Maybe This is Why There Were Pirates

I don’t want to make fun of anyone because if you want to dress as a pirate, why shouldn’t you? There have always been a few folks dressed in an interesting manner at Kalamazoo and while I can’t recall ever giving it much thought I’ve pretty much figured they were doing so because what they were wearing added something to a paper or presentation they were giving. Heck, I happen to wear a giant belt buckle much of the time as a holdover from my days in rodeo and as a horse trainer, though my wearing it all the time at this year’s Congress was more a factor of my leaving in a hurry and forgetting to throw something less obtrusive in my bag.

However maybe there’s another explanation. Check out this article from a Detroit CBS affiliate titled Hobbit Alert: Michigan College Hosts Medieval Fair. I saw that and about spit up water all over my keyboard.

I was happy to see that they also referenced Game of Thrones.

There’s no real harm in this if it gets more people there, unless folks didn’t get what they were expecting. But I’d say the article fails to capture the flavor of Congress.

 

How Much do You Know About Vikings?

David Beard posted a link to a Viking quiz on his Archaeology in Europe Blog. It’s pretty tough. I’m too embarrassed to say exactly how I did but let’s just say I didn’t pass. In my defense, I took it closed book. I have quite a few books on Medieval Scandinavia and the Vikings which I intend to read when I start on the Carolingians (likely several months from now). Hopefully once I do that I’ll score a bit better.

Here’s the link to the quiz

 

The End of Days

OK, the world’s ending today and somehow I didn’t know about this until yesterday. If I had, maybe I wouldn’t have bought all those books last week. But even if there isn’t any beer in heaven, maybe we can bring books?

Though based on this diagram provided by Laura Blanchard via Facebook, I don’t think my chances of going are very good. 1

1 Yes, THAT Laura Blanchard, former head of the Richard III Society and Philadelphian. When I first started going to Kalamazoo, every morning you could see her sitting in the Valley III lobby with people literally lined up to see her. She knew everybody.

 

Nerdness

In my never ending quest of self-discovery I have once again turned to that most reliable of sources, the online quiz. I’m not surprised by the history score but I am surprised at the science/math. I took a lot of it in college which I have diligently tried to repress as much as possible. Unfortunately, I sometimes have to use it in my job. Maybe I don’t dislike it quite as much as I claim when I’m stuck with a data table working through a statistical analysis?

And despite the score (and the occasionally pathetic acting) I like Star Trek (the series – other than Wrath of Khan I haven’t cared for the movies). I’ve just never spoken Klingon, or gone to a convention.

 

I Missed "IT"

You may wonder why I capitalized “it.” And put it in quotes – twice. Evidently, today is International Hug a Medievalist Day. I’m uncertain why such an event was not listed in the little calendar I bought for about 3 bucks that I carry around in my shirt pocket (no namby-pamby PDA for me!) but it’s been making its way through blogs. Well, a few of them anyway. There’s even a Facebook page celebrating this grand event with, at latest count, 4,574 attending.

I’m not a medievalist (IMO a medievalist is someone who makes their living, even a pitifully small portion of it, from medieval history – I haven’t decided what this makes undergrads) but I did manage to get a hug today, for a completely non-medieval reason. I didn’t find a medievalist to hug which is unsurprising since if one lives in my community, I don’t know of him or her however if the opportunity presents itself, I encourage you all to take advantage of the occasion.

 

Labels have Landed me in Hell

A few days ago I noticed that someone had tried to use the search feature on this blog and it hadn’t worked very well. For whatever reason, I was under the illusion that the Google Search option would pick from my labels first. It doesn’t – it does what Google does everywhere else and searches for terms in posts. How I managed to forget this basic fact is another question. When I’m on someone else’s blog sometimes I click on the labels (or tags) included at the end of the post and see where it takes me. I’ve noticed some blogs where the labels are on the sidebar and thought that would be a useful thing to add here. Then I found I had 172 labels. I took one quick glance at those sitting in a seemingly interminable line down one side of the page and quickly killed that option.

This has landed me in Hell (see below) – I’m a label-glutton. I shall try to do better (though I’m fairly certain I said I thought I’d likely repeat my sins on the Hell-survey) and if I can figure out how to delete, say, 130 of those, I’ll try to add it back.

Thanks to Jonathan Jarrett for pointing out this little exercise. Or maybe not – in only making it to the third level I’m minor league next to him. Of course I did rate Very High in two categories and high in another two. I’m evidently a very sinful person.

