Insomniac's Corner

The Plantagenets had two ancestral grandmothers
named Melusine, one the daughter of King Elinus of Albany and the
other the daughter of Baldwin du Bourg, King of Jerusalem.

In the first instance the Plantagenets derived their name from a
princess named Plantina (possibly derived from Plantanu or Planta-
Anu) who was actually the younger sister of Maelasanu des Scythes or
Melusine McLean and this obviously means that the Plantagenets were
not actually directly descended in the male line from Melusine
herself, who in a matriarchal Pictish system of inheritance, was the
senior daughter of King Gille Sidhean of Albany, and the heir of her
mother Queen Pressina or more formally The Queen Bruidhe-Anu des
Scythes.

Melusine certainly was the matriarch of the Angevin or Anjou dynasty,
but her senior heir and the first Count of Anjou was Maelo de Vere,
not Tortolf de Rennes, making the Plantagenet dynasty descending
from the younger sister Plantanu, a junior branch of the Imperial and
Vere Angevins

http://herebedragons.***********/plantagenet.html


Monty Python unforgettable contribution to the argument-


WOMAN : Well, how did you become king then?
ARTHUR: The Lady of the Lake, [angels start singing] her arm clad in the purest shimmering samite, held aloft Excalibur from the bosom of the water signifying by Divine Providence that I, Arthur, was to carry Excalibur. [singing stops] That is why I am your king!
DENNIS: Listen, strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.
ARTHUR: Be quiet!
DENNIS: Well you can't expect to wield supreme executive power just because some watery tart threw a sword at you!
ARTHUR: Shut up!
DENNIS: I mean, if I went around saying, "I was an emperor just because some moistened bink had lobbed a scimitar at me" they'd put me away!
ARTHUR: Shut up! Will you shut up!
DENNIS: Ah, now we see the violence inherent in the system.
ARTHUR: Shut up!

I heard this excerpt of the sonnet, recited, while watching an old Star Trek episode-
(A pretend sonnet, read in a pretend sick bay unit, of a pretend spaceship.)

Nightingale Woman

My love has wings,
slender, feathered things
with grace in upswept curve
and tapered tip

- Phineas Tarbolde

1996

(The poem was used in 1965 for the Star Trek episode, "Where No One Has Gone Before".)


The words to the poem were written by Gene Roddenberry back when he was an aviator, as a love poem from a pilot to his airplane. (Star Trek Chronology; Star Trek Encyclopedia) Despite this, the script of "Where No Man Has Gone Before" refers to the poem with a very slight difference, as "The Nightingale Woman"

http://en.memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Nightingale_Woman

"... one of the most passionate love sonnets of its time."



(Like the physical, material, stage props, the poem is merely a device, to assist in propelling the story forward.)


Dr. Dehner ( a young and lovely Sally Kellerman) decides to test his memorization abilities. She shows Mitchell the title of a record tape, and asks him to tell her what's on page 387. Mitchell quotes, "My love has wings, slender feathered things with grace and upswept curve and tapered tip" from the poem Nightingale Woman, written by Tarbolde on the Canopus planet back in 1996. Mitchell wonders why she happened to choose that particular poem, which is considered to be one of the most passionate poems written in recent centuries. He then pulls Dehner close to him, and asks her how she feels. Her reply, that she only fell and that nothing else happened, is seemingly disbelieved by Mitchell, but the conversation is cut short by the arrival of Lieutenant Kelso, awkwardly coming in. Mitchell smiles and invites him in, joking that his eyes are merely lit up due to the lovely doctor.


Props

Property of the theatre
Property of the acting troupe

Borrowed Property
Rented Property
Purchased Property
Lender's Property

Will the grandchildren complain, "that happened a thousand years, ago" ?

Will children celebrate the passing of a thousand years, since William the First launched the conquest of England ?

I read of the splitting of the path, that leads to Henry I losing his son and heir to drowning.

Claudius allowed Livia to become a goddess, so that she would not spend her afterlife in torment.


Rulers became saints. Was this done, so that they not would spend the afterlife in torment ?

Lion in Winter firm (1968) fiction
Arthur of Brittany was two years old
when King Henry II died.

Jealousy and Murder

Philip II of France wanted to cause trouble.

In attempt to take Anjou and Maine, the teenage Arthur of Brittany besieged his octagenarian grandmother, Eleanor of Aquitaine, at Mirabeau. Eleanor sent an urgent message for aid to her son John and succeeded in drawing out the negotiations for as long as possible. John responded with uncharacteristic speed and came to her rescue, in the process taking both Arthur and Hugh prisoner. Arthur was imprisoned at Falaise Castle in Normandy.


Philip II of France invaded Maine and forced Henry II to conclude the treaty of Azay on the 4th of July 1189, by which the English king did homage and surrendered the territories of Graçy and Issoudun. Henry II died two days later.

"John joined with his brother Richard and the French king Philip Augustus in the great conspiracy of 1189, and the discovery of his treason broke the heart of the old king."

