Category: North America

North America related travel and places

Thule, if you think it over… (Friday AI-Day series #3)

Two distinct prehistoric Arctic groups—Dorset and Thule Inuit—cooperate around a wide ice hole on a frozen landscape. The Dorset figures wear simpler pale furs and use older tools, while the Thule group wears layered parkas and stands with sleds, dogs, and advanced harpoons. Both groups gesture toward a live beluga whale surfacing in the ice hole, which remains alert and able to dive. Multiple polar bears appear as tiny silhouettes on the far horizon, observing from a safe distance. The scene is set under low winter light with long shadows and distant ridges, evoking a rare moment of peaceful interaction.
Two distinct prehistoric Arctic groups—Dorset and Thule Inuit—cooperate around a wide ice hole on a frozen landscape. The Dorset figures wear simpler pale furs and use older tools, while the Thule group wears layered parkas and stands with sleds, dogs, and advanced harpoons. Both groups gesture toward a live beluga whale surfacing in the ice hole, which remains alert and able to dive. Multiple polar bears appear as tiny silhouettes on the far horizon, observing from a safe distance. The scene is set under low winter light with long shadows and distant ridges, evoking a rare moment of peaceful interaction.

This is the first post of this year 2026, and of the second quarter-century of the 21st Century, as I view it at any rate, although few people seem to be focusing on that, maybe they are not accountants.

I obviously intended more posting this year, but the year did kick off in a predictably busy way.

Thankfully there is always AI.  Thanks, or maybe rather “due” to which, whereas before we were all crying out for content, it now seems that the boot is on the other foot and content is crying out for us, like in the Russian reversal jokes. (“In Post-AI internet, content creates you”, etc.)

Clearly not all my exchanges with AI would necessarily interest my readers, so I do need to be selective but in this “Friday AI day” series, of which this is now the third, we at least have the chance to look together with AI (I mainly use Copilot) at some topics.

The topic for today is indeed topical as we are mainly focussing on Greenland, which dominates the news. The aim here is to try and understand better the country and its people but also a little bit a couple of aspects of its wildlife, we do meander off into that at one point, do keep scrolling if that is not your bag, we come back firmly into the linguistic topic and explore a little bit the mystery of Paleo-Eskimos such as the Dorset peoples and their possible intercations with the Thules who are the ancestors of modern Greenlanders.

The main aspect we are going to be exploring below is the area of language. We won’t be learning any Greenlandic, not today anyway, but we are going to be trying to understand what the linguistic landscape looks like and how it fits with other Northern countries.

I will be adopting the simple convention that my questions are in Italics and the AI’s answers the way it gives them, which has sparse use of Italics thankfully.

If you want to find out more, then you can always ask your own AI.  Sometimes minor variations on a question can produce different answers, or the same one, in defiance of Einstein’s maxim, rather different answers depending on the mood the AI is in on a given day, it would seem.

Please respond and let me know what you think.

Continue reading “Thule, if you think it over… (Friday AI-Day series #3)” →

You with the Sad Eyes: A Memoir
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A Court of Mist and Fury (10th Anniversary Recording): A Court of Thorns an...
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Huliganov’s Philadelphia #5 – Meeting Mrs Merkel and a Pink Lady

Original YT playout date: 6 January 2010
Duration: 8:53

Here we see the bowling alley, the Union League, the inside of the Ritz Carlton and the journey from it to the airport, in the last of the series on Viktor’s visit to Philadelphia. It’s always nice to get the chance for an impromptu hobnob with one of Europe’s most important heads of state, that and a pink lady too was enough to go to anyone’s head in an evening’s entertainment.
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Theo of Golden: A Novel
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Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Full-Cast Edition)
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Huliganov’s Philadelphia, part 4 – Philadelphia Ballet

Original YT playout date: 26 December 2009
Duration: 8:53

They took us for a special performance. This is just a taster of this. If you want a special ballet performance for your conference, wedding or bar-mitzvah, get in contact with the Phildelphia ballet.
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A Court of Mist and Fury
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They Left Us Everything: A Memoir
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Huliganov’s Philadelphia, part 3 – Birth of a Nation

Original YT playout date: 20 December 2009
Duration: 43:53

We get the chance to look at the place where part of the British Empire was carved out and given to the people who lived in it, or at least the well-connected ones among them, on condition that they called themselves a different name. In the end all it was was the wrangling of one sort of elite against another sort, as we can see now, but at the time it seemed to people as though at last the ordinary man was able to assert his share of meaning. The sad thing is that to this day many ordinary British and American people don’t realise that essentially they are exactly the same nation, along with every other people that speaks the same language.

