Et tu, Europa?

There's nothing like following one's europhily to find its limits. American expat Bruce Bawer reports from Norway in The Hudson Review. It's fairly discursive, but worth reading all the way through.

What's in a name?

Japanese parents have been given government permission to name their children "Buttocks" or "Prostitute" if they wish after a bizarre row over expanding the list of officially acceptable names.

How many countries are there which restrict given names? Germany is one -- there must be many others.

In recent years . . . the authorities in Tokyo have been under pressure to reinstate obscure and archaic characters so that more interesting and original names can be created. . .

As a result, the justice ministry proposed an additional 578 characters for names, but included dozens that most parents might view as poor taste, such as "Piles", "Vagina" and "Slur".

From the Telegraph.

Antique silver raids in UK

A gang slashed patrol car tyres at Petworth police station before launching an audacious burglary at an antiques shop in the town, escaping with hundreds of pieces of silver. The attack on the police cars gave the gang of six men vital extra time to complete their raid on Nicholas Shaw Antiques after they forced their way through the security grill and entered the shop armed with crowbars and baseball bats.

They are thought to have made off with more than 400 objects valued in total at six figures during the raid in the very early hours of Thursday, July 8. . .

“What was shocking was they didn’t care about damaging the silver,” said Mr Shaw. “Some pieces must have been dented when they were being madly flung about.”

Which obviously raises the fear that the items were stolen to be melted -- although at current silver prices, their value as objects would be far greater.

An identical theft had also occurred in Hungerford in Berkshire two days before. In this case, the premises of Styles Silver was raided by a gang of four that smashed through the front doors and began to fill a dustbin with a range of coffee pots, teasets, and tableware.

They were not put off by the alarm that went off and the CCTV cameras in the road. Their hoard would have been much greater, but they were forced to make an improvised getaway after Derek Styles confronted them with a pool cue.

Brave fellow, unfortunately underarmed. From the Antiques Trade Gazette.

So much for further loans Down Under . . .

Aboriginal artefacts, including two early bark etchings, have been seized in Australia while on loan from two British museums.

Members of the Dja Dja Wurrung tribe secured an emergency order preventing the items being returned to the British Museum and the Royal Botanic Gardens.

The two bark etchings and a Aboriginal ceremonial headdress were on loan to Museum Victoria in Melbourne.

From the BBC.

Condition alert for the Mona Lisa

Leonardo’s most celebrated work, the Mona Lisa, has deteriorated so significantly over the last year that conservation experts at the Louvre have ordered urgent analysis of its condition, to be carried out early next year when the work is removed from its current display case and installed in a new climate-controlled vitrine. . .

A routine study of the work in May revealed that the thin poplar wood on which it is painted has begun to warp. Although the warping has occurred at the rate of “less than a millimetre” over the past year, according to Vincent Pomarede, chief curator of the Louvre’s paintings, one side is buckling at a faster rate than the other, causing “some concern”.

From the Art Newspaper.

The accidental collector

Two portraits by Thomas Eakins, Philadelphia's most esteemed painter, one full-length and one half-length. . . Among the earliest pieces in the collection, which spans a century and a quarter, they date from 1875 and 1890. . .

A larger-than-life statue of Abraham Lincoln, in plaster painted to resemble bronze, by Augustus Saint-Gaudens, the most important American sculptor of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Paintings by three important African American artists: Henry Ossawa Tanner, Allan Randall Freelon, and Dox Thrash.

For the rest of the list, and the identity of the collection (such as it is), look here (excerpt below).

Continue reading "The accidental collector"

Van Gogh thieves jailed

Two men have been jailed over the theft of a pair of Van Gogh paintings, stolen from a museum in Amsterdam.

Octave Durham, 31, received a sentence of four and a half years, while a man identified only as Henk B, also 31, received four years. The thieves were arrested separately in 2003, in Spain and in Amsterdam.

Apparently Dutch privacy laws prevent disclosure of the last name of one of the culprits. Most strange -- one could understand if the person were underage or of diminished capacity, but the sentence would seem to indicate otherwise.