Pledges of mutual good faith and fellowship were renewed between Philip and Richard the Lionheart of England on the 30th of December 1189, and they both prepared to go on the crusade.

"Soon after the king's departure for the Holy Land it became known that he had designated his nephew, the young Arthur of Brittany, as his successor. John at once began to intrigue against the regents with the aim of securing England for himself."

John renounced his suzerainty over Brittany and the guardianship of his nephew, Arthur.

At an interview at Le Goulet on the 25th of March, Philip demanded the cession of Anjou, Poitou and Normandy to his ward, Arthur. John refused; he was summoned to Paris before the royal judges, and failing to appear was sentenced at the end of April 1202 to lose all his fiefs. Brittany, Aquitaine and Anjou were conferred on Arthur.

John, joined by William des Roches and other lords of Maine and Poitou, jealous at the increase of Philip's power, defeated and took Arthur prisoner at Mirebeau.

Philip abandoned the siege of Arques in a fit of fury, marched to the Loire, burning everywhere, and then returned to Paris.

John soon alienated the Poitevin barons, and William des Roches signed a treaty with Philip on the 22nd of March 1203. Then Philip continued his great task, the conquest of Normandy, capturing the towns around the fortress of Château-Gaillard which Richard had built to command the valley of the Seine.

Pope Innocent III tried to bring about peace, but Philip was obdurate.

After murdering Arthur of Brittany, John took refuge in England in December 1203.

"The murder of Arthur (1203) ruined his cause in Normandy and Anjou; the story that the court of the peers of France condemned him for the murder is a fable, but no legal process was needed to convince men of his guilt."


"A contemporary chronicler states 'After King John had captured Arthur and kept him alive in prison in the castle of Rouen....When John was drunk and possessed by the devil, he slew (Arthur) with his own hand and tying a heavy stone to the body, cast it into the Seine.'

The fall of Château-Gaillard, after a siege which lasted from September 1203 to April 1204, decided the fate of Normandy. Rouen, bound by ties of trade to England, resisted for forty days; but it surrendered on the 24th of June 1204.

In 1206 Philip marched through Brittany and divided it amongst his adherents. A truce for two years was made on the 26th of October 1206 by which John renounced all claims in Normandy, Maine, Brittany, Touraine and Anjou, but it did not last six months.


Another truce was made in 1208, little more than southern Saintonge and Gascony being left in the hands of John.

Philip had reduced to a mere remnant the formidable continental empire of the Angevins, which had threatened the existence of the Capetian monarchy.

Philip then undertook to invade England. In the assembly of Soissons on the 8th of April 1213 he made every preparation for carrying out the sentence of deposition pronounced by the pope against John. He had collected 1500 vessels and summoned all his barons when Innocent III, having sufficiently frightened John, sent Pandulph with the terms of submission, which John accepted on the 13th of May.

http://www.nndb.com/people/024/000093742/

http://www.nndb.com/people/198/000092919/

http://www.englishmonarchs.co.uk/plantagenet_3.htm


Was Alice's Gryphon pointing to the murder ?

10 Old English Insults That Should be Band Names
By Fraser McAlpine | Posted on July 31st, 2015



Bedswerver

Shakespeare coined the phrase to describe an adulterer, and it’s got a brilliant swashbuckling (or, more accurately, beltbuckling) undercurrent to it. Picture four greasy rock dudes (of either gender) taking to the stage, strapping on Les Pauls and stamping down hard on a fuzzbox in front of a Stonehenge of Marshalls. “How ya doin, Cincinatti?” asks the lanky androgyne in the middle, “we are Bedswerver, and you are about to get ROCKED! WAN CHOO FREE FOWAH…”

Fopdoodle
Well that’s James Blunt to a tee, isn’t it? Or any well-to-do singer-songwriter with the unfortunate habit of hitting their guitar while playing it, as if friends with percussion instruments are an alien concept. The word was used to describe someone of little significance, which seems a little harsh in this context, but as a descriptive term for a particular type of performer, it’s bang on the money.

Gobermouch
In old Irish slang, a gobermouch was someone with an unhealthy interest in the affairs of other people, the sort of person the Brits would call a nosey parker. Taken into a musical context, and you could easily see the name being applied to either a snarky singer-songwriter or rapper with a poor grasp of interpersonal boundaries and a thirst for saying the unsayable.

Lubberwort
One for the specialists here. A lubberwort was a mythical vegetable, well-known in the 16th century for causing slow-wittedness or sleep. Then the term just became used to describe someone who appeared to be either slow-witted or dozy. Surely there’s a drone metal or stoner rock band out there that could use such a useful name?

Muck-spout
Similarly, this would suit either a capricious and mischievous rapper (said out loud, it does rather sound like someone saying “mucks about,” which seems apt) or the dirtiest, sleaziest of grotty metal bands. And it’s historically fitting too, as a muck-spout was someone with a bad case of verbal diarrhea, the kind that is riddled with scattershot cuss explosions too.

