Americans? Claim fake but supposedly glamorous Celtic ancestry? Surely not!

John McCain probably not really descended from Robert the Bruce...or Charlemagne.

I don't know which is funnier--the British genealogists who have apparently never heard of this popular American pastime of "tracing your roots" back to European royalty (I had a housemate who claimed to be able to trace his family back to the Angevin kings--which begs the question of whether one would really want to be associated with them) or the genealogist who thinks that Robert Bruce's destruction of Stirling Castle was some kind of fraternity prank. He may know a good deal about researching family trees, but I gather he knows very little about the Scots-English wars...

yikes...

Wow! that is one chewed up footy field.

That's one of the fields that Neta's league plays on. I'm not sure I'll even be able to see the line to run along...

annual review

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losing weight

...is so amazingly hard to do. ( cur for whingeing )

incredibly cool!

Many thanks to my friend Nick for this link to The Empire That Was.

A Russian photographer in 1907 perfected a technique of taking three black and white photos through red, green, and purple colored lenses and then projecting the developed images back through colored lenses and combining the three projected images onto a screen. Did you get that? Anyway, they were the world's first color photographs. He was hired by Czar Nicholas II to take photographs of the Russian empire and they are quite interesting--color photographs decades before they were common.