Finestkind Clinic and fish market

Factoid of the day

noreply@blogger.com (boinky) — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 19:09:35 PST

I'm listening to Professor Bulliet's world history(on youtube here) and he is saying that there are numerous mounds in southern Ukraine that predate ancient Mesopotemia, but that much of the archeology there is in other languages or is recent work, and of course for the layperson, there is a lot of fake stuff out there which is influence more by politics than reality.

The end of the ice age and the filling of the Black Sea in 5500 BC might have resulted from climate change...does this have anything to do with noah's flood?

and what about the drying of the climate?

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a 1996 article about this from the LATimes.

the Scythian are actually Bronze age and may be a mixed population (the Greeks called any of the horse riding "barbarians" of the area Scythian, but the real controversy is the earlier settlements in the neolithic times.

Some of this mixes up with "indo european" vs semetic racism (and don't get started with the Dravidian vs aryan origin of Harappa or the Chinese Han embarassment of having "white mummies"which are either were Indo European or Turkish in origin).

then the DNA/RNA studies are "MYGO" and getting into the act.

The "WAGD" (not) post of the day

noreply@blogger.com (boinky) — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 17:20:39 PST

MISSED!

A small asteroid the size of a city bus zoomed between Earth and the moon's orbit Friday (Jan. 27) just days after its discovery, but it never posed a threat to our planet, NASA says.

The asteroid 2012 BX34 passed within 36,750 miles (59,044 kilometers) of Earth when it made its closest approach at 10:30 a.m. EST (1530 GMT).

Going where no toy has gone before

noreply@blogger.com (boinky) — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 17:13:59 PST

then there is this:

but this is my favorite:

Poor Dumbo

noreply@blogger.com (boinky) — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 16:57:08 PST

Improbable research has an article on an episode where they did a public dissection of an elephant in 1681.

youtube report HERE.

Ah, but the silliest elephant experiment was giving a male elephant LSD.

It had to do with checking if schizophrenia/psychosis was behind the amok of male elephants.

Alas, the elephant died...

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Factoid of the day

noreply@blogger.com (boinky) — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 15:12:03 PST

The first air war was the Turko Italian war in Libya in 1911...

yes, StrategyPage has expanded to youtube.

Jousting

noreply@blogger.com (boinky) — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 18:02:03 PST

I just watched a BBC video of the medieval knight Willam Marshall, and learned he got his fame and fortune by entering and winning melees and jousting tournaments (before he became famous in English politics) The video mentions lots of modern folks joust nowadays.

So, who can afford a horse and all that equipment?

No problem: Try wheelbarrow jousting:

and yes, it is narrated by the Tolkien professor...

Podcast of the week

noreply@blogger.com (boinky) — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 17:03:05 PST

I found two entertaining lectures by Tom Shippey on Tolkien and middle English on Swarthmore college's page.

The Roots of middle earth:

Audio [50:04m]: Download

Tolkien book to Jackson:

Audio [50:06m]: Download

there are other good lectures on the link if you like current events and modern type literature.

Minoans

noreply@blogger.com (boinky) — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 16:37:51 PST

Marine archeology article here

The wreck provided tangible evidence of an astonishing array of contacts and trade between the different cultures of the Mediterranean and Near East in the late Bronze Age. The Ulu Burun ship sailed at around the time that Tutankhamun ruled Egypt, and “it is far more important than Tutankhamun's tomb as a contribution to our understanding of the period”, according to Wachsmann. “This goes to the nitty gritty of the world. It's Wall Street in a ship.”

archeoblog comments:

I didn’t know that no Minoan ships had ever been discovered. Me, I’m still waiting for the rush of perfectly preserved Black Sea wrecks to come to light.

the destruction of the Minoan civilization is now thought to be due to the Santorini eruption, with the Mycenean Greeks invading and taking over. How this fits into the myth of Theusus and the Labyrinth is anyone's guess.

And another confused story is the relationship between the Minoans and the Phoenicians and the Hyksos...and some wonder if two centuries later the Trojan war caused the Bronze age collapse, with the Sea People migration and ultimately the resettlement of the Mycenean Greeks as the Philistines.

There are so many conspiracy theories about this that it may take another century or two to figure it out.

Dr. David Nieman's series on the Hyksos suggests that Minoans were part of the eastern Amorite empire. Part one of several short snips of his lecture on the Hyksos is here:

yes, it's Indiana Jones city of Tanis...

Cooking in the good old days

noreply@blogger.com (boinky) — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 16:10:53 PST

The FeedingAmerica webpage has a new cook book from 1803

here's an example: How to make Mead:

To make Mead.
To thirteen gallons of water, put thirty pounds of honey, boil and scum it well, then take rosemary, thyme, bay-leaves, and sweet-briar, one handful altogether, boil it an hour, put it into a tub, with a little ground malt; stir it till it is new milk warm; strain it through a cloth, and put into the tub again; cut a toast, and spread it over with good yeast, and put into the tub also; and when the liquor is covered over with yeast, put it up in a barrel: then take of cloves, mace and nutmegs, an ounce and a half; of ginger, sliced an ounce; bruise the spice, tie it up in a rag, and hang it in the vessel, stopping it up close for use.

a list of their vintage cookbooks digitalized and on line can be found HERE.