http://hdlns.com/g1182 http://hdlns.com/rss_g1182.xml Arts and Entertainment -> Humanities -> History -> Middle Ages en-us Aggregation copyright hdlns (dot com), articles copyright original authors. http://hdlns.com/g1182/Middle+Ages+-+Middle+Ages+History+News+and+Articles HDLNS.com is the easiest to use aggregated content RSS Reader on the net. No need to sign up, nothing to remember. Just browse and read. http://hdlns.com/g1182zf8703za44742492/Chinese+vase+at+auction A vase thought to have belonged to an 18th Century Chinese emperor turned up an auction in rural Ireland earlier this month and sold for more than 70 times its asking price. The 12-inch http://hdlns.com/g1182zf8705za44321671/Why+is+This+Man+Laughing%3F Why is this man laughing? First, two caveats:*OK, maybe not laughing, but snickering, or smiling to himself with quiet amusement, and  OK, not a man, but in fact the Word Given Flesh, Mr. Jesus H. Christ. Still, why is He so giddy?  Appa http://hdlns.com/g1182zf8705za44626786/Enough+with+the+Dante+already%21 It occurs to me that video game reviews are generally expected to at some point talk about the game as, well, a video game, offering thoughts on the subject's graphics and gameplay and all that.  Granted, that angle has by now been pretty well http://hdlns.com/g1182zf8706za44616291/Henry+III+Fine+Rolls+Project by J J CohenITM readers may be interested to discover this valuable resource for the study of 13th C England: the Henry III Fine Rolls Project. It's an impressive site, making available for free English translations of Latin rolls that have never bee http://hdlns.com/g1182zf8703za44589803/Are+terrorist+cells+really+so+hard+to+infiltrate%3F For nearly a year, a middle-aged woman from suburban Philadelphia used her computer to fashion a new, frightening identity, federal court documents say. The stream of Internet messages in which she sought assistance to http://hdlns.com/g1182zf8706za44581552/Disability+in+a+Medieval+Corporal+Commonplace%3F by KARL STEELITM fans, a research bleg: you're familiar with the medieval commonplace that the bipedal human form is both evidence of human reason and a reminder to humans to think celestial thoughts, and that the stereotypical animal form, quadruped http://hdlns.com/g1182zf8703za44513160/Italy+embraces+library+digitization The Italian government has signed a deal with Google to put the contents of two national libraries on the internet. Up to one million antiquarian books - including works by Dante, Machiavelli and Galileo http://hdlns.com/g1182zf8706za44504418/What+are+you+reading+over+spring+break%3F by J J CohenA reporter from the GW Hatchet (our student newspaper) emailed me this morning to ask for recommended reading for students over our upcoming 'break' (quotation marks indicate that very few of those of us who teach actually take much of a http://hdlns.com/g1182zf8703za44472253/iSlave Researchers have produced a mobile phone that could be a boon for prying bosses wanting to keep tabs on the movements of their staff. Japanese phone giant KDDI Corporation has developed technology that tracks http://hdlns.com/g1182zf8703za44472252/Baltic+shipwrecks A dozen centuries-old shipwrecks ' some of them unusually well-preserved ' have been found in the Baltic Sea by a gas company building an underwater pipeline between Russia and Germany. The oldest wreck probably http://hdlns.com/g1182zf8703za44472251/DNA+from+ancient+eggshells Researchers have found that eggshells of extinct bird species are a rich source of preserved DNA. An international team isolated the delicate DNA molecules of species including the massive 'elephant birds' of the genus http://hdlns.com/g1182zf8705za44396583/A+Nation+of+Franklins%3F++Gosh%2C+I+Hope+Not I hate being such a Johnny Come Lately all the time, but today was the first I'd heard (via Crooked Timber) of the now weeks-old controversy over the National Review piece 'An Exceptional Debate' which claims that America was absolutely 100% founded http://hdlns.com/g1182zf8706za44426939/Quote+of+the+Day%3A+A+Delightful+and+Perpetual+Swoon [image credit]by J J CohenThe latest issue of Arthuriana (20.1, Spring 2010) has a good cluster of essays on Guenevere that concludes with Amy S. Kaufman's 'Guenevere Burning.' The issue is worth reading in its entirety, but I'm especially fond of Ka http://hdlns.com/g1182zf8705za44396582/An+Exciting+Business+Opportunity%21 I get a lot of spam through the old 'Contact' tab at the top of the page, mostly from people who don't seem to understand that it's just a form for sending me email and not some magical portal to my credit card numbers.