Shoo, ye witches!
You might have seen this story floating around this week. They’ve been doing some work on Knole House, the enormous Grade I listed pile in Sevenoaks, Kent.
They were renovating a room that had originally been remodelled for a visit from King James I and found these crude gouges in the wood on the beams under the floorboards and around the fireplace. Specifically, they found straight lines and crosshatches and V marks cut deep in the wood. Experts say these are apotropaic marks — folk magic intended to ward off witches and other evil.
What’s interesting about them is they’ve done tree ring analysis on the wood and they reckon they can pin the beams down to 1606. That’s just after the Gunpowder Plot. So, they figure, these marks were made to keep evil away from the King at a time he had just survived an assassination attempt.
Actually, I’m lying. That’s not the most interesting thing about them. The most interesting thing is, the picture above isn’t from Knole House, it’s from this house. That carving is on an exposed ceiling beam about ten feet from where I’m sitting right now. We always assumed they were just marks the workmen made to tally something or identify the piece of wood, but they look exactly like the marks at Knole.
No wonder the witches never come to visit.
How impossibly cool is that?
Good weekend, all!
November 7, 2014 — 10:20 pm
Comments: 28
Burn the pope! Again.
Well, Bonfire Night in Lewes went off well enough, so I understand.
I’m sure I’ve explained in years past, Sussex takes bonfire night very, very seriously. But not just on November 5. Local celebrations are staggered so the various crews can march in each other’s processions. This means there are big marches and firework displays from September right through November, one village after another.
But Lewes is the big one. Biggest one in the country. Everyone saves November 5th in deference to Lewes. It’s gotten so big, they beg people to stay away because it gets out of hand sometimes, and there have been injuries. They burn multiple effigies every year, including — I’m pretty sure they’re the only one that still dares — the Pope. (Nice selection of past effigies here).
This is because Lewes not only commemorates the Gunpowder Plot on this day, but also the seventeen Protestant men of Lewes burned at the stake during the Marian Persecutions. They are serious as a heart attack about it.
This year, two of the effigies were of Alex Salmond, the Scottish First Minister who led Scotland’s attempt to break away from the UK. This caused a Twitter storm of protest and the bonfire societies who sponsored the effigies promised not to torch them. And then they blew them up anyway, or one of them at least. The Sussex police are investigating, because butthurt is a police matter here.
Oh, also thousands of unemployed trustafarian kids wearing V masks descended on London and other European cities to protest austerity, whatever that is in this context. This caused such an enormous sensation that I’ve had difficulty finding articles about it in the major papers next day, even though there were arrests and shit. That utter moron Russel Brand was there. ‘Nuff said.
Anyway, I think we’ve gone to all the main bonfires in our area at some time or other. Lately, we’ve taken to watching the displays from a distance. To be honest, I get a little freaked stuck in the middle of huge, jostling crowds. I think we’ll go to one.
November 6, 2014 — 9:38 pm
Comments: 14
Well done, everyone!
Did he ever have that stupid press conference this afternoon, or what?
November 5, 2014 — 10:52 pm
Comments: 16
Y’all get out there and make me proud
Makes me nervous, all this chest-thumping and taking of victory laps. Particularly when the legacy media starts saying how well the GOP is gonna do. They aren’t our friends; they must be up to something. I’m worried that anything less than an absolute history blowout for the right will be spun as a kinda sorta defeat.
It ain’t over until all the fraudulent ballots are counted.
So please get out an vote today. Unless you’re a lurky leftie, in which case…dude, it’s an awful lot of trouble and you guys are just going to lose anyway.
November 4, 2014 — 3:28 pm
Comments: 23
Weaselface, yourself
It’s Garbage Day, callooh callay! The happiest day of the week!
Eh. Not really. Between the two of us, we’re one saved cardboard box and a jam jar from being hoarders. Just…not tidy people. But tonight we made an effort to round up some junk and pitch it. I was most surprised when this thing fell out of an envelope.
This thing. This drawing. It’s a nice reproduction of a master drawing by Charles Le Brun (1619–1690), the dude Charles Louis XIV called the greatest French artist who ever lived.
Yeah. Some endorsements are not so good for your rep. (Ask Wagner. Or don’t; he’s dead).
Le Brun’s paintings are exactly the kind of pompous rubbish you can imagine the Sun King eating up with a spoon. But his drawings had an influence on art for a century or more — mostly his notions of conveying emotion on the human face.
This thing, though, is a part of a series of drawings — a philosophy, I suppose — known as le Brun’s Physiognomy. He’s trying to relate people faces to animal faces. With absolutely no success, if you ask me. They all look like creepy genetic experiments.
