Catholic Herald Digital, Skirmish Magazine

I've had the British Catholic Herald on my Bookmarks toolbar for a long time.  It is the only Catholic newspaper that I read regularly.  It is not a mouthpiece for any political ideology, left or right, being simply loyal to the Holy See and dedicated to promoting the Church.  As a former Episcopalian, too, I have been following the the progress of the ordinariate for Anglicans  wishing to enter the Church with their own traditional liturgy.

But I've only read what is available on the web site.  I was reading columnist William Oddie on the new English missal tonight, and he wrote, "...if you don't take the paper, either online or in print, you should; this homepage gives no more than a taste of what you could have: it's worth the price of the paper for the columnists alone."

I've never wanted to subscribe to the Catholic Herald paper edition.  Subscriptions from Europe by mail can be very expensive.  But I thought I would check to see if they had a digital edition now, and they do, with a promotional offer of a year's subscription for £10, (about $16 US), a very good deal.  So I subscribed.

The digital edition is available from Exact Editions, a vendor of digital magazines, and I noticed that they also offer Skirmish Magazine, "the world’s leading multi-period historical re-enactment and living history magazine."  I've written about re-enacting here before, most recently in my Frontierland post.  You can view a sample issue.  I don't think I'll subscribe, but it is amazing how much re-enacting is going on out there.

The sample issue of Skirmish includes an article on a film about the 1863 siege of Vicksburg, which doesn't seem to me a good battle for re-enacting at all.  The Rebs at Vicksburg were blockaded and shelled by gunboats until they surrendered.  What would you do as a re-enactor, live in a mud-hole and eat rats?  My great great granduncle Lacey Castleberry may have been at Vicksburg, where his regiment, the 46th Alabama, surrendered and was paroled.