*  Occasionally, though, I http://hdlns.com/g1182zf8703za44320678/Stupid+security+questions It was bad enough in phone-banking days when banks and credit card companies asked for one's mother's maiden name as a so-called security measure, but why re-embrace such easily-guessed queries nowadays -- where a simple http://hdlns.com/g1182zf8703za44320679/Cycling+Nazis Summer 1937. What could be more fitting in the cool afternoon of an English country lane than a group of cycling tourists steadily pedalling their way from one historic site to another, stopping to http://hdlns.com/g1182zf8705za44290103/Dante%27s+New+Threads So, yeah, still working on the rest of the Dante's Inferno review. In fact, I've got about a week's worth of Dante-related stuff in the pipe.* But until then, enjoy this screenshot of Dante's new outfit added in the Dark Forest DLC** this week: B http://hdlns.com/g1182zf8703za44268695/Great+White+sharks+vs+giant+squid%3F If not Giant Squid, at least very big squid: In what could be the ultimate marine smack-down, great white sharks off the California coast may be migrating 1,600 miles west to do battle with creatures http://hdlns.com/g1182zf8703za44248741/Stolen+Descartes+letter+rediscovered It was the Great Train Robbery of French intellectual life: thousands of treasured documents that vanished from the Institut de France in the mid-1800s, stolen by an Italian mathematician. Among them were 72 letters http://hdlns.com/g1182zf8706za44243919/Failing+Utopia+++Feeling+Utopia by J J CohenYesterday GW MEMSI sponsored its spring symposium 'Race?'. I'd put the event together rather quickly, mainly because I'd realized that the Institute had inadvertently been dwelling in a temporal ghetto (I use that word deliberately): whil http://hdlns.com/g1182zf8711za44243885/I+feel+like+I+won+the+lottery+or+something So, a couple of posts ago -- in this post -- I talked about how much out of pocket expense my summer travels might cost me. And in that post I mentioned I might get the internal grants I applied for.Well, hot damn, I did! The big award gives me a m http://hdlns.com/g1182zf8703za44229215/Jewish+tribes+of+Africa This has been written up before, but here's yet another article: In many ways, the Lemba tribe of Zimbabwe and South Africa are just like their neighbours. But in other ways their customs are remarkably http://hdlns.com/g1182zf8706za44080273/Congratulations+to+Ruth+Kennedy+and+Simon+Meecham-Jones+... by J J Cohen... for the favorable review of their edited volume Authority and Subjugation in  Writing of Medieval Wales in the January Speculum. I was fortunate to read the volume in MS and blurb it, though my endorsement was overshadowed by a c http://hdlns.com/g1182zf8705za44054093/Dante%27s+Inferno%3A+The+Game%3A+The+Review%3A+Part+2%3A+The+Characters Hey, have any of you guys heard of this game, Dante's Inferno? It seems the good people at Visceral Games--you know, the same guys who made The Godfather: The Game, The Godfather II: The Game, and Dead Space--took the first part of Dante Alighieri' http://hdlns.com/g1182zf8703za44053617/Dinosaur+ancestry+discovery Scientists have discovered a dinosaur-like creature 10 million years older than the earliest known dinosaurs. Asilisaurus kongwe is a newly discovered herbivore that lived during the middle Triassic period - about 245 million years http://hdlns.com/g1182zf8710za44052382/Bottoms+up%21 I'm an independent scholar not affiliated with a university, so I'm not always in the mainstream of news about the subjects that I'm interested in. I'm grateful to a member of the Paternosters Yahoo mailing list, who alerted me to a gorgeous and rela http://hdlns.com/g1182zf8702za44050125/The+excellent+blog The excellent blog Hermeutic of Continuity reports and dismisses some interesting liturgical rumors here.But, H of C continues, there is better-founded good news: that a forthcoming clarification of Summorum Pontificum will hold that priest may sched http://hdlns.com/g1182zf8706za44044306/The+15th+Century+Writing+on+the+Wall by J J CohenVia Medieval News, an enhanced image of some writing recently discovered on a Salisbury Cathedral wall. The words