The Van Gogh Museum has put in a claim for 1.8m euros for the two uninsured paintings, which were stolen in 2002 and have never been recovered. However the judge rejected the bid for damages, saying the true value of the paintings . . . was unknown.

This is truly bizarre; establishing market value is not difficult, and that value would clearly be far, far higher than the 1.8M requested. From the BBC. A bit more detail over at Expatica.com:

The prosecution had demanded jail terms of six and five years during the trial, which primarily focused on whether the two men were assisted in the robbery. . .

Hats belonging to the two men — who were arrested late last year — were also found in the Amsterdam museum, while bugged telephone conversations also indicated the defendants had carried out the robbery. . .

The thieves stole the 1882 "Zeezicht uit Scheveningen" (View of the Sea at Scheveningen) and the 1884 "Het uitgaan van de hervormde kerk in Nuenen" (Congregation leaving the Reformed church in Nuenen). . .

The artworks have an estimated value of several million euros, but were not insured because they were in the possession of the Dutch State.

X-rays of sword swallowers

The things you find when you go wandering online! Link here, found via The Eyes Have It.

Medieval fortress-city find in Kazakhstan

In Kazakhstan’s Mangyshlak Peninsula, in the Caspian Sea, archeologists have found a medieval fortress city dating back to the 10-13th centuries.

The first stage of excavations has shown that it may prove to have been the largest settlement of that time in the territory of what today is Kazakhstan.

Read more here.

It's Chinatown, Andrés

Former China hand Andrés Gentry, driving from Illinois to Oregon, ponders the politics of water -- and it ain't pretty:

Agriculture now uses approximately 80 percent of California's developed water supply, but produces less than 2.5 percent of California's income.

Alfalfa, the biggest water user of any California crop, soaks up almost a quarter of the state's irrigation water. Yet alfalfa -- harvested mostly for hay to feed dairy livestock -- is a low-value crop that accounts for only 4 percent of state farming revenues. An alfalfa farm using 240 acre-feet of water generates $60,000 in sales, while a semiconductor plant using the same amount of water generates 5,000 times that amount, or $300 million. (And while such a farm could function with as few as two workers, the semiconductor plant would employ 2,000.) In short, California devotes 20 percent of its developed water supply to a crop that generates less than one-tenth of one percent of the state's economy. . .

Olympian pricing in Athens?

Some three dozen cafe and restaurant owners in Athens have been fined for price-gouging, after overcharging their customers by up to 500%, the Greek news agency ANA reported Wednesday.

Officials from the Greek development ministry have been regularly checking menus at dozens of restaurants and cafes and cracking down on overcharging, as Athens readies for the Olympic Games in just over three weeks.

The restaurants and cafes cited had profit margins of between 82 and 588% on some products, well above the state-sanctioned legal limit of 45%.

Read more here.

Greece had these price regulations in effect the last time I was there, which is now embarrassingly long ago, but it was a bit of a surprise to read that they are still in effect. On the other hand, I'm still not entirely clear on what is covered; to restrict the markup on a mass-market wine, for example, would seem far more reasonable than to declare that a lamb chop must cost no more than X Euros, no matter how skilled and celebrated the chef who prepares it.

Sculpture under attack: vandals on the rampage in Venice and Rome

Depressing news indeed:

In a series of incidents in the past four weeks in Venice and Rome, hammers have been used to smash statues and fountains.

In some cases, the heads of Roman statues more than 2,000 years old have been cleanly cut away using powerful circular saws, more than likely by professional thieves working to order. . .

Earlier this week the 360-year-old Fontana delle Api (Fountain of Bees) by the Renaissance master Gianlorenzo Bernini was targeted by vandals at the bottom end of the famous Via Veneto in central Rome. . .

Police say a hammer was used to smash away at the bees decorating the water feature and as yet they have few leads as to the culprits because no witnesses have come forward.

In another attack, vandals chipped hands, faces, feet and arms from statues in the area around Piazza del Popolo, including one dating back to ancient Rome.

