Tag: #FOWC

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Decoration Days

The tradition of roses and the military go back 2000 years to the Romans. Annually, the Memorial Day Flowers Foundation hands out over 120,000 roses and carnations in Arlington National Cemetery (U.S. Army photo by Rachel Larue)

This coming weekend is Memorial Day weekend, officially an observance to honor fallen soldiers but unofficially the beginning of the summer. We have Congress in 1968 to thank for creating the Uniform Holiday Act, which turned many of our solemn, meaningful observances into convenient three-day weekends, perfect for getaways full of clogged traffic leaving town and home improvement projects that I don’t have enough time to finish because I didn’t start until Monday. On the other hand, the garage could use a spruce up…

I’ve never been able to warm up to Memorial Day, and trying to put my finger on it, I think it’s because of the hypocrisy. To the extent that there’s a typical saying besides “Hot Dogs Half OFF!” or “Beach is Open” or “Maybe there’s a frontage road around this mess…,” the speeches come from politicians determined to shape the idea of sacrifice into a battering ram to justify more use of force. It doesn’t help that every single American war in my lifetime has been about the elite in the US sending the have-not soldiers into places we should not be, but of course that’s not the fault of those in uniform, thank you for your service. (Don’t get me wrong; I would rather have a military than the alternative.) It just too often makes me think of those Jackson Browne lyrics:

I want to know who the men in the shadows are,
I want to hear someone asking them why,
They can be counted on to tell us who our enemies are
But they’re never the ones to fight and to die…

Jackson Browne “Lives in the Balance”

Still, perhaps in penance for not sufficiently appreciating the sacrifice because of politicians’ crocodile tears, I can offer up a little historical journey. Not why America created Memorial Day because all those bot-churned quasi-stories will trace it to the Civil War. Instead, my question is was putting flowers on military graves always a thing? How did other, older cultures used to celebrate their dead? We’re one of the few cultures that only observes this for one day and restricts it to people in the military.

Meanwhile lots of other cultures, historically, set aside time to remember those who passed before us, especially family members.

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Small Countries A-Z

I like big globes and I cannot lie. Still can’t remember the capital of Uganda, though. Kajmeister photo of Kajmeister.

Somehow, I missed the memo on Nunavut, and my globe ended up broken. However, there is a silver lining. We all get to learn some geography.

During April 2026, I completed an A-Z blog post challenge and in this post I would like to share the post links and tell the story of why I chose this theme. As a quick intro, let me note that the A-Z challenge, created in 2010 by J. Lenni Dorner and friends, encourages bloggers to write 26 posts using letters of the alphabet. People interpret this different ways, but my approach has been to pick a single theme, then write the posts daily during the month of April. The hard part is always Q, J, Z, and X. I cheated on X; I’ll warn you in advance.

I wasn’t sure if I was up to the challenge for this, my seventh year in a row. I learned a lot from previous years, and it kick-started a book-writing career for me: Olympics, Accounting, Silk Road, didn’t we have fun on Ancient Inventions in 2025? You can even peruse prior years in my top menu, under “Books & A to Z.” This year time was scarce; I was partly doing people’s taxes, writing a book, and then cruising around the Panama Canal. I decided, nevertheless, to take the plunge, pledged to shorten them, and keep them thematic: Small Countries.

Who could resist writing about Panama while going through Panama?

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X is for Xinjiang

Not a sovereign state (country), Xinjiang is still huge, bigger than Texas, California, Nevada, and Minnesota combined. Wikipedia photo.

Fast Facts

  • Named for: The full name is the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region (XUAR)
  • Capital: Ürümqi
  • Long/Lat: 41 N/85 E, about 13 hours or 7000 mi from CV to the Taklmakan Desert, going west.
  • Population: 25,890,000 or 1.3 million CVs
  • Size: 642,000 sq mi or 10x CVs
  • Avg temp in April: 55 F/15 C (mountainous)
  • Median household income: $10,000 GDP/per capita but income???
  • Ethnicity: 44% Uygur/42% Han
  • Main industries: Agriculture, mining for natural resources

At the end of the alphabet, there seem to be a lot of wiggling and hedging. I am chagrined that I had to include non-UN members, countries not really independent, and now this X. Xinjiang is not a country–not even disputed as a country–but simply a region within China. There is a dispute, but we’ll get to that. It’s simply that there are no countries beginning with an “X,” so either it was live with this region, skip the letter, spell names in Catalan (which uses X), or choose a different theme. I’ll take the penalty point and move on.

At over 640,000 sq mi, Xinjiang would be the 16th largest country in the world. It’s bigger than Texas, California, Nevada, and Minnesota combined. At nearly 26 million people, it’s the 60th largest in population, which is more people than Florida. If it were a country, it would dwarf the rest of the Small Countries on my list. (I wonder if it would be bigger than all combined–let’s see, if I put them all in a spreadsheet to add their populations and …nahhh.)

However, Xinjiang has an interesting status. It was designated as the autonomous region of Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region (XUAR) back in 1955. A brisk walk through the history before and after that will remind us of what boundary states are about, even those giant regions within a giant country.

Historically, Xinjiang spread across a wide basin–the Tarim basin–ringed by a series of mountains, Tian Shan to the north and Kunlun to the south. Scholars are careful to note that Xinjiang was not simply a partial stop on the Silk Road, but the road passed through it, which was its claim to worldwide fame.

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