Mumblecrust
A shy, skinny young man in a cardigan takes to the stage. He holds a badly beaten-up guitar in one hand and a similarly distressed laptop in the other. He steadfastly refuses to look the audience in the eye as he plugs both items into the same tatty amp and turns to face the mic. “H’lo we’re mumblecrust,” he intones at speed, “this is called ‘DreamWakeSleeper,'” and then he hits the space bar, oblivious to his band name’s origins as a toothless beggar character from medieval comedic theater.

Rakefire
Rake is a cool word, and so is fire; so it’s a little disconcerting to find out that a rakefire was originally someone so uncool that they would outstay their welcome in someone’s house until long after the fire had burned down to just the last few embers. Don’t let this be your band, unless you want to take pride in re-stoking a fire most people would leave for dead. Ska revivalists, you are welcome.

Scobberlotcher
The scobberlotcher—derived from scobberloit, an old English slang term for time off work—is a workshy layabout with no clear direction or appetite for hard graft. Surely the ultimate band name for the ultimate weekend jam band that, like, just play what they feel and don’t want to make this, y’know, a career or anything.

Smell-feast
Appearing in support of Scobberlotcher whenever they can get themselves together enough to leave the house. Smell-feast are also very aptly named, being both a treat for the eyes and nostrils, but also fulfilling the term’s original intention as a description of a freeloader who only turns up at a party if there’s free food and booze.

Snoutband
These guys (and for once it is just guys) have been playing together since they met at work 10 years ago. They’re either all into the Allman Brothers or bluegrass or Frank Zappa, and they all grew those beards—tidy, no mustache wax—before it became fashionable, thank you very much. They choose to name themselves Snoutband after a guy at work who can’t stop interrupting people in order to correct them or pick an argument. The group is their release from office politics.

Stampcrab
Jessica Evans, Stampcrab’s lead singer, is a formidable stage presence. At almost six foot in her KISS-level heels, she looms over the audience, glaring at everyone and silently daring them to meet her gaze. She has musical scores to settle with the world and is supported by a black-clad group of equally sullen women clutching the least-girly guitars they could lay their hands on. They mutually agreed on the name because it refers to someone who is clumsy, a klutz. They decided to make their Stampcrab an angry one, as their sound may not be pin sharp, but by word they leave a deep impression.

And one extra one for Sherlock fans: cumberworld (or cumberground) is a term for someone who is useless, a feckless idiot. But wouldn’t it do rather well for a theme park devoted to all things Benedict-ish?

"Note: Thanks to Mental Floss for their recent dip into the ever-reliable big book of fantastic old swear words."

http://www.bbcamerica.com/anglophenia/2015/07/10-old-english-insults-that-should-be-band-names/

Fata, there is a thirty foot tall spider (nine-metres high) lurking...

Louise Bourgeois (Born in Paris in 1911, died 2010) perhaps best known for sculptures of spiders, ranging in size from a brooch of four inches to monumental outdoor pieces that rise to 30 (35?) feet.


In 2000, Bourgeois was commissioned to create Maman for the opening of Turbine Hall Gallery, part of Tate Modern in London. Bourgeois saw this as an opportunity to create the single largest and most elaborate spider in her career.


She would have celebrated her 100th birthday on December 25, 2011

https://www.moma.org/explore/collection/lb/themes/spiders

Vicente Todoli, the director of Tate Modern, said: "To acquire Maman, one of Louise Bourgeois's best-known and seminal works, the largest of her spider sculptures, is a historic moment for Tate.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/u...pider-makes-return-to-tate-modern-769729.html


Thursday 25 July 2013

Giant spiders head to National Galleries of Scotland for Louise Bourgeois exhibition

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-e...-for-louise-bourgeois-exhibition-8731185.html


Thus Bourgeois’s Maman represents a magnificent monument to the existence of change. After compelling presentations at the Tate Modern London in (2000/2007) and the Jardin des Tuileries in Paris in (2007-08), at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao (since 2001) and the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg (2001), Maman is on view for the first time in Switzerland. ( Fondation Beyeler park in Riehen/Base)

June 5, 2015


"Crystal Bridges is honored to fulfill the late artist’s wish to have Maman exhibited in an American art museum,” said Bigelow. “The sculpture adds to our collection with sophisticated engineering and stainless steel armature, which will engage viewers and challenge our ideas of architecture and sculpture.

BENTONVILLE, ARK.- Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art has acquired two sculptures and two paintings by artist Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010): Maman, 1999 (bronze, stainless steel, and marble)


http://artdaily.com/news/79067/Crys...uise-Bourgeois-and-Jasper-Johns-#.Vj5GVsso4v4


The monumental sculpture Maman, (from French: mama), measures more than 30 feet in both length and height, and will be installed on the museum’s grounds later this year.


http://www.northwestarkansas.org/2015/06/crystal-bridges-announces-new-acquisitions/

Nov 6, 2008

"Currently showing as part of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Art on Film series – Louise Bourgeois: The Spider, The Mistress, and The Tangerine, by Amei Wallach and Marion Cajoli"

Filming the process of making art or getting an artist to talk about their work can be an illuminating experience or a bit like having the curtain pulled back in the Wizard of Oz; what was magical or inexplicable becomes mechanic. Each of these films prove to be the former. Louise Bourgeois: The Spider, the Mistress, and the Tangerine “reveals much about this haunting and haunted master” writes Nathan Lee of The New York Times. At 96, Louise Bourgeois has always made work that commanded our attention.


http://blog.art21.org/2008/11/06/spiders-and-steel-at-the-mfa-boston/#.Vj5JUMso4v4

Nov. 10, 1969

Sesame Street begins.


