The Rebel Black Dot Song of the Day
Meaghan Smith, "It Snowed" via iTunes, (free) Holiday Sampler (T.L.A.M.)

Commentary: I thrilled when I rolled up my shade this morning & gazed out the window upon a world unexpectedly blanketed in white beauty. Gone was the pre-spring, half-dead ugliness of snowless winter, returned was the gleaming

"It snowed, it snowed, it snowed last night,
Everything is sparkling with diamond light…"

Operation AXIOM
One hundred twenty-nine years ago to the day, 13 March 1884, the Siege of Khartoum began. An Egyptian force under the British general "Chinese Gordon" (Wayback Machine, Parts I & II) was besieged at Khartoum, the capital of the Sudan, then an Anglo-Egyptian protectorate, by the jihadist forces of Muhammad Ahmad, the self-proclaimed "Mahdi." The Mahdist forces were the nineteenth century analog of such latter-day nightmares as the Taliban or al-Shabaab. The siege was to last for over three hundred days, during which the Liberal Gladstone government first refused & then delayed in sending a relief expedition. Two days before the relieving, khaki-clad Redcoats arrived, the Mahdi's army stormed the city & overwhelmed Gordon's half-starved defenders, massacring every man Jack of them. Gordon became a martyr of the empire, though it would take another fourteen years to completely reconquer the Sudan & smash the forces of the Mahdi & his successor, the self-proclaimed Caliph (Khalifa), Adballahi ibn Muhammad. The Siege of Khartoum, one hundred twenty-nine years ago to-day.

The Mahdist revolt has been on my mind of late as I recently saw the 1939 motion picture of The Four Feathers, a far-superior film to the revisionist 2002 motion picture. I must eventually read A. E. W. Mason's original novel, The Four Feathers.