Gas lights to sewer gas light to Romanesque sewage pumping station to stations for the dead.

Little secrets like these lurk under the skin of most towns and cities. Hidden Glasgow forums have some pretty awesome stuff as well - best threads thread is the place to start.

I've just watched Battlefield for the first time since I was seven. And it justifies every bit of childhood glee that I remember. Ace and Bambera kick ass. There are explosions and swordfighting.

Also: you know you're a sword geek when you go "oooh, that's a copy of the Battle Abbey sword" :)

( Spoilers )

Bowie Base 1: After the 2046 'International Music Pun Accord' it was agreed that all international co-operative ventures would involve some sort of musical pun or reference. The first outcome was the Pink Floyd Moon Mission, followed by the unmanned Bananarama Venus Probe.

From Black and White WTF, I think I'm going to have to adopt these two ladies as my new mascots. Because really, we should worry.

Death in England: An Illustrated History is an excellent book. Different chapters are written by experts on the particular period, so it varies a bit - I found the middle better than the ends, but generally very good.

A couple of examples of 'memento mori' that struck me from reading the book below the cut. ( Remember, you will die )

BBC7 has the episode of the new radio Dr Who (with Paul McGann) what takes the piss out of Top Gear. Listeny in the next week.

On the 18th century medical profession's attempts to get the body of Charles Byrne, the 'Irish Giant':

Already when Charles Byrne was ill, many London surgeons, who had seen and admired him when he as on exhibition, competed to get hold of his corpse for dissection. A newspaper article stated that 'the whole tribe of surgeons put in a claim for the poor departed Irish Giant, and surrounded his house just as Greenland harpooners would an enormous whale'. Most eager of them all was the celebrated John Hunter... Hunter employed a man named Howison to follow Byrne around, in order to be on hand if the invalid giant died. Charles Byrne was aware of Hunter's schemes against him. Like most eighteenth-century people, he had a great fear of dissected.

But after Byrne's death there were some very unclear machinations, and almost certainly several hundred pounds changed hands - and Hunter got his cadaver. Byrne never has had his proper burial; his skeleton still stands in the Hunterian Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons in London, a central attraction:


Image cropped from this larger one on Wikipedia.

The story of Charles Byrne is from the excellent The Pig-faced Lady of Manchester Square & Other Medical Marvels by Jan Bondeson. It has a bit of crossover of material from his Cabinet of Medical Curiosities (mainly in material on Julia Pastrana), but enough difference for it to be well worth one's while to read both.

Fatal Passage is one of those books where the title really doesn’t fit the subject; the subtitle “The Untold Story of John Rae, the Arctic Adventurer Who Discovered the Fate of Franklin” is far more what’s going on with the book, but hey, drama sells books. It’s just a bit annoying because the “Fatal Passage” is the Northwest Passage, and it wasn’t fatal to Rae at all; part of the point of the book is that he was one of a very few Westerners who explored that area without suffering or dying. It’s an interesting biography, in the classic mould of the man who is at home in the wilds being tripped up by the intrigues of urban drawing rooms. Minor quibble with how the author presents incidents as if he knew exactly what was going on in Rae’s head, which feels rather presumptuous.
I bought the book in Orkney, where Rae was from, and where he was finally buried, with a lovely monument in the cathedral:


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Finally got round to reading The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Interesting read, even this long after publication, when things like ‘paradigm shift’ have become everyday phrases. I particularly liked his point that paradigm-changing works in a subject tend to be relatively easy to read, because they’re shifting the goalposts so much they have to explain everything, whereas later working within the paradigm can take that knowledge for granted. Then it struck me that SSR itself is an easy read, and whether Khun had done that deliberately to fit his own work shifting a philosophical paradigm into the philosophical framework he created… and then I went cross-eyed and decided I needed a lie-down.

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The English Way of Death: The Common Funeral Since 1450 is one of those books that’s just packed with fascinating information. Like during the seventeenth century the aristocracy were supposed to be buried with appropriate honours to be provided by the Royal College of Arms – but these were expensive, and since the College wouldn’t come out at night they got round this by being buried at night-time. And that invites to funerals were ‘tickets’ until fairly recently; here’s one to Nelson’s funeral:


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Trust me that I’m going to bore your socks off with future ramblings on Woman: An Intimate Geography, because I’m only a few chapters in an convinced of its utter brilliance. But, since there’s a preview on google linked to there, you can start reading it now. Now. Go on, shoo. Read.

Or 'around North Wales with a malfunctioning camera'. Let the awesomely vague Cadw warning sign tempt you on:



( These pictures were taken while taking care )