Further details at Irish Central, and the Irish Times has a report of another similar discovery. The butter may have been "piseogary" (or a "pishogue').Joe explained "We were cutting turf and I found what looked like a huge piece of timber…We took it out with a spade and it turned out to be bog butter."... "It looked like a keg or an urn with two handles and a lid carved from a solid piece of wood." The container has carving marks around the edges with a removable lid with handles and holes, possibly for carrying. The wooden vessel measures a foot in diameter and is almost two feet tall. The 100 pound container was buried seven-feet down.
24 June 2011
More "bog butter" found
A recent report out of Ireland details the discovery of a small barrel of 5,000-year-old butter:
What faith-related short fiction can you recommend ?
Among the many things I do at Trinity Church is co-facilitate a reading group that we call Short Fiction on Faith. I advertise it as "the English class you always dreamed of...great literature, great discussion, no papers or tests." Short stories only, and we choose those with content that raise issues of faith and can stimulate discussion of those issues in our own lives.In recent years the group has read selections by Alice Adams, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Sholom Aleichem, Shalom Auslander, James Baldwin, Honore De Balzac, Raymond Carver, Geoffrey Chaucer, Gilbert Keith Chesterton, Pearl Crayton, Alice Elliott Dark, Tim Gautreaux, Andre Gide, Graham Greene, Jim Grimsley, Heinrich Heine, Paul Horgan, Henry James, John L'Heureux, Yi Yun Li, N. Scott Momaday, H. L. Mencken, Flannery O'Connor , Reynolds Price, Philip Roth, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Leo Tolstoy, John Updike, David Foster Wallace, Edith Wharton, Tobias Wolfe, and Dwight Yates.
The stories do not have to be overtly religious, certainly not necessarily Christian - we have read from just about any faith tradition I can think of. We have read stories from classics to contemporary, all the way from Chaucer (The Wife of Bath's Tale from Canterbury Tales) to current fiction from the New Yorker. I like to do a mix of classic and contemporary.
We have been going for 8 or 9 years, and have made our way through a bunch of anthologies and collections. For the past two years or so we have been selecting the stories individually... We have read quite a few Flannery O'Connor stories, and one of my favorite discoveries is "The Great Good Place" by Henry James.
The group is currently on summer break, and the coordinators are requesting suggestions for further reading. My own reading tends to favor nonfiction topics (evident in my recommended books category of this blog), so I may be able to offer them some science fiction stories that would be relevant, but for other short fiction, I'll turn to TYWKIWDBI visitors.
If you have recommendations for the Trinity Church reading group, please leave a message in the Comments with the author's name, the title of the work, and preferably with a sentence or two summarizing why the piece might interest them.
Thanks in advance for your suggestions.
Man robs bank in order to get health care
[James Richard Verone] noticed a protrusion on his chest. "The pain was beyond the tolerance that I could accept," Verone told the Gaston Gazette. "I kind of hit a brick wall with everything."Further details at Yahoo News, via The Dish.
Verone knew he needed help--and he didn't want to be a burden on his sister and brothers. He applied for food stamps, but they weren't enough either.
So he hatched a plan. On June 9, he woke up, showered, ironed his shirt. He mailed a letter to the Gazette, listing the return address as the Gaston County Jail.
"When you receive this a bank robbery will have been committed by me," Verone wrote in the letter. "This robbery is being committed by me for one dollar. I am of sound mind but not so much sound body."
Then Verone hailed a cab to take him to the RBC Bank. Inside, he handed the teller his $1 robbery demand.
"I didn't have any fears," said Verone. "I told the teller that I would sit over here and wait for police."
The teller was so frightened that she had to be taken to the hospital to be checked out. Verone, meanwhile, was taken to jail, just as he'd planned it.
Because he only asked for $1, Verone was charged with larceny, not bank robbery. But he said that if his punishment isn't severe enough, he plans to tell the judge that he'll do it again. His $100,000 bond has been reduced to $2,000, but he says he doesn't plan to pay it.
In jail, Verone said he skips dinner to avoid too much contact with the other inmates. He's already seen some nurses and is scheduled to see a doctor on Friday...
23 June 2011
Selections from Lapham's Quarterly
"No man can eat fifty eggs" photo from Cool Hand Luke. © The Kobal Collection.
If an internet policeman were to declare that I could only keep a hundred bookmarks on my browser, one of those would link to Lapham's Quarterly. I became a lifelong reader of Harper's during Lewis H. Lapham's editorship, and was a great fan of his incisive essays in that magazine. Retired from that position, he now maintains Lapham's Quarterly, which, like the magazine, assembles information on a wide variety of topics.
The current edition of the Quarterly is devoted to "Food." I encourage those who like TYWKIWDBI to browse the site and sample some of the linked material (try, for example, Dumas' description of the feast prepared by the Count of Monte Cristo).
Below this post are three excerpts from the "Food" issue; I have embedded only brief excerpts in order to encourage everyone to read more at the source.
"Powdered wife" explained
Cannibalism and corpse-eating during the starvation of Jamestown in 1609, as reported by John Smith in The Generall Historie of Virginia, New England, and the Summer Isles:
...as for our hogs, hens, goats, sheep, horse, or what lived, our commanders, officers, and savages daily consumed them—some small proportions sometimes we tasted—till all was devoured...there remained not past sixty men, women, and children, most miserable and poor creatures—and those were preserved for the most part by roots, herbs, acorns, walnuts, berries, now and then a little fish...More information at Lapham's Quarterly.