are in English, but what they are and what they mean is a mystery. I know what you are thinking: I scribbled it there when I http://hdlns.com/g1182zf8706za44044308/From+Jos%C3%A9+Esteban+Mu%C3%B1oz%2C+Cruising+Utopia by J J CohenFeeling inspired in my own work while rereading these words, and thought I'd share them:'We may never touch queerness, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality ... an ideality that can be distilled http://hdlns.com/g1182zf8706za44044307/Punk%27d+by+a+Jew%2C+continued [image: Geoffrey Cohen. Not me.] by J J CohenSome time back, as I toiled upon my Leeds paper, I provided here at ITM an example of what might be called a yid punk, a young man who critiqued through histrionic excess the beliefs of those to whom he wa http://hdlns.com/g1182zf8703za43975545/It+was+a+snake-eats-dinosaur+world+back+then Scientists say they have identified the fossilised remains of a snake that dined on dinosaur eggs. The 67-million-year-old skeleton was found in a dinosaur nest. The study, published in the journal Plos One, is http://hdlns.com/g1182zf8706za43966111/Postcolonising+the+Medieval+Image by J J CohenA new website dedicated to postcolonial approaches to medieval visual materials is now live. Supported through an AHRC grant, the site was founded by Eva Frojmovic and Catherine Karkov of Leeds University. 'Postcolonising the Medieval Ima http://hdlns.com/g1182zf8705za43899172/This+One%27s+Just+For+Me Sometimes I post images of general interest.  But today I'm posting one that'll probably only appeal to me, and I like it because it's an actual bona fide medieval visual pun that's really only funny to people who care about 'the rules' of how m http://hdlns.com/g1182zf8705za43899173/Got+Medieval%27s+Got+Facebook Got Medieval now has its own page on Facebook.  (I'm such a joiner.) Go there and, if you so desire, become a fan of it.  Or poke it.  Or marvel at its lack of status updates.  Hell, I don't know what the kids today (with their cl http://hdlns.com/g1182zf8705za43860711/March+Feast+Calendar+%28Part+1%29 Remember last month, when I confidently predicted that March would bring a more interesting crop of saints in the little medieval calendar I'm following?  Ah, how my hubris has laid me low once again.  For the first half of March we have http://hdlns.com/g1182zf8706za43803449/Facebook+v+Blogger%2C+encore [illustration: an alchemical hermaphroditic past-future gazing medieval Janus you'd recognize if you were our FB friend] by J J CohenOnce or twice I've mentioned here my concern that social media sites,* with their somewhat closed architecture, have http://hdlns.com/g1182zf8715za43787683/Some+of+my+summer+faculty+student+research+this+year Some of my summer faculty/student research this year(if we get the funding)Lexomic Analysis of 'Winchester Vocabulary' TextsWe propose to use Lexomic methods of analysis to try to determine relationships among prose texts from the Anglo-Saxon period. http://hdlns.com/g1182zf8705za43745130/Apropos+of+Nothing Given the positive reactions to my recent posts, I've decided it's time to make the jump from Internet Crank to Respected Mainstream Author. So here's a pitch I'm working on: What do you think? http://hdlns.com/g1182zf8705za43745129/Atemporality+My+Ass Why does Step One of the futurist's Radical New Idea always seem to involve turning the past into an easily dismissed caricature? Take Bruce Sterling's 'Atemporality for the Creative Artist,' a speech originally given at Transmediale in Berlin, post http://hdlns.com/g1182zf8703za43707432/Comic+books+crack+%241+million A comic showing the debut of superhero Batman has been sold for more than $1m (£655,000) at an auction in Dallas. The rare 1939 copy of Detective Comic No 27 was bought by an http://hdlns.com/g1182zf8705za43633408/Dante%27s+Boobferno%3A+The+Ballad+of+Beatrice%27s+Breasts If you've read Dante's Divine Comedy, you know that there's not much story to the Inferno. A middle-aged man gets chased by some animals and runs until he finds himself in the fire and brimstone section of the Christian afterlife. There, he meets an http://hdlns.com/g1182zf8715za43672464/The+Balance+Problem%28I+was+going+to+call+t The Balance Problem(I was going to call this 'The Balance Fallacy,' but that's too strong a term, though I think there is a flaw in the logic). In my previous post I quoted The Chancellor of the Pennsylvania