The always worthwhile Zunguzungu is on a Teddy Roosevelt kick of late. Here he goes looking for the origins of Teddy’s big stick.
Sticky Meme
January 24th, 2010 · 4 Comments
Tags: Asides
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Speaking of Civilization
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I generally mistrust blogs whose every post is a list of stuff from elsewhere, but this is a nice (big) collection of history lectures you can watch online.Did Alexander the Great Fight the Yeti?
As my man Head 58 says, “I don’t want to live in a world where he didn’t.“Holden's History of the United States
At Hilobrow, for J. D. Salinger & Howard Zinn.The Black Pyramids of Georgia
BLDGBLOG on messianic architecture, by way of Tama-Re, the Egyptian city built by an Afro-supremacist UFO cult in rural Georgia.Sticky Meme
The always worthwhile Zunguzungu is on a Teddy Roosevelt kick of late. Here he goes looking for the origins of Teddy’s big stick.Everything Was Open-Source, Once
This blog post at Attic #42 hits several of my sweet spots: telephone history, KGB surveillance, a plea for open-source technology, and a gripe about PDFs.Secede, Suppress, Survive
Not especially funny as Onion articles go, but it actually could be a TV show: New Alternate Reality Series on Island Where South Won Civil War.The Other KKK
Mystic anti-war boy scouts? Fascist futurist theosophists? What was up with the Kindred of the Kibbo Kift? Behind the Curtain
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4 responses so far ↓
1 Mark // Jan 24, 2010 at 5:12 pm
I was just reading about his usage of this in 1903, and how easily his contemporaries wanted to gloss over the “speak softly” part and jump right to the stick (in Theodore Rex.) Everyone always wants to jump straight to the stick!
2 zunguzungu // Jan 24, 2010 at 6:21 pm
Thanks Rob! Mark, that’s totally right, and while people always get the big stick part right, they often misquote “speak softly” as “walk softly.” I’m pretty sure Teddy never actually says that, and the carelessness of misquotation indicates what you’re pointing out.
3 Rob // Jan 24, 2010 at 8:54 pm
My pleasure, Zz. I dig all your stuff, but am especially partial to “where did [familiar thing whose origin we never think about] come from?” stories.
4 zunguzungu // Jan 25, 2010 at 1:24 pm
Old Weird America, FTW. And this particular story has it all: a made-up fantasy of Africa which turns white, with a little detour into quasi-racialized Irish.
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