Blackmoor Vituperative

As if we needed more reasons to be annoyed at Christianity.

A runway fashion show in Viking times would have spotlighted women cloaked in imported colored-silk gowns adorned with metallic breast coverings and long trains.

This surprising claim is the result of a new analysis of remnants from a woman’s wardrobe discovered in a grave dating back to the 10th century in Russia, painting a picture of Viking panache before Christianity was established that runs counter to previous ideas about buttoned-up, prudish looking Norsewomen.

“Now we can say the pre-Christian dress code was very rich,” textiles researcher Annika Larsson of Uppsala University in Sweden told LiveScience. “When Christianity came, the dress was more like that of nuns. There was a big difference.”

(from Viking Women Dressed Provocatively, Yahoo! News)

Sounds to me like the costumes from Viking Women And The Sea Serpent were not so far off, after all.

The National Library of France (BnF) has an amazing collection of prints from 1910 which depict life in the year 2000. They are credited to Villemard.

Did you know that the automatic dishwasher was invented by a woman named Josephine Garis Cochrane? She received an award for her invention at the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago. The company she founded to market the dishwasher to hotels, restaurants and other commercial groups was purchased in the 1920’s by the Hobart Corporation. They introduced the “KitchenAid” brand name that is known today. Dishwashers under this name were introduced in 1949.

Susan and I just got back from Sandusky, Ohio, home of the Cedar Point amusement park. Cedar Point is reputed to have the best collection of roller coasters in the USA, which is why we went. We did have a good time, but you know, I think Busch Gardens Europe (formerly known as Busch Gardens: The Old Country) is on par with it, and Busch Gardens is a nicer amusement park to spend the day in.

We also visited Harpers Ferry, WV, during what just happened to be the centennial celebration of the first meeting of the Niagra Movement on US soil. Pretty cool. We also got to see (from the outside) the only English Norman castle in the USA, Berkeley Castle. Too bad it isn’t open for tours anymore.

I noticed some strange things on our trip. Some of them were obvious, and easy to talk about. For example, in Pennsylvania you can’t buy wine at the grocery store. You can only buy it at state-run stores. When I asked a fellow in PA where I could find the wine in the grocery store, he made a disparaging comment on his “backward” state. Meanwhile, in West Virginia, you can buy liquor at the corner 7-11. I kind of wish I had, just so that I could say that I did.

It was also hard to miss the demographic differences, but those are more difficult to talk about. People react strangely when you notice their differences. For example, there seemed to be an unnatural number of lean, reasonably attractive women in Sandusky, Ohio. Literally half of the people on the shuttle bus going to Cedar Point on our first day were young women. I do not know why. It was also hard to miss that Ohio is a very “white” state. Here in central and south-eastern Virginia, I am used to there being a roughly 50/50 mix of light-skinned and dark-skinned people. I think of this as normal. It was very odd to see a few dark faces in an otherwise oatmeal-colored crowd. I have to wonder how it would feel to be the X in a crowd of Os. I would have liked to ask a few people how they felt being a literal as well as figurative minority, but as I said, people react strangely when you draw attention to such things, so I didn’t.

I took a bunch of photos during our trip, using our nifty new Nikon digital camera. I’ll put them online soon, probably tomorrow.

IBM PC celebrates 25th anniversary

The book is one of Britain’s best-known documents, but a poll commissioned by the National Archives suggests not everyone is sure what it is. While 80 percent of respondents had heard of the Domesday Book, 13 percent thought it was a chapter in the Bible, and 2 percent thought it was a book by Dan Brown, author of the hugely popular “The Da Vinci Code.”

(from MSNBC.com, 11th-century Domesday Book goes online)