From Nat Geog, via Cronaca, news that Philippe Aries was at least partly wrong: Members of the London-based Society of Thames Mudlarks look very different today from the Victorian street children the group takes its name from. Where ragged waifs once searched for bits of bone and coal to sell, men in overalls, gloves, and…
Akaky over at The Passing Parade lives in fear of the perpetually extending penis promised him by the spammers. No need: we will resurrect The Mighty Thor to deal with this latter-day Midgard Serpent. Here is a taster from an August 1975 story entitled Night of the Troll!, in which Thor interrupts his battle with…
In the Middle Ages anyone of any commercial talent (and his/her mum) had visions and stored some human bones in the new toilet chapel extension of the pig shed nave of the temple next to that handy spring holy source on the hillside. Here, extracted by moderately cunning device from Amazon, is the relevant part of the ToC of Eileen Gardiner’s (not completely exhaustive) Medieval Visions of Heaven and Hell: A Sourcebook:
Marleen Zachte quotes the results of a sex survey allegedly undertaken by German rubber and aluminium mag, Men’s Car, which shows that BMW drivers do it most and Porsche drivers least – if we are to believe the respondents. As usual the polluters did not dare ask cyclists.
OK, this blog is officially enamoured of Quaderns, which as well as calling Kaleboel un fenomenal poti poti now says we’re indispensable. A brown envelope is on its way to a smoke-filled office in Andorra.
The good news for mourners of dead tongues is that in Northern Ireland they’re inventing new languages, dialects and other officially authenticated and subsidised cultural goods at such a rate that the province will soon be exporting the surplus to the Amazon delta. As Jason Walsh points out: In Northern Ireland during the 1980s the…
Say what you like about the Hamsa squatters, but their PR operation is slick, and I’m 99% sure the following graffiti is their work. It appeared roughly 24 hours after the outbreak of a riot at the Quatre Camins gaol here which left a deputy governor in intensive care: The revolting state of Spanish prisons…
No help for the beardless wonder in the search for Conan Doyle’s Reminiscence of Cricket, but I did find two wonderful poems by South Asian schoolboys. Cricket Teams by Raza Shahban Ali of Fatimiyah Boys School, Karachi would have been an outstanding review of the world scene, had his laudatory couplet about England not been…
We knew Georgia was in trouble, but it’s worse than we thought, if we are to believe this article from News24.com: Georgia, Adjara – Militia in Georgia’s renegade province of Adjara on Sunday blew up the main bridges linking it to Tbilisi as Georgian warships circled overhead in a new escalation of violence in the…