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A "well-healed" amputation and a prosthetic toe (no actual heel present) - on the most ancient prosthesis ever found in-situ. Or in-sitoe, if you like to draw out the punnery. So many chortles, so little time while reading this cool post from The History Blog.

An illustrated guide to writing PoC for the white author. Perspectives, and more perspectives! I think "cudnt spel to sieve her lyfe" is the perfect detail. Nicely done indeed, with a lot of Teh Funnay too. Fair warning, though: there are a LOT of tasty links here in addition to the observations and comics!

Just who gets to play in which cultural sandboxes?

"Columbusing." I guess this is what the kids are calling it now. Back in the 80s, all people said about this kind of thing was, "I remember my first beer." I remember when our year-younger-than-we-were friend discovered feminism for me and another friend. (I remember the phrase recency illusion as well.) ... and now I feel a little conflicted, because I was in the mood for Mexican for dinner, and my mom has a few "things" about PoC from south of the US border ...

I don't see what humanity has done over those 200 years that would make anyone have a softer view of humanity.

Need some more for your TBR? Well, I sure do. This revisitation of Frankenstein - now with a new revenant of a very different sort added to the old Monster - looks absolutely stunning, and maybe more terrifying than ever for some people. This may be my "I need 37 copies of this" release this year. Even just the interview is so beautiful and striking, linguistically. Voice, kids. Voice.

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Archaeogaming. It's a tantalizing word, an interesting idea. As I said to my favorite gamer and my favorite archaeologist, I should figure out how to apply this to writing. But then - "Oh. Wait. I became a writer exactly so I wouldn't have to play nicely with others."

My daughter and I are as different as fire and rain and as alike as ice and water.

Isn't that a glorious sentence? Subtle, poetic, evocative - and yet concrete, communicative. There is a whole essay's worth more here, from Elyse M. Goldsmith, and a shout-out to Bowie. Make with the click, y'all.

The History Blog has a pair of great posts this week. First, footprints not in the sand: an ancient child's tootsies, captured in three millennia old mortar. Also, how cool is the name Manfred Bietek? Second, interested in a project? You can transcribe WWI era love letters for posterity. Cool.

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This travelogue by a gent I worked with, ummmm four or five jobs ago, gave me multiple giggles in a row. If you like limericks (even non-ribald ones), this post is for you. Glorious!

An interesting development in Sweden: a gender rating system for films. It appears to be pretty much a cis system - male and female representation, nothing beyond. But as a member of those privileged to be examined in this,  it is of great interest and a matter for hope that anyone's looking at all. (If you have the stomach for it, a click onward to the Seth McFarlane article is worth a couple minutes as well.)

The History Blog has a couple of good ones - here, telling us that CBS This Morning will be at the National Museum of African American History (not just open for a day, folks) tomorrow morning. And here, with the beautiful tribute to a Jewish woman in Egypt - a third century epitaph.

15. Because we will not forget.

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Big data, Black Twitter, and the linguistics of real speakers, not just academic grammar. A fascinating look at questions of legitimacy, linguistic stigmatization, and the beauty and art of language as it is really used. Once again, I am utterly absorbed at the ingenuity of human thinking, in the way we speak, write, communicate. Super extra bonus content: maps! Wonderful, informative maps!

I make one point about this National Geographic article before putting down the link: Egyptian use of cosmetics predates Ptolemaic GREEK ruler Cleopatra, who lived only a little over two thousand years ago, by millennia. Hanging everything Egyptian on the occupying ruling house of Greeks tires me out. (Good lord, can't we at least invoke the immortal beauty of Nefertiti?) BUT anyway - here we have a look at the antibacterial and immuno-building qualities of  ancient Egyptian eye makeup. Extra bonus feature: one more nail in the coffin of the old "EW LEAD MAKEUP - POISON! - HOW GROSS AND STUPID WERE PEOPLE IN THE PAST!?" trope.

In other fascinating ancient-chemical-knowledge news, The History Blog brings us a look at the possible ancient solution to a very modern problem - can First Nations clay help us to manage antibiotic-resistant bacteria?

This is not "new-news" as it were, but I'm struck by the thought of how often writers use so-called brainwashing, and how wholeheartedly it is accepted ... and yet, like the misconceptions we have about dirty, stupid history and so many other things that limit us both as humans and as authors, it's complete horsefeathers. On "The Brainwashed Defense" - from Patty Hearst to Moussaoui.

