A couple of weeks back I watched the Benjamin Franklin special on PBS(not sure?) for history class. There were two days I could choose to watch it, but I chose the second day(mainly because I forgot on day 1). If I’m being honest, it wasn’t super interesting, probably because Ben Franklin is never someone who has interested me. Although I did write down parts of the episode that interested me. For example, in the beginning there was a scene where two people were playing chess and they talked about the habit of hope, and that of persevering. The main part of this that interested me was playing chess, was chess even a thing when Benjamin Franklin was living?* And if it was, was it popular back then? Moving on. Another thing that I was curious about was when they said that being at sea “ignited Benjamin’s curiosity and hope and his curiosity in science”. What was so special about the ocean that spiked his curiosity? However, I feel I must note that he also reported having terrible rashes(and blisters) from the salted beef they ate during their sea fares**, so maybe all he could do was think about science.

A couple of words confused me, such as Courtier and Candor(I swear I’ve seen this word somewhere else). The exact definition of Courtier is: a person who attends a royal court as a companion or adviser to the king or queen. I know I have seen this word in a couple of fantasy books I used to read. The definition of Candor is: the quality of being open and honest in expression; frankness. This word still bugs me because I cannot decide if I’ve read it in a book or if I’d never heard it before.

Aside from the information the episode gave, the visuals were bland and unexciting. Lots of browns, but not in a cool “look at this old style video” and more in a “I put a brown filter over this because I think it makes it look cool”. I’m not sure what I was expecting from it, but I would’ve liked to see more color. The world wasn’t colorless in the 18th century. There was so much more they could’ve done with the visuals, and the filming felt bleh, which led to even more boredom. Although I did like the different people they brought in to speak about the different topics.

*Chess actually was a thing. I went down a rabbit hole about chess and its origins. The earliest mention of it is in a 10th century manuscript where it details a Baghdad,(also spelled Bagdad, previously called Madīnat al-Salām)a city in central iraq, Historian playing with his pupil. Chess was then brought to North Africa, Sicily, and Spain by the 10th century by muslims. The Vikings brought it all the way to Iceland and England, and are believed to be responsible for the most famous set of chessman, 78 walrus-ivory pieces.

**I’m using “fare” here with the meaning of travel and voyage. An example: Travel.”a young knight fares forth”

Chess History: https://www.britannica.com/topic/chess/History 

Walrus Ivory and Vikings: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/greenland-vikings-got-wealthy-walrus-tusks-180969962/ 

I really like all things true crime, and since the pandemic first hit I’ve been really into murder cases and cases where there is a clear suspect. I always speculate who is the killer even 5 minutes into an episode of true crime, so I was kind of excited when Mr. McDonnell said that we were going to be doing an activity on who murdered the Medici brother, Giuliano de Medici. We were put into groups based off of our Athens-Melos conflict group, and then we were given packets. Before we got into the packets, we were given some background info to start off of. There was an attempted murder of both of the Medici brothers, Lorenzo and Giuliano, but only one was successful. The murder took place in the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore, where both brothers were visiting for the High Mass. One escaped, Lorenzo, and one was murdered, Guiliano. We weren’t given anymore info other than that, and so we went on to look at the packets.

One of the packets had a “coded” letter from an anonymous person(we later were able to plug in letters). I tasked myself with that, and it was very fun to decode. There was a small cheat sheet at the bottom of the page that had four letters that I would not have gotten otherwise, but the majority of the letters were just their number counterparts. I don’t quite remember what it said, but it was something along the lines of someones soldiers being in the city, and no one suspecting them. The one thing I did know was that it was addressed to the Pope Sixtus(Papa Sixtus). Mr. McDonnell stopped us about halfway through class to play a short video told from the Duke of Urbino’s POV. The Duke of Urbino said that there was no way it was him, because he wasn’t even in the city at the time. He also said that his soldiers were in the city, but he had no reason to try and murder the brothers. That obviously made me suspicious, because the letter said that his soldiers were in the city as well, but I told myself to wait and figure out who sent the letter first.

Maia, who was also in my group, was working on the newspaper/s and filling out the general piece of paper that was the “legal” paper. Basically, it was a piece of paper summarizing who we thought killed them, why, and what our evidence was. She then figured out that the only name that fit for the letter was Duke of Urbino, so we put that in. From there it was kind of a straight shot, each group was told to come up with their own answer about who they thought did it, and I don’t remember any other piece of evidence besides a creepy picture of a pierced skull. The entire class agreed that it was the Duke of Urbino, and our teacher showed us that it was found out in 2012 that it was the Duke of Urbino. Basically the whole thing was very entertaining.

