A place of dignity and refinement
This iconic image shows Michael O’Brien, an Aussie, the first brave innovator to run naked across the field of a major sporting event. It was a rugby game in 1974 between England and France. The bobby’s helmet (the one covering his junk) is on display at Twickenham, where this event took place.
I always thought of streaking as an American phenomenon, but it ain’t. The first recorded running-naked-on-a-bet was on July 5, 1799 when a London man was bet ten guineas he wouldn’t run naked from Cornhill to Cheapside. The flesh was willing, but the police were uncooperative.
The first recorded incident of streaking by a college student in the United States occurred in 1804 at Washington College (now Washington and Lee University) when senior George William Crump was arrested for running naked through Lexington, Virginia, where the university is located. Robert E. Lee later sanctioned streaking as a rite of passage for young Washington and Lee gentlemen. Crump was suspended for the academic session, but later went on to become a U.S. Congressman.
I lifted that from the Wikipedia article whole, because I couldn’t say it better myself.
Oh. Right. Let’s not forget Lady Godiva, the wife of Leofric, Earl of Mercia, who rode naked through the streets of Coventry in the 11th C to protest her husband’s taxation policy. Everyone kindly looked away from the spectacle except one probably apocryphal swine named Tom, whose name comes down to us through legend.
In her honor, Coventry will be hosting the country’s first national streaking contest next month. Genitals optional, looks like. It’s sponsored by a food manufacturer to celebrate a microwavable hamburger called the Streaker, so named because it is topped with streaky bacon. Or, as we call it in the States, bacon.
Just in case you were thinking it was all Masterpiece Freaking Theatre over here.
April 23, 2014 — 9:43 pm
Comments: 14
Wait, what?
If I may continue my theme for another day, have a gander at this thing. It’s called the Mold Gold Cape (it was found in a place called Mold in Wales in 1833).
It’s an extraordinary thing. It’s sort of a shoulder cape hammered from a single piece of gold (the raw gold must have been about the size of a ping pong ball), then decorated all over with repoussé. They reckon it’s nearly 4,000 years old.
Four thousand years. That is a stunning level of craftsmanship for the time. Moreover, though there was mining in the area, there were no big cities nearby, no great dynasties that they know. Just this amazing thing buried on a hill in the middle of sweet fuck all.
It was dug up with a skeleton by workmen. This being 1833, they divvied up the gold (the cape was already broken in bits by time and earth) and scattered anything else they found. Fortunately, the British Museum got wind of it through a local and managed to buy back most of the pieces right away, though there are still a few fragments missing, and almost none of the other grave good survived.
I learned about this from a popular BBC Radio Series called a History of the World in 100 objects. It’s one hundred fifteen-minute podcasts about interesting and important objects in the British Museum, arranged in chronological order, chosen and narrated by the chief curator. I’m pretty sure if you hit the link, you guys are allowed to download and listen to this one. Great history in handy bite-sized chunks (if a little lefty in parts). Mucho recommendo.
The Mold Gold Cape is episode 19, and here’s how it starts:
For the local workmen, it must have seemed as if the old Welsh legends were true. They’d been sent to quarry stone in a field known as Bryn-yr-Ellyllon, which translates as the Fairies’ or the Goblins’ Hill. Sightings of a ghostly boy, clad in gold, a glittering apparition in the moonlight, had been reported frequently enough for travellers to avoid the hill after dark. As the workmen dug into a large mound, they uncovered a stone-lined grave. In it were hundreds of amber beads, several bronze fragments, and the remains of a skeleton. And wrapped around the skeleton was a mysterious crushed object – a large and finely decorated broken sheet of pure gold.
The fuck, BBC? We’re just going to walk on by that, really? See, this is where Brits can be entirely too blasé.
Three possibilities. One – it isn’t true; there weren’t any such sightings (but it’s hard to get a more rigorous source than the British Effing Museum). Two – hells yes, a ghost haunted this treasure for forty centuries (I’m not of a mystical bent, but what the hell – humility is the essence of science). Three – distant memories of a grand and famous burial persisted in local legend for four thousand years.
Holy cats.
April 2, 2014 — 10:09 pm
Comments: 7
Anybody missing a cleaning lady?
As we discussed below, they are ALlllways digging up stuff here. Every time they enlarge a parking lot or put an extension on an elementary school, they find some lot of poor skeletons huddling underneath.
Know what happens to them? Unless there’s treasure buried with them, not much. They’re catalogued, packed away in boxes and stored by the county council, more or less unexamined. There’s all kinds of stuff they can learn from DNA analysis and tooth enamel these days, but that shit costs money. And, as I said, there are so many, many old bones lying around.
We watched a program recently that went back and looked at some pretty ordinary Stone Age bones stored away in a warehouse somewhere. They discovered little holes drilled in many of them, post mortem. From the position, they deduced the holes were used to articulate the skeletons. Thing is, they weren’t awfully fussy that the right man’s leg bone was connected to the right man’s hip bone.