The Dante’s Inferno Test has banished you to the Third Level of Hell!
Here is how you matched up against all the levels:

Level	Score
Purgatory (Repenting Believers)	Very Low
Level 1 – Limbo (Virtuous Non-Believers)	Low
Level 2 (Lustful)	Very High
Level 3 (Gluttonous)	Very High
Level 4 (Prodigal and Avaricious)	Moderate
Level 5 (Wrathful and Gloomy)	Moderate
Level 6 – The City of Dis (Heretics)	High
Level 7 (Violent)	Moderate
Level 8- the Malebolge (Fraudulent, Malicious, Panderers)	High
Level 9 – Cocytus (Treacherous)	Low

Take the Dante’s Inferno Hell Test

I’m currently on vacation for Thanksgiving so gluttony is perhaps appropriate. In any case, don’t any expect new posts here for a week or so.

 

I Might Just Nominate this for Post of the Year (at least in the Humorous Category)

I absolutely LOVE this post from Roger Pearse.

He closes with:

“Let us praise those selfless souls who refrained nobly from copying long and boring texts, and who generously gave of their libraries to the flames, so we would be spared wading through it!”

I know this is tongue-in-cheek – Roger knows better than I that nobody ran around burning books. Not on a large scale anyway. This goes back to my Mythbusters as to why ancient works failed to survive – nobody wanted ‘em.

As a Greek classicist (with a fair amount of knowledge of ancient Rome) once said on a Library Thing discussion board, a bit less eloquently than Roger (paraphrasing), “You know why those books didn’t survive? Because they were crap.” *

* I’d cite this properly but then I’d have to wade through hundreds – maybe thousands of discussion board posts to find the exact quote and link. If he runs across this, hopefully the author (cough)Tim Spalding(/cough) will forgive my transgression.

 

How Do You Exorcise a Blog?

When I started this blog I decided on a few things ahead of time. First was that this was going to be pretty much exclusively Medieval. Second was that I wasn’t going to bore people with details of my daily life – I’m not that interesting. Plus I have a bunch of people I see every day and it’s one of my joys to bore them with details of my life – I’m afraid to dilute that by boring blog readers too. But now a situation’s come up that I think I need Internet-savvy people to help me with.

A few weeks ago – April 10 to be exact – I stuck a counter on this blog. Partly just from curiosity, partly because I’d made several fairly lengthy posts and if I was going to keep that going I wanted to make sure someone was reading. I was pretty happy to find that yes, people were reading my blog – at the rate of about 25 hits per day.

I also signed up for a monthly blog report. My shock came on May 1 when I received this:

Monthly Stats Report: 1 Apr – 30 Apr 2010

Project: Medieval History Geek

URL: http://medievalhistorygeek.blogspot.com/

	Page Loads	Unique Visitors	First Time Visitors	Returning Visitors
Total	666	330	234	96
Average	22	11	8	3

Notice the number of page loads in April?

I’d like to think this is a sign that April is an evil month. There’s a lot of evidence to support this. The IRS comes after Americans on April 15, I have to pay my property taxes in April, my car registrations are due in April which is another hit to the personal treasury – but I’m afraid that isn’t it.

Satan has entered my blog.

I need a little help here – how do I get him/her/it out?

I don’t have a lot of stuff on demonology here. I looked at Valerie Flint’s The Rise of Magic in the Early Middle Ages, a couple of books by Kieckhefer and The Malleus Maleficarum. Nothing about getting a demon out of a computer – or the Internet, or wherever a blog is supposed to “exist.” I can get my hands on a translation of the The Acts of Peter but I’m not sure that will give me a lot of guidance on battling evil in the digital age though I think it’s possible that Simon Magus had a hand in developing Windows Vista. I have a lot of Vitas/Vitae here – don’t recall Athanasius recounting Antony’s battle with evil electrons either.

I believe this is definitive proof that the Devil follows the Internet – and for some reason he’s settled into my blog, or at least sent one of his helpers. I don’t want to see the same numbers at the end of May. And I don’t have the time right now for me and my blog to go to Compostela, or try to steal a saint’s toenail or anything.

Some suggestions short of dumping my computer in Holy Water would be appreciated. And if you prefer to send suggestions anonymously, feel free to send me an e-mail – but keep in mind I’ll be posting all suggestions after removing your name & e-mail address.