Nov. 10, 2016

Republicans rejoice that lower income, poverty stricken, disadvantaged children are locked out and excluded from watching the new HBO version of Sesame Street ?

Nov. 10, 2019


50th Anniversary Celebration of Sesame Street will be an HBO Spectacular Special!


Get a subscription, parasitic lower income toddlers!


Richard Plepler, chief executive of HBO, in a statement. "We are delighted to be a home for this extraordinary show, helping 'Sesame Street' expand and build its franchise."


Kids' content is one of the biggest drivers of consumers picking up subscription-video-on-demand services. HBO also runs a cable outlet devoted to kids and family programming that is typically bundled with its flagship network.


http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/tv/ct-sesame-street-hbo-20150813-story.html



"I Am Big Bird" features lengthy interviews with Spinney, his wife and manager Debra, Frank Oz, the cast members of "Sesame Street" ("Bob," "Luis," "Maria," "Susan"), as well as the producers and head writers of the show. It is a warm and enthusiastic celebration of Spinney as a man and a performer.


Jim Henson first saw Caroll Spinney at a puppeteer festival.
Henson invited Spinney to join him and his team in New York to create a new television show for children called "Sesame Street".

Spinney landed upon the idea that Big Bird was, essentially, a 6-year-old kid who also happened to be a gigantic fluffy yellow bird. The other Muppets on the block, Bert and Ernie, Grover, Kermit, The Count, were of more indeterminate age and experience. Bert and Ernie were independent enough to have their own apartment. Kermit had a job as a roving reporter. The Count clearly had centuries of experience behind his counting mania. But Big Bird was different. Big Bird needed to be cared for. He was the audience.



Big Bird's presence on the show (along with all of the educational counting and spelling games built into the show's structure) allowed "Sesame Street" to tackle many difficult topics through his character's perception of events. In one of the most famous "Sesame Street" episodes ever aired, the grown-ups on the block have to explain to Big Bird that Mr. Hooper, who owned the corner store, had died and was not coming back.

(Will Lee, the actor who played Mr. Hooper, had actually died, and instead of pretending Mr. Hooper was on vacation in Bermuda, the creators of the show decided to address the issue head-on.)

No one who has seen that episode will ever forget it. (Molly Eichel wrote a wonderful article at the A.V. Club about the episode.) Spinney remembers filming that episode, with tears soaking his face inside the suit at the end of it.


http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/i-am-big-bird-the-caroll-spinney-story-2015


March 13, 2015



45 years, Caroll Spinney has been beloved by generations of children as the man behind Sesame Street’s Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch – and at 80 years old, he has no intention of stopping.



The first season of Sesame Street featured three regular puppeteers: Jim Henson, Frank Oz and Caroll Spinney. Though Oz occasionally returns to set for cameos, Caroll Spinney is the last puppeteer who works on the show.



http://www.wearemoviegeeks.com/2015/03/big-bird-caroll-spinney-story-trailer/

"A John Goodman production."

Which John Goodman?


House of Frankenstein (1944)

What does Dr. Gustav Niemann have to do with Dr. Frankenstein ?
He wants to use Dr.Frankenstein's research to give yet, another Igor
a new body. (Yes, Igor is a hunchback, yet again.)


Boris Karloflf!

What happened to Lon Chaney ?

Everything is from the Olde World.

Nova
Life's Rocky Start

Four and a half billion years ago, the young Earth was a hellish place—a seething chaos of meteorite impacts, volcanoes belching noxious gases, and lightning flashing through a thin, torrid atmosphere. Then, in a process that has puzzled scientists for decades, life emerged. But how? NOVA joins mineralogist Robert Hazen as he journeys around the globe. From an ancient Moroccan market to the Australian Outback, he advances a startling and counterintuitive idea—that the rocks beneath our feet were not only essential to jump-starting life, but that microbial life helped give birth to hundreds of minerals we know and depend on today. It's a theory of the co-evolution of Earth and life that is reshaping the grand-narrative of our planet’s story.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/earth/life-rocky-start.html


Created 4.3 billion years ago, in the presence of water, here on Earth ?

Scientists have discovered the oldest fragment of Earth’s crust—and it’s blue.

This 4.4-billion-year-old zircon crystal was only 200 million years old when it formed in the calamitous chemical environs of Earth’s infancy. The finding, reported in Nature Geoscience, confirms our understanding of how the planet cooled and became habitable. The BBC reports:

Its implication is that Earth had formed a solid crust much sooner after its formation 4.6 billion years ago than was previously thought, and very quickly following the great collision with a Mars-sized body that is thought to have produced the Moon just a few tens of millions of years after that. Before this time, Earth would have been a seething ball of molten magma.

