Rebekah Marks⚓🧭🐈

This is another myth that won’t die. Easter was never a pagan festival. In most European countries in the medieval period Easter had names derived from Passover, and scholars have found no evidence that the celebrations of Easter were inspired by earlier festivals. (1/3)

@feederofcats Aww...we love you Dweeby!

Dweeb wants to know if everyone will still love him while he looks very ridiculous for a minute

HISTORY HAS BEEN MADE! The hottest temperature in the history of March for the United States has been set, at 112 degrees in Yuma, Arizona! This block-buster heatwave has shattered over 250 daily temperature records too!

If I could wave a magic wand and banish one misconception about Shakespeare’s English, it would be that "thou" is just old-fashioned "you." What "thou" actually meant was: this is not a neutral relationship. You'd use "thou" with God in prayer and a criminal in the stockade.

@Andrewnsnyder The Princess and the Goblin, The Princess and Curdie are both so good! I'm still trying to figure out if Phantastes had a plot in it somewhere......I feel like everyone gets it but me.

You should read more George MacDonald.

You do not honor other cultures by weakening your own. You honor them by standing firmly in what is yours. Shakespeare is not a symbol of domination. He is one of the clearest expressions of what human language can reach at its highest level. His work survived because generation after generation, across cultures, found truth in it. What they are calling decolonising is diluting something rooted, tested, and refined over centuries. This is what happens when a civilization loses confidence in its own inheritance. The idea that Shakespeare being universal is harmful reveals something deeper. It suggests that greatness itself has become suspect. That if something endures across time and place, it must be explained away, not studied. That instinct erases standards. Tradition is not exclusion. It is memory. It is the record of what a civilization discovered was worth preserving. Once you start apologizing for that, you create a vacuum where nothing holds. A culture that cannot defend Shakespeare will not be able to defend anything else that made it.

Everyone knows what a six-shooter is.... The name is part of the mythology of the American West, woven into dime novels and wanted posters and a thousand Saturday morning westerns. The cowboy draws his six-shooter. The outlaw empties his six-shooter. Six shots, six chambers, the whole cylinder loaded and ready. Except that almost nobody actually carried it that way. The Colt Single Action Army, the revolver that defined the era, had a design problem that every experienced user understood within about five minutes of owning one. The hammer, when the gun was at rest, sat directly on top of whichever cartridge was positioned beneath it. There was no safety mechanism of any kind. No firing pin block, no transfer bar, nothing between the hammer and the primer of the cartridge but gravity and good fortune. If the gun was dropped, or knocked against a saddle horn, or bumped hard enough against anything at all, there was a real possibility it would fire. Not a theoretical possibility. A practical, documented, this-has-happened-to-people-you-know possibility. The solution was simple and universally adopted. You loaded five rounds, positioned the empty chamber under the hammer, and went about your day. The gun held six. You carried five. Everyone knew this. It was taught, passed on, drilled into anyone who spent serious time with the weapon. Load one, skip one, load four more. Hammer on the empty. The phrase for it was "five beans in the wheel." This arrangement persisted not for months but for decades. The Colt Single Action Army was introduced in 1873 and the practice of carrying five rounds continued as standard until the gun was redesigned with a proper drop safety in the 1970s, nearly a hundred years later. The revolvers that replaced it across that entire period had the same problem and the same solution. Five rounds in a six-shot gun was not a quirk of the frontier era. It was the correct and accepted method of carrying a single action revolver for the better part of a century. Hollywood, naturally, never got this memo. The six-shooter of the movies is always fully loaded, always fires exactly as many times as the plot requires, and is reloaded from impossible angles at implausible speeds. The real weapon required more care, more patience, and a slightly different relationship with arithmetic. The men who carried it daily understood that the sixth chamber was not for bullets. It was for the hammer to rest on without killing you. The name stuck anyway. Six-shooter. It had a better ring to it than five-shooter, and the West was always better at legend than at accuracy. #archaeohistories

