THESE FORUMS NOW CLOSED (read only)
Fun Stuff => CHATTER => Topic started by: Carl-E on 11 Nov 2012, 14:17
-
I nearly forgot - despite America's habit of moving holidays to the nearest convenient Monday, today is Veteran's day (aka Armistice Day).
I'd like to thank all the vets out there, recent and not-so-recent, for their service.
And remember, "armistice" means the end of fighting. I like that word...
-
From little towns in a far land we came,
To save our honour and a world aflame,
By little towns in a far land we sleep;
And trust that world we won for you to keep.
Rudyard Kipling.
-
Yes. It is Remembrance Day here in Australia, though many of the ceremonies were held yesterday on Sunday.
Australia lost many sons in the war that ended on 11th November 1918, and among those fields of stone that sprout all over northern France are gravestones inscribed with Chinese characters, only memorial to the largely forgotten thousands of men who served in the British and French labour battalions (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Labour_Corps). Both my selves remember them all.
-
And it's Saint Martin's day here in Germany which has nothing to do with any of that but with a guy who shared his cape with a homeless guy on a cold night.
-
One of my favorite "saint's lives" stories, and wholly appropriate for the holiday.
Akima, it's still Sunday on this side of the world. And when I think of Australia and WWI, I always think of this;
-
Because both Armistice Day and Rememberance Sunday were today, we had the morning communion service shifted so that it ended just before 11am. It was quite amazing to see the doors open and a stream of students come in silently to join the unusually-large congregation for the two minutes' silence. Then in the evening we sang Faure's Requiem liturgically and the names of the college's fallen were read. It takes more than ten minutes and it was very, very hard to sing the beautiful setting of For the Fallen immediately afterwards. My friend, who has perfect pitch and therefore was acting as a human tuning fork, took almost a minute before she was able to give us the note, because she was crying. I was holding it together until we reached a boy with my brother's first name and I realised that they would probably have been his age when they died.
-
And it's Saint Martin's day here in Germany which has nothing to do with any of that but with a guy who shared his cape with a homeless guy on a cold night.
Same here, but in the Netherlands it is commemorated by kids going door-to-door carrying homemade lanterns and sing songs for candy. Our Veteran's day is in the end of June.
-
Today for Veterans day I posted the link to the 'Abu Ghraib torture and abuse' article on wikipedia because I don't like deifying soldiers.
-
I was trying to avoid posting in this thread because I didn't want it to turn political, so thanks for doing it for me, Jace.
-
Now is not an appropriate time for disagreements or arguments about this.