holy fuck

it's raining. in june.

this is:

1. not normal
   
2. bad news for fire season

i say again: holy fuck!

you can't make this shit up

Man with bloodied chain saw let into the U.S.; held for extradition. link courtesy of the_steelmare.

i have no words.

our forefathers

i'm not one of those americans who feels a burning need to discover my heritage and thus claim to be anything but american. i'm a euromutt through and through, and i take no particular pride in my lineage (although i'm more interested in the Welsh part than the others, since my name is Welsh in origin). however, there are some very interesting people in my lineage, and i've become especially fascinated by Sir Dafydd Gam (ap Llewellyn), born 1351 in Peutun, Llan-ddew, Breconshire, Wales. (His surname "Gam" evidently meant "crooked;" most sources say he had either a squint, or only one eye. arrrrr.)

a particularly florid account of his life comes from Wild Wales: Its People, Language, and Scenery, by George Borrow:

To Machynlleth on the occasion of the parliament came Dafydd Gam, so celebrated in after time; not, however, with the view of entering into the councils of Glendower, or of doing him homage, but of assassinating him. This man, whose surname Gam signifies crooked, was a petty chieftain of Breconshire. He was small of stature and deformed in person, though possessed of great strength. He was very sensitive of injury, though quite as alive to kindness; a thorough-going enemy and a thorough-going friend. In the earlier part of his life he had been driven from his own country for killing a man, called Big Richard of Slwch, in the High Street of Aber Honddu or Brecon, and had found refuge in England and kind treatment in the house of John of Gaunt, for whose son Henry, generally called Bolingbroke, he formed one of his violent friendships. Bolingbroke, on becoming King Henry the Fourth, not only restored the crooked little Welshman to his possessions, but gave him employments of great trust and profit in Herefordshire. The insurrection of Glendower against Henry was quite sufficient to kindle against him the deadly hatred of Dafydd, who swore "by the nails of God" that he would stab his countryman for daring to rebel against his friend King Henry, the son of the man who had received him in his house and comforted him when his own countrymen were threatening his destruction. He therefore went to Machynlleth with the full intention of stabbing Glendower, perfectly indifferent as to what might subsequently be his own fate. Glendower, however, who had heard of his threat, caused him to be seized and conducted in chains to a prison which he had in the mountains of Sycharth. Shortly afterwards, passing through Breconshire with his host, he burnt Dafydd's house - a fair edifice called the Cyrnigwen, situated on a hillock near the river Honddu - to the ground, and seeing one of Gam's dependents gazing mournfully on the smouldering ruins he uttered the following taunting englyn:

"Shouldst thou a little red man descry
Asking about his dwelling fair,
Tell him it under the bank doth lie,
And its brow the mark of the coal doth bear."

Dafydd remained confined till the fall of Glendower, shortly after which event he followed Henry the Fifth to France, where he achieved that glory which will for ever bloom, dying, covered with wounds, on the field of Agincourt after saving the life of the king, to whom in the dreadest and most critical moment of the fight he stuck closer than a brother, not from any abstract feeling of loyalty, but from the consideration that King Henry the Fifth was the son of King Henry the Fourth, who was the son of the man who received and comforted him in his house, after his own countrymen had hunted him from house and land.

he was knighted on the field that day, by some accounts as he lay dying.

i can prove a direct patrilineal connection to Sir Dafydd from my ancestor William Henry Gaines, who fought in the American Revolution. a monument to Sir Dafydd's descendants the Games family (which became Gaines in the New World) is the only remaining figure from a tomb erected in the chancel of Brecon Cathedral.

as ancestors go, he's pretty damn interesting.