Tourists strolling in the famous Villa Borghese in central Rome cannot help but notice the number of headless statues now dotted around the gardens.

The attacks began last month in Venice after a man took a hammer to several important monuments.

Antonio Benacchio . . . wreaked most damage on important features on the front of the Doges’ Palace and two small statues on the front of the Chiesa del Redentore. In all cases, he hacked hands off religious figures: those of God and Moses on the Doges’ Palace and those of St Francis and St Mark on the church.

Summer camp with a difference

And I was telling my daughter just this morning that there were summer camps for every interest:

Teenagers attending the summer day camp on the Far East island of Sakhalin have been sent home after it was found they were being trained as criminals.

From Ananova.

The origins of African agriculture

rchaeologists have long believed that food production developed worldwide much the way it did in the Near East: as climate changes made wild grains less available, hunters and gatherers settled in villages and relatively quickly domesticated plants and then, over the next few thousand years, animals.

But recent genetic studies and excavations in Africa suggest that the patterns of domestication there were strikingly different. This new research, emerging in the last few years in academic books and articles, shows that in Africa, wild cattle were domesticated several thousand years before plants, and that farming and herding spread patchily and slowly across the continent.

Read the rest in the NY Times.

And you thought peer review was rough . . .

A British academic is facing ritual curses, allegations of criminal defamation of two dead kings and demands for his deportation after he cast doubts on the authenticity of one of Thailand's most important cultural artefacts.

The 3ft-high stone obelisk, known as 'Inscription One' and engraved on each of its four sides, is said to have been carved on the orders of King Ramkhamkaeng in 1292. It describes an idyllic kingdom based in Sukhothai, the first capital of Siam.

The stone is officially recognised as the first ever use of the fiendishly complicated Thai script. Last year it was added to Unesco's Memory of the World register.

But Michael Wright, an author who has lived in Thailand for 45 years and lectures at Thammasat University, one of the country's top two educational institutions, believes it is a fake.

The stone was allegedly discovered in Sukhothai in 1833 by Prince Mongkut, who went on to become King Rama IV, the leader portrayed in the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical The King and I.

But Mr Wright accuses Prince Mongkut of having the stone carved to create a historical precedent for his reforming policies.

From the Telegraph.

More Macclesfield Psalter news

A bit more background on the tussle over "the most important medieval illuminated manuscript found in Britain in living memory" -- source necessarily anonymous, but as reliable as they come:

Astonishing, but the Heritage Lottery Fund posted the Fitzwilliam's acquisition grant request online well before the auction -- not only publicly disclosing the museum's interest (which was supposed to be secret -- hence the use of a dealer as bidding agent), but also the exact amount requested (£2,359,080). To be sure, the Fitzwilliam might have been planning to kick in some funds of their own, but at the least it revealed the minimum they were prepared to bid.

Even worse, my source reports that the Lottery Fund's decision not to give the grant was ultimately based on reasons of extreme political correctness. To wit, that the Psalter would not be meaningful to non-Christians, and that its small size would make it too difficult to view by the wheelchair-bound (not to mention, one supposes, the blind -- or would that be, "differently sighted"?).
Apparently, the decision last year to fund the acquisition of Raphael's Madonna of the Pinks was "in part because [it was felt that] young single mothers could relate to the experience of suddenly finding themselves pregnant like the Virgin Mary".

Animal rights extremism in the UK

You know things are getting out of hand when they call out the troops:

The Army may be placed on standby to assist the building of an £18 million laboratory at Oxford University, should further contractors pull out of the project because of harassment by animal rights extremists.

Ministers are considering a plan to use army units to deliver critical building supplies to the site to ensure that the research centre is not derailed by violent protests.

From the Times of London. Some background here via New Scientist:

Crucial medical research may be under threat in the UK, scientists have warned, after blaming the halt in building of an £18 million animal experimentation laboratory in Oxford on action by animal rights extremists.

