This guy
It was an unexpectedly nice day today. I would like to digress a moment and tell you that weather reporting is utter shit here. They can’t help it — it’s a little island stuck out in the wild Atlantic — but they make predictions with such confidence and they are always, always, ALWAYS wrong. I miss being in New England, where you get to watch your weather come at you for five days.
Anyhoo! It was supposed to be cloudy, but nay it was sunny, so we decided, more or less randomly, to go to Bodiam Castle. Little did we know they were hosting a sort of Medieval Fair (Fayre, Faire, Faër, or Phære).
Most of the activities were for kids, and then there was this guy. He was hammering coins more or less in the manner of old. He put a disk of metal between two dies and bang, there you go. A man who did this for a living would be expected to make 2,000 in a day, he said.
He explained in some detail how he screwed with the mint marks on the back so no-one would think they were real old coins. As you might imagine, forging collectible coins is a thing, and collectors are mighty grumpy about it. But as all of this guy’s blanks were pewter, I doubt that would ever be an issue.
He also made jewelry and other bits. I bought a rather wicked-looking pewter torque bracelet, hammered and twisted (like moi). It didn’t fit, so he used brute force to pull it open and close it around my wrist. So…I guess I wear this permanently now.
Gotta show you this one large and in color, so you can see how cool his stuff is. My bracelet is just visible in the red case at the far left of the picture. Pictures courtesy Uncle B.
August 5, 2015 — 9:09 pm
Comments: 8
The English are so weird
I have posted about flower festivals before, where the members of a parish church fill the church with flower arrangements. Different people do different arrangements all around a single theme.
This sounds lovely, if you’ve never seen it. In practice, specific arrangements often include brain hurty items like plastic dinosaurs, old shoes or decapitated Barbie dolls.
I have no idea how this got started or what the point is, other than to spruce the place up and draw visitors. There’s usually a program (thank god for the program, or half the arrangements wouldn’t make any sense at all) and someone playing the organ and they sell you a cup of tea and a piece of cake. It is both civilized and grotesque.
We went to one this weekend that took it a step further and eliminated the flowers. The whole inside of the church was covered in…hats. Just hats. With labels.
Ladies’ hats, military helmets, Boy Scout berets, chainmail coifs, this here sombrero (there were two, actually).
I described this to a group of my neighbors and they were like, “oh, well yeah. That’s a little weird.” Then I told them that this same church last year featured wedding dresses of the parishioner and they were all, like, “oh, hey, our church did that!”
My life is a Monty Python sketch.
August 4, 2015 — 9:36 pm
Comments: 6
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
compare and contrast
It’s an armadillo, haterz. It won first prize in the “named animal made out of vegetables” category, so there.
The Summer fete season is at its peak. I haven’t posted much from our adventures because it’s all the same every year. That’s the pleasure of it: it’s all the same every year. I get the feeling it has been the same going back decades. With a few minor changes, centuries.
Contrast this with the news. About two thousand migrants a night are still storming the Channel Tunnel. Some make it through. There are supposedly women and children in the camps in Calais, but all we see are strong, young men, swarming over fences and onto goods lorries.
Oh. Excuse me. David Cameron has been slapped for using the word “swarm” — it’s dehumanizing, apparently. The UN has told us to shut up and take our fair share of Syrians, Afghanis, Libyans, Gambians, Kosovars. It’s worth asking what our fair share is, and why.
An awful lot of the people I know here are reflexively liberal (that’s what having a huge monopolistic state media will do for you), but I don’t know anyone who isn’t horrified by this scene. There’s an instinctive understanding that the world of armadillos made out of squashes is not compatible with…that.
‘Member, Dead Pool Tomorrow. 6 WBT. Be here or be somewhere else; I’m not the boss of you.
July 30, 2015 — 9:51 pm
Comments: 12
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
Bohemia, yo
This happy chappy is Daniel Vávra, a Czech video game developer. Long story short, he had an idea for a videogame, tried to get funding, was told all anybody wants is puzzles to play on iPhones, took his idea to Kickstarter. He was trying to get half a million to start, he got nearly $2.5 million to date (he has another corporate backer, as well – it’s a big team and a long lead time).