state system who wrote: 'if rising scholar http://hdlns.com/g1182zf8706za43663737/Three+points+about+the+academic+job+market by J J CohenWe are all, I think, very much aware of what a terrible year this has been for recent PhDs seeking academic humanities employment. Most of us have friends and colleagues seeking such jobs. Most job seekers, smart and accomplished as they http://hdlns.com/g1182zf8714za43630886/Unfinished+thoughts+on+why+what+we+do+is+important So I’m making lists of thoughts in stickies about my talk tomorrow before I outline it in the morning (it’s an informal talk — I’m supposed to talk about the paper project, not the paper itself, so it doesn’t have to be http://hdlns.com/g1182zf8703za43596996/Giant+Cretaceous+sharks%2C+and+more The fossilised remains of a gigantic 10m-long predatory shark have been unearthed in Kansas, US. Scientists dug up a gigantic jawbone, teeth and scales belonging to the shark which lived 89 million years ago. http://hdlns.com/g1182zf8715za43596019/Cutting+Through+a+Little+BS+About+How+Tough+Tenure+Is Cutting Through a Little BS About How Tough Tenure IsIf you want to be really depressed about academia, read these reactions to the Huntsville murders in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Let me try to boil things down to the simplest possible terms http://hdlns.com/g1182zf8706za43588194/Jews+of+Stone by J J CohenSo I've got this talk coming up at the University of York -- last one of the conference, no pressure: after me there is just tea and the Croxton Play. In my lecture I'm working with William of Newburgh (AKA Billy Newby) since his Historia http://hdlns.com/g1182zf8705za43477809/Animals+Do+the+Darndest+Things This week's marginal image comes to us from the famous Macclesfield Psalter: The Macclesfield Psalter has made a few appearances in Mmm.. Marginalia over the years. Remember our friends the Knight-Terrorizing Snail, the Man Who Rides a Giant Duck http://hdlns.com/g1182zf8705za43442133/Dante%27s+Inferno%3A+The+Game%3A+The+Review%3A+The+Preview So, they made a video game out of Dante's Inferno called Dante's Inferno. You may have heard. I've got no solid numbers to back me up on this, but I'm pretty sure I'm the best possible person to review this game, as I have degrees in both Medieval http://hdlns.com/g1182zf8705za43442132/This+Blog+is+NSFW+%28NSFW+pics+included%21%21%21%29 I talked to a friend this weekend who informed me that because of last week's marginalia post--you know, the one with the tree-nesting willies and the women who love them--his workplace's web filter now blocks Got Medieval as an inappropriate use of http://hdlns.com/g1182zf8703za43441732/The+%27Chemist%27s+War%27 A horrifying episode from Prohibition, yet virtually forgotten:Frustrated that people continued to consume so much alcohol even after it was banned, federal officials had decided to try a different kind of enforcement. They ordered the http://hdlns.com/g1182zf8706za43433316/Well%2C+Okay%2C+Go+Ahead+and+Pray+for+the+Horse by KARL STEELYou may be familiar with the ending of the romance of Bevis of Hampton, which sees the--SPOILER ALERT! IN THE MIDST OF LIFE WE ARE IN ETC.--deaths of the hero, his wife, Josian, and Bevis's indominably loyal horse, Arondel. There follows http://hdlns.com/g1182zf8703za43399641/The+credulity+of+historians A new book about the atomic destruction of Hiroshima has won critical acclaim with its heartbreaking portrayals of the bomb's survivors and is set to be made into a movie by James Cameron. 'The Last http://hdlns.com/g1182zf8703za43371511/Distracted+walking On the day of the collision last month, visibility was good. The sidewalk was not under repair. As she walked, Tiffany Briggs, 25, was talking to her grandmother on her cellphone, lost in conversation. http://hdlns.com/g1182zf8703za43371510/Stone+Age+sailors%3F Early humans, possibly even prehuman ancestors, appear to have been going to sea much longer than anyone had ever suspected. That is the startling implication of discoveries made the last two summers on the http://hdlns.com/g1182zf8703za43371509/Peanut+allergy+treatment+test It seems so simple -- can the results be replicated on a large scale? The largest ever trial to find a treatment for potentially fatal peanut allergies is to give sufferers tiny amounts daily to http://hdlns.com/g1182zf8706za43366403/Organ+Swapping+in+Medieval+Iceland%3A+quot+lectores%2C+tot+sententiae%2C+I+hope