• The Daily Telegraph
• Le Figaro
• The New York Post
• L’Orient-Le Jour
• L'Osservatore Romano
• The Irish Times
• Conservative Home
• The Jewish Chronicle

• FAZ / Eng.
• NZZ / Eng.
• Magyar Nemzet
• ABC.es
• The Catholic Herald
• Il Foglio
• London Playbook
• Financial Times

France

Mitteleuropa

Knickerbockers

Argentina

The Levant

Africa

Cape of Good Hope

Netherlands

Scandinavia

Québec

India

Muscovy

Germany

When Christopher C. was a wee lad, his daddy would bounce him on his knee and tell him of an island in the Indian Ocean named Socotra where the streets were paved with gold. Lately, after reading the current price of gold on the Paris market in the Yemen Financial Observer, Chris decided to launch an amphibious assault on the island and seize it for himself. Above, C. is seen leading what Chris Moreland called “the most unimpressive invasion force the world has ever seen”.

Once the expeditionary force made landfall, transportation by big ole Arab rowboat was considered logistically unsound, so the crack squad headed inland towards the capital of Socotra by means of a handy Japanese pick-up truck. Socotra, where the streets are paved with gold!

Unfortunately, like everything else his father ever told him, it was a lie. Unless ‘gold’ is Arabic for ‘dirt’ and ‘paved’ is Arabic for ‘unpaved’, which would make Arabic a dashed silly language.

Disappointed with his anticlimactic conquest, Chris returned to the mainland where his rented room awaited. There, he picked up a bottle of non-alchoholic beer, cursed the Gods, and questioned whether life really had any meaning after all.

A while ago, we reported on the planned expansion of St. Nersess Armenian Seminary, the only Armenian seminary outside Armenia over in New Rochelle. Unfortunately, the seminary’s uppity neighbors got their proverbial knickers in a twist over the expansion and have pressured the City Council to deny planning permission (something that sounds very familiar to any Thorntonian; I guess the City of New Rochelle just doesn’t want outstanding educational institutions). Because of this the Board of St. Nersess met and decided it had to move elsewhere, so anyone who has a cool $15,000,000.00 to spare: it’s yours!

The house, on Stratton Road near Iona Prep, was built in the 1920’s by none other than William Randolph Hearst. He never lived there though, but just had it on hand for friends of his who were visiting New York and needed a place to stay. The building, to my recollection, is in fairly good condition, but the 8.65 acres it sits on seems rather small when you’re actually there.

Back in school we had some random day off that no other school had (Founder’s Day, I believe) and so Lucas de Soto and I, ever the adventurers, decided to pop over to the Armenian seminary to see what it was all about. (A Presbyeterian and a Catholic walk into an Armenian Seminary… sounds like the set-up for a bad joke). We turned up unannounced and everyone there was terrifically friendly. The secretary offered us cake, showed us around a bit and then introduced us to “the greatest expert on Armenian history ever” who was leaving for Philadelphia in under half an hour but would no doubt take a few minutes to answer any of our questions (unfortunately I’ve forgotten his name). He too was very friendly indeed and answered all our questions and told us about Armenia, the Church, the Armenian Patriarch of Jerusalem, and about the Divine Liturgy and how it differs from the Mass. We also got to chat with a few of the seminarians who were mulling about the kitchen. The historian even offered to teach us the Armenian language for free, and I was tempted to take them up on it. Lucas and I found it quite fascinating; well worth a day off from school.

Strange as it may seem, Remembrance Day is perhaps my favorite time in the entire British year. It is somewhat surprising that despite the cultural revolution of the past few decades, despite the intellectual, academic, and political assaults on tradition, history, the military, and the time-honoured institutions of this realm, Remembrance Day remains and is widely commemorated. Three times this Remembrancetide I had the opportunity to partake in the annual two minutes silence: first, on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month (Remembrance Day itself), then the following evening while watching the unbeatable Festival of Remembrance at the Royal Albert Hall on television, then the following morning at the Remembrance Sunday chapel service, which was followed by the joint service of town and gown at the War Memorial.