The game looks gorgeous. It’s set in a meticulously recreated 15th century Bohemia. They’ve consulted historians and architects, rotoscoped sword fighters, bought topo maps of the area, really trying to nail the era down as fully and accurately as they can. No magic (their slogan is “dungeons, no dragons”). You have to eat and sleep and make homemade medicines.
It’s called Kingdom Come: Redemption. I know most of you aren’t gamers, and I don’t usually recommend early access, but these guys are the real deal. They’re professionals and they’ve hit all their deadlines. The game is currently in early alpha (they’re calling it “technical alpha”; they’re mostly looking for basic playability glitches. Flying horses and chickens that walk through walls). Due out for reals in a year.
The t-shirt? Vávra is under heavy fire because there aren’t any people of color in the game. In 15th C Bohemia. He doesn’t seem too bothered.
Don’t think this is a bit of SJW fluff. This is a thing now. The Witcher — a popular series of games based on Slavic myth — has been dinged recently because everybody in it is Slavic.
And some silly grad student at the University of Leeds has written a paper — or put together a presentation, it’s not clear — on how ‘medievally-themed video games are a space where whiteness can be anchored, in a “happy history” where a world is free of multiculturalism and white guilt’.
Unfortunately for her, she picked the worst possible game to illustrate this. Skyrim is a great game in a fantasy medieval Nordic setting, but it’s completely multicultural and, at times, annoyingly preachy and 21st C about it. Her research seems to have been entirely interrogating players without investigating the game at all.
May Talos smite her in the ass for it.
Oh, yeah: the commenter Formerly known as Skeptic has won the dick with Bobbi Kristina Brown. They finally unplugged the poor kid and let her go. See you back here on Friday for Dead Pool Round 76.
July 27, 2015 — 9:39 pm
Comments: 19
Got this badass coming up the Channel
England top left, France bottom right, we’re somewhere under those big black blobs in the middle. Thunder, wind, the whole schtick. A lifetime’s worth of rain in ten minutes, or however it was the Mail drama’d it up.
I shall wish you a good weekend and sign off, I think. Good weekend!
July 24, 2015 — 8:44 pm
Comments: 7
Big bird
An emu shut down the A21 in Sedlescombe today. They got it penned in a field, but they still haven’t found who it belongs to.
Used to be a flock near us, now gone. I wonder if whoever it was sold it on.
Anyhoo, the article makes a remark about Rob Hull. He was a British comedian of the Seventies who…had an emu. You kind of have to see it.
Here he explains how to groom an emu. Here’s something a bit more camp, if you like that. British talk show host Michael Parkinson once bitterly remarked that, for all his long career, he would mostly be remembered being knocked out of his chair by emu.
Fun fact: later in life, Hull came to resent emu bitterly. Because that’s what people who perform with dummies always do.
In 1999, Hull climbed up on the roof to adjust his TV aerial, slipped and fell through a greenhouse and died. He was survived by emu.
July 23, 2015 — 10:36 pm
Comments: 6
Can I just get the t-shirt?
I was banging around the web today — following a link that led to a link that led to another link, deeper and deeper into the forest — when I was startled to find myself invited to join the Knights Templar.
“Oooooo!” went the little rogue braincell that plays Skyrim and yearns to LARP.
They’re vague about who they are and what they’re doing. The news on site is topically British, but the domain was registered out of Arizona. They’re equally vague on what they want to do, though it’s obviously pro-Christian and anti-Islam. It’s £60 British or $90 Murican, which seems steep for something I don’t know what the hell it is all about.
I poked around a little. According to the Ordo Supremus Militaris Templi Hierosolymitani (OSMTH), there are 1,700 groups calling themselves Templars. Which they are perfectly entitled to do. This includes the branch of the Masons that is explicitly Christian.
So, is this one a genuine grassroots movement of some kind or an opportunistic scam? Who knows. Love their t-shirts, though.
July 22, 2015 — 9:10 pm
Comments: 11
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