the scattering of Jews to many parts of the world

Still going through that new journal of mine and I can't bring myself to rip out the pages some to me unknown history student took intermittently on the first two dozen pages or so. So where he or she hasn't written on the line, I use it. And I started my handwritten journal entry today on the page after the one ending with that last part, evidently a vocabulary list dealing with what I was growing up was called the Near East, the Middle East being the Arabian Peninsula and its environs. The title today was the written definition of diaspora, and the reverse of that -- that is, instead of scattering now drawing the Jews back to their Promised Land -- is aliyah, which I chanced to read yesterday was engaged in by 200 Jews out of Yemen, courtesy of Israel. Kudos to this note taker, though, who defined Jerusalem as Israel's capital city.


Jews and Arabs get into such a fight about that, enough that most countries keep their embassies to Israel in Tel Aviv (and when I was a kid this was Tel Aviv Jaffa) instead of Jerusalem. (Easy way I figured out to remember Arabian Peninsula geography: Yemen's the heel, Oman's the sole, Qatar's the laces, and Bahrain's the aglets -- those plastic tips of the ends of your laces. I figure you known where Saudi Arabia is; it's the foot.) Got home with the kids last night, and like most young people with money they'd earned by doing chores for Grandma and Grandpa, they were eager to get something for themselves with it for dinner. I was ok with that; we went to Marketplace and picked up three Roma pepperoni pizzas and they each got a bag of chips for themselves and we ate well while watching the latest Once Upon A Time (we have to watch it Mondays because we don't have cable).


"Devil's Due." I've also seen this rendered as "The Devil's Due," but I digress. Fills in the gap between Rumpelstiltskin when he was still human limping home from the Ogre Wars and his then-wife Milah leaving him for it, and finding the presence of a future Captain Hook a convenient excuse to do so. To save their son Baelfire, Rumpel's willing to do anything and promises his second-born child to a healer named Frederick ... I remarked that the actor playing Frederick looked familiar and found out as Martha was watching the episode that he was played by the same actor (Aaron Douglas) who was Galen Tyrol, the chief engineer from the most recent Battlestar Galactica -- yes, I know he's referred to as a senior chief petty officer, but he pretty much IS chief engineer. I guess that's a fine point only a geek would appreciate, but hey, deal with it. That, and the fact my first grade teacher Mrs. Radtke and Captain Kirk share the same birthday today, but they're separated by some decades.


Look, the flashback on the episode was more engaging than the main plot (can't wait to see a flashback on Hades)! Let the Underworld -- or Underbrooke, in Regina's interesting turn on words -- not wear out viewers the way Neverland in season three did. In other news, this morning I just finished José Rodrigues dos Santos' novel Codex 632 (translated from the Portuguese by Alison Entrekin, ISBN 9780061173189), which is the investigation of a history professor into the identity of Christopher Columbus. It's a matter that, despite more than five centuries of scholarship, we really don't know much about. He's not the fire-breathing many-headed hydra that many non-Western peoples consider him, yet the leader of the expedition of the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria isn't quite who we may have learned about in school. I understand it's cool to change interpretations of him every decade or so, and him being dead he can't say much about it.


By the way, a codex is a book constructed of paper, vellum, papyrus, or similar materials, with hand-written content usually bound by stacking the pages and fixing one edge. I can appreciate this. My next ... several books will probably be bound in the traditional fashion, and right now I'm considering where my next should be fiction or nonfiction (the two big divisions I have on my list, right now both standing at six apiece). I have several manuscripts in process, but what to finish, what to finish, or start anew and dash off! But here, see my list (as of last Friday, the books I have available) ...

fiction: Progeny, Legacy, The Carbonari Players, Litany, The Book of Numbers, Refugees From The Emerald City

nonfiction: The Chariot of Israel, And The Horsemen Thereof; Unto The Brethren, The Burning Bush Wants To Be Your Friend, The Persian Trilogy, A Sign Unto You, Judges: That Ye Be Judged

poetry: nor long remember


Any thoughts?


David