Monday, January 04, 2021

Alexa, What Is "History?"

      This morning, I was trying to remember who the Yorkists were fighting.  I was pretty sure they weren't "Scrantonites," but were they really "Lancastrians," or was I misremembering?*

      Being in the kitchen, fetching that all-important second cup of coffee, I idly asked the robot about the two (ha!) sides in the Wars of the Roses.

      She told me about Henry's territorial gains in France.  She did not specify which Henry, and so after a brief mental dalliance featuring either the radio/TV humorist or the Governor of Jamaica (he had interesting hobbies and prior experience) seizing an estate on the Côte d'Azur by force of arms, I stopped her and rephrased the question.

      She told me, "The Wars of the Roses were an internal matter."

      Well, she certainly showed me, I guess.

      (It was indeed Lancastrians, by the way, but who had roses of which color, and what's Henry Tudor up to with his, anyway?  Oh, wait, now I see it.  I guess we'd need a some kind of donkey-elephant-horse's ass chimera to pull that off in this country.)
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* This makes more sense in light of my father's long-term employment at RCA's Marion, IN picture tube plant.  Other centers of tube manufacturing were in Lancaster and Scranton, PA and there was both internal competition and personnel transfers between all three.  So I heard a lot of dinner-table complaint about  "Scrantonites," and "Lancastrians" when I was young and somehow it got a bit tangled up with world history.

2 comments:

Earl said...

White rose - Stuarts Red rose either wine or York. Background for Game of Thones, no dragons.

Stuart (from uk) said...

War of the roses still exists. However it's now confined to cricket matches between Yorkshire and Lancashire.