British history. Both games can be played solo or multiplayer.
[via Rock Paper Shotgun, where they like those games quite a lot]
posted by Kattullus
on May 5, 2010 -
14 comments