Nay, so great was our famine that a savage we slew and buried, the poorer sort took him up again and ate him, and so did diverse one another boiled and stewed with roots and herbs. And one amongst the rest did kill his wife, powdered her, and had eaten part of her before it was known, for which he was executed, as he well deserved; now whether she was better roasted, boiled, or carbonadoed, I know not, but of such a dish as powdered wife I never heard.
American food in 1832
As reported by Frances Trollope (the mother of novelist Anthony Trollope), from Domestic Manners of the Americans:
They consume an extraordinary quantity of bacon. Ham and beefsteaks appear morning, noon, and night. In eating, they mix things together with the strangest incongruity imaginable. I have seen eggs and oysters eaten together; the sempiternal ham with applesauce, beefsteak with stewed peaches, and salt fish with onions. The bread is everywhere excellent, but they rarely enjoy it themselves, as they insist upon eating horrible half-baked hot rolls both morning and evening...Additional commentary is available at Lapham's Quarterly.
They seldom indulge in second courses, with all their ingenious temptations to the eating a second dinner, but almost every table has its dessert (invariably pronounced “desart”) which is placed on the table before the cloth is removed and consists of pastry, preserved fruits, and creams. They are “extravagantly fond,” to use their own phrase, of puddings, pies, and all kinds of “sweets,” particularly the ladies; but are by no means such connoisseurs in soups and ragouts as the gastronomes of Europe. Almost everyone drinks water at table, and by a strange contradiction, in the country where hard drinking is more prevalent than in any other, there is less wine taken at dinner; ladies rarely exceed one glass, and the great majority of females never take any...
Their large evening parties are supremely dull; the men sometimes play cards by themselves, but if a lady plays, it must not be for money; no écarté, no chess; very little music, and that little lamentably bad. Among the blacks, I heard some good voices, singing in tune, but I scarcely ever heard a white American, male or female, go through an air without being out of tune before the end of it...
A remarkable polyphagist (France, 1795)
All the polyphagists whose wonderful deeds are recorded in history are superseded by the famous Tarrare, who was known to all Paris and who died at Versailles at the age of twenty-six years...The rest of the story can be read at Lapham's Quarterly. Original source: the Society of Physicians, from The Eclectic and Analytic Review.
At seventeen years of age, Tarrare weighed only one hundred pounds and was already able to eat, in twenty-four hours, a quarter of a bullock of that weight... One time on the stage, he defied the public to satiate him, and ate in a few minutes a pannier-full of apples, furnished by one of the spectators; he swallowed flints, corks, and all that was presented to him...
He swallowed a large eel alive without chewing it, but we thought we perceived him crush its head between his teeth. He ate, in a few instants, the dinner prepared for fifteen German laborers... M. Comville, the surgeon-major of the hospital where Tarrare then was, made him swallow a wooden case, enclosing a sheet of white paper: he voided it the following day by the anus, and the paper was uninjured...
The general-in-chief had him brought before him, and after having devoured in his presence nearly thirty pounds of raw liver and lights, Tarrare again swallowed the wooden case, in which was placed a letter to a French officer, who was a prisoner to the enemy. Tarrare set out, was taken, flogged, imprisoned; voided the wooden case, which he had retained thirty hours, and had the address to swallow it again, to conceal the knowledge of its contents from the enemy...
The servants of the hospital surprised him drinking the blood of patients who had been bled, and in the dead room devouring the bodies...
ʌǝpǝʌpǝɯ ʎɹʇıɯp
Russian President Dmitry Medvedev looks at his own reflection,
while visiting the Lytkarino Optical Glass Factory in the town of Lytkarino.
Photo credit AP, via The Telegraph. Text inverter here.
Victorian locksmithing
Michele Bachmann supports intelligent design
"I support intelligent design," Bachmann told reporters following her speech at the conference, CNN reports. "What I support is putting all science on the table and then letting students decide. I don't think it's a good idea for government to come down on one side of scientific issue or another, when there is reasonable doubt on both sides."On behalf of all educated and sensible Minnesotans, I would like to apologize for Mrs. Bachmann's continuing presence in the political arena.
"I would prefer that students have the ability to learn all aspects of an issue," Bachmann said. "And that's why I believe the federal government should not be involved in local education to the most minimal possible process."
Celestial "water sprinkler" discovered
Seven hundred and fifty light-years from Earth, a young, sunlike star has been found with jets that blast epic quantities of water into interstellar space, shooting out droplets that move faster than a speeding bullet.The mind boggles. Truly.
The discovery suggests that protostars may be seeding the universe with water. These stellar embryos shoot jets of material from their north and south poles as their growth is fed by infalling dust that circles the bodies in vast disks.
"If we picture these jets as giant hoses and the water droplets as bullets, the amount shooting out equals a hundred million times the water flowing through the Amazon River every second," said Lars Kristensen, a postdoctoral astronomer at Leiden University in the Netherlands.
"We are talking about velocities reaching 200,000 kilometers [124,000 miles] per hour, which is about 80 times faster than bullets flying out of a machine gun," said Kristensen, lead author of the new study detailing the discovery, which has been accepted for publication in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.
"What a fool believes" (The Doobie Brothers)
This was the Grammy-award-winning "Song of the Year" in 1980, and "one of the few non-disco No. 1 hits on the Billboard Hot 100 during 1979. The song lyrics tell a story of a man who is reunited with a former lover and attempts to rekindle the relationship with her, only to realize she never really loved him and shows no interest in continuing an affair with him."
I've listened to this song uncountable times in the past 30 years, and it wasn't until I decided to blog it today that I realized I have been mishearing the lyrics. I thought the words were "The wise man has the power to reason away..." It's just the opposite.
Not quite a "mondegreen" - but almost. (See also "Obama's Elf").
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