But knowledge that its surface hardened so early raises the tantalising prospect that our world became ready to host life very early in its history.


http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/next/e...-crystal-is-the-oldest-piece-of-earths-crust/

Valentine's Day is not far away.

Romance is not dead, and my hope in love is revived.

"Star Wars Fan Makes Ultimate Marriage Proposal"

*sigh*

(My generation was fascinated with Star Trek.)

The last of Jaguar Land Rover's classic Defenders will roll off the production line this week, ending 68 years of production - does this mean the carmaker's best off-road days are behind it?

Picture a Land Rover and you might imagine a box-shaped green vehicle etching desert sand or surging through floodwater.

It's a nostalgic vision of a car whose practicality is legendary - and according to motoring journalist Quentin Willson one that is redolent of a bygone era.

"The world has changed. We don't have the same needs as in the post-war era when it was developed," he said.

The classic Land Rover model, today called Defender, has evolved but JLR said it had essentially "changed very little during its lifetime", while vehicle standards had "changed dramatically."


The firm supplies parts for 15 years, so those with older Defenders will be able to keep them going, she added.

Dave Phillips, Land Rover Monthly's editor, believes the new Defender "may be just as versatile" as the original.

He said: "It is certainly not the end of off-roading for Land Rover."


http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-35285258

"After more than a century of collecting, the library has amassed more than 40,000 restaurant menus. About 18,000 of those menus, dating from 1851 to 2008, have been digitised and are available on their website."

http://menus.nypl.org/


"...one for the Grand Hotel Royale in Budapest -- the inspiration for Wes Anderson's 2014 movie, "The Grand Budapest Hotel" -- which offers fancy French dishes and Cognac:

circa 1901 The menu is listed in French


http://www.independent.co.uk/life-s...s-americans-loved-a-century-ago-a6834606.html

What did we like to eat ? Radishes and celery. Avocado! And turtles.

(The more elderly members of our families would offer olives, radishes and celery before holiday meals. Most of them have died recently. Most were close to a hundred years old.)

"A woman named Frank E. Buttolph was integral to the archive. She started collecting menus in 1900, which she explained in a letter to the trustees of the NYPL. Buttolph, a visionary who intended for the collection to be for research, was considered an eccentric with a strange obsession."


"...images are menus ranging from 1899 to 1959. Many of the menus, some of which had elaborate covers with artworks printed in color, tell the reader much more about the past than what foods were commonly consumed in restaurants. Cocktails and beverages were remarkably different."

A banquet for one person would cost $1.50! Five courses with sides included, and dessert with coffee. Chicken soup, steak, meatballs and spaghetti, baked Virginia ham.


http://www.neatorama.com/2014/09/07/New-York-Public-Library-Menu-Collection1850-Present/

Hamburger Royale for 35 cents.

What would thirty five dollars buy you today ?

(I am curious to look at these menus. I have read old cookbooks, and the number of sauces they had at the turn of the last century was almost endless.)

Otzi the Iceman, returns!

"Otzi, a 5000-year-old mummy, is brought to life and preserved with 3D modeling. Airing February 17, 2016 at 9 pm on PBS"


Paleo-sculptor Gary Staab creates an exact replica of Otzi the Iceman, Europe's oldest known natural mummy; and, in the process, defrosts some of the mysteries that surround his way of life. Included: the possible purpose of the tattoos covering his body; whether the Stone Age medicinal kit he carried with him would have worked; and what his DNA reveals about his physical traits, medical dispositions and family history.


gsgs comment-

What happened, 7,000 years, ago, that would urge people to migrate ?

Poor, dear, Otzi remained covered and hidden from modern eyes until 1991.
His mummified corpse lay in its natural grave, until our modern climate stripped away the ice and snow.


"The analysis showed that Otzii's ancestors belonged to an early wave of farmers who migrated into Europe beginning around 7,000 years ago and eventually replaced the ancient hunter-gatherer way of life."


http://www.broadwayworld.com/bwwtv/article/NOVA-ICEMAN-REBORN-Premieres-on-PBS-217-20160121

On Öland, an island off the coast of Sweden, archaeologists have unearthed the remains of a 1,500-year-old fort whose inhabitants were brutalized in such an extreme way that legends about it persist to this day.


http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/02/remains-at-iron-age-fort-tell-a-story-of-a-horrible-massacre/


The Roman Empire was falling apart, and Öland suffered. We know the island had direct ties to Rome because there is an extremely large number of Roman coins and other trinkets there. It appears that many of Öland's best soldiers served in the Roman military, bringing freshly minted coins back with them.


http://archaeology.org/issues/207-1603/features/4158-sweden-sandbyborg-massacre


February 16, 2016


Two thousand years ago, Öland was connected to the mainland by the Baltic, and from there to the Mediterranean via established overland trade routes. Ölanders profited greatly from long-distance trade with the rest of Europe.