It is my firm belief that you can discern a great deal about a country from its ceremonial culture. From the naked paganism of Nazi Germany and the Stalinist banality of Soviet Russia to the splendid majesty of Great Britain and the restrained republicanism of the United States, rituals are not empty acts, but are indeed indicative of an inner soul, an essence.

Most of our readers will not be familiar with the workings of Remembrance Day in Britain. The climax to a typical Act of Remembrance is the two minutes of silence in remembrance of and thanksgiving for the great sacrifice made during all wars. Usually, there are two particular brief epigrams of sorts read, one before and one after the two minutes of silence.

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years contemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.
We will remember them.

When You Go Home,
Tell Them Of Us And Say,
For Their Tomorrow,
We Gave Our Today.

The two minutes of silence is one of the few remnants of dignity in this land. Two minutes in which the entire nation comes to a halt. Railway stations, public streets, shops, offices, even the busy stock exchange come to a complete halt as we stand, silently, to remember uncountable deeds and intangible sacrifice.

America, of course, does not have the culture of Remembrance Day, but celebrates the day as Veterans Day instead. The United States was exposed to the massive slaughter of modern warfare a full fifty years before the Great War so shocked Europe. To this day, no war has claimed the lives of as many Americans as did the Civil War, which led to the creation of Memorial Day. One of the many blessings bestowed upon our country is that we have never had to suffer on such a great scale in our own homeland again, while Europe has witnessed warfare as recently as a few years ago in the Balkans.

The Balkans was where it all started, after all, on that fateful day in Sarajevo, June 1914. The greatest reflection I have read this Remembrance Sunday was Gerald Warner’s column printed in the latest Scotland on Sunday. It is well worth registering with scotsman.com for. Read it.

New York University is a very odd fish. It was founded (as the University of the City of New York) in the 1830’s as an academic refuge for the city’s Dutch Reformed and Presbyterians opposed to the very Episcopalian flavor of Columbia College, though it was never officially aligned to either denomination. Around the turn of the century when Columbia moved uptown to a brand spanking new beaux-arts campus NYU decided to follow suit by moving even further uptown and building their own classically-inspired campus. They kept their buildings in Greenwich Village, however, and by the 1970’s found the Bronx campus (University Heights) to be a burden on the old chequebook and sold it to the City.

In the meantime, NYU was known (and pretty much had been since it was founded) as a “commuter school”, which is to say that most (though not all) of its students were from around the metropolitan area who travelled from home to school and back again. This has completely changed in the 1980’s, as graduates who had done well for themselves (and other philanthropists) began donating large sums to NYU and it remade itself in the image of the normal residential university (again, like Columbia). Of course, having forsaken their proper campus they were stuck with a number of buildings around Greenwich Village and so pretty much began to buy up any building of any size that came onto the market in the neighborhood. [A commenter on Curbed.com says that NYU is probably the largest landowner in the City after Trinity Church. The largest landowner is actually the (Catholic) Archdiocese of New York, followed by Columbia University (which happens to own Rockefeller Center, among other things). After that, I’m not sure but NYU probably has more land, while I would think Trinity Chuch probably has higher returns for the particular land they own.] NYU is now an almost entirely residential university in that even if its students are not living in dorms they are almost certainly not living with their parents nearby. Indeed, the proportion of native New Yorkers has fallen while those from other states and countries has risen markedly.

