Ut oh.
It is never a happy thing to capture the attention of the Daily Mail.
The effigy burned at the bonfire every year — the Guy, as it were — is usually a satirical portrait of one of that year’s numero uno pains-in-the-ass. Burning the figure is a two-fingers-up to the pope or the prime minister or whoever got on local society’s collective tits that year. Rye goes one further and generally starts the bonfire by blowing up the guy with a grand, window-rattling boom.
This year, Rye Bonfire Society decided to do something else. Instead of an effigy, they made a large three-poppy display on the front of the bonfire, in commemoration of the WWI centenary. They didn’t blow it up, they burned it in what I imagine they thought of as a sort of grand and honorable Viking funeral.
Unfortunately, burning, snatching, crumpling and otherwise disrespecting poppies has become the Brit equivalent of flag burning, so the display hit some people wrong. They — the organizers — should have seen the likelihood it would be so.
Still, I am an unfan of the Mail, a shit-stirring rag. It’s pretty lousy to make a big deal of this; Rye is the last place that would deliberately disrespect the Great War. I’d hate to see ‘our side’ become as tetchy as the opposition about unintended slights.
November 12, 2014 — 9:19 pm
Comments: 9
Welp, I’m about to steal your evening
Okay, the Portable Antiquities Scheme is one of the bestest British things ever. They set it up in ’97 when they realized metal detectorists were finding all kinds of historically important stuff in the field, and almost none of it was being recorded. Treasure — which has a very specific legal description — has to be reported to the authorities by law, but the ordinary run of amateur finds don’t classify as treasure and were legally just walking away.
So, instead of stomping in with heavy government boots and strong-arming the finders into compliance with more restrictive rules, the government set up a totally voluntary scheme. You find something, you report it, they identify it, photograph it, feed it to the database and hand it back to you. Very high compliance rate, because — why not? Not only do you get your stuff back, but they can help you validate it and sell it on if you like.
The scheme was introduced right about the time I discovered I’d be moving to England, so I followed it from the beginning. Uncle B bought me a metal detector almost first thing. I didn’t turn up anything interesting in our garden (it’s been dug over so many times in the 20th C) and our closest detector club closed down and…I just back-burnered it, I guess.
Tonight we went to a talk by our local Finds Officer. Boy, have things grown since I last checked in! The Scheme is now overseen by the British Museum and the database has just logged its millionth object. She said the things they’ve learned from these small finds have widened the view of the history of this area considerably. (In passing, have you ever noticed how new finds in archaeology always, always, always show our ancestors were more, not less, sophisticated than we had believed?). Nobody else is building anything like it.
For your geeking pleasure, here is their searchable database. Dates, places, materials. Maps. Photos, free to use. Yay, another timesuck!
November 11, 2014 — 11:01 pm
Comments: 4
Yeah, that’s a bug
Long story short: Englishwoman hears the roar of a motorcycle, then the smack of something against her front window, examines the CCTV footage and decides she was visited by a fairy.
Um, no.
But you know what I immediately thought, right? Cottingly Fairies is what.
Long story short: during WWI, two little girls in England took pictures of themselves in the garden surrounded by terrible paper cutouts of fairies. For some reason, quite a lot of people believed they were real, included Arthur Conan Doyle. Astonishingly, this was still the subject of controversy when I first got into photography in the Seventies.
I’ve never understood why. Honestly, they’re terrible fakes. They’re not even good illustrations (and so much of their era). I was always particularly struck by #4, in which our fairy sports a modern Flapper bob. I mean, geez — is that a Marcel wave?
Anyway, one of the little girls confessed in 1981 (when she was no longer a little girl, duh) that she’d traced the fairies out of a 1915 picture book, thereby laying to rest one of the dumbest controversies ever.
October 22, 2014 — 7:58 pm
Comments: 20
Fifty four years ago Saturday
The Tennessee Eastman explosion, October 4, 1960. Sixteen dead, couple hundred wounded. Blew out a section of the factory the size of a city block.
I was born not far away, but I was a little babby of five months when disaster struck, so I remember naught.
Tennessee Eastman has an interesting history. Founded in 1920 by George Eastman, of Eastman Kodak fame, who was having trouble getting the chemicals he needed for photography in the aftermath of WWI. Over time, they have made all sorts of interesting chemicals. At the height of dubya-dubya eye-eye, they were kicking out a million and a half pounds of explosives each day.
From ’43 to ’47, Tennessee Eastman managed that part of nearby Oak Ridge that produced all the enriched uranium for the Manhattan Project.
