I'm working on a Battles piece for Yarmouk (636 CE) - which is already way too long for the source material - but have hit a rock and can't finish up until I get my hands on more reference material.
Because there's an issue with the sources.
The Wikipedia article, standard starting point for any Internet-centric research, appears above the usual standard; well-researched, detailed, and well written. So much so that I almost binned the idea of writing this one up and turning to Frontiers 1914.
Being me, I went ahead and started pulling up as many of the primary sources as I could and ran into a real head-scratcher; nobody else I could find, and I mean NObody, provided the level of detail for the fight that characterized the Wiki article. Primary, secondary, both...nobody was saying the same stuff.
Quite the opposite, in fact; many secondary sources' central thesis was "we just really don't know exactly what happened because the primary accounts don't say or are contradictory".
Now the author(s) of the Wikipedia piece seem to have leaned heavily on the work of David Nicolle, specifically his 2000 Osprey title "Yarmuk 636 AD". So presumably Nicolle has the goods - and if he does I'm guessing they come from the primary source I cannot for love or money find on-line; the 12th Century CE/6th Century AH work The History of Damascus (Arabic: تاريخ دمشق, Tarikh Dimashq) attributed to Ibn Asakir (Arabic: ابن عساكر).
If the stuff in the Wiki is right, it almost has to come from our boy Ibn Asakir; I've got the other major Arabic works (and the other side of the hill, the Byzantines, produced little of value I've found) and neither the Kitab Futuh al-Sham nor the Futuh al-Buldan say anything remotely close to or as detailed as the tactical-level detail in the Wiki.
I've got Nicolle on order, but it's not due in for another week or two. Until then I'm forced to suspend operations on Yarmuk.
Speaking of suspending operations.
The Fire Direction Center is unusually well-staffed right now because the employer (in one form or another) of half the staff, Portland Public Schools, is on strike.
Normally you'd think an old lefty like me would be stickin' to the union and, yes, I have a lot of sympathy there for a couple of reasons.
First, because the union position makes a lot of sense. Smaller class sizes, more prep time, increased staffing for stuff like Special Ed. Even the wage demands aren't whopping out of line given the cost of living her in Portland proper. This ain't fucking Idaho.
Second, because the District has fucked this up five ways and Sunday. They've been imitating the worst habits of higher ed, staffing up the Head Shed and shafting the troops, and then bullshitting the line dogs about that. This spring as they handed a raise to the assistant vice-superintendants with which Big Pink (the District HQ) teems they axed damn near all the lowly Educational Assistants over at my Bride's workplace.
That's just stupid.
But.
Here's my problem; the District's base position - that there's just no money for all the teachers' asks - isn't really wrong.
The State of Oregon has been chronically underfunding public schools for decades. A lot of that goes back to the anti-tax Eighties, when scumbags like Don McIntyre roamed the Oregon Earth like fatheaded dinosaurs, conning the gullible Public into cutting taxes to make sure Phil Knight could afford a second airplane.
A lot more goes to the ridiculous way that funding is allocated.
The state took over public school funding in the wake of lawsuits that pointed out - correctly - that basing school funding on county property taxes was inherently unfair and unequal. Poor people living in shit places had no money to begin with, so their schools were shit, and their kids ended up poor. Rich people? Not so much.
But then the state turned around and handed the money out on a headcount flat rate.
Every kid in your classroom got you, say, $4,000 a year. Yeah, there were some extras, including Federal dollars from stuff like Title 1, but the big slug came from the state general fund.
You see the problem there?
That's not that much better than the old system. The nice well-bred white kids in Lake Oswego get four grand each and are then backed up by Mummy and Daddy's money and tutoring and camps and enrichment and fuck-all else.
The poor kids in Southeast Portland?
Yeah.
And even within a single district that's a problem. The nice wealthy enclaves that feed high schools like Portland Public's Grant and Lincoln and (what-I-still-think-of-as-Wilson) Wells do just fine on the base handouts.
The feeders for our daughter's Roosevelt, or Jefferson? Given their huge population of poor kids and English-as-a-Second-Language-kids and kids with family problems and learning issues?