I’ve had a fair amount of experience with NYU. According to facebook.com I have seven friends there, though one spent his freshman year there and wisely thought “This place is for suckers” and transferred to Georgetown, while another friend (now graduated) never bothered to join the Facebook. Anyhow, in my final year of high school I had a good friend who was a year older than me (a Holy Child girl, troublemakers all) who went to NYU. Most weeks I would head down one afternoon after school (always Mondays actually; I’m a creature of habit and it suited her schedule) and have dinner and, to use the parlance of our times, “hang out” and “chill” until heading back up to yonder Westchester around 9 o’clock. As you can imagine, one met a fair number of NYUers during such perambulations and I have to say, though the young lady in question did have a pretty roommate from Connecticut (a ‘Darienfrau’ as Igby Slocum would say, though she was actually from Guildford), I not even once met a single person with whom I might want to voluntarily spend any of my time. They were, to a man, boring, self-obsessed nitwits, completey devoid of anything interesting. Though (I’m told) a number of Columbians were irate at me for having described their academy as “a fallen institution”, fallen though it is Columbia is still better than NYU. I have not nearly spent the same amount of time at Columbia as I have down at NYU and yet I’ve met interesting people from there. Also, my mother works at Columbia and though she likes to tell many hilarious stories of the freaks she has met amongst the studentry, she also tells of a number of very kind, nice, and interesting students she has had the occasion to meet. I very much doubt this would be the case if she was working at NYU. The most interesting people at NYU are actually the security guards who, although they all take their jobs terribly seriously (and rightly so), are usually much better for some decent chat than the students. Of course, Fordham students are superb and beat NYUers and Columbians any day of the week.

But who, then, are the other NYUers whom I count amongst my friends? They still manage to be interesting folks. Strangely enough none of the eight Violets I know are friends with one another. In addition to the Holy Child girl and the wise Georgetown transfer, there is 3) a fellow Thorntonian (guy), 4) a Bronxvillian guy, 5) a hilarious girl from Larchmont whom I’m good friends with, 6) and 7) two girls, both Californian, I know from the summer I spent at Oxford, and 8) a girl who is a member of my Upper East Side circle of friends. The reader will note the preponderance of females. NYU is very much a feminine university these days; I mean, heck, their athletic nickname is the Violets after all, not the Fighting Irish. Of the guys I know, one’s only their because he’s exceptionally talented in the realm of film, another knew well enough to transfer away from NYU, and the third is a fellow Thorntonian (Thorntonians are known for either surviving in adverse situations or cracking up and going loony, so that accounts for his survival to date). Every NYU girl complains about the lack of available men since NYU predictably attracts a large number of men of… err… “alternative lifestyle options”. Naturally this creates a situation, like the Anglican priesthood, where being a male at NYU one might automatically be tarred with suspicions of being “of an alternative lifestyle” and thus a very large proportion of self-respecting young men are deterred from even applying.

But back to Curbed. So NYU is building yet another dorm and many are complaining about their precious neighborhood being turned into the quarter for spoiled students. Ah well. I’m not terribly troubled. Greenwich Village to me is part of Manhattan’s vast underbelly, a term I use only half abusingly. It’s just that most places below Gramercy Park seem either too crowded or too weird for me to live. It’s not that the underbelly is ugly, there are some beautiful buildings and some quite charming parts. But as the Brits say about France, “lovely place, shame about the people”. And you know, if you go for the SoHo/Chelsea/Village scene, then fair enough. Enjoy it all you like. I’m just an Upper East Side kinda guy myself.

Much was made over the recent start of the hunt season here in the United Kingdom in spite of Comrade Blair’s ban, but New Yorkers mount their horses a little earlier. Above, a few members of the Windy Hollow Hunt in front of Old Glory.

The Rombout Hunt, in the Hudson Valley.

This little fellow from Long Island’s Smithtown Hunt wants out so he can hunt down that dagnabbed fox!

The Smithtown Hunt in the field.

Of course not all things stay the same. This year Orange County’s Windy Hollow Hunt got a lady to perform the annual Blessing of the Hounds.

One of my favorite New Yorker cartoons has to do with the Blessing of the Hounds. I can’t find it online, so I’ll wait until I’m home and then scan in it for your enjoyment.

Below, the Genesee Valley Hunt.

Via the Whapsters, we bring you this rather nifty shot of the Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe still under construction in the Diocese of LaCrosse, Wisconsin.

Previously: Patroness of the Americas

His Imperial Majesty Wilhelm II, the German Emperor, and His Excellency Mr. Theodore Roosevelt, President of the United States of America.

I’ve never heard of nor seen this house before. Unfortunately NYPL titles it merely as “A Westchester County Country House”. Not very helpful. I wonder if it’s still around. I rather like it. It has a nice simple, warm, cozy feel to it.

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