Oak Ridge is a kind of neat place. It’s out in the middle of nowhere, but you can go in and take a lame-ass multimedia tour. I’ve always believed the lame-assery was a carefully contrived put-on. I once knew a risk management engineer who was given such a scary lecture about inspecting parts of the facility that he decided to write his report based on guesstimates instead.
Anyway, I don’t think they were manufacturing anything that interesting when disaster struck. The reports say it was nitrobenzene, which is a precursor to aniline. Hella flammable, obviously.
Unlike the tragedy that struck our friends the Iranians over the weekend. Whatever ignited that one, I have a feeling it was humming Hava Nagila at the time.
October 6, 2014 — 8:33 pm
Comments: 11
Ye olde swirley
Here’s an interesting article from the BBC: local groups searching churches to catalogue Medieval graffiti. (I would also direct you to the Suffolk group and the Norfolk group for many more pictures).
Basically, it’s a bunch of amateurs (with professional guidance) fanning out across England to document and record ancient church graffiti. The project started in Norfolk in 2010.
2010. Seriously. That fascinating stuff has been hanging around for, like, a thousand years and nobody has formally cataloged and examined it. It blows my mind.
I can’t tell you how strange and common that is here — this weird lack of curiosity about local history — but I can kind of tell you why.
For hundreds of years, serious historians concentrated on Roman Britain. Those generations of academics who believed Greek and Roman culture were the high point of civilization — and that was, let’s face it, most of the modern era — were inclined to be embarrassed by what they saw as the primitive customs of the locals before the edifying arrival of Caesar’s boys.
To these people, the Medieval era was just a sinking back into provincial ignorance — do they still call it the Dark Ages? — the long snooze of Western Civ, waiting to be rescued by Italian culture again (i.e. the Renaissance).
Modern academics are much more inclined to revere primitive cultures. But the peoples who love pagan-y things tend to be Lefties. And Lefties believe showing the slightest interest in English things is raaaaacisssssst.
So there you have it. There are all these amazing places and objects and boxes of bones squirrelled away all over the country, unexamined. Every once in a while an academic turns something over with his toe and goes, “huh.”
Makes me crazy.
July 23, 2014 — 10:40 pm
Comments: 12
Sophisticated
I’m going to recommend another egregious lefty entertainment product to you: A History of the World in 100 Objects. It’s one hundred handy fun-sized fifteen-minute BBC podcasts based around objects in the British Museum and it’s very cool.
The series ran daily for twenty weeks starting way back in January of 2010, but the whole thing is still available (at the link) for downloading. Also, have a look around the website — it’s cool, too, and includes much more than a hundred objects, in part because they solicited listener submissions. I’ve talked about this series before, but I’m currently re-listening to it from the beginning.
The objects are awesome, but the bias is unmistakable from the beginning. The narration was written and read by the curator of the BM, a lefty cunt-whistle named Neil MacGregor.
Take the above object. It’s a little sandal tag carved out of hippopotamus ivory for Den, one of the earliest Pharoahs of Egypt. Wikipedia says: “Den is said to have brought prosperity to his realm and numerous innovations are attributed to his reign.” Which is the sort of observation we used to make about kings.
MacGregor says this object shows that powerful men have used war and the propaganda of war to control their own people from the beginning of civilization. He called it sadly familiar. To support this contention, he brought in an editorial cartoonist (bound to be from the Guardian, though I was too lazy to check) who said yes, indeedy, he also sometimes drew important people larger than ordinary people. So there you have it.
I’m not reading too much into this, I promise. 2010 was Peak Butthurt over the Iraq War, and he was very clearly calling out Bush’n’Blair.
The BBC is all but unavoidable in this country. We often bitch about it, Uncle B and I. The steady drip-drip-drip of cynical lefty worldview gets into your head no matter how hard you push back. I think it was Melanie Phillips who first described the modern Left as an auto-immune disease: us bad, not-us good. Over and over, all day long. It works its way into the dispirited bones of the unwary.
To this day, they can find a George Bush joke in the gardening program.
Just saying. Listen to the podcasts anyway. Despite everything, there are some wonderful objects and fascinating facts in there. And fifteen minutes is the perfect chunk size for doing doing chores.
July 14, 2014 — 11:23 pm
Comments: 9
Bookmark this
This is a fun ongoing series from the BBC: Victorian Strangeness. The author combs Victorian newspapers for nuggets of weird.
