Olio*

 

It's time once again to clear out the attic here at "Just Sayin'."  So, here are three sort-of blog ideas, apropos of nothing:

Going Medieval

The list of very old places in Europe I want to see keeps growing.  Just found about the "Ruelle des Chats" -- Cats' Alley -- in Troyes, France. It is about seven feet wide, and the house tops lean into each other.  Guess there wasn't good urban zoning in place back in the Thirteenth Century.  They did, however, place stones along the bases of the buildings so people could get up out of the way of horses.  The structures you see today are reconstructions after the great fire of 1524,  but certainly look old and odd enough for those of us who like this sort of thing.

What If?

What if we had accepted the 1954 election in Vietnam, which chose Ho Chi Minh as president as the French closed up shop?  Would anything have turned out substantially different if we had not decided on twenty years of war instead?  The result was the same, except maybe Laos and Cambodia might have gone a different, much less miserable and violent, way.  

What if the French (maybe we do have a blog theme here) had not tried to claim and conquer the Ohio Country in order to link up their colonies in Canada and Louisiana?  Losing the latter to either the British or Americans later was probable, but they may have kept Canada more or less along its present borders and not have instigated the French and Indian War, which certainly contributed to the beginning of the American Revolution.  Several French Canadian officials did see and express that they did not nearly have the resources or manpower to make the Ohio expeditions turn out favorably.  But the 1789 Revolution and Napoleonic wars would have resulted in Canada's loss in any case.

The Big List

I was thinking about favorite books yesterday; here are mine.  What would you add or subtract?

The Story of Mankind (Van Loon), History of Greece (Bury), The Great Game (Hopkirk), The King Must Die (Renault), Memoirs of Hadrian (Yourcenar), Studs Lonigan (Farrell), In Our Time and For Whom the Bell Tolls (Hemingway), Dubliners (Joyce), On the Road (Kerouac), A Small Town in Germany (Le Carre), Voyage of the Beagle (Darwin), The Wind in the Willows (Grahame), Death Comes to the Archbishop (Cather), Rome Across the Euphrates (Stark), Translations and Selected Poems (Pound), The March of Folly (Tuchman), Translations from the Chinese (Waley), Iberia (Michener), South Wind (Douglas), Raintree County (Lockridge), Treasure Island and The Black Arrow (Stevenson), The Golden Bough (Frazer), Julian (Vidal), Caesar (McCullough), August 1914 (Solzhenitsyn), The Farfarers (Mowat), The Alexandria Quartet (Durrell), The Fatal Shore (Hughes), The End of the Road (Barth), and Circe (Miller).  

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*Olio = miscellany.  A very useful crossword puzzle word.