As the empire began to decline, Scandinavian warriors from the islands of Bornholm, Gotland, and Öland found that a set of skills different from what they had sharpened before was now in demand. They had traveled thousands of miles south between a.d. 350 and 500 to work as mercenary bodyguards for the last of the Roman emperors, who paid well to guarantee their loyalty.

"Then, around A.D. 450, the gold began to run out."

The Western Roman Empire was at an end, and there were no emperors left who could pay for imported bodyguards. The latest dated solidi archaeologists have found on the island date to around this time.


The killers seem to have left the bodies of their victims where they fell, and then departed, never to return. “It’s compelling because people were killed inside the houses, and then the killers went out, locked the doors, and left,” says Näsman.


"There was a struggle on the island, and this is humiliation beyond death. Killing someone is one thing, but forbidding burial is a real demonstration of power.”

As if the gruesome circumstances of the deaths weren’t enough, two of the bodies were found with sheep or goat teeth in their mouths, a nasty twist on the coins typically deposited to smooth a warrior’s way into the afterlife. “It wasn’t enough to kill them and leave them in their houses,” Victor says. “It’s really, really ugly treatment.”

The assailants didn’t even take the animals. The team has found skeletons of lambs, pigs, and even a horse inside the fort. “Horses are some of the most popular booty, but they left the horse and pigs and lambs behind,” Victor points out. “It’s not normal behavior.” The animals seem to have been locked in and eventually starved to death

(No one was spared. Children's bones were found.)

"Because life in the fort was extinguished so abruptly, the site has the potential to illuminate details of daily life in Scandinavia around a.d. 480."

gsgs comment-

The refuge remained untouched, because the traditional tale of horror and dread connected with the site.

But, someone is greedy enough to go against common local knowledge.

"The Sandby Borg project began in 2010 in response to the threat of looting. Researchers at that time had little idea of what they would actually find. Archaeologists testing geophysical prospecting methods in the area noticed that treasure hunters had recently dug pits around the fort, perhaps looking for gold coins."

Focus 5: The Van Beers Affair. Master painter or conman ?

Portret Jan Van Beers
From 19 March 2016 to 5 March 2017

Though Jan Van Beers (1852-1927) has gone down in history as a painter, during his lifetime this artist from Lier was best known as an ambitious society figure.

He first made a name for himself with his history paintings, but he became a highly talented portrait painter of the Parisian beau monde. Realistic details characterize his work, which sometimes looks photographic, even to the extent that Van Beers was suspected of copying photographs and also of painting over them. Van Beers took his adversaries to court and had his work examined by experts. The outcome was inconclusive.



http://www.kmska.be/en/tentoonstellingen/Nu/Bruegelland.html


http://www.imageandnarrative.be/inarchive/painting/Jan_Dirk_Baetens.htm


Disappointed but still determined, Van Beers moved to Paris. His historical pieces did, however, not receive the critical acclaim he felt they were entitled to in Paris either. Thus, around 1879, the artist decided to play his final trick, one that would make him a rich and famous man-finally! Van Beers started painting small (sometimes even tiny) pictures, delicately brushed, hyperrealistic in their details and extremely finished. Success was almost immediate. Soir d'été, the first of these pictures to appear on an official Salon (in casu the Paris Salon of 1880), was greeted by Salon reviewers with praise and commendation (the painting can no longer be traced, which is, as a matter of fact, the case for almost all works by Van Beers). Art critics, in France and Belgium alike, lauded Van Beers's elegant and fine touch and remarked that no other artist could ever surpass the picture's finish (De Mons 1879-1880: 236; X. 1879-1880: 320). The painter, for his part, was obviously satisfied with the applause he was finally receiving and started producing and exhibiting more of his wonderful miniatures, in this way responding to the interest art critics and-probably equally important-well-to-do amateurs had now taken in his work. Commercial motives were clearly of some importance here, as La Fédération Artistique suggested (Lagye 1879-1880b: 429):

"Ah! Ah! s'est dit le malin artiste, on veut du précieux et du fini. On nous oppose les Dijckmans, les Menzel, les Desgoffes. Nous allons prouver que nous savons aussi pincer de cette corde-là."

Thus, by 1880, it seemed that Van Beers had found the artistic (and commercial) niche he had been looking for so long and was finally on his way to the top of his profession.

At the Brussels Salon of 1881, however, the artist became the centre of a scandal that rocked the Belgian art world and would forever deny him the prominent position he had aspired to so long-even though, admittedly, the affair would not halt his rise to fame but rather catapult him to instant celebrity.

The Roman dinner party is a popular and recurrent theme in Roman literature. In a letter, Pliny the Younger chides his friend Gaius Septicius Clarus for not turning up to his dinner party,

All ready were a lettuce each, three snails, two eggs, porridge, with mulsum and snow…olives, beetroot, gourds, bulbs, and a thousand other things no less appreciated. You would have heard comic actors or a poetry reader or a lyrist, or, such is my generosity, all three. But you chose to go to someone else’s for oysters, sows’ wombs, sea urchins, and dancing girls from Cadiz.