A couple weeks back we had a Athens vs Melos conflict debate that was quite interesting. We were each given roles to play and we were told to not share our papers with anyone else. Before the whole debate started I had no idea what the Athens vs Melos conflict was, or even what the workable peace framework was. We were given an introduction about a week/two weeks before the debate, which was helpful, but not really. It just made me more confused. Of course I had heard about the conflict before, given that my dad is a history professor, and I’ve always been interested in that era of time, but I had never found time to explore it more.

I was given the role of an Athens General, which meant that I didn’t make final decisions, but my opinion on things was taken into account pretty strongly. We were given about a week(I think) to learn about the whole conflict and how we were supposed to perform it. Something I didn’t know beforehand was that Athens had captures one of Meloss messengers and then tortured him to get information. Another thing to note, is that we weren’t told the historical ending of the conflict until after, and Mr. McDonnell advised us to not look it up.

Someone in my group was joking about starting off with threats, and threatening their access to other people, but that seemed like a really bad idea for multiple reasons. One, it completely nixed the idea of staying peaceful and not going to war, and two, it skipped lots of steps in the workable peace framework. The workable peace framework is a set of steps that are supposedly the steps to getting peace during a conflict. In the middle of the steps is a “sources of conflict” section that includes Identities, Interests, Values, and Emotions. This center area is where the conflict supposedly originated from, and Mr. McDonnell told us to try and figure out where this conflict originated from. The goal of the workable peace framework is to get to “engage in negotiation”, however if you did want to go to war you would go to “wage war”.

Mr. McDonnell kept reminding us to keep the workable peace framework in mind while we were doing the debate, and this meant that it was almost always on my mind. However that wasn’t the only interesting thing about this debate. The debate kind of opened up my eyes to how important it was to acknowledge what the other side needed. To be honest, I didn’t think much about what Melos would need if they joined the Delian league and paid yearly tribute, as it didn’t occur to me that paying so much money from a small island every year would affect them all that much.

While I don’t particularly enjoy debating, especially on things that I think are a nuisance, this was kind of fun. It was interesting to learn about the Delian League, and how other people thought was the best way of negotiating.

I spilled hot chocolate on my white sleep shirt the other night and I was kind of stunned for a moment. I ran the shirt under water about 5 minutes after I spilled it, but by then it was too late. Thankfully, when I used shout and put it into the washing machine it came out, but it occured to me that not everyone has shout. So I thought that I would write a blog post on how to get stains out of different materials, starting with leather.

My dad has leather seats in his car, fancy I know, but my dogs nails tend to scratch it when the blanket isn’t down in the backseat. One time when my dad was away on a business trip my mom and I took the dog to the dog park, and realized too late that his nails were scratching the seats. When we got home I was frantically searching up way to get scratches out of leather, and here’s what I found. According to https://leathergallery.co.za/blogs/news/how-to-fix-animal-scratches-on-your-genuine-leather-couch, “if the stain is minimal, a simple genuine leather re-colouring balm will work wonders”. But if it is more serious you can, in this order, clean the area, trim loom fibres, apply leather binder, sand down the area, aplpy a heavy leather filler, re-sand the area, apply colourant, and apply finish. That was a lot more steps than what I did, which was just put a teensy tiny bit of olive oil on a cloth towel, and rub in circular motions, but make sure to wipe off the excess oil. It actually worked surprisingly well. Granted, I did it in the dark and with only the cars interior light to help, but it still worked well.

Moving on, have you ever dropped a sharpie on your couch? I unfortunately have, and even worse it was at my grandmas house. I actually left her house before I could muster up the courage to clean it, but when I came back the same year it was gone, so supposedly she cleaned it herself. However, I still searched it up and here is what came up. If you mix one tablespoon of liquid hand washing detergent and one tablespoon of white vinegar with two cups of cool water, and blot the stain and leave it for 30 minutes, it should lift. However I am skeptical, so I looked up another source to see what else people had to say. Another article said that if you used hand sanitizer with a high alcohol content it would lift, which I’m pretty sure I have seen in a Five Minute Crafts video. Finally, one more source said that if you used aerosol hairspray on it, it would, and I quote, “Come right out!”, which I also find very hard to believe. In all honesty, I don’t plan on testing these methods out ever. It would be a recipe for disaster if I made stains purposefully.

