Me: [idly looking up info on popes]

Wikipedia: This list is incomplete; you can help expand it.

Me: wut?

Wikipedia: [lifts eyebrows suggestively]

Filipp Oktyabrsky erasure

Screenshot from kiddle.co which is apparently a Kids Encyclopedia. Presumably some kind of scrape/transform with LLMs using Wikipedia data? I say that because for some reason they have an article on the Old English medical spell/prayer/recipe "wið færstice." This is the text of the first two paragraphs of the article: "Wið færstice is an old medical text written in Old English. It's found in a collection called Lacnunga, which is kept at the British Library. The name Wið færstice means 'against a sudden or sharp pain'. Long ago, people believed that sudden pains, like a sharp stitch, could be caused by witches, elves, or other spirits. This old charm was meant to help cure such pains. While some experts think it might have been for rheumatism, it could have been for other kinds of sudden pain too."

If you let me write a website for kids this is the kind of shit I would come up with

In all honesty though if I was a billionaire I would totally give $10M for a professorship dedicated to advancing Dunn's theory about Proto-Tsimshian-Indo-European. #TeachTheControversy

I'm delighted to announce my appointment as the first Alfredo Trombetti Professor of Nostratic Languages. No longer will Harvard linguistics students have to submit to the dogma that language families must be built on evidence rather than vibes.

Uimh aside, shouldn't that be like... mheiping

Liam has reminded me of something I've been meaning to do for a while:

Why "Beauvoir" and not "de Beauvoir"?

A thread 🧵

We don't talk enough about how the old lady whispering hush appears to have a full set of Loebs

And with what quill did the Secretary of the Society for the Suppression of Cruelty to Ganders formally indite his circulars?

Those were some of the early Einsatzgruppen operations, before the Germans figured out how to do gas chambers. They just gathered up all the Jews in the area, lined them up near a ditch, and shot them.

My ancestors were mostly reds who left after 1905. Another fled conscription (supposedly payed a Polish peasant to smuggle him out in a wagon under a bale of hay.)

The SS killed all the Jews in the towns that they came from. One town has reused stones from the Jewish cemetery to build apartments.

Paragraph from an article in the London Review of Books: "In 1937, Franco sponsored a hajj to Mecca. To transport pilgrims, his government took the Spanish steamship Dómine (‘O Lord’), outfitted it with a mosque, and renamed it al-Maghrib al-Aqsa, the Arabic for Morocco. On board, the Spanish government organised Sufi liturgies and ritual sessions of dhikr, the invocation of God’s name. Styled as the ‘protector of Islam’, Franco met with the pilgrims in Seville, in the Royal Alcázar’s Islamicate throne room, where he delivered a speech framing Spain as a new Mecca. In the Arabic translation, Franco speaks in Quranic idioms; the general, al-khaniral, himself becomes Muslim. ‘It is difficult to overstate the sheer political strangeness of this moment,’ Eric Calderwood has written. For the Francoists, the appeal to ‘Hispano-Arab’ unity was a way to frame Spanish colonialism as superior to its counterpart in France, a foreign invader that used tactics of divide and rule against Arabs and Berbers to destroy Moroccan unity. (The Spanish colonial regime’s support of the Moroccan nationalist movement – legalising political parties and even financing several of them – paved the way for Moroccan independence in 1956.)"

Did everyone else know that Francisco Franco styled himself "protector of Islam" and sponsored a hajj during the Civil War?

we need more linguists because i don't want to have to explain to otherwise educated people that there's no such thing as a "biological pronoun"

We don't talk enough about how the old lady whispering hush appears to have a full set of Loebs

Hydria (Water Vessel) with Medea and Pelias Greek, made in Athens, 510-500 BCE Attributed to the Leagros Group Terracotta From Vulci, Italy The British Museum, purchased from Alexandrine He sino, through james Milingta, 1845,11093 In Greek myth, the hero Jason was offered the throne of the city of lolcus by King Pelias in return for the Golden Fleece. When the king broke his promise, the sorceress Medea took revenge through a gruesome deception. She demonstrated her powers to the daughters of Pelias by cutting up and boiling an old ram in a magic potion, from which the animal emerged youthful. Hoping to do the same for their aging father, his daughters attempted the procedure, cutting him up and putting him in a cauldron. Instead of being rejuvenated, he perished. The vase shows Medea at her cauldron, while Pelias and one of his daughters look on.

UPGRADED YOUR RAM FOR YOU

A soul’s a sort of a fifth wheel to a wagon.

Late Roman Iron Age pre-Claudian elite culture in Britain be like:

Happy Surrender and Freedom Day! On April 9, 1865, Robert E. Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant and the Army of the Potomac. home.nps.gov/apco/planyou...

One of my favorite fantasy books (you could learn more about the French Revolution from this novel than from some history books). Super cool to see this alternate cover concept.

you said georgian but I still wasn't ready for that accent

this wikipedia editor is orbiting the moon right now!

Earthset from Artemis II. I am overcome.

And here’s the eclipse photo from Artemis II. I am in tears.

:O

Bitter herbs
#Passover
BL Add 14762; the 'Ashkenazi Haggadah'; c.1460 CE; Germany, S; f.22v @blmedieval.bsky.social

Matzah
#Passover
BL Add 14762; the 'Ashkenazi Haggadah'; c.1460 CE; Germany, S.; f.22r @blmedieval.bsky.social

Flexner's "Century of Struggle"

moby-dick, his eyes enormous: from hell's heart you STAB at moby? for hate's sake you spit your last BREATH at moby? oh! oh! the great shroud of the sea for ahab! the great shroud of the sea rolling on as it rolled five thousand years ago!!!!