Cool Stuff on Other Blogs V and Miscellaneous Thoughts

I’m in the situation of wanting to blog but not being comfortable in my office chair for extended periods (though I’m getting there). I’m starting to work on a couple of long-ish posts but for the moment I’m going to substitute by offering a collection of what others bloggers have said over the past month or so.

I’m going to open with a few not-quite-random thoughts. Before I get to those, let me offer a quick “out” if you want to skip this section.

Take me to the collection of posts

Today’s a big day for me. My recovery from hip replacement surgery (HRS) has gone far better than I ever could have anticipated. I’m pretty much going wherever I want on crutches and can stand in place without them, easily. The only reason I can think of for this is that my HRS followed an injury, not a progressive arthritis condition so my leg has not been weakened over a period of years. Today happens to be a landmark – First Shower Since Surgery! Oh frabjous day!

One of the useful features of Blogger is following. Following allows me to select blogs I’m interested in so that whenever I log in I receive a link and the first few words of new posts from my follow list. I can select a specific blog and receive a chronology of recent posts in this summary form. About a month ago I mentioned several new blogs I’d found. Several of them have had recent posts which definitely qualify as Cool Stuff. This morning, when I started putting this post together, I realized that while these blogs are on my blogroll they are not on this “Blogs I Follow” feature. OK – I’d entered them before but Blogger had a glitch so I re-entered the six missing blogs. All looked fine until I returned to the login page (called Dashboard) and they had been re-deleted.

That’s it. The proverbial camel is in intensive care filling out disability forms and getting fitted for a wheelchair. This blog will be migrating to WordPress after January 1. I have the time over the next couple of weeks to (hopefully) do this right. Over the next couple of days expect a followup post with more details about this which will include some requests re anything to pay attention to from others who have made this move and WP Bloggers. Sorry Blogger – enough is enough.

These posts are listed mostly in alphabetical order, by blog title (with one exception). Also, while several of these have more than one worthy post, I’m only putting up one per blog – sorry folks!

Jonathan Jarrett always has good info on his blog but he also frequently throws in fun content. His Christmas Gift Formulary is flat out awesome! Someone out there in the reenactement world needs to be contacting Dr. Jarrett for permission to use this in their activities. I think I have a new poster child for what I’m talking about when I say “other blogs have cool stuff.”

Ancient Bodies, Ancient Lives has an interesting post which nicely illustrates the hazards of jumping to quick conclusions regarding the “meaning” of material remains. In this post the case in question concerns whether a mummified cat discovered walled into a house meant this was the domicile of a witch.

I bet 5th Century Romans and the Gallo-Roman Aristocracy would have loved to have been able to call Attila an alien. Bones Don’t Lie has a nice post detailing some of the finds of cranial deformation and how these are, even today, sometimes interpreted as extraterrestrial remains. The Huns are not specifically mentioned however this gives an idea of how widespread this practice was, and some links within it show how it continues today.

From the Garden into the City has a post on Justinian’s wife, the Empress Theodora. There are several interesting messages in this post. One is to read Procopius carefully. Much of his material contains veiled insults directed toward the Imperial Couple. Justinian marrying Theodora always makes me think of the modern advice to not fall in love with a stripper.

Michelle Ziegler at Heavenfield has a post discussing Paul the Deacon’s account of the devastation of the 6th century Italian Countryside following the plague. Quite the apocalyptic vision there and, as Michelle says, it found its use well before books and movies began appearing during the past century discussing Humanity’s capacity to end itself.

There have been several Leeds reports recently which I’ve been following however of them all, I’m only going to include one here. Magistra et Mater opens this post with a summary of a presentation by Walter Pohl related to ethnogenesis. This is a nice subsection of this topic, one in which the tone of conversation has often left me feeling as if trying to really learn about this just isn’t worth what you have to wade through. I’m paid to have to deal with that kind of invective in my real job; I’m not going to spend time on it in my hobby.

I am continually amazed at the contributions of Roger Pearse. Very recently he provided an annotated edition of Galen’s mentions of Christianity and Judaism. You can find the content through this blog post of his. I couldn’t begin to summarize everything Roger has done (I doubt I’m aware of half of it) but if you ever want to begin finding out, start at tertullian.org.

Though a bit later than my usual focus, The Lost Fort has an interesting post on The Hansa League. This network has some intriguing Early Medieval precursors and is another example of how exchange networks worked during the Middle Ages. As usual, Gabriele has supplemented her post with some great pictures.

Over at Historian on the Edge, Guy Halsall recently put up a series of posts (more correctly, one article split into four posts) titled, “The Genesis of the Frankish Aristocracy.” I’m not going to comment on the quality because, quite simply, I haven’t read this yet. I have it printed off and once my leg’s a bit more up to par I intend to go through it, check it against what sources I have, and see what I think (and am left wanting to learn more about). I anticipate that, knowing the general quality of Dr. Halsall’s work, these will be quite good and useful and I have no qualms about offering the links here though I can’t quite give it a recommendation yet. The links are below:

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4

Merry Christmas Everyone!