Thanks!
Did I tell you this story? My dad was drafted right at the end of WWII. He made it out of training just as the war in Europe was over, so they put him on a boat to the South Pacific. They were (you probably know) putting together a hellacious huge force to begin a bloody inch-by-inch land invasion of Japan. A rookie lieutenant had pretty low odds of surviving that.
Then we dropped the bomb. Two, in fact. And that was that.
The anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima was yesterday. When it rolls around every year, I always say a little prayer of thanksgiving for all the lives saved by that bold and terrible act. Including, by a slightly tortured route, my life.
Have a good weekend, y’all.
August 7, 2015 — 9:07 pm
Comments: 33
How do you say, “godammit, kitty!” in ancient Croatian?
Paw prints found on a 15th Century Croatian manuscript. Also Roman roof tiles in Gloucester. And Roman mortar in York. And in Leicester.
In the Netherlands, they convinced themselves that animal prints in floor and roof tiles were lucky and every home must have at least one. I suspect that’s a case of potters making the best of all those godammit, kitty! tiles.
But my favorite is this German manuscript from 1420, left oddly incomplete on one page. Scribbled on the blank part are accusatory pointing fingers, a sketch of a cat and the inscription
Here is nothing missing, but a cat urinated on this during a certain night. Cursed be the pesty cat that urinated over this book during the night in Deventer and because of it many others [other cats] too. And beware well not to leave open books at night where cats can come.
August 3, 2015 — 9:14 pm
Comments: 10
That cat is so happy
From an illuminated manuscript of Jean Tinctor’s Invectives contre la secte de vauderie. “Vauderie” being an old French word for sorcery. This is Satan inviting his disciples to lick the cat’s butthole.
LOOK HOW HAPPY THAT CAT IS.
This is from a series of Medieval manuscripts showing cats licking their assholes. My old friend iamfelix sent me the link, which she said turned up in Iowahawk’s Twitter feed.
July 29, 2015 — 9:52 pm
Comments: 14
I went to the place and saw the thing!
I went to Canterbury today to see the Magna Carta! It had its 800th birthday last month, as I posted at the time.
Canterbury’s copy is one of the four surviving original copies from 1215, but that wasn’t the one on display. The four Big Guys are going to the British Library. The one I saw was from Faversham in Kent and is a later issue from 1300.
Another one of this edition turned up recently in a Victorian photo album in Sandwich. It’s probably worth £10M, so do check that junk in the attic before you toss it.
This one is displayed in a darkened room in a glass case draped in black cloth. If you want to see it, you ask the boy, and he gently raises the cloth and lets you peek under it for a moment. Hence the shitty out of focus picture.
I found this process awfully funny, for some reason.
Then we went to Canterbury’s city museum, which was beyond awesome. The building was as cool as anything in it (it was the Poor Priests Hospital, built in 1373). But it was dark and none of my pictures came out, sadly.
A long and enjoyable day. My dogs are barkin’.
July 8, 2015 — 10:23 pm
Comments: 7
Oh, now I get it
These here ladies are Circassian Beauties, which are a flavor of sideshow freak and not actual ladies from a place called Circassia.
Step back. People from Circassia were believed to be the most beautiful and whitest of all the white people. The reputation starts in the late Middle Ages, when the women were prized in the slave markets of Russia and Turkey. They were regarded as ideals of feminine beauty. A Circassian slave bore Cosimo de Medici (the founder of the Medici dynasty) a son. By the 18th C, “Circassian” was a marketing slogan for beauty products.
In the whimsical Victorian proto-science of race, Circassians were regarded as the white race at its purest. Circassia is in the Caucasus Mountains. Yes, dear readers, this is when white people were first called Caucasian — even though, probably, very few of our grannies were from Circassia — and it stuck.
That ‘fro thing, though? That’s pure PT Barnum. By which I mean the actual Phineas Taylor Barnum, who incorporated fuzzy-headed white ladies into his freakshows. God knows why he thought that worked as an explar of white people nonpareil. I guess his prototypes didn’t look exotic enough with regular white people hair.
Anyhow — funny old world! — about the time the Circassian Beauty became a standard sideshow attraction across the US of A, the Russians were busily genociding the actual Circassians. Ha! Ha!
More about Circassian Beauties. Wikipedia. The blog I stole the picture from. A post from this interesting blog.
You reckon this is what Rachel Dolezal was going for? Because she got a lot closer to this than that other thing.
p.s. To anyone who thinks our Rachel really, truly thinks she’s black? Straight blonde hair doesn’t like to do that thing. Once a month or so, Rachel has to go into a beauty salon and request a root darkening and the kinkiest perm in town. What we used to call a bad perm.
p.p.s. You know, for less than a hundred bucks at 23andme, we could nail what her parents are made of. Come to think of it — considering what’s at stake with hiring quotas — shouldn’t we insist candidates for race-based jobs be routinely DNA tested for ancestry?
p.p.p.s. Nah. A DNA test would show Bruce Jenner is a man, so that’s out.
