From SouthFlorida.com, 11/18/06:
Charting the pilgrims' progressThanksgiving travel can take a lot of the joy out of the holiday. But the worst airport hassles or nightmare interstate traffic jams are nothing compared to the original spirit-sapping journey, which is documented in Desperate Crossing: The Untold Story of the Mayflower. The History Channel special effectively melds dramatic re-creations and well-credentialed talking heads, fortified by mood-setting location shooting.
Desperate Crossings is enlightening, entertaining and inarguably timely. However, it wouldn't have suffered from judicious editing to reduce its bloated three-hour length. A little less would have been more--just like Thanksgiving dinner.
7 comments:
Looking at the accompanying icon/picture with this story, I think that failed attempts to make waffles were part of the first Thanksgiving.
Writerfella here --
That likely is true, since the colonists had no flour or sugar from which pies, cakes, pancakes, or waffles could have been made. Yet modern 're-enactments' of that purported first Thanksgiving feature all sorts of biscuits, breads, pastries, cakes, pies, etc. And the first Thanksgiving also had no media by which to watch football games with stereotypical Native names or mascots. They must have had to sit around and tell each other stories. Geez, given the era and the environment, what could those have been about?
All Best
Russ Bates
'writerfella'
Overheard at the first Thanksgiving: "Do you think we should go get in line to get that new Sony PS3? I know it's a few hundred years and all, but I really want to be first!"
Writerfella here --
And they might have been able to do it, if only they had known about Leonardo da Vinci's experiments in camera obscura, photochemical image transfer, and positive crystalline image retention. The Shroud of Turin is the best known example of da Vinci's handiwork. The most recent examinations revealed that the image on the Shroud is of Leonardo himself! Dan Brown certainly was flummoxed by da Vinci's codex and codices, as all he saw was a supposedly simple 'da Vinci Code'.
All Best
Russ Bates
'writerfella'
Unfortunately, the Leonardo theory is still dubious. See the following pages for details:
http://www.shroud.com/scavone.htm
The Leonardo connection loses virtually its entire scientific underpinning, however, when one notices that the labs are thus only about 5% certain of the extended time span and only 2.5% certain the Shroud could be as late as 1500. They are, after all, 95% certain it was made 1260-1390.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shroud_of_Turin
It should be noted that Picknett and Prince's theories, appealing as they are to the imagination, are not taken seriously by most academic scholars. They are based upon many suppositions.
Writerfella here --
Just as the 'expanding universe' theories and the 'astral body extinction' theories and even evolutionary theories weren't taken seriously, either. But the axioms contained in Occam's Razor always have prevailed as knowledge has grown where poetry eventually fails. Just what has become of the 'flat earth' theories or the 'eight thousand year old earth' theories or even the geocentric solar system theories? Once upon a while, all of these were the dominant schools of thought, and anything differing was not taken seriously...
All Best
Russ Bates
'writerfella'
For every successful challenge to the status quo you can come up with, I can come up with several unsuccessful challenges to the status quo. For instance, what became of the Mormons' "Indians are a lost tribe of Israel" theory or Erich Van Daniken's "ancient astronauts" theory? Nothing, because there was little or no evidence to support them.
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