Oxford University revealed on Monday that by "mutual consent" it had agreed with the construction firm Montpellier Plc to end their contract to build the biomedical research facility.

Montpellier pulled out following an intimidation campaign by animal rights extremists, which targeted shareholders. A company that supplied concrete to the site is also reported to have come under attack.

The lab was being built to house research into diseases like Alzheimer's disease. About 98% of the animals housed at the new lab would be rodents, but some primates would be kept too. The new lab would consolidate and replace existing labs at the university.

It is the second time in 2004 that a major animal research lab has been scuppered by animal activists. In January, plans for a primate research centre at Cambridge University, backed by prime minister Tony Blair, were axed as the security costs of protecting the lab from extremists were deemed too high.

Link to the latter story here.

And for those who wonder why this has been so widely labelled "terrorism", look at this Guardian piece:

The website could not have been more explicit. "All headlights and glass smashed, all electrics and air lines, oil lines cut, tyres slashed, fuel tanks, oil and transmission tanks contaminated, cab controls smashed up, approx 100 power cables supplying site electrics were chopped through," it said, describing how members of the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) had broken into the Bournemouth offices of construction company RMC just over a fortnight ago.

"Fuse boxes and other bits of electrics smashed, fuel pumps damaged, fuel tanks spilled, all site conveyor belts slashed beyond repair. Slogans painted everywhere, estimated cost £250,000."

According to the anonymous posting on the direct action website Arkangel, ALF members went to work with axes, bolt croppers and crowbars for nearly three hours, causing damage to tractors, bulldozers and a crane. Their message signed off with a challenge: "How do you like it so far, RMC?"

The company had been targeted for the simple reason that it supplied concrete for the construction of a new research laboratory at Oxford University.

Myopic seeing-eye dogs

Scientists investigating the health of guide dogs have made an alarming discovery: sometimes the blind are leading the blind.

According to a new study, at least one in 10 working guide dogs is seriously short-sighted. Some of the so-called seeing dogs have such poor vision that they would be prescribed glasses if they were human, researchers found.

From the Telegraph.

Russian hacker-extortionists arrested

We've made passing mention of the ongoing extraction of protection money from online bookies. Here's some followup:

The leaders of a gang alleged to have blackmailed internet betting sites after computerised attacks to disable their web servers have been arrested in Russia, law enforcers announced on Wednesday. The arrests mark the first success in tackling this new form of computerised crime.

The UK's National High Tech Crime Unit (NHTCU) and counterparts in Russia tracked down three men suspected of running the extortion racket. The men were arrested in raids carried out in St Petersburg, Saratov and Stavropol in southwest Russia on Tuesday.

The gang is thought to have extorted hundreds of thousands of dollars from betting firms around the world over the last year. It is impossible to determine an exact figure however because some sites may have failed to report incidents of extortion.

Read more here.

British boozing

There are surely some enthusiastic drinkers in the UK, as this NY Times article spells out:

Britain has historically been a hard-drinking place, but the current trends are alarming.

In contrast to many countries in Western Europe, where drinking has declined, in Britain, where the minimum legal drinking age is 18, people are starting younger and drinking more. Although some researchers say the figures are actually higher, government statistics show that Britons on average drank the equivalent of 8.6 liters of pure alcohol each in 2001, nearly double the rate of 1951. That translates into more than 86 bottles of wine, or 350 pints of beer. Young women on average now consume about 12.6 drinks a week, an increase of 66 percent since 1992.

While people in a number of countries still drink more overall, Britons (and the Irish, as well) are likelier to go on drinking binges, consuming five, six, seven or more drinks in a single session. . .

The related costs are ballooning. While crime overall has declined, alcohol-related crime is increasing: in 1999, half of the 2.4 million violent crimes reported were linked to alcohol misuse. On weekends, 70 percent of emergency-room patients are involved in drink-related incidents. Deaths from chronic liver disease in England, a crucial indicator of alcohol-related harm, have shot up more than fivefold since 1950.

