Early Modern Notes

Fortunately, the nurse has now taken out the staples* so laughing doesn’t hurt so much…

Election List VII: Bombshells the McCain Campaign Has Yet to Drop About Barack Obama
  but should we be giving them ideas?

The Nutty Conspiracy
  peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and the Plot to rool the world. With graphs

Thursday miscellany: Obama’s evil hypnosis trickery
  … did I mention I was enjoying this stuff?

O’Reilly’s Electoral Map
  different from everyone else's electoral map!

….

* Close-up, the effect is mildly Halloweenish. I considered showing you photos. Then I decided that was a bit sick.

Well, it’s been a bit quiet here lately. Recently this has been mostly because I was spending a few days as a guest of the NHS to get rid of this little bugger. (Google tells me that Youtube has some video. Having already heard the surgeon’s detailed explanation of what he was going to do to me, I’m really not sure I want to look…) All gone well, and now I’m back at home, it’s not a bad time to be skiving off work for a couple of weeks and surfing blogs all day, now is it?

Whatever happens next Tuesday, there is something rather wonderful about observing the great wingnut-blogger meltdown. Although some of it is not really safe for reading when you’ve got holes in your tummy and the district nurse hasn’t been round to take out the little staples yet. Laugh-Sting-Ouch. So much to choose from, but Jon Swift’s Great Moments in Election-Year Blogging should be remembered as a true classic.

So much lunacy in one short season…

A Modern Tale of a Binge Drinker, um, Pony.

A drunk pony was rescued from a swimming pool after gorging on fermented apples and falling into the water.

The pony, called Fat Boy, broke in to Sarah Penhaligon’s garden in Newquay, Cornwall, to get to the fruit, which had fallen from trees.

He ate so many apples that he became confused.

(Cricket fans may wonder: Drunk Fat Boy? Falling into water? Was a pedalo involved?)

What I’ve been reading online lately…

the trolls, they are us
  sometimes, everyone is wrong on the internet

Yep, dis is definitivly
  … teh best place

Digital history and early modern studies
  Mercurius Politicus on how digital sources shape an audience’s experience of them and the implications for training graduate historians

‘Like history in the first person’
  In 1960s California, a teacher conducted a terrifying experiment in fascism

Airminded · The Sudeten crisis, 1938
  "a post every day showing how the crisis was unfolding in the press on the same date 70 years ago"

I had been steadfastly avoiding pictures of Sarah Palin’s VP debate performance. It sounded a bit nauseating.

Well, yeah. (What a thing to inflict on your unsuspecting bloggy readers on a Sunday. Evil man.)

Palin could never get away with that schtick over here. Everybody would laugh and point and spread rumours that she must be Anne Robinson’s unacknowledged love child. Wink, wink.

Holy crap, Mandelson’s back.

So, the obvious questions. Correct predictions will definitely win a prize of some kind. (Signed photos?)

1. What scandal will get him chucked out this time?

2. How long will it take?

3. Or will he survive until the Tories get in?

Derek Draper, a former adviser to Mandelson who has recently returned to work for the Labour party, said: “I think Peter will prove to be a pretty formidable secretary of state, a really brilliant contributor to the strategy of the government and the presentation of the government and people will look at Peter and think: ‘You know what, we misjudge Peter Mandelson sometimes,’ and actually the strengths of Peter and the good side of Peter will come through now.

Um, yeah, of course.

My copy of Vampire Weekend arrived this morning.

Love it to bits.

If, like me, you’ve missed out up till now because you were put off by the name, you can download a couple of tracks to try out here. (‘A-Punk’ is so cute it could make kittens cry.)

Take a look at Google, January 2001. (H-T)

I was still a PhD student. I had a website, but it wasn’t at this domain and it was a bit rubbish. (All static HTML and barely a drop of CSS in sight! Here’s the granddaddy of today’s site, believe it or not; it looks even worse than it did then. For whatever reason the archive version isn’t loading the background image and so it’s showing the background color, which is clashing nastily with the header. Why I thought that bgcolor was a good idea is anybody’s guess.)

And I didn’t have an internet connection at home. (My grey brick of a laptop didn’t even have a modem.) Fortunately, the university facilities were pretty good. But how did I cope?

A search for early modern resources. Interesting to see what’s still going (although it might be at a different address these days) and what’s defunct or disappeared altogether.

(Which sorta reminds me of the really important piece of news this week: BÉRUBÉ’S BACK!!!)