George Carlin, a Genial Comedian

The most genial comedian was George Carlin. His ingenious pistol delivery of truthful political commentary was unmatched by any comedian before and since.

No topic was off the table:

1.      “Save the planet, save the trees” – the motto of the people who do not know how to save themselves, much less the planet. The planet is fine, it has been here for four and a half billion years; it is the people who are not fine.

2.       Tired of Earth Day and sanctimonious environmentalists, “white bourgeois liberals.” They only care about a safe, clean place to live for their families. They don’t want a wall around the southern border to stop illegal immigration, they want a tall wall around their homes.

3.       Tired of bicycle paths that seldom anybody uses.

4.       Humans have been here for 100,000 years; are we putting the planet in jeopardy? We are putting the wallets of middle class in jeopardy, forced to drive tin cans, exposed to geoengineering, eating fake meat, sweat in their homes, all in a bogus effort to “save the planet,” an effort which benefits the climate change industry.

5.       The planet survived through “volcanoes, earthquakes, plate tectonics, continental drifts, solar flares, sunspots, magnetic storms, magnetic reversal of the poles, hundreds of years of bombardment by asteroids, comets, meteors, worldwide floods, tidal waves, worldwide fires, land and oceanic erosion, cosmic rays, and recurring ice ages.” Plastic bags, straws, and aluminum cans are going to have an influence?

6.  The planet will be fine long after we are gone and there will be nothing left behind of us, “maybe a little Styrofoam.” We are just a surface nuisance in the grand scheme of the planet’s survival.

Seven offensive words banned the genial George Carlin from radio and television. After that, he performed on cable and in clubs where FCC rules did not apply.

Today those words that got George Carlin banned are found in many lyrics of ghetto rap music, music that Americans of all stripes play in their cars and as entertainment everywhere.

Ateneul Roman, a Historic Concert Hall

The beautiful concert hall, Ateneul Roman, was built on land owned by the Romanian Association of Equitation. The association was planning to build a circular arena for equitation however, for an unknown reason, the project was abandoned after the circular foundation was built.

When the land was sold, the decision was made to build an opera house, Ateneul Roman. The French architect, Albert Galleron, did not demolish the foundation, instead he decided to build on top of it.

The problem was that the state did not have money. Enter Scarlat Rosetti, who made a huge donation, but it was insufficient. The state decided in 1885 to run a public fund-raising lottery promoted under the banner, “dati un leu pentru Ateneu.” (give a coin for the Ateneu). Surprisingly, thousands of people bought tickets with the silver coin (4.17 g silver) called ‘leu’ and 12,300 tickets were sold.

In the presence of King Carol I, the foundation stone was placed on October 26, 1886. Ateneul Roman was inaugurated two years later on February 14,1888.

The forty-one meters tall cupola was built with twenty steel arches weighing forty-two metric tons. It was shipped in pieces from Germany and assembled in Bucharest. The most beautiful feature of the building is the twenty-five meters long and three meters tall fresco of various scenes from Romania’s history. The painter, Costin Petrescu, spent five years creating his masterpiece, consulting at times with historian Nicolae Iorga, to make sure that the details were historically accurate.

After the communists took power in 1948, the beautiful fresco was covered with a red velvet curtain, which ultimately saved it from destruction. The fresco’s images of kings, churches, palaces, and other bourgeois symbols offended the ideological sensibilities of the communists.

For decades, the communists destroyed everything that reminded them of the old regime, beautiful statues, buildings, paintings, art objects, books, and frescoes.

Without explanation, in 1966, the red curtain came down. The communists moved on to other places to destroy and forgot about Ateneul Roman. However, the last scene of the fresco, which depicted King Carol II and his son Mihai, was destroyed, and replaced by a frame of communist agitators with their hammer and sickle red flags.

If this is reminiscent of the destruction of statues of American heroes in 2020-2021, the renaming of schools, streets, roads, highways, universities, it is because the destroyers are the twenty-first century communist agitators who are attempting to take over America. That is how communists operate and communism spreads!

 

                                                

The Story of the Communist People's House

The People’s House, described as hideous by the West, now renamed The Palace of the Parliament, stands out as the heaviest building in the world, around four million metric tons, with 365,000 square meters, and eighty-four meters in height. It is about two percent larger than the great pyramid of Giza. The building is so heavy that it sinks 6 mm every year. It is the most extreme example of the communist systematization program (urban planning) when architectural gems were demolished to make room for Ceausescu's grandiose plans.

One of its engineers spoke about the two anti-nuclear attack bunkers beneath the building with twenty kilometers of tunnels, large enough for electric cars. The allegation that the tunnels reach Otopeni airport has not been proven.

It is said that the origin of the building was Ceausescu’s visit in North Korea in 1971 when he experienced monumental buildings and large boulevards. The idea grew in his mind for a magnificent palace when the earthquake of 1977 turned many buildings in downtown Bucharest into rubble.

He ordered an entire area, Uranus Izvor, about seven square kilometers, erased completely. To realize his dream, tens of thousands of people were forcibly removed from their homes, old churches demolished, Brancovenesc hospital, 37 factories and workshops, Mihai Voda Monastery, and the National Archives were demolished and moved elsewhere.