Zoiks! That despite some pretty major advances in medical care. And while they are pummelling their livers, the drinkers are hard on their surroundings, too:

The overnight Saturday train from London to Aberdeen, a favorite for men on stag nights, was canceled recently because no guards would agree to work on it, The Guardian reported.

No lottery money for V&A;'s Libeskind addition

Prince Charles will surely be pleased:

The Victoria and Albert Museum warned last night that its radical £70m Spiral extension is in jeopardy after an application for lottery funding was thrown out.

A request for a £15m grant to build the London museum's long-awaited modernist extension, designed by Daniel Libeskind . . . was rejected by the Heritage Lottery Fund. A spokeswoman for the V&A; said the decision could mean the abandonment of the project

From the Independent; also at the BBC.

Meanwhile, in Oxford:

The oldest museum in Britain has been awarded a £15m lottery grant to pay for an ambitious redevelopment scheme.

Curators at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford plan to put the windfall towards doubling the amount of display space and opening 30 new galleries. The transformation of the neo-classical building will cost a total of £50m and also include a new education centre.

Jailhouse or frat house?

Read and decide:

The breakout occurred Thursday night after cellblock doors at the Hawkins County Jail were left unlocked and a faulty control panel failed to alert jailers, Sheriff Warren Rimer said.

Two of the inmates walked out through a fire exit, leaving the door propped open with a Bible, and made a hole in the exercise yard fence. They walked to a market, bought some beer and returned to the jail to share it with other prisoners. When the booze ran out, the other two inmates made another beer run to a different store.

Ramses flees for the suburbs

Ramses II, son of the Sun god, the greatest warrior king and the most prolific builder of ancient Egypt, has been defeated by the rumble and fumes of modern traffic.

His monumental pink granite statue outside Cairo central rail station has all but vanished within a sarcophagus of scaffolding erected to enable experts to prepare it for removal next year to a less polluted site outside the city.

Discovered in 1883 near Memphis, the ancient pharaonic capital, the statue was moved to Cairo in 1954 and has been a landmark ever since.

Read more here.

Zero tolerance for jaywalkers

If you've ever been hissed at in Germany for crossing against the light, check this out:

A Czech traffic police officer fired shots over the heads of pedestrians because they walked across a street against a red light. One of the bullets hit the side of a passing car, but the occupants escaped injury.

The incident in the city of Plzen is being looked into.

From Ananova.

Pigeon pecks hole in Thomas De Keyser painting

A pigeon has damaged a 17th century painting by Dutch artist Thomas de Keyser in the Amsterdam Historical Museum after slipping through the automatic sliding doors to the "shooters" gallery.

The dove pecked a hole a couple of centimetres in size in the canvas "Het Korporaalschap van Kapitein Jacob Symonsz. De Vries en Luitenant Dirck de Graeff" painted in 1633.

This would be one of the large group portraits of local militia members (think of Rembrandt's so-called "Night Watch") -- hence the reference to the "shooters' gallery". From Expatica.com.

Roman Britain miscellany

There have been a number of shorter notices of various finds in Britain over the past week or two. Here are some links:

Excavating a Roman bridge over the River Tyne (BBC).
Rescue archeology at Whessoe in County Durham (BBC).
Roman finds at a construction site in Shepton Mallet (BBC).
Public visits to excavation of Calleva Atrebatum, in north Hampshire (BBC).
Traces of Bronze Age farming in the Forest of Dean (BBC).
Roman finds near Chesterfield pub (BBC).
Luxury villa at Swindon (Western Daily Press, The Scotsman).
Head and body of statue of Livia reunited (Guardian).
Iron Age burial of wealthy child (Sheffield Today).

ADDENDUM: Sharon at Early Modern Notes comments on the British love of archeology, listing a number of recent archeology-themed TV series. I'm not sure how many have been aired in the US, but most should be available on video, I would think -- especially the BBC productions.

More Indian burials found in SF Bay Area

Caltrans has unearthed what appears to be an ancient Ohlone Indian village on Yerba Buena Island, in continuing work to build a new $4 billion span of the Bay Bridge.