by KARL STEELAs a lingering flu drags me through the weekend, I offer you a brief story, which involves some ongoing themes of ITM: animals; disability; and the technological and organic supplementarity of the posthuman body. Please turn in your hymn http://hdlns.com/g1182zf8703za43330490/Minaret+collapse+in+Morocco At least 41 people have been killed and 80 more injured after a minaret collapsed at a mosque in northern Morocco. The Lalla Khenata mosque minaret in the Bab el Bardiyine neighbourhood of Meknes http://hdlns.com/g1182zf8706za43326073/Medieval+Disability+Studies by J J CohenIn the comments to an announcement that reaffirms for me, once again, the revolutionary promise of postmedieval, Michael Pryke mentioned that his 'postmedieval reading group' at York University (about which he was supposed to guest post a http://hdlns.com/g1182zf8714za43311820/Wherein+I+shamelessly+advertise+my+future+failures http://glasscock.tamu.edu/enews/gradcolloquium_davis.html http://hdlns.com/g1182zf8706za43280584/When+Did+We+Become+Post+human%3F+Table+of+Contents+and+Preview+Essays Figure 1. still image from Doll Face (2005 film by Andrew Huang)by EILEEN A JOYAs of this week, the inaugural (and now somewhat big-ish double) issue (281 pages) of postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies is in the final production phase http://hdlns.com/g1182zf8711za43279183/The+marriage+of+Research+and+Teaching Despite my title, I swear this is not an allegorical treatise or a long lost Passus of Piers Plowman, though I do think that someone with more talent than I should write such a thing just for the fun of it!No, this is my long promised post on what va http://hdlns.com/g1182zf8715za43203390/No+Title Unexpected Good News: An Audie FinalistJust heard from Recorded Books that:'We're thrilled to announce that our Modern Scholar course 'A Way with Words IV: Understanding Poetry' by Professor Michael D।C. Drout of Wheaton College has been named as a http://hdlns.com/g1182zf8705za43177296/February+Feast+Calendar+%28Part+2%29 'Hey, February's more than half over, so shouldn't we have had part two of the feast calendar by now?' asks a thoughtful but misguided* reader.  I suppose so, dear reader, I suppose so.  But when you see what boring saints February has lef http://hdlns.com/g1182zf8703za43098925/Bringing+back+the+aurochs%3F Scientists have analysed the DNA of ancient giant European wild cattle that died out almost 400 years ago. They have determined the first mitochondrial genome sequence from aurochs (Bos primigenius) from bone found in http://hdlns.com/g1182zf8706za43090963/Amy+Bishop%27s+violence+is+not+a+comment+on+the+tenure+process by J J CohenAmy Bishop shot and killed three faculty members of the department that denied her tenure. In the wake of this horrible act of violence, I am weary of hearing comments like this, which imply that the tenure process itself might be to blam http://hdlns.com/g1182zf8706za43057498/A+Good+Death+%28Obligations+and+Animals%29 [illustration: breakfast table, this morning. Katherine's comfort toy, Buster, now wears Scooby's collar] by J J CohenAnimals have been on my mind lately.The interrelation of human and animal has always fascinated me, so much so that every book I've http://hdlns.com/g1182zf8715za43011960/Give+the+People+What+They+Want+Feeling+pa Give the People What They Want Feeling particularly cynical about academia, I was thinking about how sometimes a particular essay ends up making a reputation for someone, and then, many years after the reputation has been made, the elite positions at http://hdlns.com/g1182zf8705za42993558/Just+a+fruit+tree%2C+I+swear+%2Ainnocent+whistle%2A I mentioned my hunt for a good digital copy of this week's image back when I discussed the political implications of the mural at Massa Marittima, and now at long last, here it is.  