Ray Girvan has come up with a story about Bismarck, the father of modern pathology, and a pair of sausages, I’m still quite pleased with the Catalan medieval exclusion of miraculous weapons, religious icons, and sugar candy (doping?) from judicial combat, while Baldick, whose standard work is extensively and incompetently plagiarised on the net, has inter alia:
- Corsicans stabbing each other with daggers affixed to the front of their helmets, recalling the forehead butting popular along the Black Sea littoral.
- A dwarf who demands that he and his huge Gascon opponent wear sharp-bladed collars, so that the latter will be unable to look down on him without decapitating himself.
- Cagliostro, who challenges a supposed quack to Russian roulette with pills (I suspect there’s something more interesting behind this).
- M Mellant, who kills M Lenfant at x paces with a red billiard ball in Seine-et-Oise in September 1843.
One of the subthreads to last night’s Zombieland (h/t G) was Woody Harrelson’s search for Twinkies, which I thought meant that he viewed them as a sugar-candy-type anti-zombie accessory and that he fancied Jesse Eisenberg. Unfortunately neither turned out to be true, but it’s hard to go wrong with zombies, and some scenes greatly pleased one’s inner 13-year-old. For example:
Unfortunately duelling pianos are rarely that satisfying.
Similar posts
Back soon
On a more popular level, there’s that Dahl story of the woman who kills her husband with a frozen chicken and then serves it to the police.
Am currently reading The Romance of the Three Kingdoms (chapter 2) and see a lot of sorcery is used in battles.
http://transblawg.eu/index.php?/archives/4060-Bismarck,-Virchow-and-the-apocryphal-sausage-fightBismarck-und-die-Wurst.html
Lamb to the Slaughter is actually about, well, a frozen lamb leg. It’s simply handier. But I do like the chicken thought!
Thanks, A Nun, but a leg of lamb is not an unusual weapon, is it?
I don’t believe Candide’s garden is cloistered, yet.
Are there any records of deaths administered by leg of lamb before Roald Dahl and freezers? Have there been copycat killings?
There were deaths by ham in biblical times, which is why it got forbidden and only a lamb’s leg was available.
@Trebots. You’re right, although many, there is no evidence.
It’s incredibly difficult commenting on this site, you know, especially twice.
@Candide
My apologies – didn’t mean to be rude.
I believe you’re thinking of the death of Ham, aren’t you? Or are you referring to the death of Mama Cass Elliot? It isn’t true that she choked on a ham sandwich.
You were not rude, MM! Mistaking me for A Nun is actually quite flattering for me.
Curse spammers.
It is curious that the speakers of what used to be called Hamitic languages generally abstained from pork products.
Ah, you mean pronounced as Ham-eatic, yes?
Ham’s mates are the only ones who can’t eat ham! I mean it’s like a gay man called Fanny.