So ideally places like Jefferson and Roosevelt and their feeder junior highs and elementary schools would be on a "base x 1.3". And real snakepits (Hi, George Middle School!) would be on a "base x 1.5" that would provide the extra staffing and teaching (and social work and community support) they'd need to help get those kids through K-12 and out with something like a 21st Century education.
So ideally both sides of this strike - District and teachers - should be on one side of the picket line and the State government on the other. The solution isn't in rearranging the deck chairs; it's in rebuilding the fucking boat.
But that risks getting the Oregon Taxpayer - that skittish, ignorant, tightfisted sonofabitch - worked into a snit.
The GQP, of course, will fire off every flare in the "taxes are theft" pyro locker, because they hate non-Jesus schools anyway.
And the Richie Riches who pay most of (but not really enough of) the taxes will squeal like piggies in a sty because their money is going to Those People, when government's only job is to keep Them far enough away from Us so that we don't have to deal with Them.
(see: "Homeless Crisis").
So the problem is that there's no obvious solution to the strike between the striking parties. To get there requires Oregon to choose to put money into poor people and brown people (and troubled people) and the nice wealthy white untroubled people who HAVE the money would sooner eat dirt.
WASF.
That's cheery, isn't it? Yeah, and I'm not even going to get started on fucking Gaza.
Lemme see if I can end with something cheeery.
Oh, yeah; these came in the mail:
I ran into this little manhwa (the Korean version of what in Japan would be called "manga", a serial comic) several years back and was utterly delighted.
It's a silly and funny isekai-type romance; our heroine (who's kind of a glum college student IRL) is in proper fantasy fashion somehow transported into the world of her favorite bodice-ripping novel...but as one of the minor characters.
Which is just as well, because the protagonist - the eponymous "Duke" - is kind of scary and obsessive about the heroine. So our girl Ripley - at least, now shes "Ripley", the redhead in the picture - just decides to get drunk and have fun at the party scene she's emerged into. Which is fine....
Until she wakes up in bed with Scary Duke Zeronis, the two of them having just had both of their "first night" (which Ripley has no conscious memory of - girl, you gotta know when to stop drinking!) and thus, at least to the Duke, having plighted their troth and consummated their bond and become mates and holy shit is she in trouble now.
And he, meanwhile, is being slowly gentled and broadened by this red-headed whacko by whom he's being led around.
It's all very cute and funny and sometimes touching and mostly just vastly entertaining.
The Webtoons site went sorta dark after the end of the online series; sometimes the stories do that - my guess it's related to where the artist/writer is hoping to sell a print version like this. So I had been stymied when I'd hoped to re-read some of my favorite bits.
Until now! So, yay!
Something to curl up with now that the rains have returned. At east until Nicolle shows up.
And speaking of things showing up in the mail, this:
I think I mentioned that one of my retirement hobbies is returning to a sport I played decades ago, the Japanese fencing called kendo.
I'm not very good, mind. My body is damaged and so I'm both slow and clumsy. Small children can beat me.
But it's not about winning; it's the discipline and training, trying to be the best kendoka I can be.
The thing in the center of the photo is a shinai; a wooden "sword" made from bamboo staves used to practice the parts that involve actually hitting people.
(There's a different sort of wooden sword, called a bokken or bokuto, that's actually shaped like a katana, the "samurai sword" you think of when you think of this stuff.)
The bamboo version is supposedly the result of an Edo-period sensei trying to come up with a way of training sword-fighting that didn't involve clubbing the living shit out of students with a heavy wooden stick.
When I picked the sport back up a year ago I dug up my old shinai from back in the Nineties. It was a bit dry but still serviceable, quite the tribute to the makers, whoever they were.
But the poor thing is getting worn out with new use. So I finally retired it and got a replacement.
It feels very new and lush after my old stick. Now I just need to do all the sanding and oiling and suchlike that you're supposed to do to prepare for simulated combat.
Somehow the idea that you have to break down something brand new and fiddle with it to make it work right seems very old and "traditional", so properly kendo, which is about as "old and traditional" as it gets.
So I've got to break out the sandpaper and furniture oil and sit down with it. Very satisfying in a sort of tactile way. Go figure; I'm just like that.
Now if I can just recall the sequence of the Bokuto Ni Yoru Kendo Kihon-waza Keiko-ho...
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