Amazon Announces Three More Fulfillment Centers; Things Are Moving Very, Very Quickly -- December 20, 2016

See poll at sidebar at the right asking whether we will see "the market" hit 20,000 by the end of the week.

Oil patch. Chesapeake Energy boosts liquidity with $465 million asset sale, over at MarketWatch.

Amazon, Illinois, Michigan. December 20, 2016. Amazon adding 1,000 jobs with two new Illinois fulfillment centers. Later, Amazon announced another distribution center in Livonia, MI, hire at least 1,000 new employees.
Merger. Praxair and Linde will merge, creating world's #1 industrial-gas firm worth about $67 billion.

That was easy. But what was that all about? China "steals" US asset on the "high seas." US shows intense displeasure; Trump joins in. Within a couple of days, China says it will return the submersible drone; within a week the drone will be returned. Hmmm....

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The History Page Ivory Vikings: The Mystery of the Most Famous Chessmen in the World and the Woman Who Made Them

Nancy Marie Brown

c. 2015

Note: there is picture and a caption of one of the kings from the set of chessmen that Nancy Brown describes in another of her books, page 145, Song of the Vikings: Snorri and the Making of Norse Myths, Nancy Marie Brown, c. 2012. I ordered this book sight unseen from Amazon.com after reading her book on the "ivory Vikings."

Now, back to the "ivory Vikings":

It's been more fun than I expected, so let's look at another chapter. This time ... the knights.

References the Bayeux Tapestry which I know well; outlined a book on this subject some years ago.

Discusses the very small size of horses in the Middle Ages. Very small horses, the size of ponies.

The Age of Chivalry (named from the French for horse, cheval). That I did not know; something new. Lewis knights: shields were kite-shaped; similar shaped noted to be carried by Norman conquerors in the Bayeux Tapestry.

The shields, then, date the Lewis chessmen to between 1150 and the early 1200s (consistent with dating based on other pieces).

One odd Lewis knight wears a carinated, flat-topped kettle-hat. It reminds one researcher of an illustration from the Book of Saul in the Crusader Bible, made in Paris between 1245 and 1255.

These same researchers feel the Lewis chessmen must have been carved in a town like Trondheim -- where the carver would have seen a king's retinue. But, in reality, the knights don't help us identify where the chessmen were carved.

Author discusses the discovery of the Lewis chessmen.

James Murray founded the Oxford English Dictionary. His son Harold, H. J. R. Murray wrote the definitive history of chess - it took him 16 years: A History of Chess. Fittingly, a Lewis knight is embossed on the cover.

British Museum has grown to be a forceful backer of the Norwegian theory.

Still exploring the theory that Margret's ivory workshop is under the Skalholt church in Iceland. Margret of Adroit.