Woke in Time for the Graham Norton Show

 Told you I would not sleep the whole night. 

It seems that I am having a new experience: Red travel warning issued in Delaware County; travel prohibited. I do not recall there being red travel warnings when I was younger. Upon waking up, I did stick my head out of the door. The wind is up. No traffic to be seen in the time I kept the door open.

The Common seeks donations. Being completely broke until Wednesday, I cannot do a thing. 

The new Times Literary Supplement has Using your loaf about English cooking and food, and its list of the best books.

Checking out the stuff on Jstor:

The Adventurous Life and Mysterious Death of Frank Lenz  - never heard of him, but now  I wonder why not, very interesting story behind the outline.

Onna-Bugeisha, the Female Samurai Warriors of Feudal Japan - ever since Shogun, the samurai have been an interest.

Kawahara Asako was among several Aizu women determined to defend the castle against invaders. Their education had prepared these women for war. Diana E. Wright points out that they received extensive combat training and were educated to be “equally skilled in the ways of the pen and the sword.” These warriors stand in a long tradition of women in Japan who joined battles alongside their male counterparts and immortalized themselves as Onna-Bugeisha, literally, “female martial arts masters.”

Empress Jingū, said to have ruled between 201 and 269 CE, is one of the country’s earliest female warriors. As the legend goes, Jingū led an invasion of the Korean peninsula while pregnant with the future Emperor Ojin. Almost a thousand years later, Tomoe Gozen, likely the most famous Onna-Bugeisha in history, fought in the Genpei War (1180-1185), serving as principal commander in several battles. A fierce fighter, Gozen led 300 female samurai into battle against 2,000 enemies and was one of only five warriors to survive. Two years later, she oversaw 3,000 men....

The Birth of the Soviet Union and the Death of the Russian Revolution - The USSR would have been a 100 years old this year; wonder if Putin noticed.

The huge new nation created by Lenin in 1922 was far from what he believed would emerge from the revolutionary upheaval of 1917. His Marxism was outward-looking and internationalist, and he rejected patriotism and nationalism. And although, as David R. Marples notes, the USSR initially “saw a flowering of national cultures in republics like Ukraine and Belarus, and especially the growing importance of national languages,” Joseph Stalin moved away from this policy in the 1930s by centralizing authority and concentrating more power in the hands of the Party leaders in Moscow. The story of the creation of the Soviet Union was therefore one that began with the overthrowing of the Tsar and the promise to free Russia’s exploited masses and ended with the birth of a powerful, bureaucratic, and undemocratic state that killed off the hopes of the Russian Revolutions.

Thornfield Hall published The Blizzard Diaries: Nine Below Zero & 10 Book for Winter Reading. Charming record of the blast that has come to visit. I like the books selections, too; although I have read only Dickens, LeGuin, and Sayers.

Variety has The 100 Greatest Movies of All Time. I would like to say how many I have seen, but then it would be noticeable how many i have not seen. Number one was a shocker.

It is 1:07 am, and I think this has ben enough for this session.