Isn't it funny how some things look so much like other things? See this guy here? He's a Janissary . (I love history and often lurk in its pages.) The Janissaries (derived from Ottoman Turkish ينيچرى (Yeniçeri), meaning "new soldier") comprised infantryOttoman sultan's household troops and bodyguards. The force was created by the Sultan Murad I from Muslim sons in the 14th century[1] and was abolished by Sultan Mahmud II in 1826 with the Auspicious Incident [2](*from wikipedia)
This is what you probably thought he was... Ku Klux Klan - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Funny how much the two outfits look alike. Funny how they had some very similar ideas about people not like themselves. Hummm... Oh wait, those ideas are not funny at all. Poor choice of wording.(A SNL joke I always liked... "Did you get that at KKK-Mart?")Here's a tid bit. You may already know this, and I hope you do. We often attribute many of the laws and changes that happened to benefit the newly freed slaves to Abe Lincoln. But Lincoln was politically cautious. It was such a tremendous change for folk of that time to absorb that he was afraid of the repercussions. Most of those original laws can be attributed to this group: Radical Republicans
There is a lesson here. History is fickle. We bend it and abuse it. We twist it to enhance our heroes, to put ourselves in a fresher light. It is important to look beyond the top layer of history. You gotta dig. It's amazing what you find in there.
When left to its own devices, my brain goes off on tangents. This is one of them. It began with a question about a war... the Battle of Avarayr between the Armenian rebels and the Sassanid Empire that just happened to have occurred on May 26, 451 A.D. Yeah, 1,558 years ago. Amazing. One thing led to another until I found myself immersed in the Ottoman Empire and came across the drawing of the Janissary. That in turn led me here to you.
This is my fourth day in a row off. We have no school today. I don't know if the teachers are there working or not. This may be the result of cuts in the budget... we lost several days to cuts. I do not really care a whit why, only that it is so. I take my orts of happiness where I can glean them.
Tomorrow I will return to my countdown to vacation. Whoot! I like it when I have a focus and direction. I like that many of you have enjoyed the countdown. It is fun for me. Today I am thankful that I can share it, and thankful that someone is out there to share it. Hope your day is full of sunshine and something really good that you personally enjoy... whatever that may be.
