A Jester in the King's Court

Since I can’t always be funny (as my last post shows rather clearly), I’ve decided (thanks to urging by a certain man named Javier) that I should post my daily Wikipedia jaunts on here. A Wikipedia Jaunt (now capitalized because I just made it a proper title…before that ending of last sentence it was under review), or WJ, is when you start with one topic, and by clicking links to read up on other topics, knowing that on Wikipedia, about 93% of what you read is accurate, and the rest would like to be. So….here is what I learned today….

Topic: Wikipedia Jaunt 1

As I opened Wkipedia today, I saw a posting on Hurricane Irene-Olivia, which in 1971 became the first tropical storm to cross from the Caribbean (pronounced “Care-A-Bee-ian) into the Pacific (pronounced “Pa-sif-ik”). This storm started in the Windward Islands and ended by drenching Yuma, Arizona.

This led me toward the Windward Islands (because it sounded like something out of a Ledged of Zelda game called Wind Waker…yeah, I’m an adult), which as it turns out are part of the Windward Antilles, as opposed to the Leeward Antilles, which are called that because they are down wind from the predominate trade winds of the area.

So I thought I should check out the Leeward Antilles, which led me to find out that the population of the Netherlands’ territorial island of Saba increases yearly by about 300 when their medical college is in session, and that the British Virgin Islands use the US dollar as their primary form of currency. Also, Anguilla is new to the tourism business and usually only sees 25K tourists a year, the majority of which are ecotourists.

All of this Antilles reading made me wonder where the name came from…and it turns out its from “Antilla” which was a postulated island or archipelago in the west during the period of exploration (which I think was a very cool time to live in for reasons that I shall probably address in a real blog soon). Antilla was associated with the ancient concept of The Isle of the Blest, which was the land on the far west that divided the world of man from the River Oceanus, which fed into the world ocean. The isle of the Blessed, also called the Fortunate Isles, were the lands where the heroes of ancient times were thought to be received into rest by the gods. This view combined the islands of Antilla with the Elysian Fields of Greek Myth and was probably held to late in the Classical period.

Ok…clearly this can lead me to Ancient Grecian myth….or the Canary Islands, another suggested referent for the Isles of the Blessed….but I’ll end the Jaunt here….