June 17, 2015 — 9:33 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
Then and now
This is a ring that turned up in a 9th C Viking burial in Sweden. It’s made of glass (apparently that was a new and expensive material then) and the inscription reads “to Allah” in Arabic. It was a woman’s burial in a place called Birka (ha! ha!), but the body has completely rotted away, sadly, so they can’t tell if it was an Arabic woman that somehow made it to Sweden. Here’s hoping some hardy Viking beat up and A-rab and stole his stuff to give his good lady.
Archaeologists think it confirms old stories that there was trade between the Vikings and the Islamic world. Quite possible, too — those guys got everywhere.
There’s an escalating kerfuffle between Sweden and the region. Swedish Foreign Minister Margot Wallström had planned to address the Arab League and give them a finger-wagging lecture on human rights. So the Saudis blocked her. So Sweden published the speech she was going to give (it didn’t mention the Saudis by name, but it talked up women’s and human rights — wait, there’s a difference?). So the Saudis won’t issue any more visas to Swedish businessmen. So the Swedes cut off military cooperation with the Saudis. So the Saudis have expelled Sweden’s ambassador.
All this matters, I guess, because the Swedes desperately need oil. And the Saudis desperately need…pass. I don’t know. Blondes?
Anyway, it’s not just the Saudis. The whole Arab world has its panties in a twist (wait, do they wear panties under those things?). The Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) which represents 57 muslim countries (wait, there are fifty seven of the buggers?) issued a statement that read in part:
“The world community, with its multiple cultures, diverse social norms, rich and varied ethical standards and different institutional structures, can not, and should not, be based on a single and centric perspective that seeks to remake the world in its own image.”
Emphasis mine. Rich and varied ethical standards. Ho ho ho.
March 19, 2015 — 9:14 pm
Comments: 20
Free Dippy
This is Dippy the Diplodocus — though whether anyone called him that before he was embroiled in controversy is a matter of, um…controversy. He’s been in London’s Natural History Museum since 1905, a gift from Andrew Carnegie to Edward VII. He was moved into the Wal*Mart greeter spot in 1979, where he has delighted and inspired school children for 35 years.
And he’s coming down.
The Museum is having a bit of clear up and the issue with Dippy is, he ain’t real. He’s a painstaking plaster cast (or as one Independent writer put it its ‘very existence is a malicious lie’) of a diplodocus skeleton that was dug up in Wyoming in 1898. The original is in Pittsburgh.
Haha, just kidding! The real reason is, they’re replacing him with the skeleton of a blue whale because gaia and shit.
The change is part of a ‘decade of transformation’ planned at the museum by its director, Sir Michael Dixon.
Explaining the decision, Sir Michael said: ‘As the largest known animal to have ever lived on Earth, the story of the blue whale reminds us of the scale of our responsibility to the planet.
Blahblahblah…challenge the way people think…never been more urgent…under threat…species and ecosystems are being destroyed…poignant reminder…make a real difference. Boo! Phooey! Bring back the plaster dinosaur!
There’s a hashtag and shit, but it’s hard to turn an ecowarrior. Dippy is doomed.
January 29, 2015 — 10:31 pm
Comments: 15
eeeeeeeeee
Here you go. From the Smithsonian, the only known recording of actual American Civil War veterans doing the Rebel Yell. Many years after the fact, obviously.
I’ll save you the trouble. It isn’t “YeeeeeeeHA!!!” like I always thought. It’s more like “eeeeeeeee!”
Don’t get me wrong — thousands of armed young men pouring over a hill going “eeeeee!” straight at you would probably be pants-peeingly terrifying, I was just hoping for something more…coherent. Not just a bunch of dessicated old coots making a high-pitched noise.
Yes! I am still celebrating Holiday Lameness.
December 30, 2014 — 10:00 pm
Comments: 17
Gosh, it was a lot of trouble to get dressed in 1964
Got jammed up with a work thing tonight, so I’ll leave you this image to contemplate. Click the pic to embiggen. It’s from the Nashille, Tennessean newspaper of 1964: Christmas shoppers turning out shortly after Thanksgiving.
It’s from my FaceBook feed(!); a group about Nashville, my kinda sorta hometown. People frequently post pictures of downtown street scenes, and there’s something deeply unsettling about recognizing a shop or a restaurant that I hadn’t seen or thought about for forty years. I dunno why. Because these things are trivial — and were trivial then — but still leap vividly out of old gauzy braincells.
I don’t know why I found this picture so interesting. Because everything and everyone are jammed together so tightly? Because the people are all dressed up? Maybe it’s just because this seems like a whole ‘nother world.
December 11, 2014 — 11:03 pm
Comments: 22