Attilla the Hun

I've been watching the deleted scenes in the Avatar collectors edition--the DVD version, since the Blu-Ray version is so ferociously protected it won't play on either my Optiarc BD drive or my Samsung BD player, defeating all firmware--another great anti-piracy feature, although everything on the Blu-ray Collector's discs is already up on Pirate Bay for you lucky pukes with high-speed broadband. Anyway, one thing that was cut was a bit where Grace says to Jake after he comes back from his first one-on-one with Colonel Quaritch:

"What did Attila want?"

For those of you who can't tell your Atillas from your left fields, Attila the Hun was a “barbarian” king who started out hiring his tribe to the Romans, then conquered or intimidated a lot of other “barbarian” tribes to make his own empire, and successfully hit up the Romans for regular payments of protection money. Then he got an offer he couldn't refuse from Honoria, sister of one of the Roman Emperors of that time (the middle 400s) when there was a Western emperor and an Eastern emperor. The offer was: “Help me dethrone my idiot brother Honorius and I'll marry you and we'll rule the Roman Empire together, or at least as much of it as we can grab.” In the 1954 Italian sword-and-sandal movie, Attila was Anthony Quinn and Honoria was Sophia Loren.

Attila was not Mr. Nice Guy, but as horse-barbarian conquerors go he wasn't so bad. He didn't level any cities and divert rivers over the ruins, or make pyramids of skulls, or impale thousands of people on wooden stakes, or nail their hats to their heads. All he did was murder brothers and cousins to secure his inheritance, kill lots of people in battle, take slaves, loot and plunder and lay waste, and the like; perfectly acceptable and civilized behavior for centuries among the ruling Romans (and Greeks, Persians, and Chinese.) Besides clinging to his barbarian ways, he remained stubbornly pagan. Rome was properly (Roman) Catholic by then, giving Romans another reason to look down on the barbarians (all non-Romans except for the better classes of Greeks). Some or most of the Germans were Christians by now, although mostly “heretical” Christians who followed the theology of Arius, and didn't follow the orders of the Pope and, worse, didn't pay tithes to the Bishop of Rome and taxes to Rome's emperors.

Since most of the history we have from this time and place was written by Catholic monks, Attila gets some very bad press for dissing his Pope and stealing the plate from various churches, cathedrals and monasteries. This is why the Almighty struck him down, although passing out from too much wine and drowning from a nosebleed also had something to do with it, if that's how he really died—he may still have at least one living relative who wanted to be king.

Attila's biggest battle was at Châlons on June 20, 451, which I often see listed as one of the decisive battles of history. Well, it was big for its time and place, and it was probably interesting in a military sense, but monks aren't generally interested in military stuff, so they didn't write down much useful detail. Attila had a big army, mostly warriors from subject tribes and most of them German. Both a large Roman army under Flavius Aetieus (made up largely of German legionnaires and auxiliaries) and a large army of non-Romanized Germans under Theodoric I, king of the Visigoths, were fighting against Attila. According to the monks, the Christian coalition won.

Atilla invaded Italy the next year, possibly because he thought Gaul was looted out for the present, but Aetius decided to solved Hun problem in much the same way the US Army handled the Souix, Comanche, and Apache problems. Instead of chasing the after the warriors, Aetius hit the Huns at home, slaughtering or enslaving the women and children and old men. Atilla pulled out of Italy back to what remained of his people, and died the next year before launching a new campaign. Then his makeshift empire melted away like snow on a hot stove.

I don't think Attila matters much, historically speaking. He's interesting, but he was just one charismatic and competent leader from a tough but small tribe who saw his opportunities and took them. We're not even sure what modern languages Hunnish might be most closely related to. The language is not only dead; it is forgotten; we have only a few words written down by unfriendly foreigners, and they have to be distorted. It would have been much the same if Attila had made himself a Roman Emperor, even if he had founded a dynasty, his grandchildren would have been speaking the Latin or Greek the locals spoke, and his people would have melted away into more sophisticated foreign cultures and larger foreign populations, exactly as they did in the history they got.

About half of China's dynasties have begun as barbarian conquerors; “Barbarians may enter the Middle Kingdom, but they are not permitted to leave.” That is a cryptic way of saying China is never really conquered because any conquerors quickly become Chinese. Rome had a similar power to integrate both conquered and conquerors. The German Franks were soon speaking the local Latin dialect, which discovered itself to be French in a few more centuries; the German Visigoths and the German Vandals who conquered Iberia began speaking the local Latin dialects, which became Spanish and Portuguese. Attillus Augustus Imperator would have just made for more modern-day Attilas, Attillos, and, possibly, Adelles--and Edsels.

