Hail horsecow!
I am equal parts fascinated and frustrated by the archaeology of pre-Roman Britain. Frustrated because (apologies to the silly hippies that dance around Stonehenge twice a year) we’ll never know much about them other than the glimpses we get from their garbage dumps. Fascinated because what we do know is often really very weird.
Like this. There was a people in southern England in 400BC who dug pits in the chalk to store food (it would keep it slightly cool). After a couple of years, they would abandon one pit and dig another. The abandoned pit would be filled in with…stuff. Archaeologists describe them as offerings to the gods, because that’s what archaeologists always do.
Some of the pits held the usual. Whole pigs. Dogs. Goats. A woman with her throat cut. Same old, same old.
Then there was the six-legged sheep. The horse with cow horns. The cow with horse jaw. The headless sheep with the cow skull on its butt.
These were frankensteined together from multiple animals. They know the animals were intact when they were buried, with skin on, because the bones are anatomically placed, correctly articulated. It’s probably too much to hope they were stitched together into fabulous monsters. Is it? Isn’t it?
I’d like to think these weird people are my ancestors, but (like native Americans) we’re talking many, many genetically and culturally distinct peoples.
Nah, these ones are mine.
July 21, 2015 — 10:12 pm
Comments: 12
A short, sad story with no illustration
I took a late nap tonight, so let my post be a short, sad story.
We live near several beaches popular with tourists in the Summer. Over the weekend, a young woman drowned at one of them. The local paper ran a couple of lines on it: thirty year old woman, got into trouble in the water and drowned, was airlifted to the hospital, all attempts to save her were in vain. End of.
Here’s what actually happened: a Muslim family came down from London for the day. I doubt any of them could swim. The young woman went into water in her Muslim regalia — I’m not sure if it was the full niqab, but certainly a large, loose, heavy skirt. When it got soaked, the weight of it pulled her under the water. Her female relatives were afraid to come after her and the men of the party — because of awkward prohibitions about touching — stood helplessly by her body in the water until rescuers arrived.
By which time it was impossible to save her. Though the police tried, giving the family the additional upsetting spectacle of seeing her largely disrobed and handled by a strange man in a public place.
This is not the first time this exact thing has happened on this same beach.
So: the papers are not telling you things because they are desperate not to offend.
And: the group they are desperate not to offend really, really needs to know this thing, at risk of drowning.
This is all kinds of messed up.
July 15, 2015 — 9:51 pm
Comments: 12
Oh, boo.
Ah. Patrick Macnee has died. He was 93.
And before you ask, no. No one had him in the Dead Pool.
His first acting role was in a school play with fellow pupil Christopher Lee.
My mother let me stay up super late to watch the Avengers when I were a lass. (In a bid for Mom of the Decade, she also let me stay up super late to watch Frankenstein and Psycho). To this day, the harpsichord makes me feel all tingly.
I bought several seasons on DVD a few years ago and made Uncle B watch them with me. They are even sillier than I remembered.
But a lot more realistic than I ever knew back then…
June 25, 2015 — 8:19 pm
Comments: 17
Bruce Jenner is bustin’ out all over
Lion skin cloak? Check. Knobbly club? Check. Tits? Ohhhhh…wait a second.
We went to a stately home for a delphinium festival today (when you hook up with a gardener, marvelous things happen). This was on the grounds. It’s got all the usual accoutrements of a classical Hercules, but this is clearly a chick.
Well. Wikipedia tells me this is Omphale queen of Lydia and not quite a goddess. Hercules accidentally biffed someone and was sentenced by the Oracle to be her slave for a while, for some reason.
Unfortunately, none of the central texts survive in the original, so we are left piecing the story together from bits of art and literary allusion. The important thing is, this was a period of rich cross dressing for Hercules and Omphale.
*shrug*
In a perfectly unrecognizable form, the story of Hercules and Omphale was the subject of MST3K Experiment 502: Hercules. You can watch it in its entirety here.
Because I am all about the cultcha.
June 24, 2015 — 7:53 pm
Comments: 2
Happy Magna Carta Day!
The big guy turns 800 today.
The Magna Carta was something of a fetish object in 17th C English law. It was believed to be a fragment or recreation of a sort of ancient Saxon Bill of Rights lost after the Conquest (probably no). As such, it was subject to centuries of scholarly interpretation, hairsplitting and the accretion of penumbra.
The Founding Fathers gave it a shout out. It still has juju for modern American righties.