From BnF MS Fr. 25526, a 14th-century copy of the Romance of th http://hdlns.com/g1182zf8706za42953122/Be+Our+Facebook+Friend+Amicus+Amica by J J CohenIf you are on Facebook, would you be our ITM Facebook page friend?Did you know you can set your Facebook language to Lingua latina? What could be better than being among the amici of In the Middle? (Thanks, Karl, for showing me this!) http://hdlns.com/g1182zf8706za42770360/Reading+the+Stars by J J CohenI have recently been rereading Postcolonial Approaches to the European Middle Ages: Translating Cultures, ed. Ananya Jahanara Kabir and Deanne Williams. Michelle Warren has a great essay in the collection on Joseph Bédier, Creole identit http://hdlns.com/g1182zf8710za42699306/Pierced+pendants I taught a class on reliquaries not too long ago, and since I'm often interested in making reproductions of medieval or renaissance rosaries, I'm always on the lookout for the sorts of pierced or open-able little containers that are so often seen dan http://hdlns.com/g1182zf8706za42695911/Animal+Language+and+the+Burden+of+Understanding by KARL STEELThe sixth-century Grammarian Priscian defined 'vox' as 'aerem tenuissimum ictum vel suum sensibile aurium' (air very subtly struck or its sensible effect on the ears), a definition that, as Marcia Colish (whose translation I use here) ob http://hdlns.com/g1182zf8702za42625213/John+Allen%27s+informed+speculation%3A John Allen's informed speculation: new cardinals in 2010? http://hdlns.com/g1182zf8705za42591987/Veni+Vedi+Emi Gamestop launched Dante's Inferno at 12:01 AM this morning, and Got Medieval was there--along with five other people*, all of whom were there to buy Bioshock 2 instead.  Nevertheless, marvel at my bounty. -- *But, to be fair, one of the other http://hdlns.com/g1182zf8706za42550134/Historicizing+Erotohistoriography%3A+A+Query+from+Elizabeth+Freeman Figure 1. reliquary designed to hold St Patrick's arm [Ulster Museum, Belfast]by EILEEN JOYSome ITM readers might recall that last winter I wrote three posts [here, here, and here] on the published essays and 'erotohistoriography' of Elizabeth Freema http://hdlns.com/g1182zf8705za42519753/The+King+of+Love Hey kids, remember, Valentine's Day is less than a week away. In honor of that most romantic of holidays, I present you the most romantic of marginal images, the King of Love from the Maastricht Hours*: According to Andreas the Chaplain (or Andreas http://hdlns.com/g1182zf8705za42335852/February+Feast+Calendar+%28Part+1%29 Sorry this is late, everyone--I was busy saving humanity from the Collectors this week. Nothing I could do about it.* The February feast calendar kicks off on February 1 with the Feast of St. Bridget of Kildare. Bridget, the patron saint of chick http://hdlns.com/g1182zf8706za42447340/snow+day%2C+encore Snowmaggedonby J J CohenYou may have heard that Washington DC has been hit by a little storm. We'll be shoveling our way out of this one for quite some time. My own prediction is that we'll attain a thaw sometime around the Cherry Blossom Festival.Fo http://hdlns.com/g1182zf8706za42468682/update+on+the+King%27s+College+palaeography+protest... by J J Cohen... at Medieval News. Remarkably the Facebook group now has 4,304 members. If you haven't yet, sign the petition (4896 signatures!) and send a letter. Also keep in mind that these are not the only cuts to be made at King's, nor at British http://hdlns.com/g1182zf8703za42453780/Crash+Blossoms In their quest for concision, writers of newspaper headlines are, like Robert Browning, inveterate sweepers away of little words, and the dust they kick up can lead to some amusing ambiguities. Legendary headlines from http://hdlns.com/g1182zf8703za42453781/Big+dinosaur+footprint+find+in+China Scientists in China say they have discovered more than 3,000 dinosaur footprints, all facing the same way. The footprints - thought to belong to at least six dinosaur types - were found in eastern http://hdlns.com/g1182zf8705za42369213/Technical+Difficulties+--+Please+Stand+By Update [2/5/10]: It's all good. The bodley server is behaving again and the saints are now safely returned.A couple of people have already contacted me worried over the lack of the usual crudely drawn manuscript image from (Bodleian MS Rawl. D. 939) http://hdlns.com/g1182zf8706za42387678/Strange+Beauty%2C+Alf+Siewers%2C+and+Ecocritical+Medieval+Studies [illustration: a well known medievalist-ecocritic meets a Tiny profligate, scolds him for his carbon footprint, shortly after a recent GW MEMSI event] by J J CohenQuite a storm is descending upon DC, mighty enough to provoke terse poetry. Trendi http://hdlns.com/g1182zf8715za42353555/Crazy+Sheep+DNA+from+Medieval+Manuscripts+Project%3A+Update Crazy Sheep DNA from Medieval Manuscripts Project: UpdateFor quite a number of years now I have been involved with a long-term interdisciplinary project to extract DNA