Starting July 13, Caltrans found at least five skeletons during a preparatory archaeological dig for the final phases of the work, which is still years away. . .

It was the second such finding, following the discovery of 21 Ohlone remains in the fall of 2002 during a pre-work exploration.

Strange footnote to the latter, however:

In a weird twist of bureaucratic fate, half of those Indians were reburied and half were crated to UC Berkeley, their resting place for the foreseeable future. That's because half were found on state-owned land and half on land owned by the federal government, but the tribe isn't federally recognized.

Overall, it sounds as if the California transportation authorities are doing a good job of working with the Ohlone, though there are always those who want to out-Indian the Indians:

Preservationists in Berkeley said they were willing to stop California's biggest-ever public works project to keep the resting place sacred.

"We want to see that the burials be left alone and the project relocated," said Leonard Becker, with Sacred Sites International Foundation. "They have significance in their place to their people."

[Andrew] Galvan [an Ohlone who participated in the 2002 inspection] rolls his eyes when he hears that and wonders why Sacred Sites doesn't get interested in any of the hundreds of other Indian remains found in the Bay Area every year.

"I don't know any Indians saying this is all modern desecration," he said. He suggested the find was part of a settlement, typical of those that have dotted the Bay Area for 13,000 years. "In prehistoric California, where people lived, they died. Where they died they were buried. Definitely we have a habitation," he said, noting that common household artifacts were unearthed on Yerba Buena Island, which could have been a key trading stop between the two shores of the Bay.

Full article here.

Yes, it could get worse . . .

. . . than crowded flights and nothing to eat but honey-roasted peanuts:

Two crew members on a domestic Aeroflot flight beat up a passenger who had complained that the flight attendants were drunk, airline spokeswoman Irina Dannenberg said. . .

Seeing that the crew were intoxicated and were not fulfilling their duties, [passenger] Chernopup asked to be served by a sober and competent flight attendant, Dannenberg said. He was then beaten up by crew members.

On Russian flights, attendants often have to struggle to keep intoxicated passengers under control. But on this flight, Dannenberg said, flight attendants were so intoxicated that they "behaved improperly" and only began catering to passengers 1 1/2 hours into the four-hour trip.

The daily Izvestia quoted another passenger as saying that half of the food the crew served ended up on the floor, leaving the aisle strewn with debris that passengers had to walk over as they disembarked.

From CNN, via the indispensable Marginal Revolution.

Art market news

Interesting excerpts from a £295 report I don't have access to, in the Telegraph (same article cited in the previous post):

The Business Ratio Report analyses accounts filed by 102 leading British auctioneers and art and antiques dealers between 2000 and 2003 and makes gloomy reading. Average sales dropped by a fifth and pre-tax profits plummeted by almost half. Even Richard Green, Britain's biggest art dealer by some distance, was not immune to the market's difficulties. Sales by his two companies dropped from £91 million in the year ending July 2002 to £53.5 million in the following 12 months.

A few companies defied the downward trend, notably Mallett, which increased sales from £17.1 million to £25.3 million in the last two years covered by the report and Daniel Katz, whose business rose to £12 million. Katz tops the pay league by a mile. According to the report, the six employees at his gallery earned an average of £590,333 in 2002-2003.

I'm afraid I never received anything like that in any of my rather short gallery career.

Napoleon's jewelry to the Louvre

The London jewellery dealer Humphrey Butler has negotiated the sale of an emerald and diamond necklace with earrings, given by Napoleon to his second empress Marie-Louise in 1810, to the Louvre for almost £2.5 million. It is thought to be one of the highest prices ever paid for a historic piece of jewellery.

Partners in the deal: S. J. Phillips of London and Thomas Farber of Switzerland. From the Telegraph

Dowdifying the Founding Fathers

"Revisionism" sure has become a dirty word. Not so very long ago revisionist history denoted the work of legitimate historians proposing major changes in interpretation: a healthy questioning of accepted wisdom -- not always successful, but serious and sincere.

