An eclectic assortment of stuff: food, archaeology, fun, books, history, geekery, etc.
Posted in art, history & archaeology on Sep 29th, 2007
From the BBC: Castle unveils medieval tapestry.
A tapestry that recreates part of a priceless Renaissance work of art has been unveiled at Stirling Castle.
The intricate 12ft by 14ft tapestry, entitled The Unicorn is Killed and Brought to the Castle, has taken a team of weavers four years to complete.
It forms the third part of the [...]
Posted in books & lit on Sep 28th, 2007
This Shakespeare- themed tube map (1072 x 337 px) is a fine and fun thing. A Guardian article, All change at Lady Macbeth, explains:
Titus Andronicus, the general who bakes the sons of an empress into a tasty pie, lies at the north-west edge of a new diagram of Shakespeare characters inspired by the London Underground [...]
Posted in books & lit, history & archaeology on Sep 28th, 2007
From the BBC: British Library books go digital.
More than 100,000 old books previously unavailable to the public will go online thanks to a mass digitisation programme at the British Library.
The programme focuses on 19th Century books, many of which are unknown as few were reprinted after first editions.
The library believes online access to the titles [...]
Posted in history & archaeology on Sep 28th, 2007
From discovery.com: Ancient Fishermen Lured Fish With Fire.
Fishermen around areas mentioned in the New Testament worked the night shift, suggests fishing gear found in a 7th century shipwreck off the coast of Dor, Israel, west of Galilee, where Jesus is said to have preached.
The standout item among the found gear is a fire basket, the [...]
Posted in history & archaeology, religion on Sep 28th, 2007
From The Local (Sweden): Archaeologists discover portable altar.
Archaeologists have uncovered a one thousand-year-old portable altar at an excavation site in Varnhem in western Sweden.
The stone object was found resting on the skeleton of a heavy set man believed to have been a priest.
Archaeologist Maria Vretemark from Västergötland’s Museum describes the miniature altar as "a [...]
Posted in history & archaeology on Sep 25th, 2007
From Haaretz: Archaeologists unearth quarry used to renovate Second Temple.
The Antiquities Authority announced Sunday that archaeologists have found an ancient quarry where King Herod’s workers may have chiselled the giant stones used to renovate the Second Temple in Jerusalem some 2,000 years ago.
The Authority said Sunday that experts believe stones as long as eight meters [...]
Posted in books & lit, religion on Sep 24th, 2007
Amazon sells it: The Year of Living Biblically : One Man’s Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible. It’s A.J. Jacob’s new book, which describes his attempt to follow every rule in the Bible for a year.
Here, this is from a Newsweek interview:
NEWSWEEK: It’s been a little over a year since your [...]
Posted in history & archaeology on Sep 23rd, 2007
From the BBC: Three-year Genghis Khan trek ends.
An Australian man has completed a three-year journey from Mongolia to Hungary, following in the footsteps of the Mongolian leader Genghis Khan.
When Tim Cope began his 10,000 km (6,200 mile) journey in June 2004 he expected it to take 18 months.
However, a stint at home when his father [...]
Posted in books & lit, history & archaeology on Sep 19th, 2007
From the Guardian: Ancient writings from the Dead Sea scrolls are to be read for the first time by British scientists using powerful x-rays.
The team will examine rare and unread fragments of the scrolls, which are believed to shed light on how the texts came to be written in caves along the north-west coast of [...]
Posted in books & lit, food, history & archaeology on Sep 19th, 2007
You know about Mrs Beeton’s book, yes? In case not, here’s a brief intro from the Canadian Conservation Institute:
Beeton’s Book of Household Management is the pre-eminent 19th-century source of recipes for all seasons, for all foods (even guinea pigs!). Much more than a simple cookbook, it has provided generations of readers with delightful insights into [...]
Posted in history & archaeology on Sep 19th, 2007
From the Jerusalem Post: Serendipity in the Negev.
In late July, archaeologists and students from four universities in three countries – Israel, Germany and Canada – converged on a remote, blisteringly hot hilltop in the northern Negev. Their goal was to perform the first ever archaeological excavation of a Philistine agricultural village, as compared to an [...]
Posted in language on Sep 16th, 2007
From The Telegraph: The rise of Indian English.
It has taken decades of struggle, but more than half a century after the British departed from India, standard English has finally followed.
Young and educated Indians regard the desire to speak English as it is spoken in England as a silly hang-up from a bygone era. Homegrown idiosyncrasies [...]
From CBS News: Preserving The Language Of Jesus.
For thousands of years, a tiny Syrian village has kept a well-guarded treasure: the language of Jesus. Tucked away in the Qalamoun Mountains, just north of Damascus, Syria, is Malula — one of the last places on earth where Aramaic is still spoken.
Aramaic was a thriving language during [...]
Posted in history & archaeology on Sep 11th, 2007
From the Guardian: The sorry story of how Scotland lost its 17th century empire.
For centuries the ruins in the swamps of southern Panama have been testament to Scottish folly, an attempt to create a tropical empire to rival those of the Spanish and Portuguese.
The five ships which sailed from Leith in the summer of 1698 [...]
Posted in environment on Sep 10th, 2007
From the Scotsman: Cheers! Your petrol tank could soon be smelling like a distillery.
Scotland’s whisky industry could become the source of eco-friendly biofuels for cars, with motorists powering their engines from the by-products of distilling.
The concept of turning the husks from the malted barley and other cereals used in the manufacture of whisky and other [...]
Posted in food on Sep 10th, 2007
From the Telegraph: France’s songbird delicacy is outlawed.
French gourmands are to be denied what one restaurant critic describes as the "barbaric pleasure" of feasting on tiny songbirds after their government announced that it intended finally to enforce laws that have been on the statute books for eight years.
Long considered the pinnacle of gastronomic delight by [...]
Posted in history & archaeology on Sep 10th, 2007
From the BBC: Viking ship ‘buried beneath pub’.
A 1,000-year-old Viking longship is thought to have been discovered under a pub car park on Merseyside.
The vessel is believed to lie beneath 6ft to 10ft (2m to 3m) of clay by the Railway Inn in Meols, Wirral, where Vikings are known to have settled.
Experts believe the ship [...]
Posted in science on Sep 10th, 2007
From the BBC: Hidden method of reading revealed.
The mystery of how we read a sentence has been unlocked by scientists.
Previously, researchers thought that, when reading, both eyes focused on the same letter of a word. But a UK team has found this is not always the case.
In fact, almost 50% of the time, each of [...]
Posted in history & archaeology on Sep 10th, 2007
From the International Herald Tribune: Archeologists find ancient tunnel used by Jews to escape Roman conquest of Jerusalem.
Israeli archeologists on Sunday said they’ve stumbled upon the site of one of the great dramatic scenes of the Roman sacking of Jerusalem 2,000 years ago: the subterranean drainage channel Jews used to escape from the city’s Roman [...]
Posted in miscellaneous on Sep 10th, 2007
From the Independent: Strange island: Pacific tribesmen come to study Britain.
In March this year, a British TV company invited a small tribe called the Kastam, from the tiny South Pacific island of Tanna, to send a delegation to England, a country none of its people had ever visited before. They spent a month living here, [...]
Posted in food, history & archaeology on Sep 4th, 2007
From haaretz.com: A serving of Philistine culture: Boar, dog and fine wine.
Unlike most of the peoples living in the region in the biblical era, the Philistines were not Semites, but rather one of the Sea Peoples who immigrated from the Aegean Sea region of today’s Greece and western Turkey. They brought with them technologies new [...]