The beautiful Vacaresti Monastery, with its galleries and shady porticoes was gone, replaced by Ceausescu’s self-glorifying palace, a monstrosity with thirteen floors and 400,000 square feet of empty marbled and chandeliered space and a central reception area the size of a football field, adorned with gold leaf and pink gypsum with a five-ton crystal chandelier hanging over the staircase. This is truly an entrance worthy of Versailles.

At the time when ordinary citizens were forced to live in semi-darkness, with one 60-Watt bulb in their cold apartments, this chandelier burned more electricity than two Romanian villages. The palace consumed eighty-five thousand watts of electricity.

The billion-dollar building’s unfinished roof is part of the one-third of the building which remained incomplete by the time the megalomaniacal Ceausescu was executed. Five years under construction, the building was incomplete because Ceausescu visited his palace often and ordered parts of it that had been built (staircases, rooms, decorations) to be destroyed and built again. His palace was five times larger than Versailles. His dream destroyed so much of the Romanian soul and its history.

The People’s House was built around the clock by soldiers and “volunteers.” The chief architect was a twenty-eight-year-old woman named Anca Petrescu who supervised seven hundred architects. The materials, walnut and cherry wood, marble, and stone, were extracted from the Carpathian Mountains. The chandeliers were made from 3,500 tons of Romanian crystal. The wool rugs were so large that they could not have been manufactured in the factory, they had to bring the looms inside, and the rugs were woven for each room as needed.

Ceausescu’s palace was built as a symbol of communist power at a time when the population was standing in endless lines daily for bread, cooking oil, flour, rice, and other necessities. Everything was rationed, people were told how much calories to consume according to their profession, medical care was rationed, medicines were rationed, and people were cold in their apartments and had to endure the lack of water and rationed electricity delivery.

The building was never finished and inaugurated before Ceausescu’s execution on Christmas Day 1989. It remains unfinished today, a symbol of the megalomaniacal communist regime ruled by one obsessed man and his insane wife.

 

Roman Coins, Impossible to Spend

Ostia was the major port hub in the Roman Empire from which the Roman Empire managed trade across the Mediterranean – grain, timber, olive oil, luxuries, silk, and wild animals for gladiatorial games.

We know that Rome traded with the East for spices, ivory, jewels, and other luxuries from existing documents and a wall painting found at Ostia dating from second century A.D. which depicted a Roman trading ship being loaded with goods.

Trading land routes were blocked when the powerful Parthian Empire in Persia cut off established trading roads. Hippalus, a Greek merchant from the first century B.C., learned how to use the southwest monsoon to sail to and from the Indian sub-continent. When he provided a good geographical map of the winds, other merchants took advantage of this opportunity and trade flourished. For forty days in July and August, merchants voyaged from Arabian ports to the Malabar ports in the southwestern coasts of India. In December and January, same merchants returned via the Red Sea or the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean. Trade routes stretched as far as Sri Lanka, Burma, Malaya, and even China.

During the reign of Augustus (27 B.C. to 14 A.D.) commerce with India satisfied the demand from rich Romans who purchased jewels, silk, pearls, and other luxuries. One ship brought curiosities, a man born without arms, a large river turtle, snakes, and a “partridge as big as a vulture.” Roman design export bowls of Arretine ware (Arezzo, Italy) were found in old trading posts in India. More than 120 ships sailed each year on the monsoon from Roman-controlled Egypt to India. Alexandrian Greek merchants provided all the raw materials and luxuries that the Roman Empire demanded. Exotic and rare pearls and gemstones were brought from Sri Lanka.

The Greek merchants paid the Indian traders at first with gold coins. Although the Indians could not spend the currency, the fact that Roman gold and silver coins were always dependable in the amount of gold and silver contained, the Indians used it as store of value in the form of bullion. Pliny wrote that the quality of Roman coins, the same weight and content in gold and silver, made Roman coins so desirable to collect. The King of Sri Lanka was impressed by the “honest traders of Rome.”

The first Roman coins were found in India in 1775. Archeologists and historians at the time assumed that the coins had been abandoned or lost in extenuating circumstances, buried, and forgotten. However, more recently, historians believed that Indians kept the coins not as a medium of exchange but as bullion. It is a known fact that Indian girls’ dowries are composed of gold jewelry and gems which the brides wear with elaborate wedding dresses made of colorful silks.

However, when the silver coins were debased under Emperor Nero, the Indian merchants’ confidence in Roman coins waned and traders used other substitutes for exchange such as high-quality tableware, glass, linen, coral, lamps, wine, and fashioned gems. Eventually, Arabs and Persians took over the trade as the Roman trade with India came to a halt in the third century A.D.

Venice, Built on Tree Trunks in a Lagoon

Romantic Venice was a city built on a lagoon. It was first a refuge for Romans to flee from barbarian invaders such as the Huns and Germanic tribes in Northern Italy during the decline of the Roman Empire which fell in 476 A.D.

