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How to defeat an opponent from the classical era

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The Grand Admiral's staff once showed him a this reconstruction of a group of eight dancers performing an 18th century dance to music from Handel, one of the greatest composers of that era, with bot the chamber orchestra and dancers dressed in period costume, and asked him how he would defeat a navy from such a society. After watching the clip Thrawn replied that this was a society which structured life like a piece of clockwork or a game played by elaborate but fairly rigid rules. " If you are stronger, " he said, " Play the game largely by their rules: you will win, and they will surrender and as long as you honour the terms of the surrender, so will they. " " But if you are weaker, do what they will not expect. Break the rules, perhaps by breaking their line of battle. They will not be able to quickly devise a response. " They showed him  an account of Rodney's tactics at the Saints and Nelson's at Trafalgar. " Like this? " they ...

Book Review: A Knight of the Dragon Academy parts 1:3

"A Knight of the Dragon Academy 3" by Michael Dalton and Eliza Hawk was published last week. As the title suggests, the third part in a series: the authors have finished pretty much all the initial storylines so they could leave it as a trilogy but have also left open the possibility of developing the series further. Lnks to the amazon pages to order these stories A Knight of the Dragon Academy eBook : Dalton, Michael, Hawk, Eliza: Amazon.co.uk: Kindle Store A Knight of the Dragon Academy 2 eBook : Dalton, Michael, Hawk, Eliza: Amazon.co.uk: Kindle Store A Knight of the Dragon Academy 3 eBook : Dalton, Michael, Hawk, Eliza: Amazon.co.uk: Kindle Store Author Michael Dalton described this series as "Pern by means of the Medicis" It does indeed have distinct echoes of Anne McCaffrey's "Pern" series except set in a society more like Renaissance-era Venice and Italy in an age of religion and a world of fantasy rather than being set in the future on an alien...

Music spot for w/c 16th February 2026 - a Star Wars Parody Sea Shanty, Sinking the Death Star

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Answer to yesterday's quiz question

 Well, here is the answer. " Paraskevidekatriaphobia " is an irrational fear of a date. Such as an irrational fear of Friday the 13th.

Book Review: The Empress of Otherworld

The Empress of Otherworld (2017) by Corey Michael Dalton and Bryland Sutton is a comedy fantasy novel, mainly for children of all ages, which features characters from L Frank Baum's " Wizard of Oz " stories, from Lewis Carrol's " Alice in Wonderland, " from J.M. Barrie's " Peter Pan " and some original characters, with some additional ideas more than a little reminiscent of C.S. Lewis's Narnia. If you can imagine that someone had brought Wonderland, Oz, and the world of Peter Pan together into a common story in the same way that the authors of the American TV fantasy drama series " Once upon a time " brought lots of children's storis together, you have a fairly good idea of what "The Empress of Otherworld" is like. The first line, which I'm not going to quote to avoid a spoiler, skewers Hap, the central character as memorably as C.S. Lewis skewered the central character of " The Voyage of the Dawn Treader ...

Notice of forthcoming book review - The Tripods by John Christopher

Many years ago, as a pre-teen, I found a copy in a school library of " The White Mountains " which was the first volume of John Christopher's "Tripods" trilogy. The original trilogy consists of 1) The White Mountains (1967) 2) The City of gold and Lead (1967) 3) The Pool of Fire (1968) I read it avidly, and as the second and third books were not to be found in either the library at the school where my Mother taught and where I had found it while waiting for her, nor that of my own school, I located them at the city library and read them avidly too. In 1984 and 1985, two seasons of a television series were broadcast which covered the first two books of the trilogy. Sadly a third season which would have covered the events of the third and concluding volume of the story, "The Pool of Fie" was cancelled, proving that state corporations like the BBC are capable of making decisions every bit as disastrous as big private companies like Fox, Disney and Paramou...

Quiz question for 13th February 2026

  This is a particularly appropriate question for today. What irrational fear is referred to by the following word, paraskevidekatriaphobia? An appropriate prize (it isn't something nasty) will be sent to the first person to post the correct answer in the quiz thread comments on either of the two blogs on which this quiz post will simultaneously appear at 06:00 UTC on Friday 13th February 2026.