During the first shut down me and my dad drove around to look at estates, just for the fun of it. As we got farther away from home, it became more and more like pasture land and fields, which led to us finding Belted Galloway cows. Belted galloway cows, sometimes called oreo cows, are this adorable type of cow that just mose about, as all cows do. Upon further inspection we, my dad and I, found another pastures with these cows, and decided to name them all Wendell. With absolutely no connection to the owner we have had to watch from afar, but we have still grown an attachment to them. Which is why when we saw the sign that said “RIP Radar”, and only 4 cows in the pasture, we were devastated. My dad started joking that he had been made into patties, which got me thinking about which type of cow meat was best.

Angus is currently the most popular among North American ranchers. This is partly due to economics—Angus cattle mature quickly and put on weight well—but also because Angus beef is reliably marbled and tender. Surprisingly Belted Galloways are second on the list of favored cattle. Belted Galloway meat is praised for its high quality, its excellent marbling, its low saturated fat content, and, of course, its taste. The Belted Galloway Society notes that regardless of whether Belties are grass- or grain-finished, the resulting beef is tender and flavorful. Reading about Belted Galloway cow meat is very devastating because then I start thinking about how Radar probably got eaten. Hopefully he just grew old and died.

Belted Galloway cows were first imported to the US in 1950. They originate from scotland, where they were once a solid cow color, but got their stripe after the introduction of the Dutch Belted Blood. Normally Belted Galloway cows are bought for ornamental purposes, however as stated before, they can be eaten. They’re a medium-sized breed, but their carcass dressed weights can exceed 60% of their live weight. Belties have a double coat of hair, which allows them to keep warm in the winter without developing a layer of back fat like some other breeds. This obviously allows them to survive/endure harsh conditions that scotland presented. Because the breed was evolved in a harsh environment it resulted in high disease resistance. They are naturally polled (without horns), which makes them an excellent pet if I do say so myself. Their disposition is also usually pretty calm, and they don’t usually become aggressive, even when penned.

That’s all I could find on them in the short time that I am writing this, but I hope it was fun to read.

On December 12, 2019, a cluster of patients in Wuhan, Hubei Province, China begin to experience shortness of breath and fever. This would be some of the first known people to have COVID, which has killed over 5.5 million and infected 313 million people. COVID is a type of Corona Virus (CoV), which is a large family of viruses that cause illness ranging from the common cold to more severe diseases. A novel coronavirus (nCoV) is a new strain that has not been previously identified in humans. So what is COVID? COVID-19 is caused by a coronavirus called SARS-CoV-2. Older adults and people who have severe underlying medical conditions like heart or lung disease or diabetes seem to be at higher risk for developing more serious complications from COVID-19 illness. On January 21, someone living in Washington State is the first person to have a confirmed case in the US. It spread terrifyingly quickly, and within a couple months it was in Pennsylvania.

When I first found out about it, I was sitting next to Natalie after dance class, and my comforting thought was that it was all the way in Washington. I thought that there was no way that COVID would reach us, but it did. For me, a super scary thought is that A) you can have it and have no idea, and B) the symptoms are the same of so many other colds and flus. Here are the full list of symptoms:

Fever or chills
Cough
Shortness of breath or difficulty breathing
Fatigue
Muscle or body aches
Headache
New loss of taste or smell
Sore throat
Congestion or runny nose
Nausea or vomiting
Diarrhea

While losing your taste or smell isn’t too common, its still could be an indicator for something other than COVID. And even you have COVID, the chances of you showing all of the symptoms is very uncommon. When I had COVID I just thought I was coming down with the cold, despite the fact that I knew about everything that was going on. However, when the lady up the street from us got COVID, she couldn’t move for multiple days because her muscles just hurt. She also lost her voice, and all of this happened right before she was supposed to run a marathon, which meant that now she couldn’t. COVID hit a lot of families, and so many people had a different experience with it.

During the first quarantine I saw a video talking about how ambulances had no where to go because all of the hospital beds were filled with COVID patients. Just the thought of those people sitting in ambulances, waiting to be helped was scary. For a while, COVID seemed to be getting better, I was hearing about less news outlets talking about it, and some places were lifting their mask policy. But I was wrong. Over the summer of 2021 it seemed to peak at 11, 601 deaths per day. It is no surprise that it peaked during summer, probably because people were desperate to go out and actually interact with people in person, me included. But it just shows how devastating the virus is, and how quickly it can spread. COVID is still happening, so make sure to wear a mask.