Race don’t enter into it, and I say that with an awarness that this is getting posted to huliganov.tv about the first anniversary of the death of that martyr to the excesses of white supremacy in the police force, George Floyd. Politics and structures don’t enter into it. Language is what defines our thought, and language is what makes us what we are. The people who speak one language are in essence all one nation.

English speaking people should never allow the world to classify us by whichever box the masons and royalists of history have made for us. We are the English, whether born in England and speaking with the accent I have, whether born in the US and never having been in England or had any ancestry from there, also those from Canada who are not from the French speaking part. They are the French, which is OK, there’s nothing wrong with that. You can live with them, you can play families with them, but you’ve got the French and the English there sharing a givernment structure and pretending to be a Nation, but it’s only artiificial.

Nations are a neologism anyway. In the past there were city states as well as Nations – nations won out and forced everyine to have a nationality, but it was just a way to put people in boxes and control them. We need to get back to language groups, and the way to be a citizen of the world is to learn a series of languages well enough to function well in other groups and effectively be part of them too.

There is no reason why we need to wait for some official to grant us a passport. We join the Russian nation by learning Russian well enough, even though very few people are awarded a Russian passport on that score. You have to be, like, Kim Philby or something.

So it’s time that we rejected Nation, and opened ourselves to the idea of Languation, Lation, Spation or whatever you wanna call it. That’s actually where we came from, and we may have been happier then.
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A Court of Thorns and Roses 6
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Reminders of Him: A Novel
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Huliganov’s Philadelphia, part 2 – Signers’ Hall

Original YT playout date: 13 November 2009
Duration: 23:00

We go to the place where the bronze casts of the original freemasons who decided that they were “the people”, as in not just SOME people, but THE ones with a capital THEE, and could get rid of the monarchy from the colonies. Some of them were dissidents, but only because they wanted some amendments to the Constitution, not because they were loyal to “Boy” George, the English king, who was considered to have had bad, even chameleonic karma. He was a herpetologist, you see, and his herpes were known all over the world. He tried to tax the colonies to finance his requirement for Zoovirax, so that he could house his chameleons and other herpes in appropriate terrariums, and therefore is considered to have been the first ever international terrarist.

They all signed following the words “yes, we really want to hurt you” in this very hall, built some 200 years later, and in that day they split the English nation into two, forcing the British to colonise Australia instead. The Western part started to be called Americans (even though they were in the process of killing the real Americans, but this self-same thing had been done before in Prussia by the people who made up a leading cohort in the non-loyal Americans) and the Eastern Part plus Canada carried on being the British Empire, and they played cricket and gave up slavery. Officially anyway. Later on America also gave up slavery in the South, battling each other in the process, and later on still they did battle against alcohol producers, the environment and most recently of all someone else’s freedom fighting, as well as turning up close to the end of two world wars, and helping us beat the Germans, who nevertheless love them and forgive them everything.

The leader, Ben Jammer Franklinstein, who was Grand Master of Pennsylvania, even though it was supposed to be a Quaker State and they have oats rather than Grand Masters, wanted all the people to sign, not just his fellow freemasons. He said the following immoral words: “I’d like to get the world to sign, in perfect harmony, this declaration of our state of independency. I’d like to buy the world a coke, and furnish it with ice, and put some lemon in as well, if only just a slice.” however, it was a rainy night in Georgia, we feel, from which that particular soda started raining all over the world.

And such is American history in a nutcase.

In honour of this, Viktor D. Huliganov signs the Treaty of Independence, thus ratifying it and assuring its immor(t)ality. He may not be a freemason like 13 or more of those 33 those bronze figures, but he is all in favour of life, liberty and the pursuit of ice-cold soda.
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The Let Them Theory: A Life-Changing Tool That Millions of People Can’t Sto...
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Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Full-Cast Edition)
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