The term is now permanently tainted, however, by its widespread adoption by pseudo-historians whose notion of "revision" is radical re-editing in support of a pre-established point of view.

Brandywine Books has recently pointed out some examples that are widely circulated online, in which America's Founding Fathers are recast as modern-day evangelical Christians -- even Thomas Jefferson! There is also a manufactured quote from Patrick Henry, consisting of passages cut from a much longer speech and reassembled without any indication of having been edited. Where have we seen that done before?

Songbirds from Down Under

Nightingales, mockingbirds and songbirds around the world originated in Australia, then populated the rest of the globe, a new DNA study suggests.

Until relatively recently, researchers had believed the opposite, that sparrows, finches, wrens, crows, canaries, ravens and sparrows originated in Europe and North America, then had populated Australia.

Read the full story of this about-face at Discovery News.

Redating Marathon

The battle of Marathon - and the epic 26-mile run from the battlefield to Athens celebrated with every modern marathon - may have been misdated by a month.

A team from Texas State University argues from the evidence of the lunar cycle that the date for the battle of Marathon should be August 12, 490BC, rather than the generally accepted date of September 12 that year.

The change of date might help solve a riddle that has puzzled athletes for a century: why an experienced Greek distance runner collapsed and died at the end of the 26 miles, when millions of relatively unfit modern runners have survived with no more than sore feet and wobbly knees.

On the strength of this, some historians have even pronounced the story a myth. But in Athens in August, temperatures can rise to 39C (102F).

From the Guardian.

Chaucer's sloppy scribe unmasked

A scribe - who until the weekend was known to history only as Adam the scrivener - so infuriated Geoffrey Chaucer with his carelessness that the poet threatened to curse him with an outbreak of scabs.

Now alert academic detective work has unmasked the sloppy copyist of the words of the father of English literature as Adam Pinkhurst, son of a small Surrey landowner during the 14th century.

The revelation of his name and some of his background, announced by Cambridge University yesterday, has caused intense excitement and admiration among specialists in the subject. It indirectly helps to authenticate the two most authoritative texts of Chaucer's great work, the Canterbury Tales, the first long poem written in an approximation to modern English.

And it discloses the scribe as the writer of an elegiac reference in the text of the tales to the fact that Chaucer had died before completing them.

Read the full story in the Guardian.

Baseball in the 18th century

Thought I had blogged this a while back, but once again, what's a month or two in the march of history?

Two documents came to light this spring that should have a profound effect on the popular history of the national pastime of baseball. One was a lot in the April 17-May 1 Internet and phone sale by Robert Edward Auctions, Watchung, New Jersey. The lot consisted of a handwritten letter, scrapbook pages, and a photo postcard of Abner Doubleday.

The material indicated the extent to which Albert Goodwill Spalding had manipulated the evidence to establish the legend of Abner Doubleday's invention of baseball in Cooperstown, New York, in 1839.

f that news didn't cause Abner Doubleday to start spinning in his grave, the news out of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, in the week following the sale should have.

Baseball historian John Thorn followed up on a clue he found over a year ago while doing research on the Internet. Thorn discovered that Pittsfield's laws and bylaws appeared to contain a prohibition against the playing of baseball near the city's meeting house. . .

On September 5, 1791, the citizens were to vote on a bylaw prohibiting the playing of baseball so as not to endanger the windows of the new town meeting house. . .

"Be it ordained by the said Inhabitants that no Person, an Inhabitant of said Town, shall be permitted to play at any game called Wicket, Cricket, Baseball, Batball, Football, Cat, Fives, or any other game or games with Balls within the Distance of Eighty Yards from said Meeting House—and every such Person who shall play at any of the said games or any other games with Ball, within the Distance aforesaid, shall for every Instance thereof forfeit the sum of five shillings to be recovered by Action of Debt brought before any Justice of the Peace to the Use of the Person who shall sue and prosecute therefor."

The following paragraph provides similar fines for the "Parent, Master, Mistress or Guardian" of minors breaking the new law.

From the Maine Antique Digest.