I try…
That’s an old diagram of a carved stone called Haystack Rock (Google images at the link) on Ilkley Moor in West Yorkshire. The marks are called cup and cup-and-ring respectively and appear in early neolithic contexts all over the UK and Europe, but also as far as Israel and India.
Could be coincidence. Pockmarks and rings (and, in some cases, straightish lines) are about as basic a shape as you can carve into a stone. Could be the result of some kind of pan-neolithic belief, religious or otherwise. Could be something purely mechanical: it has been suggested the marks might have something to do with shaping or polishing stone axes.
I don’t usually like fanciful explanations — particularly the tendency to assume every difficult thing our ancestors did had a religious significance — but the location of this stone in particular, in the midst of a neolithic burial ground, makes me wonder if the marks are some kind of memorial. I can so imagine myself working through a bereavement by slowly grinding a little permanent mark into a sacred stone.
Oh, well. Too fanciful. Never mind.
I retreat into history to avoid rage-inducing current events. I found a nice article on Haystack Rock on a good antiquarian blog (much recommendo), at the end of which:
On a very worrying note, we need to draw attention to what amounts to the local Ilkley Parish Council officially sanctioning vandalism on the Haystack Rock, other prehistoric carvings and uncarved rocks across Ilkley Moor. As we can see on a couple of photos here, recent vandalism has been enacted on this supposedly protected monument. […] The recent vandalism on this stone and others has now been officially recognised as an acceptable form of — get this! — “twentieth / twenty-first century informal unauthorised carving” and has been deemed acceptable by Ilkley Parish Council as a means to validate more unwanted carving on the moorland “in the name of art”!
Holy shit, they’re letting special snowflakes vandalize neolithic monuments in the name of muh art!
March 29, 2016 — 8:43 pm
Comments: 14
prehistoric fun
I’m still officially on holiday (back to work tomorrow and an hour short on sleep, hurrah) but here’s something fun for you to play with: it’s a map of prehistoric sites in Britain.
We’re in the Southeasternmost whole square, a territory we share with London (stupid London always bigfoots all over our local news headlines) and, from the top map, it looks like there’s nothing here. But those black dots are just megaliths. If you click our map square, we have plenty of forts, sacred wells, barrows and tombs.
It is all, needless to say, impossibly cool. And makes all the housing construction in this area — mostly to accommodate immigration — doubly tragic.
Oh, dammit, I went there and sucked the fun out of it.
March 28, 2016 — 8:48 pm
Comments: 13
Everybody bitches about his job
I goofed off tonight playing Hearthstone (sad, sad little weasel), so please accept a link to this amusing article about marginalia I read earlier this week.
You know, back in the days before Gutenberg, when every book in our world was laboriously hand-copied by monks, sometimes they’d spare a minute to bitch about it in the margins. Like
“Now I’ve written the whole thing: for Christ’s sake give me a drink”
or
“The parchment is hairy”
or (this is rather sweet)
“This is sad! O little book! A day will come in truth when someone over your page will say, ‘The hand that wrote it is no more.'”
The picture? It’s the third one that turns up in a Google Images search of “marginalia.” If you right click it (using Chrome) and ask Google to identify the image, its best guess is, “kanye west amber rose memes.”
Yeah, you know? Sometimes I don’t want to know.
March 3, 2016 — 10:53 pm
Comments: 4
The thirtieth anniversary of something I don’t remember
Sunday is the thirtieth anniversary of the assassination of Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme. He was walking home from the movies with his wife when he was approached by a gunman and shot dead.
Sometimes I like to play a game with True Crime books: I shuffle to the picture section and, without reading the captions, try to figure out from their faces who’s the victim, who’s the perp and who’s the policeman. In this case, though, it’s easy — dude on the right is a druggy who was picked up for the murder three years later after Mrs Palme picked him out of a lineup. That’s about all the evidence against him, though, so the case is classed as unsolved. A hundred and thirty people have confessed to the murder and been dismissed.
It’s officially the biggest murder investigation in history — bigger than JFK’s, bigger than Lockerbie. And it’s still active. Sweden even scrapped their 25-year statute of limitations on murder to keep it going (which is fine. There shouldn’t really be a statute of limitations on murder).
He was a hard left anti-Imperialist, pro-Revolutionary, the first Western head of state to visit Cuba and speak in favor of Cambodia’s revolutionaries. So you can imagine the prevailing theories.
The Turks say the Kurds did it, the Kurds say the Turks did it. There was a Yugoslavian, and a LaRouchie. Indian gunrunners. Chilean fascists. The Masons. The CIA. I’m not even kidding. If you like this sort of thing, this is just the sort of thing you’d like.
Not me. I hate the unsolved ones. Good weekend, all!
February 26, 2016 — 9:19 pm
Comments: 10
Toy.
I mentioned earlier this week I was hoping to go to a work-related seminar today, and so I did. It was about conservation of historical documents and it was, for the most part, very interesting.
The best nugget was learning that the British Museum’s whole object catalogue is online. You can browse the database of nearly four million objects (and growing), with good descriptions and high quality photos. (Try the advanced search. Nobody uses the advanced search and that makes the head of cataloguing very sad).
The lowlight was a presentation about trying to bring diversity to historical research. The speaker carefully never defined diversity, but told us the measures they’d taken (they who? The Arts Council, I think) to increase ‘diverse’ trainees in history. Like, eliminating the degree requirement for entrance and ultimately limiting the program to London. And even then, they had a three in ten dropout rate. This was after a day of being told the pool of jobs was shrinking.