So, think on that. They were — I guess — digging up the ancestors, stringing skeletons together from random bits and — I dunno — hanging them up at parties? Does that blow your mind? That blows my mind.
Every once in a while, a local council gets a lottery grant to do some actual archeology, which recently happened in Eastbourne. They had 300 skeletons kicking around in storage, from 1,500 to 4,000 years old and they got £72,000 to do some science on them.
They dated and sexed them all (my goodness, that doesn’t sound nice) and singled out 12 for particular analysis. That lady in the header was the real surprise. She lived her whole life in Sussex and was buried in Roman times, about 245 AD, but she’s from sub-Saharan Africa. The Roman empire didn’t extend that far. What’n the heck was she doing here?
She was healthy, lived to about 30 and grew up on a plentiful diet of fish and vegetables. Wife, mistress, slave. They have no idea.
I guess I just thought we knew a whole lot more about early Britain — or, at least, had done everything we could to find out. Turns out, not.
April 1, 2014 — 10:08 pm
Comments: 5
Look, the old tenants left some stuff behind
This place has had so many previous owners, and they left so much of their junk behind. Europe, I mean. It’s tough for an American to take.
F’rinstance. In 1962, five Viking ships were dug up in the Danish town of Skuldelev, so they built a museum to hold them in the nearby city of Roskilde. In 1997, they went to enlarge the museum and accidentally dug up nine more Viking ships in the parking lot.
I know, right?
Anyway, one of them was the longest Viking ship ever found. It’s about a hundred feet long, and there’s maybe twenty percent of it left. Curators boxed the thing in flat-packs, like Ikea furniture, and shipped the whole business over here for a big show about Vikings in the British Museum.
They put a £135M extension on the place to house this (and displays like it). We saw it on TV the other night; it’s way cool. The whole end of the building opens so they can drive big objects right in.
On display with the ship is the Vale of York hoard, a collection of Viking silver found by father and son metal detectorists in a field in Yorkshire in 2007.
There’s a lot of that going on these days, too. Amateur metal detectoring leading to big finds, I mean. And for once, the government got wise and works with detectorists through the Portable Antiquities Scheme. Most detectorists know to stop everything when they make a good find and call in the experts.
By law, individuals have to report precious metal finds to a government officer. But here’s the smart part: if any museums want the artifacts, they have to offer the finder a fair market value. So looting is, like, nonexistent. It’s like having a giant voluntary army of archeologists combing the countryside.
If you’re at all interested in this stuff (and you probably wouldn’t be here if you weren’t), any of the links above will take you to hours of thrilling geekery.
March 31, 2014 — 9:15 pm
Comments: 16
Holy stinky barrels of Medieval Danish shit!
Doing a big urban archeological dig in Copenhagen, when they turned up these priceless artifacts. Yes, those are huge barrels of 14th Century human shit. And yes, apparently they do still stink.
Before they were used as latrines, they were used for storing other things, so archeologists hope to learn a lot from those barrels. Some very unlucky undergraduate is going to have a memorable job prepping them for inspection, I tell you what.
We went to a lecture the other night on the vanishing trades of Kent and Sussex (segue: barrel making). Most of them involve wood. This is the woodiest part of England and trees have been grown very much as a renewable resource here for millenia. Harvested, mostly, by pollarding and coppicing.
The problem with wooden wheel making, basket weaving, barrel making and the like — they’re hard to master, incredibly physical, and nobody in his right mind would pay a living wage to a smart guy for hand weaving a freaking basket. So a lot of that is inevitably going to be lost.
Which is a pity. Fun fact: a tree that is pollarded once and then left to go natural will live another hundred years, or two. A tree that is continually pollarded at regular intervals is effectively immortal. There are trees in this county that have been perpetually harvested that are reckoned to be several thousand old. Think on that.
Right! Tomorrow, 6pm WBT, Dead Pool Round 61. Fred Phelps didn’t make it to the next round. His last act on earth was to deprive poor StPatrick_TN of a dick. Asshole ’til the end.
March 20, 2014 — 10:50 pm
Comments: 16
My ladybits need this
Ladies and gentlemen, Viktor Yanukovich’s gold-encrusted bidet. You know, the ex-president of Ukraine who just did a runner.
I was a little uncomfortable with protestors raiding his house, but it turns out his official salary was less than $22,500 a year and — holy cow, you should see this place.
They’re dredging papers out of his personal lake that help document the corruption, and corruption it certainly is. He’s been in government since 1996, and before that he was regional head of a trucking company for twenty years, and before that he was a petty criminal, apparently. The ex-prosecutor-general Viktor Pshonka has skipped town, too, leaving a lavish palace behind.
