Nuns vs. Monks in medieval "baseball"

"Rivalry in sports is not just something of our time. Nor is baseball. Both date back to at least the fourteenth century, when this image was made. What is less likely encountered in a baseball game today are the teams: monks vs nuns. The scene is from the margin of a medieval page, the location used to make fun of people. The manuscript contains a romance, popular among the medieval nobility. Somewhere, someone in a castle had a good laugh about these religious men and women playing ball. "

Found at Erik Kwakkel's remarkable tumblr about medieval books.

The marginal illustration comes from a 14th century book in Oxford's Bodleian Library (MS Bodley 264).  It has many hundreds of these marginal cartoons, which you can view at this link. 

(fols. 3r-208r) The Romance of Alexander in French verse, with miniatures illustrating legends of Alexander the Great and with marginal scenes of everyday life, by the Flemish illuminator Jehan de Grise and his workshop, 1338-44; with two sections added in England c. 1400, (fols. 209r-215v, with fol. 1r) Alexander and Dindimus (Alexander Fragment B) in Middle English verse, with coarser miniatures, and (fols. 218r- 71v, with fol. 2v) Marco Polo, Li Livres du Graunt Caam, in French prose, with miniatures by Johannes and his school. 

During a brief perusal, I found these images:

I'm at a loss to explain why the illuminator chose to depict hematochezia in that last vignette.  But the one that interested me most was this one, depicting beggars wielding scabella -

- which I blogged in 2011 (discussion at the link).

33-horsepower combine, 1902

"Evolution of the sickle and flail, 33-horse team combined harvester, Walla Walla, Washington."

From Wikimedia Commons, via Retronaut [sepia tone removed by me]

"What shall we do tonight, dear?"

Maps showing an inverse correlation between television penetration and fertility rates in India.  I would presume the relationship exists not as a direct cause-and-effect, but rather a correlation based on social class, education, and income.

Via Fuck Yeah Cartography!

Stone ship

“Tjelvar’s grave”, Boge, Gotland, Sweden, 1938

Tjelvar’s Grave is one of the best preserved stone ship settings in Gotland. According the legend Tjelvar, the first man lived in Gotland, is buried there. Archaeologists have dated the grave to made in the late Bronze Ages, 1100-500 BC.

Tjelvar’s grave is 18 metres long and 5 metres wide. The height of the gunwale stones diminishes towards the centre of the ship, which has also been filled with stones to form a boat-deck. A plundered stone-slab coffin, containing cremated bones and a few potsherds, was uncovered in an excavation in the 1930s.

More info on stone ships. 

Photo by Mårten Stenberger, from the Flickr photoset of the Swedish National Heritage Board, via First Time User.

M is for metastases

Map from the McDonald's app, via The New Aesthetic and Fuck Yeah Cartography.

Excerpts from "Wings of Life"

YouTube link.

"Wings of Life, known as Pollen in France and Hidden Beauty: A Love Story That Feeds the Earth in the United Kingdom, is a 2011 French-American nature documentary..."

This is a high-definition, super-slow-motion video of insects and bats pollinating flowers (and of butterflies in flight).   If you don't take advantage of the full-screen button for this video, you might as well not have one.

A hat tip to reader Lloyd in Spokane for sending me the link.

50 years passes like nothing

YouTube link.

1959 Chevy vs. 2009 Chevy in a crash test.

Via Reddit, where the comment thread includes observations about the attitudes of classic car enthusiasts.

Heart-shaped medieval Books of Hours

We know of only a few examples of heart-shaped Books of Hours, all dating from the 15th or the 16th century. 

Additional photos of several other such books are posted at damien kempf, via Erik Kwakkel.  For a general introduction to Books of Hours, check out this 12-minute video:

YouTube link.

This video "presents a brief documentary about the patronage, content and use of medieval Books of Hours. The Biekorf ("Beehive") Library, best known for its collection of cistercian manuscripts from Ten Duinen en Ter Doest, holds 21 medieval Books of Hours."

Video via Erik Kwakkel.

The "chained library" of Zutphen

The ‘Librije’ is a unique 16th century public library in the St. Walburga’s Church in Zutphen. The Church itself dates from the 11th century. The building and the interior of the library have remained almost unchanged throughout the ages. The greater part of the original collection of books is still in situ... Some books have been chained to the reading desks since the time of foundation...

The reason for chaining the books was a purely practical one. The ‘Librije’ was open to the general public. Anyone could obtain a key and sit and study the books for as long as the church was open. But the books had to stay where they belonged…

Particularly in the 15th and 16th century learned inhabitants of Zutphen left their books to the ‘Librije’. After the Reformation books from the dissolved monastries in and around Zutphen were added to the collection... The present collection contains books on theology, law, history and literature – works by Church Fathers, medieval commentaries on the bible, books on the lives of saints, legal commentaries, classical writers like Virgil, Horatius, Seneca, Homer and Herodotus and humanistic authors like the Dutch scholar Erasmus. The collection contains 5 manuscripts and 85 incunabula (books printed before 1500).

More information here, and more pix here.  Via Erik Kwakkel.

Addendum from a comment by reader Mel V:

The brass knobs and the clasps were for practical reasons, not decorative ones. Unlike modern books that would lie flat, the older ones would gape open unless they were latched. Latching them tightly helped preserve the shape of the pages and spine. The knobs are from an era when books would have been laid flat on shelves instead of stacked on edge. The raised metal protected the leather covers, presumably from being scuffed by the shelf and to make sure there was no moisture trapped between the cover and shelf. It'd be overkill for today's books, but when a book represented thousands of hours of a scribe's work and was expected to last for several hundred years, it starts to make sense.