It boils down to: taking scarce jobs away from qualified English people who want them to foist them upon unqualified, unspecified ‘diverse’ people who don’t.
And with that depressing thought, I bid you a good weekend!
February 19, 2016 — 10:24 pm
Comments: 7
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
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
plus ça change, huh?
I’ve been browsing editorial cartoons tonight (gosh, I’ve wasted an improbable chunk of my life staring at Google Images). Made me fink.
You have to go back a hundred years before the ideas and the artwork strike me as worthy. Like this one, from 1919 (who doesn’t revile “the mad notions of Europe”? Amirite?). Of course, these days you find these old gems mostly in course syllabi for How Our Ancestors Were, Like, Totally Retarded 101.
Editorial cartoons from about the mid-20th C onward are mostly lefty. And ugly. (One exception would be Michael Ramirez, who I think is a flipping editorial cartoon conservative mad genius).
And at some point they stopped trying to persuade the other side (me, IOW) and went straight for enrage. Ideas were replaced with ciphers. Like if they could hang a label on something (“red scare” or “McCarthyism”), they didn’t have to address the issue (whether the government ever was really and truly infested with commies and whether that’s done us any favors).
I don’t know. Maybe cartoons always made somebody mad. You’d have to ask a lefty whether Ramirez cartoons make him irrationally angry. But the modern stuff just seems awfully heavy on snark and ridicule. And they punch down (or at least sideways) more often than they punch up.
October 14, 2015 — 10:28 pm
Comments: 8
Old bones
This is what we went to see in Alfriston: the Clergy House. We’ve been several times before; it’s one of my favorites.
The house is a perfect transition from Medieval to Tudor. It was built in the 13th C. The original floor (hard-packed and white, made of sour milk and chalk) had a firepit in the center. It was one big open room, with the master’s table at one end and the servants at the other, just like a Medieval hall (or Viking longhouse). The smoke rose up to the high pitched roof and escaped out the…well, thatch or stone. They’re not sure of the original.
One big smokey, sweaty communal living area, just like Wayland intended.
Then the Tudors got hold of it and installed all sorts of wacky newfangled conveniences, like a fireplace and an upstairs with stairs and rooms.
The picture shows what it looked like in the late 19th, when it had damn near crumbled back into the earth. It was so far gone, it was more easily returned to its original Medieval condition, with the outline of the later innovations still showing.
It’s not one of those so-rebuilt-it’s-practically-Disney sorts of places, though (I’m looking at you, Great Dixter). It’s all original, down to the funky floors and wattle-and-daub construction.
I could spend a lot of time staring at those walls, if the steward hadn’t been such a loquacious and excitable young man.
Remember, now: Dead Pool Round 77. Tomorrow. 6WBT. Be here, or be somewhere else! Or go somewhere else and then come back here!
September 24, 2015 — 9:03 pm
Comments: 6
Congratz to Her Maj
At 5:30 this evening, my time — about four hours ago — Queen Elizabeth the Twoth became the longest-reigning British monarch. Sixty three years a queen. The British papers are full of it, if you’re interested, but I cribbed a few numbers from the Observer:
33,446,430 minutes – approximate length of Elizabeth’s II reign when she set the new record. This works out as 23,226 days, 16 hours and 30 minutes.
12 – prime ministers who have served Elizabeth II since she became the Queen. The first was Winston Churchill (1951-55); the latest is David Cameron (2010 to date).
10 – hours the Queen has spent reading out speeches at the State Opening of Parliament. She has delivered the speech in person 62 times. She doesn’t get to write it, though. Boo.
7 – Archbishops of Canterbury to have served the Queen. The first was Geoffrey Fisher, who officiated at her marriage and coronation. The others were Michael Ramsey, Donald Coggan, Robert Runcie, George Carey, Rowan Williams and Justin Welby.
97 – state visits the Queen has undertaken so far. Her first was to Norway in June 1955. Her most recent was to Germany in June 2015.
173 – visits by the Queen to Commonwealth countries. Her first was to Kenya, where she learned she had become Queen on February 6 1952. Her most recent was to Australia in October 2011. The Telegraph said the Commonwealth still covers a quarter of the world’s population, but I’m damned if I can find the quote now.
2 – countries that have left the Commonwealth during the Queen’s reign: Zimbabwe (in 2003) and the Gambia (in 2013). How’s that workin’ out for them?
0 – passports the Queen has held. She has no need for one, as all British passports are issued in her name. Extra trivia: for a similar reason, she can’t sing the national anthem. How would that go? “God save our gracious ME”?
56 – televised Christmas messages delivered by the Queen. Her first was transmitted live in 1957, while the first pre-recorded TV message was in 1959. There has been a televised message every year since 1957 except in 1969, when a repeat of the film Royal Family was shown. I don’t know why.
109 – state visits hosted by the Queen. The first was a visit by King Gustaf VI and Queen Louise of Sweden in June 1954. The most recent was a visit by the president of Mexico Enrique Pena Nieto and his wife Angelica Rivera de Pena in March 2015.
50,000 – number of people the Queen hosts in an average year at banquets, lunches, dinners, receptions and garden parties at Buckingham Palace. I know several people who’ve been to a garden party at Buck House since I’ve been here, so I can believe it. Not me, though. I’d knick the silverware.
67 – years the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh have been married. They will celebrate their 68th wedding anniversary on November 20, 2015.
She’s got a way to go to be the longest serving monarch ever, though (scroll down).
That reminds me: I need to get my citizenship sorted while I can still take the oath to this nice old lady.
September 9, 2015 — 8:49 pm
Comments: 11