horrible history for grown-ups
Should we call William Shakespeare the Bard, His Bardness, Barder, or El Barderino? A South African anthropologist named Thackeray thinks that some of Shakespeare s poems suggest that he enjoyed marijuana. He particularly finds Sonnet 76 suspicious. It contains the verse, “Why write I still all one, ever the same/ And keep invention in a noted weed,” as well as a reference to “compounds strange.”…
This is how Medieval dentistry explained the toothache : a worm busy eating a way out of the jawbone into the tooth and peeping out through the cavity. Not a bad description of what a cavity actually feels like. (Am I alone in picturing a nano-version of the movie “Alien” peering out of your kisser? Probably.) Much of Medieval dentistry involved ‘killing’ this worm or putting it to sleep. Using…
When Medieval prostitutes broke the laws regulating clothing, they often dressed as men. Perhaps this is because male fashion was both titillatingly outré and more form-fitting? In the 14th century, men began to wear daringly short doublets, tights, and codpieces. Women with their full skirts were a mystery below the waist. In Italy, dressing as a man certainly seems to be a signal that the lady…
The Canadian city of Winnipeg staged an enormous Nazi Invasion in 1942. On If Day (French: Si un jour ), the “Nazis” (played by young Board of Trade members in German uniforms borrowed from Hollywood) attacked Winnipeg at dawn in -24°C. Some painted sabre scars on their faces to look even more vicious. Super efficiently, they got Winnipeg’s surrender at 9:30 am, and renamed the city Himmlerstadt…
Queen Victoria’s only real friend during her childhood was her almost unknown half-sister Feodora. Victoria s half-sister, the beautiful, clever Feodora, was packed off at 21 to a penny-pinching life in a draughty German castle. Victoria was only nine years old. Feodora was glad to escape; she admitted to Victoria in one of their hundreds of letters that she “might have married I don’t know whom…
No one at the Oxford English Dictionary suspected that their most industrious contributor was a madman, a murderer, and an American. Presumably, in that order. In an early version of crowd sourcing, Oxford English Dictionary editor James Murray appealed in newspapers for readers who would report as many quotations as you can for ordinary words . He preferred words that were rare, obsolete,…
Frogmore Cottage, Meghan and Harry’s new home, once belonged to a young man Queen Victoria addressed as your loving mother and your closest friend’. She even signed off some letters with a swirl of kisses! Victoria visited Abdul Karim, her teacher or munshi, at the cottage every second day and never missed a lesson , according to the writer Shrabani Basu. Mr Karim was just 24 when he arrived in…
A new hairdresser or ornatrix flowed into Ancient Rome every day. As the women flowed in, hair soared in up-dos and business boomed in hair care essentials like decomposed leeches, urine, and pigeon droppings. Positions in a wealthy household were specialised to an almost ridiculous extent. In one household, you might bump into a secundus or regulator of hot and cold water for a bath, a Eutactus…
March 20, 2019, isn’t just the first day of Spring. It’s also National Alien Abduction Day, also known as Extraterrestrial Abductions Day. This is a holiday dedicated to people who either want or expect to be abducted by an alien life form. Many point to Toronto as the source for Alien Abduction Day. Thanks, Canada. Back in 2008, Toronto hosted an Alien Abduction Festival on March 20. Since then,…
The Roman Catholic Church once denounced the use of forks. “God in his wisdom has provided people with natural forks-his fingers. Therefore it is an insult to Him to substitute artificial metallic forks for them while eating.” The first modern fork, as far as we know, was used in the 11th century by the wife of the Venetian Doge, Domenico Salvo. This angered St. Peter Damian, Cardinal Bishop of…