Not so much lefties. It’s the fashion in the academy today to disparage the Magna Carta as a gentleman’s agreement between a small clique of the superwealthy — the King and his Barons — that was rescinded within days.
Well, yes and no. Mostly no.
A lot of the clauses do specifically outline the relationship between Barons and King, but there was plenty in there about the common man. Like clause 20:
For a trivial offence, a free man shall be fined only in proportion to the degree of his offence, and for a serious offence correspondingly, but not so heavily as to deprive him of his livelihood. In the same way, a merchant shall be spared his merchandise, and a villein the implements of his husbandry, if they fall upon the mercy of a royal court. None of these fines shall be imposed except by the assessment on oath of reputable men of the neighbourhood.
Or 35, the beginning of standardized weights and measures:
There shall be standard measures of wine, ale, and corn (the London quarter), throughout the kingdom. There shall also be a standard width of dyed cloth, russet, and haberject [cloth of mixed color, worn by monks], namely two ells [about two yards] within the selvedges [the bound edges of a piece of cloth]. Weights are to be standardised similarly.
Indeed, clauses 36 to 42 really do form the bones of our modern concepts of justice and liberty. Or fairness and freedom, since ‘justice’ and ‘liberty’ have been tainted by association with fuddy-duddy Tea Party types.
Also, there was stuff to do with managing common resources. Like, it abolished freshwater weirs (fish traps; see picture). Not only were they impacting fish stocks, they were making navigation impossible. So the rivers could become the superhighways until superhighways. And it forbade – I love this phrase – “all evil customs relating to forests and warrens.” That is, the killing or mutilation of poachers out of hand.
And, yes, it was rescinded within a month, but it was revived again and again. Every time a subsequent king wanted to squeeze a little more in taxes out of his people, he had to gin up a new edition of the Charter to appease them first. Which is why, in addition to the four left of the original batch, there are so many later versions.
The original wasn’t broken up into clauses, by the way. That was done by later commentators. The original is a big sloppy run-on Latin mess, but the translation is a pretty short and easy read.
Go on. What’re the odds some day some SJW smartass will bet you never read it?
June 15, 2015 — 8:13 pm
Comments: 11
Release the quacken!
That’s not my joke, that’s his joke. The man who owns these ducks.
The summer fête season is upon us. This was taken at the first one in our annual calendar, in fact. Most of them have a show ring and various entertainments, and trained herd dogs are a regular feature.
This guy was good. He had an experienced dog (seven years in training) and a rescue dog (less than a year) and he was using them to herd a dozen ducks through a series of ramps and obstacle courses.
The new dog was very good, bless her heart. Not as good as the old hand but holding her own. The trainer said the experienced dog thinks nothing of rounding up a flock of 500 sheep all by himself.
He had some interesting observations. Like, if your dog runs off and you yell at him when he comes back, he’ll think you didn’t want him to come back and eventually he’ll run away for good. Also, he never trains dogs with food rewards. He doesn’t want them doing their job for pay, he wants them to work out of pride and a place in the pack. He’s obviously put a lot of thought into this.
Anyway, it’s Summer — stand by for livestock posts!
June 9, 2015 — 9:42 pm
Comments: 11
Because bullet points are easier than essays
I promised you a post on the British elections and didn’t deliver. Fridaypost’s as good a time as any.
A Conservative win wasn’t the worst possible outcome — obviously — but it wasn’t the one I was hoping for. I was hoping for a divided, unstable government with a small Conservative majority that would force Cameron to jig right. Here’s some bullet points in no particular order:
■ The Liberal Democrats went from part of a ruling coalition to near annihilation. Seriously, they may be done. Forever.
■ None of the pollsters came close to predicting the outcome, which sadly won’t be the end of pollsters.
■ Labour lost big.
■ The SNP won big (at the expense of Labour).
■ UKIP took a healthy chunk of the vote, but only one seat.
■ They lost Nigel Farage’s seat.
■ Cameron is bound to see a big Conservative win as a big Cameron win.
Here’s a simplistic weasel-eye-view of why this happened, also in fun, easy-to-digest bullet points:
■ It was inevitable that the LibDems would collapse at their next election test. They were a far left party that had entered into a coalition government with the main right party.
■ It became clear early on that the Scottish National Party was going to murder the Labour vote in Scotland. Stirred up nationalism and leftover bad feeling from the failed Scottish split-off (Labour had encouraged them to stay in the union).
■ Sawed off SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon began to strut and crow that if Labour got in, she’d call the shots.