Despite such extravagances, many Romans took great pride in the freshness and simplicity of their produce and all the more if it has been sourced from their country farm.

Of course, many people could not afford extravagant ingredients, and had to make do with a staple of wheat bread augmented with some fruit and vegetables and whatever else they could find or afford. The poorest Romans could not even afford street food, and came to rely on the free bread ration issued to inhabitants of the city.

Other Features of Roman Dining

http://www.romeacrosseurope.com/?p=2988#sthash.FTkh6kNc.dpbs

May Fair is not ready, in America.
Little pieces of it survive.
Little children are why we pass it on.
(We had May Day. Why should we keep it from them ?)
What Morris Dancers have to do with Spring, I have no clue.

Would be pleasant to warm myself by the Beltane fire.

A thousand years, ago, what was May Day ?

What caused the Little Ice Age?
Aug 09, 2012

Miller and his colleagues radiocarbon-dated roughly 150 samples of dead plant material with roots intact, collected from beneath receding margins of ice caps on Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic. They found a large cluster of “kill dates” between 1275 and 1300 A.D., indicating the plants had been frozen and engulfed by ice during a relatively sudden event.

The team saw a second spike in plant kill dates at about 1450 A.D., indicating the quick onset of a second major cooling event.

The researchers also analyzed sediment cores from a glacial lake linked to the 367-square-mile Langjökull ice cap in the central highlands of Iceland that reaches nearly a mile high. The annual layers in the cores suddenly became thicker in the late 13th century, they said, and again in the 15th century as the climate cooled.


http://earthsky.org/earth/volcanoes-might-have-triggered-the-little-ice-age

The IRS Impeachment Farce
(gsgs comment - The Persecution of IRS chief John Koskinen )

June 1, 2016

Politico noted on Wednesday, actually impeaching Koskinen would be unprecedented: Never before has such a low-ranking official been impeached for an offense such as the one Republicans say he committed.

Even more telling, though, is what Republicans have been doing to the IRS when they haven't been picking on its chief: Cutting its budget to smithereens and otherwise trying to render it dysfunctional.

Since 2010, the tax collection agency has seen its budget fall by 17 percent after adjusting for inflation, crippling its ability to do the very thing with which it is tasked: Collect revenue. Enforcement staff at the agency has fallen by nearly a quarter during that time, even as the number of individual tax returns has increased by the millions and the agency was charged with implementing facets of huge new laws, such as the Affordable Care Act.

http://www.usnews.com/opinion/artic...rt-against-irs-chief-john-koskinen-is-a-farce


gsgs comment- President Obama cannot be blamed for the dysfunction the IRS.
If Republicans refuse to help, and block all efforts to increase funding for the IRS budget, there will be less people to investigate the true circumstances.


Before Congress, IRS commissioner is the adult in the room
June 08, 2016

http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-bl...ess-irs-commissioner-is-the-adult-in-the-room


Koskinen has fought for fair funding for his agency and clarification of important rules for nonprofits. His focus on needed policy exemplifies that which we should be seeing from members of Congress, who are instead, busy underfunding the fight against the Zika virus, not confirming a Supreme Court nominee and not passing vital spending bills.

Removing Koskinen may make some Congress members feel better, but it will only leave in place the bad rules that led to the scandal and the possibility of another.

The question of whether Koskinen might secretly be relieved to be rid of this job remains open. Because adults fulfill their commitments and Koskinen's term does not end until 2017, it's likely Congress will give Commissioner Koskinen many more chances to show his maturity.

http://www.politico.com/story/2016/06/irs-impeachment-republicans-koskinen-223755


“You’re inviting the other party to reciprocate when it’s their turn; then it’s just tit-for-tat,” said Oversight panel Democrat Gerry Connolly (D-Va.). “It debases the process. This has been sparingly used since the founding of the republic … and for good reason. The bar is a very high bar, and it ought to be so we don’t resort to partisan office removal.”

"Are they willing to toss 200-plus years of precedent to bring him down?"

"Only once, 140 years ago, in 1876, did the House move to impeach an agency chief, Secretary of War William Belknap, on charges of corruption."

February 23, 2012

In 1628, the Swedish warship Vasa sank on its maiden voyage.

Twenty minutes into her journey, the ship was hit by two strong winds.

It heeled to port, water gushed in, and the ship sank less than a nautical mile into the journey.

The ship was asymmetrical, and the ship was top heavy.

"There is more ship structure on the port side of the hull than on the starboard side,"� explains Hocker.

The shipbuilder, a Dutch man named Henrik Hybertsson, had never built a ship with two gun decks or with so many guns. (64 bronze cannons)

Fred Hocker discovered four rulers the workmen had used to measure.

Two were in Swedish feet, which were divided into twelve inches.

The other two were in Amsterdam feet, which had eleven inches in a foot.

http://www.pri.org/stories/2012-02-23/new-clues-emerge-centuries-old-swedish-shipwreck

The ship was salvaged and recovered in 1961. The 226 foot ship was placed in a museum. (69 meters long)

2004 the museum upgraded the climate control system.

