Galen is an indispensable early source for historians of the walnut, the hazelnut, the testicle, and so forth, but this does not explain why galen is used in Swedish to describe a disturbed person.
A fragment from Italo Calvino’s quasi-17th century folk romance, Il visconte dimezzato/The cloven viscount, uses storks as a portent of battle. Several unconnected 2nd century Greek accounts might appear to do the same, perhaps particularly if one’s a lazy sod and doesn’t read anything but scraps of stuff on Google Books.
“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.”
Hera can no longer afford the dragon and has installed security cameras to stop the Hesperides stealing her golden apples. (Pomegranates, actually, which I believe some people also view as possible candidates. On this walk.)
The Google Earth version of ancient Rome is a bit like a collection of faked-up trainspotters’ notebooks. Until they find some way of populating it with exfoliant opera, our best bet as responsible amateur social historians is the porn industry: European production company Daring Media Group will release its first movie, Roma, in October at…
Provided by the Junta de Andalucía in collaboration with Vodafone. Don’t forget your glasses, and enjoy the raffle, presumably to be held in the rest break between the Introduction and the Practice sections: The English Wikipedia says that the history of Andalusia ended with the Muslims, which seems like fair comment. The Spanish version says…
Dido and Hengist are remembered as early heroes of isoperimetry for having solved the challenge of maximising the area of a land grant made to them by stringing together strips of oxhide and using the resulting closed superthong to trace, respectively, a semi-circle at Carthage and a full circle at Kaercorrei. What was news to…
From the baldie: Some unusual Neolithic rock paintings. Apparently the locals used to take tourists to visit them and, to improve their colour and line, throw buckets of water over them. Once almost everything had been washed away, the authorities acted with characteristic firmness, building a 4m wall-with-spikes around the complex. The locals now explain…