"Foaming manure pits" on hog farms

As reported by Mother Jones:

You see, starting in about 2009, in the pits that capture manure under factory-scale hog farms, a gray, bubbly substance began appearing at the surface of the fecal soup. The problem is menacing: As manure breaks down, it emits toxic gases like hydrogen sulfide and flammable ones like methane, and trapping these noxious fumes under a layer of foam can lead to sudden, disastrous releases and even explosions. According to a 2012 report from the University of Minnesota, by September 2011, the foam had "caused about a half-dozen explosions in the upper Midwest…one explosion destroyed a barn on a farm in northern Iowa, killing 1,500 pigs and severely burning the worker involved."...

But if the causes of manure foam remain a mystery, a solution seems to be emerging, Jacobson told me: Dump a bit of monensin, an antibiotic widely used to make cows grow faster, directly into the foam-ridden pit. At rather low levels—Jacobson told me that about 25 pounds of the stuff will treat a typical 500,000 gallon pit—the stuff effectively breaks up the foam, likely by altering the mix of microbes present. No other treatment has been shown to work consistently, he said.

The agriculture industry and the antibiotic producers seem to be fused at the hip.

(The video is a Vimeo one that seems not to embed or load well.  There are pix at this PowerPoint presentation).

Man remodeling an old house finds treasure

In his decade of working construction and home remodeling, David Gonzalez always dreamed of finding some hidden treasure in the demolition work. He’d even put dollar bills in new walls for folks to unearth in the future.

So he chalks up to karma the 1938 Action Comics #1 book he found amid old newspapers used to insulate a wall of a fixer-upper he was gutting in Elbow Lake, Minn. The old comic book, from June 1938, features a new character named Superman lifting a car on its cover...

The comic could have been worth more had it not been for a heated argument with one of his in-laws... When his wife’s aunt grabbed the comic book amid all the excitement of the discovery, he grabbed it back and tore the back cover. Experts downgraded the comic book’s condition to a 1.5 on a 10-point scale...

Still, it’s going for more than 10 times what Gonzalez paid for the abandoned house in Elbow Lake.. He and his wife went to the Grant County courthouse and researched the owner, who told them a neighboring restaurant had offered $10,000 to buy it. They planned to demolish the house and put in a parking lot. “So I offered $100 more and got it for $10,100,” he said.

Video report at the StarTribune link.  The comic book sold at auction for $175,000.

A drone-mounted remote-controlled handgun and a gun-totin' Granny

YouTube link.

The video is an ad for a ClearPlex screen-protector product; it has been edited and almost certainly does not reflect the reality of the concept, but it's food for thought...

Via Boing Boing.

Now, before everyone gets too inflamed against/for/about the previous video, watch this one in which a grandmother shoots an iPhone, to understand the tongue-in-cheek aspect of both:

YouTube link.

Scene 1- Granny warms up with an AR-15 .223 caliber rifle on unprotected MacBook Pro
Scene 2- Granny shoots two iPhones in the air with a 20 gauge Benelli

Repaired pages in medieval books

As reported by the Uppsala University Library:

The manuscript dates from the 14th century and it belonged to the monastic library at Vadstena Convent after its purchase in Konstanz in 1417. ..

Some time after the book was copied, the holes and tears have been mended artistically with silk of various colours, mainly in blanket stitch as used in embroidery...

During the project the black thread was subjected to colour analysis to find out which colouring agents had been used. The results showed that the black dye had been made with iron sulphate and tannin, which implies that the thread was dyed with iron filings and various plants that contain the tanning agent tannin e.g. oak apple and sumac leaves. The whole dyeing process is very acidic and if the wrong proportions of tannin and iron salt are used, sulphuric acid forms considerably accelerating the natural decomposition of the thread or material.

Top photo: the black threads of the medieval repair have disintegrated; modern stabilization with a silk gauze.

Lower photo:  An intact medieval repair.

Via Erik Kwakkel and allhomosapienswelcome.

"Surveillance" vs. "open mike"

By now most people who follow current affairs have heard of this incident that occurred after the conclusion of a Congressional hearing, when two of the participants did not realize that their conversation was being picked up and broadcast by an open microphone:

The director of the National Security Agency was overheard offering a round of beer to the FBI's second-in-command following Tuesday's congressional hearing on the NSA's controversial surveillance programs.

The three-hour hearing had just wrapped up around 1 p.m. when NSA Director Keith Alexander turned to FBI Deputy Director Sean Joyce and praised him for his testimony.

'Thank you, Sean,' Alexander said, according to a clip of the exchange that was first reported by Ben Doernberg. 'Tell your boss I owe him another friggin' beer,' he added. 

Video of the exchange at the link.

The best commentary I've encountered is this one from the Reddit thread:

"It must be terrible for him to have a conversation he thought was private heard by other people who might now use it against him."

A "motley crew" dance for you

YouTube link.

Via Boing Boing.

A good excuse to review "motley":

The word motley is described in the Oxford English Dictionary as a cognate with medley, although the unrelated mottled has also contributed to the meaning... When used as a noun, it can mean "a varied mixture." As an adjective, it is generally disparaging — a motley collection is an uninspiring pile of stuff, as in the cliche motley crew.

The word originated in England between the 14th and 17th centuries and referred to a woolen fabric of mixed colors. It was the characteristic dress of the professional fool...

[M]otley did not have to be checkered and has been recently thought to be one pattern with different colored threads running through it.

Motley is the only wear.

—Shakespeare, As You Like It, ii. 7