Conservation
Vasa Museet

Play Stump the Annotator!

In some episodes, there are a few comments that mystify us. We've listed them below. If anyone out there knows what any of them mean, please let us know and we'll credit you on the site. (Going forward, we'll be including time codes to make them easier to find; eventually we hope to add them to the older stumpers as well.)

http://www.annotatedmst.com/pages/2

Argument Clinic
Monty Python's Flying Circus
November 1972
Series 3
Episode 3

Angry man: WHADDAYOU WANT?

Man: Well, Well, I was told outside that...

Angry man: DON'T GIVE ME THAT, YOU SNOTTY-FACED HEAP OF PARROT DROPPINGS!

Man: What?

A: SHUT YOUR FESTERING GOB, YOU TIT! YOUR TYPE MAKES ME PUKE! YOU VACUOUS TOFFEE-NOSED MALODOROUS PERVERT!!!

M: Yes, but I came here for an argument!!

A: OH! Oh! I'm sorry! This is abuse!

M: Oh! Oh I see!

A: Aha! No, you want room 12A, next door.

M: Oh...Sorry...

A: Not at all!

A: (under his breath) stupid git.

Somewhere, some people are putting on a production of Spamalot, this summer ? Thanks to BBC America, the tradition of silly walks, continues...

(Somewhere, along the line, all the naked breasts and backsides were blurred out, on Public Broadcasting System programs. In the olde days, they were not so prudish, in the beginning.)

Souplesse


"Souplesse is the ideal, sought by all and obtained only by The Few."

https://www.theguardian.com/sport/live/2016/jul/09/tour-de-france-2016-stage-eight-live


http://www.velominati.com/tradition/look-pro-souplesse/

Souplesse


I know it when I see it.

Real Life Romance: Sylvia Beach and Adrienne Monnier

Dec 26, 2015


Both were writers, publishers, and translators, but their greatest influences on literature were the result of their tireless economic and social support of the writers and artists of the era.

When Adrienne’s father came into some money, he gave it to Adrienne to use as capital for a bookstore. She opened her store, La Maison des Amies des Livres, in 1915.


Adrienne gave Sylvia business advice, helped her with her French, helped her navigate the bureaucratic process of starting a business, and coached her on how to deal with the various temperaments that Sylvia encountered. While today the name “Shakespeare and Co.” is more famous than “La Maison des Amies des Livres”, both stores left an incredible mark on the literary landscape of post-war Europe and America, and Shakespeare and Co. would not have existed without Adrienne’s support.


While most of the authors who visited Adrienne’s store were men, she used her essays, reviews, and translations to champion the works of women.


In 1954, Adrienne was diagnosed with Meniere’s Disease, which affects the inner ear. This disease is not fatal in itself, but it can make life absolutely miserable. It causes tinnitus, hearing loss, migraines, and severe vertigo. Adrienne committed suicide in 1955.

Sylvia remained in Paris until she passed away in 1962.


http://smartbitchestrashybooks.com/2015/12/real-life-romance-sylvia-beach-adrienne-monnier/

2 July 2016


Yves Bonnefoy, France's most famous contemporary poet and celebrated translator of Shakespeare whose poems were translated into 30 languages, has died at the age of 93, officials confirmed Saturday.


"What saddens me is to see that our education system does not give poetry the place it deserves," he told French radio in a recent interview.

"Everything around us can serve as an inspiration for poetry," he said, which he saw as "a way of discovering the fundamental meaning of life."


http://m.france24.com/en/20160702-french-poet-yves-bonnefoy-dead-93


"It seemed to me that the sort of poetry I wanted to write could appeal only to a few people, and that the simplest way was to publish it myself. But there was a bookshop in rue de l’Odéon that belonged to Adrienne Monnier, who had been a friend of writers since World War I—Valéry, Claudel, Breton, and many more. On the opposite side of the street was Sylvia Beach’s English bookshop Shakespeare and Company, and the two women had championed English and German writers as well—Hemingway, Walter Benjamin, and of course James Joyce, whose Ulysses was first published by Sylvia Beach in the original English and by Monnier in French translation."

"Adrienne Monnier and her salesman Maurice Saillet had the kindness to be interested in my beginnings. So when in 1946 I published my poem “Traité du pianiste” at my own expense, they put it on the table of recommended books—next to Ulysses! Three years later Adrienne Monnier was put in charge of a poetry collection at Mercure de France, and she asked me to contribute a book. It became Du Mouvement et de l’immobilité de Douve. By the time it was published in 1953, Adrienne had closed her book shop, and soon after, she killed herself."


http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/1790/the-art-of-poetry-no-69-yves-bonnefoy

Oetzi the Iceman's Ice Age Wardrobe


DNA traces origins of Iceman's ragtag wardrobe

18 August 2016


I wear what I eat ?

"His last meal was composed of ibex and red deer."


"A coat made from at least four separate goat and sheep hides"

leggings made from goat skin
a shoelace of cow leather
a sheep leather loincloth
a quiver made of roe deer
a fur hat, with straps, made from brown bear

http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-37094141