Anyway, these are the weasel faced ladies. When it turned up, Uncle B exclaimed, “I wondered where that got to! I bought that for your birthday. Or Christmas. I don’t remember; it was years ago.”
It was in the current bills-to-pay pile. Ladies and gentlemen, my housekeeping.
November 3, 2014 — 9:40 pm
Comments: 12
…and then there’s this…
Today was a misty, mizzly, miserable sort of day. It precipitated: something more than fog but something less than rain. We did our weekly shop then set out in search of lunch.
I’ll be honest with you, we stopped Mickey D’s first. But the school holidays are on so the place was chock full of screaming children. Um, no.
So we went on to an old pub not far away. We’ve been in this one many times, but we’re not regulars and we heard it’s under new management. When we walked in, honest to god it was like a Hammer film. You know the scene, where strangers walk into a country pub and all conversation stops and grizzly old men squint at them over pints of beer? That one.
Being the smooth social operator that I am, I gibbered, “Oh my gawd, this is like a Hammer film, where strangers walk into a country pub…”
Turns out, it’s not new management, it’s old management. The man who owns the place and has rented it to a series of wannabes has taken it on again to build the business back up. He came and sat by the fire (see crappy cellphone photo of fire) and all the old boys told us spooky stories about the pub.
He told us about a wounded smuggler being brought in to have his injuries dressed (this was — and is — a *big time* smuggling area, beginning in the 18th C. Before that, it was piracy). And a notorious and probably fictional murder on a bridge nearby. We’d heard of that one.
More recently, there was the neighbor up the hill who had 17 children. All their water came from a big rainwater butt. One day, the man next door disappeared. Three days later, they find him drowned in the water butt with his pockets full of nuts and bolts. Suicide by fresh water supply. Pretty unneighborly, if you ask me.
And the bloke who tried to kill himself with a humane killer. My advice, don’t Google it. It’s a sort of gun barrel with one round in it. Put it against an animal’s head and hit it with a hammer, bang. So he put it against his own forehead, swung, missed and smacked himself in the eye with the hammer. A sort of happy ending. Well, we laughed.
There was the inevitable pub ghost. All it did was move a chair and smell like rotten eggs, though, so I wasn’t impressed.
Also, the food wasn’t bad and the beer was excellent. All in all, a most convivial way to spend an English afternoon.
October 29, 2014 — 9:22 pm
Comments: 24
Has science gone too far?
The answer is yes. Yes, it has.
This is exactly what it looks like: a woman with a foot where her knee should be, but backwards.
This East Yorkshire woman had bone cancer, so they removed her thigh and knee. Then they moved her lower leg up to replace her thigh, but turned it around facing backwards. That way, her ankle bends in the same direction her knee used to.
It makes a certain sense. I get it. It’s not unlike having a big toe grafted to replace a thumb. But…I dunno. I could maybe, after a lot of years, get used to having a toe on my hand.
Having my foot where my knee should be but facing backwards rattles me on a deep, baseline body image level. I can’t explain it. Just, trust me…I would freak the fuck out. Every day until they took it offa me.
This lady looks happy, though, so who am I to judge? brrrrrr
October 28, 2014 — 8:12 pm
Comments: 17
We ate here today
It’s between Battle and Hastings. As in Battle of Hastings? 1066?
Oh, well. We should’ve ordered the greasy breakfast; the burgers weren’t great.
October 27, 2014 — 8:54 pm
Comments: 16
Puny mortals!
But I don’t want to talk about that. I want to talk about GamerGate.
GamerGate is an unfolding nasty slap-fight between low-status nerdy video game players and high-status hipster smartasses. It should be small and meaningless, but it’s blossomed into something big and ugly…and emblematic.
I’m firmly on Team Nerd, but I haven’t been able to articulate what I think about it — and before I managed to do it, someone at PopeHat did it ever so much better than I could, with links and references and everything. (If you don’t read PopeHat, I recommend that you do. This group blog frequently pisses me off — I’m just sure they take more pokes at my team than they do the other guys — but is nearly always thoughtful and interesting and seldom wasted time).
Clark does a bang-up job relating the current kerfuffle to the larger historical trends, which is the very thing I have been thinking about lately. Larger historical trends, I mean. If you haven’t got time for the whole thing, skip to the bit that’s sub-headed “Our forces have Technograd surrounded are pounding it with shame bombs, and our sappers are inside the walls” (I’d link to it directly, but there isn’t a tag for me to grab onto. That’s nerd talk).
Oh, and see you back here tomorrow, 6pm WBT, Dead Pool Round 70!
October 23, 2014 — 9:06 pm
Comments: 8
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