Another song for my personal Song Hall of Fame... "Finest Worksong" by REM

I've long been leaning left politically... and this song reminds me of socialist ideals. Woody Guthrie has a big part in this world view, I think. Pete Seeger. Bernie Sanders. George Galloway. Billy Bragg. Clydeside. People with flat caps.

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So, the Russian unrest is resting a bit more now... Here's the summary from the BBC ( Read more... )

Apparently it's a year since Russia invaded Ukraine.

I saw Joe Biden was in Poland making a speech, on the news channels this afternoon. He was in Kyiv yesterday during an air raid.

As a rule, Gypsies profit from non-Gypsies only.

... Romnichals took an early American role as horse traders, and achieved particular success in Boston.

... For a while at least, the label 'horse trader' or 'horse dealer' seemed almost synonymous with 'Gypsy.'

... The colorful wagons used by Romnichals to advertise their presence to any community they ( Read more... )

The language of the Gypsies was the key that unlocked the mystery of their supposed origin.

...the discovery that Gypsies originated in India was made by a scholar who noticed a close similarity between the language of the Hungarian Gypsies and the Sanskritized Malayalam of subcontinent Indians.

... the English word, "pal," (first recorded in 1681) ( Read more... )

Although Europeans have historically treated Gypsies poorly, Gypsies tended to fare better in Western Europe than in Eastern Europe, where they suffered the extremes of racial prejudice, including enslavement.

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Some Gypsies were annexed into America with territory itself: for example, Napoleon transported hundreds of Gypsy men to Louisiana during ( Read more... )

More info about Gypsies... from an internet source.

Although a Persian story has been cited as proof they came from a single caste of entertainers, more recent evidence, including blood-type research, points to a gathering of diverse peoples in the Punjab region of India to form an army and its support groups to counter Muslim invaders.

In the ( Read more... )

I found interesting info about Gypsies on the internet.... I might excerpt some of it here...

Here's the first bit:

The term Gypsy derives from Egyptian, reflecting a mistaken assumption of the origins of the people who refer to themselves as the Roma.

Ethnic Gypsies are the descendants of diverse groups of people who were assembled in northern India ( Read more... )

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