Notes From All Over -- The Early Evening Edition -- Nothing About The Bakken -- June 27, 2020

Music:

• TCM: A Hard Day's Night, 1964.
• Steve Jobs: born 1955.
• iTunes: announced by Steve Jobs in 2001.
• And, of course, the rest is history.

US Senate:

• 35 seats "up"
• GOP: 23
• Dem: 12
• five are considered "toss-ups"
• all five are currently held by GOP
• Dems need three to take control of the US Senate; four if Pence remains VP
• followed at "Campaign 2020"
• Politico: 11/19/2019
• Ballotpedia
• wiki 

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The Literature Page

Enemies of Promise, Cyril Connolly, c. 1938; second printing, 1948; new foreword, 2008.

Wow the things one learns.

Now, we come to quarterings.

From the book: "[My ancestors were] a fiery race, proud of their Anglo-Norman descent, their sixty-three quarterings and their position among the sporting Church-of-England "Ascendancy," the landlords of the Pale. -- p. 144.

So, quarterings?

See this link.

The example shown is roughly 28 x 22 quarterings, or approximately 616 quarterings. The explanation begins (I've highlighted the words / phrases that need additional exploring on my part):

In the marital achievement of a man and an heiress, her arms are displayed on his, in an escutcheon of pretence.

A man who marries an armigerous woman, not an heiress, impales her arms.

A spinster bears her father’s arms in a lozenge with no crest or other trappings.

A married woman bears her married arms in a shield but still without trappings.

In widowhood a woman continues to bear the married escutcheon but on a lozenge.

A married woman seldom bears arms apart from her husband though since the passing of the Married Women’s Property Act one can conceive cases where she might wish to display arms suo jure.

It will take awhile to go through all that, but I couldn't resist: armigerous. Oh, that's easy: simply a person entitled to bear heraldic arms.

Which, of course, led to this:

Marriage of an heraldic heiress. If a heraldic heiress marries an armiger, then, rather than impaling her arms on the sinister side of his as would be usual in the marriage of a woman whose father bore arms, she instead displays her father's arms on a small shield over the centre of his shield – an "escutcheon of pretence" – for as long as there is no blood male in her extended family.

I now know what I can do if the Covid-19 lockdown lasts until 2025. Purse an academic degree in heraldry.

And then this, on the next page, "And at Montagu there was an island in the mountain river on to which I used to be hoisted clutching a stinking meercat's skin, lord of a rock on which a bird deposited the shells of crayfish, an Ithaca twelve feet long."

So, what's an Ithaca? There is an Ithaca shotgun (and here) but that hardly seems to be the context, and the Ithaca shotgun was "American," the writer was British living in South Africa.

Later: wow, I'm really embarrassed. I was overthinking this. A reader answered the question about Ithaca. The reader said "it is a restatement of the image of "island.   Odysseus had his home on the island of Ithaca. 

Wow, how did I miss that? I am really embarrassed.