150 Years Before Columbus a Dominican friar from Milan Wrote of the Americas. 🌎 📰A 2021 peer reviewed paper published in Terrae Incognitae by Paolo Chiesa, a Medieval Latin scholar at the University of Milan, laid out the case. 📜Galvaneus Flamma, a Dominican friar from Milan, wrote it in the Cronica universalis (1340) that west of Greenland lies a land called “Marckalada”, described as fertile, wooded, and full of animals. ✍️ This manuscript was lost but a surviving text was made by a monk named Ghioldi at the monastery of Sant’Ambrogio in Milan. 🗝️ Paolo notes several key passages in Cronica universalis that offer clues to the knowledge of North America 🛞Genoese Sailors report the Norse talk of a lands beyond Norway, Iceland and Grolandia (Greenland) Beyond Greenland lies Markland. 🛞That Greenland has a bishop (true: the Bishopric of Garðar) 🛞People live in subterranean houses for warmth. 🛞Polar bears swim and drag sailors to shore. 🔗 What this study shows is the connection between the Norse, and North America, made it to the Mediterranean a century and a half before Columbus

Κόσμος — Ōrdō et ōrnātus — “Order and adornment”

You watch Irish dancing and just know - that’s a real people. Something about it just hits you on a visceral level.

@CaptFitzjamesRN @cmdrgore @saintishly I don't know if any direct descendants are still alive, but I did see a descendant of Nephew in a documentary a few years ago.....🤔

@cmdrgore @saintishly I'm kind of going through a similar thing with John Barrow's grave (which is thankfully intact but needs repairs) and only the owner of the grave can give permission for works to be carried out. So I'm hoping that John Ross' grave has a living & caring owner.

poor john ross.. look how they massacred my boy

Today is St. Patrick’s Day, the Patron Saint of Ireland 🇮🇪✝️ Although alot of people will spend it drinking green beer and wearing plastic hats the Catholic Church celebrates the life of a great Saint who was instrumental to the preservation of Europe as we know it and for the conversion of the nation of Ireland. Kidnapped at 16 by pagan pirates, St. Patrick was dragged from his noble family and forced into slavery in the freezing Irish wilderness. For six brutal years, he suffered in total isolation. He finally escaped, walked 200 miles to the coast, and made it back home. He was safe. He became a priest, then a Bishop. But then he had a vision. God called him to go back to the exact same violent barbarians who enslaved him. He went back to save their souls. When the High King of Tara ordered that no fires be lit before his pagan festival, Patrick marched up the Hill of Slane and lit a massive Easter bonfire, openly challenging the king, the druids, and the penalty of death. According to tradition, one of the high druids challenged Patrick to a supernatural duel to determine whose god was greater. The druid invoked demons and even levitated before the crowd, but Patrick, filled with the power of Christ, commanded them to fall. The wizard crashed to the ground and died. Witnessing this, the king was shaken. Convinced of God’s power, he allowed Patrick to continue preaching. Over the next 30 years, Patrick baptized thousands, converted chieftains, and used the shamrock to explain the mystery of the Trinity. Through him, Ireland was set on the path to becoming one of the most Christian lands in Europe. He drove literal snakes out of Ireland. He drove out demons, paganism, and human sacrifice, conquering an entire nation for Christ. Enjoy your pint today, but remember you are celebrating a spiritual warrior, a Bishop of Holy Mother Church, a Saint who is in Heaven right now looking down on you, praying for you, praying for the Church. His life and total devotion and faith in Our Lord Jesus Christ should be an example for all of us to follow. Saint Patrick, pray for us! Christ is King.

@feederofcats We love you, Dweeb! ❤️

Please send your best and most positive thoughts to sweet baby Dweeb as he goes in for his jaw surgery today. Be strong Dweeby, we love you so much 🧡

@CaptFitzjamesRN Nooo! 😢 Wasn't that a sensort strapped to it? Surely whoever put it there knows it collapsed. Was he.....trying to break out?

RIP John Ross' grave. 😭😭😭

The Original Cat Lady St. Gertrude of Nivelles is recognized as the patron saint of cats. She was a seventh-century abbess who founded the Abbey of Nivelles. (626-659) Her feast day is celebrated on March 17th. #StGertrudesDay

@Trail_Cams Oooo big stretch!

Happy Lafayette Day

@aedanusburke South Carolina, always looking for someone or something to secede from.

South Carolina’s first secession didn’t happen in the 1860’s or the 1770’s, that was the second and third times a better government was sought by the people. The first secession was in 1719 when the people overthrew the Lords Proprietors government and worked to establish South Carolina as a royal colony. Part one of the story can be found here with part two below: ccpl.org/charleston-tim… Part 2 can be found here: ccpl.org/charleston-tim…

Don't forget that Saint Patrick is not the only saint whose feast day is March 17. It is also the feast of Saint Gertrude of Nivelles, the patron saint of cats and the people who love them. (Meme art from an original work by Carolee Clark, King of Mice Studios)

In Old English, a cat was called a “cat,” which meant “cat.”