Decline – Leeds's Singing Organ-Grinder

“Chaste, pious, prudent”: to which British king does the poem below the break refer?

Part of the series Crazy Shit AMA Recites.

Do financial instruments count as technology?

Re this, JB comments that showing any kind of relationship between financial and technological innovation is kind of hard, but rather liked this illustration – of what happens when you let an entrepreneur also run monetary policy. (When was Spain’s first bubble? Spanish Wikipedia is big on Anglo disasters, but doesn’t mention Spanish railways in…

A broker converting coin into MIssissippi stock in the Dutch print series, Het grote tafereel der dwaasheid, The great scene of folly.

Juvenal: Will you please … learn the colour of your own bread

Class consciousness didn’t commence in the bakeries of the Industrial Revolution.

Otto van Veen, distribution of herring and white bread after the raising of the Spanish siege of Leiden by the Geuzen in 1574

¡España británica!

Why impose disastrous Spanish policies on thriving Gibraltar when British colonisation of Spain would have so many advantages?

Vitoria: Wellington could have had it all.

Weird word-initial stress: ási

I’m well aware of the whole ansí, ansina, asina, assí, etc etc business that preceded the standard así in contemporary mainstream peninsular usage, but I’m struggling to get my head round this particular version of the adverb: 1 do los moros habitar en los pueblos conquistados, ási como estos lo havian permitido á los christianos;…

Interesting hints on pronouncing the Urdu q

Think of a bird or a bottle.

How to grow enough mustard for a salad from seed in two hours

Ingredients: a horse, a fire, seed.

Castells, for real

A mad, mad Japanese video, and a human ladder at the Muslim siege of Aleppo in 637.

Roman double testudo, from Potter <em>Archaeologia graeca</em>. I'm told that the optimal shagging angle for turtles is 30º, so this counts as deviant.

The Two Gardeners

An anti-intellectual French horticultural fable.

Illustration by <a href='http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Ignace_Isidore_G%C3%A9rard'>Jean Ignace Isidore Gérard</a> aka JJ Grandville, <a href='http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/File:Fables_of_Florian8.jpg'>Wikimedia Commons</a>

A West Cornish Barbary pirate and ghost-ship

“Discontented devil of a blackamoor, why canst thou not be satisfied to live here?” “Avast there; all our gold and diamonds can’t procure us here the bright sunshine and joyous people, nor the rich fruits and wine, of my native clime.”