The early Venetian settlers made homes from reed, wood, and clay on the marshy islands of the Venetian Lagoon, on patches of dry land. Because their first church, San Giacomo di Rialto, was consecrated on March 25, 421 A.D., the traditional date of Venice’s founding was 421 A.D. Its first Dodge (leader) was elected in 697 A.D.

To build more and heavier structures, millions of tree trunks from ancient forests, alder wood, oak, and larch, were driven into the soft lagoon mud. These trunks were petrified when exposed to salty, oxygen-free water, and formed a base of stony pillars. On top, horizontal planks and Istrian stone were laid to make it even stronger.

It is alleged that 100k alder tree trunks support the San Marco’s Campanile or Bell Tower. It collapsed in July 1902 due to structural failure after 1,000 years of existence and was rebuilt and rededicated in 1912.

There are sixty-two easily accessible islands by boat, water taxi, and water bus but, depending on who you ask, there are more than 120 islands, some of which cannot be easily accessed or not at all. One is an actual cemetery, and another is a place where the black plague victims were housed.

 

Vindolanda

An interesting example of democracy is found in the Roman Middle Republic when soldiers elected their own Centurions. It was quite common to see a 22-year-old Centurion serving on his second or third campaign. Who were the Centurions? Like the soldiers they commanded, Centurions were part-time militiamen. We know about this election from Polybius who described the process.

An interesting example of nepotism and friends in high places comes from Roman times. 

The Vindolanda tablets discovered south of Hadrian’s wall provide an insight into life on the Roman frontier in Britannia.

The posting for a soldier in this particular garrison was difficult.

Tablet number 891 which was discovered in 2017 refers to the earliest period in the fort’s occupation between 85 and 92 A.D.

The tablets survived because they were thrown away into the fort’s ditch, among many discarded military pieces that are now archaeological treasures.

In this letter, the writer asks for lighter military duties for a friend named Crispus. The writer uses flattery to appeal to the officer Verecundus’ “justice and kindness.”

Another interesting find among the tablets of Vindolanda is a diploma from Cheshire issued in the reign of Trajan to a Spanish DECURION by which he is granted Roman citizenship and the right of legal marriage with a present or future wife.

A DECURION was the leader of 10 Roman cavalry legionnaires.

When the Cows Come Home

This idiomatic expression in English refers humorously to an argument without a conclusion, something that will last not just an extended period but potentially forever.

The same phrase has a concrete meaning in Romanian and brings to mind a childhood experience from long ago and a shepherd named Nae whom everyone called Nea Nae, a form of respect, like an uncle.

Nea Nae was the village drunk in my maternal grandparents’ village. He was also the cows’ shepherd. The village had about 10,000 inhabitants with a population density of 215 people per square kilometer. Homes were clustered close to each other with enough yards for an outhouse and a garden.

The village, now called a ‘commune’ (interesting choice of words), was surrounded by pastures and co-operative plots of land, owned by the Communist Party government, and a few individual parcels on which villagers planted crops and shared the harvest with the state (not willingly).

Most homes had a milking cow, chicken, rabbits, ducks, and a pig, with a menagerie of outdoor cats to keep rodents under control. And this is where Nea Nae came into play. The villagers hired him to take care of the cows, sort of.

Every morning, Nea Nae followed the large herd of cows coming out one by one from each yard to the grazing pasture outside of the village, rotating the pastures in various ends to keep the grass growing. Before the sun set, he followed them back to the village, and one by one, the cows entered their respective yards, knowing exactly where their homes were. So much for the bad publicity that cows are dumb. They were smart enough to follow Nea Nae’s directions to the pastures and back home to the right yard. Each home was separated for privacy by tall wood fences, but the gates were opened by the owners, and the cows miraculously knew which yard was theirs.

‘When the cows came home’ was a real spectacle to watch. Sitting on my bench perch facing the unpaved road, I witnessed the cows return home from my grandparents “ulita” (road) many evenings. The cows never fell in the deep ditches dug up for irrigation and rain drainage on the side of the road. They slowly moved on to their destinations. The cow patties left behind were like land mines to avoid at all costs when we played.

Nea Nae, a kind and gentle soul with a well-tanned and ruddy complexion, was already tipsy by then. He went home to eat and then to the “circiuma” in the middle of the village to finish off drinking with his friends. They drowned their sorrows with him daily.

The villagers drank the cheap alcohol religiously provided by the state to keep the masses compliant and working menial and difficult jobs for subsistence level pay.

Nea Nae used to say that he was never going to die in his own bed because he was seldom in it. He slept on the floor partly under the bed most of the time, after he fell off from the very narrow twin bed he owned.

He used to be married in his younger years, but his wife had left him on account of his alcoholism. They passed each other in the village like strangers who only say hello. His only child, a daughter, checked on him from time to time. But the village did a much better job of keeping up with Nea Nae because he was their cows’ caretaker and cows were important for survival.

On the few times when he ran out of money and was temporarily sober, I listened in awe to the petite Nea Nae spinning tales to his neighbors who listened to him mesmerized as well even though they knew none of them actually happened. He was such a gifted storyteller who had missed his calling. The sad thing was that he could not read. 

Under Nea Nae's watch, the cows always came home to their barns.