The Edsel, named after Henry Ford's only legitimate son, might as well have been named the Attila because “Edsel” is one of the Germanic versions of the name, which had somehow become traditional in at least one family of Fords, perhaps another Viking legacy to the Irish to go along with Dublin and trial by jury. Ford should have gone for the original version, both for the car and the son—although Henry Ford was much more of an Attila than Edsel. Maybe the man who put America on gasoline-driven wheels was more of an Attila than Attila. Hitler kept a bust of Henry Ford in his office.

I'm in love, I'm in love,
With Attila the Hun,
Attila the Hun,
Attila the Hun.
Though he pillaged my village
And killed everyone,
I'm in love with Attila the Hun.

--Lyrics of a silly song I heard on the Dick Van Dyke Show as a kid, at least the way I remember it.

Fanfiction Follies

I've added another chapter to The Milk of Demon Kindness, but much luck in reading it on Fanfiction.net. Nobody's stories seem to be available for reading right now. I raised the rating to "M" for "Mature" but if you're looking for porn, you'll be disappointed.

Mizushō Fanfic

I've put up the first twelve chapters of a fanfic I call The Milk of Demon Kindness on Fanfiction.net.

Two Extinct Birds of North America

The Passenger Pigeon (Ectopistes migratorius)

This may have been the most numerous species of bird that ever lived on Earth. It was larger than the rock dove, a once-rare species that has established itself in cities around the world, what almost any North American thinks of when hearing the word “pigeon.” Ectopistes migrated from place to place in enormous flocks, nesting and feeding in the deciduous forests—the forests that weren't made up of pine trees. At least a quarter of North America was covered with deciduous forests when the first European settlers arrived. It may not have flown quite as well as the smaller pigeons that are often raced by hobbyists, but it could fly over any tree. Despite that, it nested on the ground. This doesn't sound like the best strategy for making sure enough of your eggs become descendents instead of breakfast, but it worked for a long time.
In 1878, one hunter in Michigan shipped about three million dead Passenger Pigeons to eastern markets. In 1890, no hunters shipped any Passenger Pigeons from Michigan because there weren't any left.
Pigs also played a part in the decline of the market for Passenger Pigeons. Continuing the practice from prehistoric times, immigrant farmers from Europe turned loose hogs in woods to forage. The hogs actually came back from the woods because hogs are smart enough to be trained like dogs to return to the sound of a horn, or a whistle, or a Slim Whitman CD if you feed them to that sound when they are piglets. It is not known who first discovered this, but it's pretty certain his or her name wasn't Pavlov or Slim Whitman.
It isn't known exactly why all the Passenger Pigeons are gone now. We're pretty sure that white people had something to do with it, and pigs which nearly all got eaten by white people because white people have more money to buy pork products, and because pigs haven't gotten smart quite smart enough yet to figure out that the man or the woman feeding them now is planning on eating them later, or selling them to someone else to eat to get enough money for the next Slim Whitman CD. But white people, with or without their pigs, have put some serious hurt on other species and so far most of them are still around, even if they're harder to find now. Quite some time before the last of the Passenger Pigeons were gone from the wild, professional Passenger Pigeon hunters either found new work or starved to death because getting money for not working wasn't invented until the 1920s in the United Kingdom, where there were never were any Passenger Pigeons (and it was way to far to swim there) and wasn't imported to North America until the discovery in 1932 that people with no money living in their cars ("Hoover Chariots") or in clusters of cardboard boxes ("Hoovervilles") or in vacuum cleaners ("Hoovers"), or even sleeping on the ground under discarded newspapers ("Hoover blankets") could vote for someone who wasn't Herbert Hoover ("Hoover"). The professional hunters did not finish off the Passenger Pigeons because the average expenditure to stay breathing long enough to find a Passenger Pigeon plus ammunition to kill it was less than you could get for the Passenger Pigeon, and the hunter couldn't even break even if he (or she) ate the damned thing. White people who could afford something else don't seem to have eaten Passenger Pigeons, even if they ate pigs that ate Passenger Pigeons, Passenger Pigeon eggs, Passenger Pigeon poop, or even Passenger Pigeon hunters. There's more than one reason you shouldn't sleep with a pig.