■ Brits got in the voting booth and panicked at the thought of gormless weirdo Ed Miliband running the country under the thumb of the Scots. (Which may or may not have depressed the UKIP vote, although the UKIP vote wasn’t bad — they came in third in the popular vote).
Early appearances are that the election will pull Cameron to the right, not least because he can’t blame the LibDems for his leftist inclinations. In conclusion, here’s the 2006 audio snippet of Cameron calling UKIP “fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists.”
May 29, 2015 — 8:43 pm
Comments: 9
I’ve got a new hobby
I’ve got a new hobby: collecting old postcards of local scenery. They’re cheap and plentiful in junk shops and on eBay, especially if you buy them in lots.
The thing I love most about it is that the famous tourist spots have been done again and again, from exactly the same angle, sometimes dozens of times. And the only way you can tell the nearly identical images apart is an Edwardian hat here, a 1950s skirt there, sepia tone, hard color, a horse cart, a motorcycle. It’s like a weird time machine with an almost (but not entirely) unchanging landmark in the background and a shadowplay of fugitive humanity drifting around in front.
Spooky.
I’ve also decided that postcards are the path to artistic immortality on the cheap. Oh, you can’t make money on them — the scale is bad and the math is all wrong — but as long as you can sucker someone into selling them in a tourist town, they will be saved and collected forever and ever.
You know what, though? I have a suspicion this one isn’t really from 1650.
p.s. Cold, day 3. I am Ye Olde Snotte Monster. I’m taking one more day off tomorrow and then I really must pull myself together, unpleasant honking sounds or no.
May 19, 2015 — 9:10 pm
Comments: 16
timber!
I’m a total museum hag. I swear, I’d stare at moose poop if you put it in a glass case with a laminated tag. I particularly like funky little private museums, personal and desperately short of funding.
That was the main reason to suggest Hasting on my b’day: there were several little museums we hadn’t seen. Two were side by side: the Shipwreck Museum and the Fisherman’s Museum.
The Shipwreck Museum was especially fun. Rusty cannons, pieces of eight, old china, instruments and models. In one display, there were bundles and bundles of what looked like stacked firewood. Turns out they were muskets, probably someone gun-running to the Confederacy.
And then there was this thing — the thing in the picture — which doesn’t have anything to do with shipwrecks at all. Don’t strain your eyes, the inscription reads:
THE FIRST LONDON BRIDGE
Part of a timber pier considered to be of the first London Bridge built, according to tree-ring dating, most likely in AD 85-90.
As oak trees grow one ring per year (in wet years the ring is thick and in dry years thin) it has been possible for scientists to trace the tree-ring pattern to the south-east of England and back almost 3,000 years.
If you count the rings at the end of this timber, the outermost being AD 78, this confirms that the tree was growing during the lifetime of Christ.
And that is how you know this is a privately funded museum, free of government monies: that sweet old-fashioned reference to Christ. I wonder how many Muslims have been triggered by that thing?
We put a few pounds in the collection box on our way out.
May 13, 2015 — 10:09 pm
Comments: 8
Say it with me: funicular
So on my birthday we went to Hastings. That’s like saying on your birthday you went to…I dunno…name a shit-hole. Ferguson? Tikrit? It’s not a nice place, mostly.
But down on the waterfront, there’s a little sliver of the charming fishing village Hastings used to be: Hastings Old Town. There are shops and restaurants and museums and the largest fishing fleet in England that is launched from a beachfront.
I like it. Uncle B, not so much. Eh, whose birthday?
It was a warm but a hella windy day, so it was fun to watch the waves come crashing in against the pier. Some damn fool was out surfing in it; we kept waiting for him to be smashed against something.
And I didn’t much fancy taking a ride on this thing. In the picture. The East Hill Cliff Railway. It’s the steepest funicular railway in England.
Funicular. Heh. Love that word. It means the two cars are tethered to each other so they balance and it takes less energy to move them up and down.
When it opened in 1903, this one was hydraulic — there were two big water tanks in the towers at the top and gravity did the thing. Now it’s electric, I think.
Anyway, that’s not important. The important thing is, I took this picture with my new birthday camera. After I busted my old camera, and then busted his old camera, I didn’t really fancy one of them fancy pants new SLR’s to bust.
This one is a Nikon D-60, the next generation after my beloved D-40. Last product in that line, and ever so slightly better at everything. And, yes, first thing I did before it left this house was buy a padded case. Here that pic is in color and unfuzzed.
Back in business, ladies and germs.
May 12, 2015 — 9:54 pm
Comments: 14