Oh, Valentine’s Day, how you don’t make any sense. Valentine’s Day comes from the Catholic Feast of St. Valentine, but even that holiday is problematic. There are at least three early saints with that name, and it’s not clear which one Feb. 14 was meant to celebrate. The Orthodox ChurchContinue Reading
Yesterday I introduced the billion mark stamp from 1923 Germany with a bit of background behind this truly absurd item. Today, I visited a stamp store (which the owner says now officially makes me a philatelist, rather than a person who just happens to have stamps) and had a lovelyContinue Reading
The poor state of history education in our primary and secondary schools has left many of my college students seeing history as nothing but distinct facts to be memorized, often in list form. I know I had to repeatedly memorize the major battles of the Revolutionary War and their dates.Continue Reading
DangerousMinds.net has provided this little gem: a college student has transcribed the musical notes painted on the butt of one of the characters in Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights, which is arguably the most bat-shit crazy painting of the Renaissance. So…is this best played on an ass trumpet?Continue Reading
As previously mentioned, my grandfather’s concept of organization is…creative. Going through his jumbled collection of stamps invoked many facepalming exclamations of “Grandpa!” This was one of them, exclaimed even before I opened the envelope to which he had scotch-taped a green stamp of Benjamin Franklin. Scotch-taped. By its appearance itContinue Reading
As I recover from surgery, I’ve shifted my hobbies to things I can do on the couch that don’t require a lot of thought. It’s why you haven’t heard from me in a while. Much of that included organizing a spectacularly disorganized stamp collection I had inherited and forgotten. (AnotherContinue Reading
Medieval marginalia is most known for being bizarre and offensive. It frequently is, but not always, particularly in earlier manuscripts. In the mid 12th century, Peter Lombard wrote a gloss of the psalms. That is, he created pages that displayed both the text of the Book of Psalms and hisContinue Reading
I’ve been offline the last couple weeks recovering from surgery, during which time I’ve come to some interesting conclusions about my fibromyalgia. Background I first showed symptoms when I was about 12, when the pain was literally crippling. While I got back on my feet, I spent years moving asContinue Reading
First, let me be clear: wide-release movies are not meant to be documentaries. There will be deviations of history, and I’m fine with that. I will also say that I greatly enjoyed Braveheart as a movie. However, if you’re going to make a historical movie, you might want to includeContinue Reading
One of the reasons this blog has only a loose theme is because of the diversity of my interests. I once tried a more focused blog. However, I quickly found other things I wanted to share, but I felt I’m spamming readers who came to the blog looking for aContinue Reading