Nice skirts, boys
Screw Burns Night, Up Helly Aa is here! It’s a Viking festival held in Lerwick celebrating Viking influence in the Shetlands and Orkneys, those bits of island Scotland that are practically Norway.
Bunch of lads dress up and parade through the town and then burn a Viking longship. Duuuuude.
I don’t know who does their costumes, but they’re clearly professional and from the same source. The boys look fabulous.
Abe Vigoda, dead at last. Abevigoda.com updates for the first time ever. Congratulations, Howard Devore. A short round, but not the shortest round ever. See you back here Friday for Dead Pool Round 81.
January 26, 2016 — 7:43 pm
Comments: 14
Every day, some new geekery
Well, I learned a new thing today: there is a kind of pottery known as crested ware (crested pottery or crested china). Little tiny figurines with the crest of a city or county, obviously originally sold as inexpensive souvenirs. Ebay is alive with them. They are, not surprisingly, collectible.
I’d gone looking for a Sussex Pig. The wild pig is the unofficial mascot of Sussex, and his unofficial slogan is “Wunt be Druv.” Which has a ring to it.
This crested Sussex Pig is from a mold known as the sad pig, because duh. I was surprised to find pigs described as Sussex Pigs sporting crests not actually from places in Sussex.
But the one in the picture is from Bognor, which definitely is in Sussex, now officially Bognor Regis since George V convalesced there after a lung operation. Where he famously said, in some context or other, “bugger Bognor.”
Oh, also, happy Burns Night. Hope you’ve made the tatties, neaps and haggis. Or you could save time and just throw up in a bucket.
January 25, 2016 — 8:30 pm
Comments: 17
Huh.
I was looking for a picture of a Medieval embroidered glove tonight (don’t judge me!) and I ran across the Worshipful Company of Glovers of London.
Well, of course there’s a Worshipful Company of Glovers of London.
They have a very fun antique glove collection to browse. Surprised to see, though, they only go back to the Seventeenth Century.
If you liked that, you’d probably also like the museum attached to Dents, Her Maj’s glove maker.
Never did find what I was looking for, though.
Have a good weekend, y’all. Don’t get blowed up!
November 6, 2015 — 9:52 pm
Comments: 10
Remember, remember
Happy November 5, y’all. As I’ve explained in years past, Sussex takes its Bonfire Night very, very seriously. So seriously, in fact, that a single night won’t do it. The villages across the county take turns hosting bonfires, parades and fireworks right through the Fall, from September to December.
Somebody out there observed it tonight, though. I’m not sure which village. ‘Twas a dark and stormy night and we thought at first we were hearing thunder, but we could just make out a flash of fireworks far away on the horizon. The finale, though — holy shit, that rumbled through the earth like the apocalypse. I hope nobody got blowed up for real.
It’s a hoot that Anonymous has adopted Guy Fawkes. It’s never smart to dabble in somebody else’s civil war, and Fawkes was all about knocking over the Protestant government and replacing it with a Catholic one. Bonfire Night is written into law as a celebration of hatin’ on the Catholics. Thusly:
‘An Acte for a publique Thancksgiving to Almighty God everie yeere of the Fifte day of November’ ‘be held in a perpetual Remembrance’ and that the day be ‘a holiday for ever in thankfulness to God for the deliverance and detestation of the Papists’.
Heh. Lub dat spellynge.
If you ever have the chance to interrogate a Fawkes-mask-wearing anarcho-trustafundian, ask him why he loves the Pope so.
p.s. The identity of the year’s effigies is always a closely guarded secret. Lewes (site of the largest celebration, as it was site of the most Protestant martyrs) has six of them. One is usually the Pope. Another this year looks to be David Cameron with a pig’s head.
November 5, 2015 — 9:17 pm
Comments: 16
Just another quaint English village
I have unilaterally declared this our new Hallowe’en tradition. It is a 1966 Hammer Film called the Witches starring Joan Fontaine. It is very silly.
Joan Fontaine. Just look at her. I’ve often wondered if there was something wrong with that eyebrow of hers that made it do that trademark thing.
Says the top commenter on the IMDB listing:
In her autobiography, Miss Joan Fontaine, who had acquired the film rights to the novel years before, complains at length about the “primitive” working conditions at Hammer studios, the small size of her dressing room, the awful food and the unprofessional British actors she had to lower herself in working with. We all know that the real bee in her bonnet was that a movie she had basically designed as a vehicle for HER talents ended up being taken over by Miss Kay Walsh, a superb dancer and talented actress who had had an extensive career in films and theatre (check out her IMDB listing–you’ll be impressed). Luckily Fontaine was (to her credit) too much of a pro herself to let her dissatisfaction show on screen.
Well, I don’t know about that. IMDB also says it was her last film. She died in 2013, so she had a helluva long retirement.
The village scenes were shot in Hambleden in Buckinghamshire, but the action supposedly takes place in Sussex and the inevitable stately home was a place called Parham House. It’s now closed for the season, so I’m making this blog entry to remind myself we should go visit when it reopens in the Spring.