Pigs went right on eating anything they could get away with, of course, but before the Passenger Pigeons were all gone, people in North America had pretty much stopped letting them run around loose. White people in cities like New York finally got tired of all the pig shit on their shoes and passed laws against letting pigs run around without a leash, or even with a leash, and also against letting pigs vote. So did Chicago, although (of course) in Cook County the laws against pigs voting have never been enforced, even on dead pigs. Folks out in the country noticed there weren't a whole lot of deciduous forests for their pigs to run around in--only the ones who could spell "deciduous," but the ones that couldn't got tired of waiting for their Slim Whitman CDs to arrive, so they penned up their hogs and fed them corn (when it wasn't worth selling), garbage (until they could sell it on Ebay) and wandering professional Passenger Pigeon hunters, all of them graduates of the Hoover Correspondence College, founded by Herbert Hoover's ("Hoover") vice-president, the only Native American to hold the office, Chief Running Joke. Okay, actually Hoover's VP was Charles Curtis.
The last Passenger Pigeon died in 1914, in the Cincinnati Zoo. Her name was Martha. What's left of her is on display at the U.S. Museum of Natural history.

The North American Valkyrie (Dies irae)

While a nearly complete specimen of this species is preserved and is on public display at the National Museum of the United States Air Force in Dayton, Ohio, its ecology is largely a matter of conjecture. It was a migratory predator, probably too large to hunt other flyers, although it was capable of bursts of speed up to Mach 3.08. Its feeding grounds were extremely restricted, no more than a few committee rooms in the District of Columbia. It's nesting grounds, however, were much more extensive, including Moscow, Beijing, Pyongyang, Havana, and possibly Hanoi. No observations of the North American Valkyrie laying its eggs have been confirmed, but the prevailing theory is that it laid one to four parachute-retarded thermonuclear eggs of 1 to 30 Megatons at the end of its high-speed dash and then abandoned them, completing its life-cycle. Since it surfed on its own shock wave, focused downward by its downfolded wingtips, whomsoever was under its final flight path would have been pretty sure that the Wrath of God or something close to it was overhead.

A closely related species has been confirmed from remains found in Russia. The Eurasian Valkyrie (Yakovlevius copii) was somewhat smaller and had different nesting grounds (except for Beijing). Possibly it was smaller because of the more restricted feeding available in the Kremlin in its time. It may have laid a larger egg.

One Page of Negima

Here's a page from Period 295 (Translation courtesy of cnet128):

Lesson 37

Finally finished up with Lesson 37. I hope there's someone left to read it. Download it at [Sorry, service has been shut down.]

If you don't know already, Mizusho got kicked off of Mangafox along with a lot of other "mature" series. I'm looking for other homes.

UPDATE: Mizusho is back on Mangafox, but Megaupload is dead now.

My g/f got me a DVD of Avatar, so I finally got to see it. Even without 3D, it's a good movie, though after reading the original script I think it would been a better movie if there was a little more backstory.

The latest IMDB review complains that it's a ripoff of Star Wars, which it is not. If anything, it's “inspired” by a Harry Harrison novel from the 1960's, Deathworld. That novel featured human colonists fighting the ecology of a planet that was all linked together in an empathic gestalt, so that the harder they fought, the meaner and tougher the hostile critters got. Admittedly the colonists weren't servants of a greedy megacorporation; they were simply annoyed at the small hazards of country life when they first landed, such as bug bites and plants with thorns. They got mad...and the ecology responded to their anger, starting the cycle. I'll bet James Cameron has read that novel.

Another possible source of inspiration is Alan Dean Foster's Midworld, which features human colonists who've gone “native” and fight to defend their home tree.

James Cameron is probably going to do at least one sequel, but first will come (I really hope this time) Battle Angel.

I've read two outstanding books over the last week: Tokyo Vice by Jake Adelstein and Last Train From Hiroshima by Charles Pellegrino. The first is relevant to the Mizushō background because it has a lot of stuff about the water trade and Yakuza involvement in it. There's even a chapter called “Welcome to Kabukichō.” The second book is a tougher read, though it is beautifully written. Last Train has been optioned by James Cameron, so we might see a spectacularly gruesome recreation of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings.

Chapter 36

Was available at Megaupload, before the FBI shut them down.