My brother got a new set of airpods over winter break, and he was playing with the functions and different appliances for most of christmas morning. Previously he had the second generation airpods, which was I figured was very different, if not technologically then at least physically. At one point he mentioned something about spatial audio, and then started moving his phone around after putting the new airpods in. It’s that, that got me thinking about the different types of airpods you could get, and their individual features. It is quite easy to just look up the differences on the apple store or somewhere else, in fact it only took me about five seconds to find the list of differences, however it is less easy to understand what everything means. So I decided to compare the cheapest airpods you can get and the most expensive pair you can get, in an amount of detail that I think will help anyone understand.

The least expensive pair you can get(as of right now) are the second generation AirPods, which cost $129. The most expensive pair you can get are the AirPods Pro, which stand at a whopping $249. Both of these only come in white, however there is a range of unique case designs you can get from virtually anywhere. Starting with weight, it is unsurprising that the AirPods Pro weigh more at a total of 51 grams, whereas the second generation AirPods weigh 42.4 grams. For reference, the Pros could be equated to two Alkaline AA batteries, which weigh 46 grams, and the second gen is around 40 jumbo paper clips. Although, if I read that it would be no help to me at all, given that I haven’t ever held 40 jumbo paper clips, much less one.

Weirdly enough, the second gen airpods have a longer listening time(on one charge) than the Pros do, at 5 hours vs. 4.5 hours. I would like to note that I cannot actually test this information because I do not have the pros or the second gen airpods, so I am hoping that the apple website is giving out correct information. The AirPod Pros have quite a few more features than the second gens, such as Active noise cancellation, Transparency Mode, and Spatial audio with dynamic head tracking, whatever the heck those mean. The pros are actually sweat and water resistant, but that is pretty self explanatory. Active noise cancellation is basically what it sounds like, it cancels out noise, however I have no clue why the Active is in there. Probably for marketing. Transparency mode is actually the opposite of Active noise cancellation, it lets outside sound in. Multiple sources say that these features work best when your pros fit well, but who knows. Spatial audio with dynamic head tracking is a mouthful. tomsguide.com Says this about the feature, “It’s essentially a form of digital surround sound wherein the origin points of different sounds can envelop you from all directions.”. Basically the sound stays in one spot, usually whichever device it is playing from, and you can move around it and hear it from different sides of you, either louder or softer.

While the Airpod Pros do have a couple of cool features, it has a lower battery life and is significantly heavier than the AirPods Second Generation, and are much more expensive. If you want a few extra features, or if you tend to get sweaty ears while working out, I would go for the pros. However if you are looking for a solid set of airpods, the second generation will work just as well.

Today in class Mr. McDonnell asked us how one person’s decision can change so much in history. He gave us an example; what if Rosa Parks had moved to the back of the bus when the white woman told her too. He told us to rewrite a historical event. My first idea was what if Christopher Columbus didn’t “find” America, what if he missed in entirely. But then I realized that someone would have “found” America, and although it would have been a different name, most likely the same events would have occurred. I overheard someone in the class say “What if Anne Frank was never found” and that got me thinking about Hitler.

I knew that Hitler had been in prison, and that is what sparked an idea in my head. What if he was kept in prison for his entire sentence? He only served 9 months of his 5 year sentence, so what if he served the full 5 years? First I had to figure out why he was actually put in prison, and why he was let out so early. The Beer Hall Putsch(or the Munich Putsch) was a failed coup d’état by Hitler on November 9th, 1923. A coup d’état is an illegal seizure of power by a political faction, military, or a dictator. Around 2,000 Nazis marched into the city center but were stopped by a police cordon, which resulted in 16 Nazi party members death. Hitler had fled the city, however two days later he was arrested and charged with treason. Unfortunately, this event had brought attention to Hitler, and it was all over the front pages of newspapers. What followed was a 24 day trial, which gave Hitler a platform to express his ideas to the nation. He was then found guilty and sentenced to 5 years in the Landsberg Prison, where he served only 9 months before he was let out for good behavior. It is said that prion officials wanted to give him deaf guards so that he couldn’t persuade them to let him out.