from medieval parchment and use the information so retrieved to help figure out re http://hdlns.com/g1182zf8703za42338628/Copyright+madness+infects+Australia The CNN writeup is more balanced, but the BBC's better highlights the outrageousness of the underlying issues: The Australian band Men at Work are facing a big legal bill after a court ruled it had http://hdlns.com/g1182zf8703za42338627/Record+price+for+Giacometti A life-size bronze sculpture of a man by Alberto Giacometti has been sold at auction in London for the world record price of £65,001,250. It took just eight minutes for bidders to reach the http://hdlns.com/g1182zf8706za42275899/snow+day by J J CohenWe knew from the weather forecast last night that school would be canceled today for both offspring. When I woke up early, there it was in my Twitter feed, the announcement that the public schools were closed due to the three inches of sn http://hdlns.com/g1182zf8703za42260145/Action+reaction Inspired by Hollywood cowboy films, researchers have delved into the science of gun fights. Scientists discovered that people move faster when reacting to something than when they perform 'planned actions'. This is not at http://hdlns.com/g1182zf8706za42236079/Another+reason+to+come+to+DC%3A+Seminar+on+Orienting+Europe+2+12 by J J CohenIt's a snow day, I've plugged the kids into the TV for a moment, and now I will plug this event that we at GW have been working on for Friday Feb. 12: a seminar on Orienting Europe, followed by Michelle Warren's Gateway Lecture on'The Pos http://hdlns.com/g1182zf8705za42186766/Fox-Vomit+%28v%29 From the 14th-Century Urban Dictionary* by way of the Luttrel Psalter:Vomit Foxes21 up, 118 down To be so surprised/disgusted/annoyed that you spontaneously begin expelling members of the family vulpis from your mouth.'Oh my, what is that monkey doi http://hdlns.com/g1182zf8714za42155935/Question+out+there+for+photo+buffs So I’m putting together the next post on watermarks, and in doing so I was talking with a friend about how the online watermark sites don’t seem to have a lot of images. It occurred to me, in the course of discussion, that if a standard http://hdlns.com/g1182zf8706za42128731/Palaeography+at+King%27s+College+London by J J CohenBy now most ITM readers will have heard about the proposed elimination of palaeography at King's College London. Mary Beard blogged about it last week, and since she gets to the heart of what is at stake I will quote her:Palaeographers ma http://hdlns.com/g1182zf8703za42008507/Reburying+the+WW1+dead The first of 250 British and Australian soldiers whose remains were recovered from a World War I battlefield in northern France has been reburied. The unidentified soldier, who died in the 1916 Battle of http://hdlns.com/g1182zf8703za42008506/Source+of+Trajan%27s+aquaduct+found+at+last The long-sought source of the aqueduct that brought clean fresh water to ancient Rome lies beneath a pig pasture and a ruined chapel, according to a pair of British filmmakers who claim to have http://hdlns.com/g1182zf8703za42008505/Fake+Byzantine+codex+unmasked A clever bit of detective work by US scholars and scientists has proven that one of the jewels of the University of Chicago's manuscript collection is, in fact, a skilled late 19th- or early http://hdlns.com/g1182zf8703za42008504/Gandhi+laid+to+rest%2C+again+and+again+and+again Some of Indian independence leader Mahatma Gandhi's ashes, kept for decades by a family friend, have been scattered off the South African coast. The ashes were sprinkled on to the Indian Ocean in a http://hdlns.com/g1182zf8703za41986714/License+to+steal It didn't take long for the abuses to begin after police were first allowed a cut of property seized from criminals. Yet now over 25 years have passed, and despite one notable attempt at reform, http://hdlns.com/g1182zf8703za41986713/Old+San+Francisco For those looking for some great old footage of San Francisco, a friend recently brought this YouTube video to my attention, which features a streetcar's-eye view of the ride down Market to the Ferry Building. http://hdlns.com/g1182zf8703za41986712/Birds+and+birdlike+dinosaurs%3A+more+pieces+for+the+puzzle The discoveries keep on flooding out of China. What a time to be a palaeontologist!A newly discovered fossil has shed light on why a group of dinosaurs looks like birds, say scientists. Haplocheirus sollers may