The right and the wrong type of snow, according to Avicenna, Aristotle and Plutarch
With an excerpt from a plea for more state funding by the Bostonian Western Rail-road, in which we are given to understand that snow is not necessarily a bad thing.
Category: The material universe
The storks of war
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.
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.”
Why I’m called Trevor
Or, rather, how my grandfather seems to have been named after a minor railway station.
Jingoistic poem celebrating the Battle of Vigo Bay (1702)
Half roasted Frenchmen, some o’er Gratings Broil’d/Do mix with Spaniards in the Sea parboil’d;
Is the anglocabrón longing for sun, sangria and sex a new phenomenon?
Blasco Ibáñez says that actually we have always thought “at all hours of the Mediterranean rim.”
Viaje a México
Our itinerary, and that of Polo Polo on his Viaje a España.
Specs on the beach
I do hate to be beside the seaside, unless it’s raining.
Homeless Jonah about to be devoured by a great 100€-plated fish
But will an ecclesiastical trawler turn it into cat food first?
Star Trek, the origins
Kalebeul’s investigation into Vosk and the Na’kuhl temporal conduit yields some surprising results.