And finally, I have to admit an almost comically knee-jerk response to this piece. The House of Lords is moving to replace vellum with archival-quality paper for the recording of Acts of Parliament and other government documentation. Given that all my life I have heard the so-called "Dark Ages" referred to (by Brits as much as anybody else) as a period of time during which literacy was constrained to a few lonely monks scratching on animal skins ... and being a foolish American ... my first response was astonishment they were still USING vellum in the first place. My second reaction was mixed; a preservationist question arises, wondering how long other forms of documentation can be expected to last, and a traditionalist strain can see how this is a cultural loss of a kind. But the practical side of me goes back to the "Really? Still using animal skins?" surprise - and, at the end of the day, mine is not to judge. So I end with no firm opinion about this; there are too many ways right now for me to expend my opinion-forming energies. What do you think?

Finally, an interlude. Join Lilac Shoshani at table seven (and one or two other places) for a worthwhile few minutes. Just don't distract her from her writing, please ....

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A study in treatment - Archaeology News' take on the Viking Sword of Langeid ("Magic"!) and The History Blog's. Both are good articles, actually. Just interesting to note the popular-press somewhat pandering headline on AN's piece.

How owl vomit helps us study an ecosystem. Also from AN. "Studies such as these provide a window into natural baselines prior to the onset of human impacts in the last century. The effects of human land use on ecosystems can then be separated from the forces of climate change today." Fascinatingly, this study is apparently the first of its kind.

As an author who's joked for years that I only aspire to midlist glory (i.e., I don't want to be Rowling, nor even hope to be Mantel), Jessica's post at BookEnds on the subject is sobering.

Gotta love a good gruesome story (as if bone-inclusive owl barf wasn't gross enough ...), and the HB does come through. Nosferatu's H. W. Murnau's head has been stolen. And here I am, imagining the black market in horror director's heads ... Errrrm. and now I want to watch Nosferatu (but NOT Shadow of the Vampire - even Eddie Izzard's being in that does not create such a temptation).

Jessica Faust again at BE, on non-renewal of a contract, and opportunity. This should illustrate pretty clearly why I follow agent blogs for agents I'll never have. (For one, nothing's at stake. For two: LEARNINGNESS. It's good stuff.)

The insanely absorbing community, resource, and religious implications of ancient Celtic animal sacrifice - in which the animals were then rebuilt into cow-horses in unexpected hybrid corpses. Were the cobbling together the image of a god? Were these to be spiritual servants to the human remains also present in some cases (and also sacrificed - don't let anybody tell you the Celts' hands were clean of human sacrifice)? Were they avatars of living humans' experience in some way? Again via Archaeology News.

Textiles dating back two millennia are, predictably, pretty hard to come by. Textiles relating to the most famous Cleopatra's father, Ptolemy Auletes the Flute Player, are ... well, right here. Thanks again to the HB.

And, in closing: still more proof that The Stupid, Stupid Past - wasn't. The orthopedic screw dating back at least 3,000 years. Because, you know - antique medical practice wasn't all leeches and arcane religious ritual.  BOO-yah, Whig history.

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I am late to post this, but please enjoy the book trailer for Elizabeth Chadwick's The Summer Queen.

Gary Corby hosts a post by Stephanie Thornton on the women of ancient Egypt.  And he has a note about one of his own old posts as well ... which leads me to say:  YIPES!

Donna Everhart has some of the best spam.  I have had ones like this, but for me the volume (given the relative traffic here!) is far lower!  I think the spelling one might be my favorite ...

So as to not load up this page with vids for you to load - AND to give credit where it is due (I have not linked Unleaded and/or Day Al-Mohamed for far too long), please take a click here and listen to the wisdom of Stan Lee on how to build a story ...  "You just have to keep interesting yourself while you're writing it."  Too true!

The Passion of Former Days strikes again (... and again?) with a visually arresting series of double-exposed vintage images.  Some of these are metaphorical, some are just interesting juxtapositions.  Enjoy!

And finally, for this lovely evening ... and for those Extra Special nights, when nothing else will do but to smell like a Viking ... Now you can! Yep, this is a thing now.  For reasons.

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Eighteenth century women shipwrights.  Fascinating history I had never heard of before.

Intriguing possible TBR fodder - the cover design is beautiful.  Hard, as a costume/period snob, not to take a little exception to the glamour model and her fake eyelashes, in the trailer, but the subject matter is exotically interesting.  If it's done without exotiCIZing the female characters, could be good stuff.  Given that it's written by a woman of color (which is, sadly, almost surprising in this genre - though I have become a bit acquainted with Lisa Yarde's work online), hopes are high.  Certainly the review is promising.  And the research looks delicious.

Finally, an exploration of sibling marriage in history including a great look at the Ptolemies, in service of Nyki Blatchley's new fantasy, The Triarchy's Emissary.

Richard's Face

This I look forward to seeing, certainly - they're forensically rebuilding the face of the skeleton from the carpark.

Wikimedia Commons
Portrait circa 1520 (earliest known)

Loved it when they did King Tut.

National Geographic