Tag: starks

The North, Hardhome and Season Five of GoT

It has been a long time since I wrote anything about ASOIAF/GoT.  And there’s only a couple of weeks until Season 4 is out on DVD/Blu-Ray, and a couple of months until Season Five starts.

So Kelly and I recently watched the “Game of Thrones: A Day in the Life” special and they specifically talk a bit about Hardhome.  I have been thinking about what might be going on there in Season Five.  Sure, there will be lots of other stuff going on, but the North is the region that I think is my favorite, and so anything involving the North, including the Nights Watch and the Wildlings, is sure to get my attention.*

So here is what I think might happen with all things North.

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The Great Blizzard Freakout of 2015

You may not know this (I am assuming a lot of Amish read our blog), but we are going to get a lot of snow very soon.

Yes, clearly we are already headed for the history books on this one and it hasn’t even happened yet.  I think we have already broken records, mostly in regard to media hype.  “I’ll take apocalyptic references to the Blizzard of 1978 for $500, Alex.”  The French Toast alert system is so far into red that it’s gone way into the infrared spectrum.    Everywhere I go, it’s Blizzard Freakout mode, and the handful of people being reflective are talking about the big one of 1978.  It’s like I am attending a history conference about that massive weather event of my childhood.

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A gentle reminder that this is New England in winter

Although we are WAY under our usual quota for snow so far this season, winter has decided to let us know that it is still here, and that all those warnings from the Starks were not for nothing.

This morning when I got up, the temperature according to the little weather tool on the kitchen computer was -3 degrees Fahrenheit, and the wind chill was somewhere between -20 and -25 degrees, depending on just how hard the wind was blowing.  It would be white walker weather, except for the lack of snow.

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Heraldry, history and ASOIAF/GoT

As dumb as it sounds, one of the things I love about George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire is the heraldry.  Specifically, the house sigils, as they are more commonly known, are some of the most iconic things about the show.  Of course Martin based this on medieval heraldry practices that, at least technically, still exist to this day.  Plenty of families have coats of arms, as do cities, towns, universities and colleges, etc.  And the central part of any coat of arms is usually a shield of some sort.  In the world of ASOIAF these tend to be fairly simple (the direwolf of House Stark, both the HBO version and book-ish version) although a few do get more complex (like House Tarth, HBO version and book-ish version).   And GRRM goes to a lot of trouble to describe the sigils of a great many houses in ASOIAF.  To give you an idea of the sheer amount of creative calories burned, check out the Heraldry page at the Citadel website and this awesome Westeros map some uber-geeks put together.  I totally geeked out about both of those.

Well, Kelly and I decided a while back to make our own sigil (in true geek fashion) and now I will share it with the world via the Intertubes.  A lot of people did something similar with the “Join the Realm” promo web page done by HBO for Game of Thrones.  But I wanted to do our own, with symbols that meant something to both Kelly and me.

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