My favorite is the story of the two skeletons found walled up in the attic of a theater, mummified as they died — in the act of murdering each other. There was no clue to the mystery, except that the theater’s carpenter had gone missing fifteen years earlier.
For an even more fun dip, though, try doing a Google Images search of “Illustrated Police News” — the Daily Mail of its day (except the Daily Mail was the Daily Mail of its day. The Mail was aimed at the newly literate lower orders, where the News was all about the pitchers).
I don’t know about you, but I’m rooting for Bloomers Lady and her bicycle.
June 18, 2014 — 11:20 pm
Comments: 7
I don’t see scorch marks. Do you see scorch marks?
No doubt, y’all have seen the video of Tara the Hero Cat, internet sensation, rescuer of small boys and chaser-offer of wicked dogs.
Couple of things about the video that struck me. First, the family appears to have three different video cameras trained on the outside of the house (it looks like such a nice neighborhood!). And second, that dog seems to be hunting toddlers. He either hears or smells the boy before catching sight of him, and races around the corner to attack.
Black Shuck is another dog in the news this week. He’s one of Britain’s many legendary black dogs, but with a more specific history than most.
The story goes, an enormous black dog burst into a Suffolk church in 1577 during a howling gale (leaving, supposedly scorch marks on the door, pictured), ran up the aisle and killed a man and a boy, then ran off again. He became a local fixture (not to say legend) thereafter, though subsequent stories are short on specifics.
You know, I can believe it? Somebody’s dog getting loose, running a long distance from home, panicking in a thunderstorm and going violently mad in a crowd of people. Then, you know, thereafter being a menace to solitary walkers in lonely spots.
Last year, an archeological dig at nearby Leiston Abbey turn up the skeleton of an absolutely enormous dog. Estimated at seven feet, standing on its back legs, and a very old burial. The bones haven’t been dated yet, but the team will be back this Summer to dig again.
It was buried near the kitchen in the Abbey and is surely a beloved pet or guard dog. I’m sure if the monks slew the beast, the story would have come down to us somehow. But still there’s all kinds of excitement that they might’ve dug up ol’ Shuck.
This dig — like a lot of archeology in Britain — is funded by the lottery. This almost inclines me to pay the Stupid Tax and pick up a weekly ticket. Good weekend, all!
May 16, 2014 — 10:41 pm
Comments: 23
*spit*
One last bit of ironmongery. Sorry the focus is none too good, but it’s dark in the kitchen. Note the whirring thingamabob on top: this is a clockwork mechanism to turn the spit, to roast the beast before the fire. The rope leads to a weight which would have to be cranked back to the top periodically. Put some boy out of a job, this newfangled contraption did.
One of our cookery books points out that most of us have never had real roast beef — what we call roast beef is really baked beef. And when you think about the difference between a rotisserie chicken and one from the oven, you’ll realize that’s true.
The posts this week are from Michelham Priory, which we visited on Sunday. As the guide explained to us, a priory was kind of like the social services of the day. Unlike the monasteries, which were shut off from the public, the staff in the priory were priests intended to minister to outsiders. They gave food and shelter to the poor and nursed the sick.
Like all the others, this one was disbanded by Hank the Eighth, but luckily for us lived on as a private residence. Or a piece of it lived on, anyway.
Right. What time is it, kids? It’s Dead Pool time! Well, it will be tomorrow at 6WBT!
May 8, 2014 — 11:05 pm
Comments: 17
More blacksmith
This is also a product of the blacksmith’s art. Despite the fairly elaborate decoration on the latch mechanism, it wasn’t made by a jeweler. It’s the locking mechanism of a 16th C and it’s a surprisingly fiendish object.
The entire box is made of iron. The docent couldn’t tell me how much it weighs, but she reckoned it would take four men to shift it. She let me try the lid on another similar box, and it was honestly all I could do to lift it vertical.
On either side at the top, you can see two stout rings for padlocks. Centered between them in the box proper is the keyhole, and it’s fake. It goes nowhere. The real keyhole is hidden behind a boss in the center of the lid. It slips sideways, and there’s the hole. The sound it makes when you turn the key is epic.
It is further compartmentalized on the inside for papers and jewelry and whatnot. The idea was that great men had to have lots of coin on hand to pay for everything, especially when they traveled. There are four holes in the bottom for bolts, to bolt it to the bed of a cart for just that purpose.
If Robin Hood ever did make off with one like this, I hate to think how many Merry Man it would take to file enough of a slot into it to make room for a wedge to make purchase for a hammer. I don’t know how else you’d get it open.
May 7, 2014 — 9:57 pm
Comments: 8