Gold. Encrusted. Bidet. It’s a pity you can’t buy good taste.
p.s. Not, let’s be frank, that our lot are much better. There’s no possible way a legislator can rack up millions in office that doesn’t involve something very crooked and wrong.
February 26, 2014 — 11:45 pm
Comments: 12
All them nekkid ladies
Did you see, somebody over here might have cracked the Voynich manuscript? If that doesn’t ring a bell, you’d probably know it if you saw it — it’s one of those perennial old mysteries at the heart of Ripley’s Believe it or Not and such like.
It’s a manuscript from the early 1400’s in a completely unique and undecipherable language. Lots of cryptographers and linguists have had a go at working it out, without any success what-so-ever. The pictures are mostly of plants that were contemporary herbal remedies, so it’s thought to be a pharmacopeia of some kind. But then there are other illustrations, like these naked ladies and things that look like astronomic (or astrologic) charts.
Up to now, one of the leading theories was that the whole thing was a fake, perhaps by Voynich himself — the antiquities dealer who turned it up in 1912. There are characteristics — like doubled and tripled words — that are very unlanguage-like. The fact that nobody could crack a word of it probably pissed everybody off, too. But that always struck me as extremely unlikely — writing out 250 pages of nonsense, using proper ancient materials, and drawings and calligraphy appropriate to the age, without once breaking character? Nah.
According to the BBC article, the ‘breakthrough’ was some kind of statistical analysis of the word patterns, which sounds very boring. Cue learned men huffing and pooh-poohing.
But the Daily Mail’s version sounds much more interesting (*shakes fist at Daily Mail*). They interviewed Bax, the scientist, who said he’d taken the known Arabic words for some of the herbs illustrated and managed to find them near the appropriate illustration. He says he has decoded Juniper, Taurus, Coriander, Centaurea, Chiron, Hellebore Nigella Sativa, Kesar and Cotton. That’s better.
If you’re interested, the Wikipedia rundown on the thing is as good as any.
February 22, 2014 — 12:10 am
Comments: 11
Daddy in his skivvies
This artwork isn’t mine, I just weaseled it up a little. It’s an old advertising gimmick from a German lingerie maker. You don’t want to know what I was searching for when this turned up.
But I don’t want to talk about George Washington’s underpants, I want to talk about his false teeth. For I have seen them with mine own eyes, before they were stolen out of the Smithsonian in 1976. Thought you’d like to know that.
Actually, he had several pairs (and none of them made of wood). He had trouble with his teeth all his life. By inauguration day, the Father of our Country had one natural tooth left in his head (and when that went, he gave it to the dentist who had made his best pair of store-bought teeth)(whose name was Greenwood, so maybe that’s how ‘wood’ got associated with the august gentleman’s gnashers).
By the time Gilbert Stuart painted the famous portrait, Washington’s dentures were a source of constant misery. By some accounts, that’s why his mouth is swollen. But I’ve also read that they were so godawful painful, he took them out and stuffed his mouth with cotton balls, and that’s why his mouth is swollen.
But I have also read that Stuart and Washington detested each other on sight and the former wasn’t all that worried about making the latter look good. The original was deliberately left unfinished so that thousands and thousands of unflattering copies could be made and spread across the land.
Poor old George Washington. He was a heartthrob in his day.
p.s. I added the hearts.
February 10, 2014 — 8:18 pm
Comments: 10
Or maybe not
Still working my way slowly through Norman Rockwell’s autobiography (it’s an actual paper book; I’ve kind of forgotten how to use those). Early in his career, nearly all his commissions were for kids’ magazine. He describes how he would hang around elementary schools for hours checking out children, then approach the ones he favored and asked them back to his studio.
I thought what a quaint and innocent time, until I got here:
Four ground-glass windows faced the hallway leading to the other offices. When Billy and Eddie saw the shadow of a passing person on the glass, they’d shuffle their feet and scream, “Oh, Mr Rockwell, don’t. Please. Oh, Mr Rockwell, we didn’t know you were that kind of man.” And I could see the person stop and turn his head to listen. Then Billy and Eddie would fall silent and the person would put his head close to the window so he could hear better. But Billy and Eddie always ruined their own game at this point by breaking into shouts of laughter.
Billy was Billy Paine, Rockwell’s favorite model. The illustration above was Rockwell’s very first Saturday Evening Post cover, and Paine was the model for all three boys. Here’s Billy’s sad end:
When he was thirteen Billy was climbing out of a window in the second story of Edgewood Hall with a girdle he’d stolen from a lady’s room, and lost his footing, falling to the sidewalk below. A few days later, he died
A more innocent time, my ass.
Right. Back here tomorrow, 6 sharp WBT. Dead Pool Round 58!
January 16, 2014 — 11:21 pm
Comments: 14
Still workin’ it
Hope yours was awesome. Mine’s still in the works. Better scurry!
November 28, 2013 — 11:59 pm
Comments: 7