That’s right; I’m using you guys as an appointment diary.
November 4, 2015 — 10:16 pm
Comments: 8
Fog.
We’ve been socked in with fog the last few days. The UK generally and our little corner particularly. We don’t get that many super foggy days after all, and I love walking around in it. Sheep and seagulls rise up out of it like another, solider fog.
Not nice if you’re waiting at Heathrow, though.
Speaking of fog, we don’t really know what’s going on in Europe generally and Germany specifically. Official news reports show us a Germany willing to take 20 thousand but not fifty thousand ‘refugees’; half a million but not two million. We haven’t yet seen a Germany that asks, “why must we take any?”
On the other hand, there are rumors that the news is being heavily sanitized for our protection. Reports of violence and arson and much-larger-than-reported marches are squeaking out onto the web.
But maybe it’s nothing, after all. It’s hard to overstate how brow-beaten Germany has been with the ‘don’t be Nazis’ message for the last two or three generations. Young Germans sometimes seem maddeningly passive and soft.
The internet is letting me down here. I had hoped, by now, we would be better positioned to bypass the legacy media on the important stories.
November 3, 2015 — 8:38 pm
Comments: 22
I have a hilarious problem
I have a problem with video games, my imaginary friends: my house is cooler than Skyrim. Check out this photo. Yeah, there’s a roaring fire just behind the monitor. No, I haven’t ‘shopped the bits together.
I’m playing Witcher at the moment, but the principle is the same. Sword ‘n’ sorcery games are stuck somewhere between Medieval and Tudor Europe (well, the costumes in the Witcher look more 17th C, but it’s all of a piece). Big oak beams, brick inglenooks, wattle-and-daub walls. Yup, that’s our place.
I exist in a bubble of what I think of as ‘England porn.’ I work for an historical society, so my days are filled with even older buildings and old documents. My nights in Badger House involve getting sozzled in front of a roaring fire watching history programs on TV. Weekends, we go to village fetes, bonfires and stately homes.
Oh, it’s lovely. Don’t get me wrong. But I often have the feeling something horrible is sneaking up on me while I indulge.
November 2, 2015 — 10:07 pm
Comments: 14
Heh.
So when Karl Marx died — I know this is kind of hard to believe — they didn’t just shove him in a state-funded hole or cremate him and sprinkle his ashes over the Working Man’s Club. No, his friend Engels paid for him to have a big poncey tomb in the froo-froo Highgate Cemetery.
By the 1970s, there were no more burials in Highgate and, somehow or other, that meant no money was coming in. Surely a complete coincidence that the whole cemetery — but especially Marx’s tomb — fell into disrepair just about then and was picked apart by vandals. Now, here’s where it gets really weird — it turns out, groundskeepers won’t do their thing for free. You have to give them, like, money to look after stuff.
So a cooperative took over the running of the place in the Nineties (the Nineteen Nineties, remember them?) and began charging to see Marx’s tomb, with the moneys going to maintenance.
I guess the core of Marx’s philosophy must be: everything is free and nobody gets paid, because the little Marxlets are upset to fork out £4 to make the pilgrimage.
Not sure what is funnier: the guy who’s pissed at the fee because lately he’s doubled sales (a typo, surely) of his Marxist newspaper, so he knows people are super stoked about Communism. Or the picture of all those kidlets taking snapshots of the great man’s tomb with their i-Phones.
Thanks awfully to iamfelix for sending me a link to the article.
October 28, 2015 — 11:16 pm
Comments: 6
Happy anniversary!
Another one. Magna Carta 800. Waterloo 200. Plague of London 350. This year has been a corker. Must be something about decade years.
And now Agincourt 600. The actual anniversary was yesterday, and I’m really surprised how little there was on the news or in general.
Maybe we’re all anniversaried out. Maybe we’re trying not to offend our best buds the Frenchies. Dunno.
Anyway, click over to the website. It’s good.
October 26, 2015 — 8:22 pm
Comments: 8
Time for more silly English street names
Let us end the week with more silly English street names (the photo is a repeat from 2010 — moi, with a found example). For the record, I’d be delighted to live up any of them. It would make filling out forms a sneaking delight.
The article is from the increasingly useless Telegraph. They’ve put themselves behind the lamest of paywalls. You can see the front page always, but you get a certain amount of freebie articles per…used to be month, think it’s per week now. After which — if you’re foolish enough to accept cookies, as I do — you have to spend ten seconds switching over to a different browser.
In the increasingly unlikely event there is something there I want to read, I usually fire up Explorer. So not only is it ever so fucking obvious how seldom there’s a worthwhile article on offer, but when there is, I mentally associate it with the stuttering, horrible performance of IE. Well done, chaps!
Right, that’s enough of that. Good weekend, all! Our clocks change and our weather turns colder this weekend…
October 23, 2015 — 8:18 pm
Comments: 19