From then on, he focused his attention on obtaining power by legal means. He went on to do what everyone knows him for, so I will stop summarizing. But what if he wasn’t let out for good behavior? What if he had gotten into fights while in prison, and wasn’t let out until 1928? Would he still have gained such a following to do what he did? Or would he have been forgotten? Here’s what I think; I think that he would have been forgotten while in prison, with maybe one or two articles on him. When he got out I think he either would have given up or his ideas or tried to rally people up again. I do believe that if he tried to rally people again he would have succeeded, because it’s not like his followers would have gone away while he was in prison. However I think that after he tried rallying people, he wouldn’t have gotten that far, and I think he would become just a background thought in people’s mind, only coming up in the local newspaper.

Right now in History class we are working on a project surrounding the Silk Road. It is interesting because when I was in first grade I learned a little bit about the Silk Road and it interested me a lot. I never researched much about it after first grade, but it was always in my mind. I had found the idea of a long path that you could trade thing son so cool, and I still do. I was always intrigued by how the Silk Road was made, and how people made it connect and go through countries, and now I can finally learn about it.

For the project there were two options, one was to make a set of entries as if you are traveling along the silk road and the other was to find 10 artifacts and write up about them. I chose to do the entries, mainly because I like the thought of making my own character and being able to give them their own personality. Something interesting I learned is that the Silk Road wasn’t something you took for fun, the people who were on the Silk Road traded for a living. I always thought that it was something you could do for fun, like a shopping trip, so it was kind of an eye opener when I found out that people made their living off of it. Another interesting thing i learned is that people rarely traveled the whole thing, but Marco Polo is very well known for having traveled the whole Silk Road.

The project itself seemed very daunting when it was first introduced, however Mr. McDonnell is breaking it down day by day which makes it seem more manageable. I am very interested to see how everyone else’s projects come out, and because we are only a couple days into the project I can’t wait to learn more about the Silk Road.

Last week we, block 3, read Isidasi and the Promise of Buddhism. The story itself was pretty short, only 2 pages with large letters, however we had a pretty lengthy conversation about it. The story starts in a city called Pataliputta with two female mystics, Isidasi and Bodhi. Both are said to be part of the Shakya clan, and both possessed of good qualities. One day Bodhi asks Isidasi what went wrong with her life that caused her to “renounce worldly possessions”. Isidasi then launches into a story of all of her previous lives. In her first life she describes being rejected by three different men. In her first marriage she was wed to a wealthy merchant, with whom she did everything for. However the husband couldn’t stand her, said that though she did him no harm, she annoyed him to no end. His parents couldn’t comprehend why their son decided to divorce her, and proceeded to ask Isidasi what she did wrong. Even Isidasi couldn’t figure out what she had done wrong, and so she was sent back to live with her father.

In her second marriage she was wed to a rich man, with whom she only lasted a month with. In her third marriage, her father was so desperate that he spoke to a homeless man and offered him a home and Isidasi for his wife. After just two weeks he said, “Give me my cloth and pot and cup; I shall beg for spare change instead.”. For the first marriage I thought that he rejected her because she was too nice, because she had no personality other than wanting to serve him. However after her first marriage it says “… we have lost the goddess of beauty incarnate.”, meaning that she is no longer beautiful. Because of this you could assume that her last two marriages failed because she simply wasn’t beautiful anymore, or a combination of that and being too complacent.

Isidasi then talks about her next life, where she was a wealthy goldsmith and had sexual intercourse with another’s wife. It was that mistake that warranted a string of bad lives. In her life after that one, she was cooked in hell for a long time, only to be rebirthed as a female monkey who was castrated when she was 7 days old. The next life she was a one eyed, lame, she goat. She was also castrated while being a goat, she was worm-eaten, tail-less, and unfit. In the life after that one she was born as a calf, a red calf. She was again castrated after 12 months of age and then became blind, tail-less, and unfit. The next life she was reborn as a household slave in the street. All of these misfortunes came from the one mistake, from seducing another’s wife.

While all of that was pretty depressing, what confused me was that she remembered her previous lives, because we hadn’t encountered that before. Mr. McDonnell had us all stand up in two lines and talk about why Buddhism might be more appealing than Hinduism to women and people of the lower caste system. One reason that came up a lot was that as a woman your karma wasn’t reflected off of what your husband did, as it was in Hinduism, but rather what you did individually.

It was interesting to learn more about the differences between hinduism and buddhism more in depth.