The cat just stared at me.

The cat, sleeping contentedly beside my desk again (lucky cat) just looked at me a minute ago, slightly confused. The reason for that? This video:

Post by Patrick Hughes.

(Sorry for the facebook-link - I'd have preferred to link the video directly, but could not figure out how to do that.)

I laughed so hard I had to cry. Which, in turn, made the cat stare at me. (Weird humans.)

In other news: the library at Erlangen has digitised manuscripts available online, I have a medieval event coming up, I've finally managed to re-stock my beeswax pieces, and am planning to fire a batch of spindle whorls the coming weekend.

Also it finally rained during the last two days - finally! The garden was really parched, so it was high time. (The lawn outside has been in crunchy summer edition mode for a few weeks now, and as usual, it will recover - but the strawberries and tomatoes and flowers don't take the heat and drought so well.)

Unsorted links, and stuff.

Want to see the oldest bottle of wine? You find it here.

If you are rather looking for about 1.5 kg of chocolate turned into an anatomically correct replica of a human skull, look no further.

Speaking of skulls, Dread Pirate Roberts' Favourite Winter Hat is currently being test-knit by a group of lovely folks over at Ravelry. I hope to have it available as a pattern soon - and will take it to LonCon, too.

Other not so nice news regarding SFF: Marion Zimmer Bradley had a dark side, protecting her child-abusing husband as well as molesting herself. Jim C. Hines has a blog post about this, with further links.

Zappy Search!

If you are like me, you are using the internet a lot. Including doing numerous searches - for example on dict.leo.org for your German-English translation needs. I also prefer DuckDuckGo to Google as my standard search engine these days, but I frequently fall back on Google Scholar, and there's a few other things I regularly search...

Now, the normal way of doing a dictionary search is... go to the dictionary, type in your word, submit and wait for the results. Similar for all the other things except the Duck - something that was, well, not really evil but just that slight bit of annoying.

This annoyance is no more. I have discovered a nifty little Firefox app called ZappySearch, which allows you to search a page by typing a shortcut (such as gs for google scholar, for example) and your search term into the address bar, hit return, and lean back while you get your answers. Ah. Bliss.

Its developer is Matt Evans, and you can find the little app either under the Firefox app menu (look for ZappySearch) or directly on his webpage. (If you want it straight away, I recommend the website - it is the newer version, and might take a little more time to turn up in the app menu thingie).Thanks, Matt, for making my life easier!

Hah! It works again...

Sometimes (though not very often, I'm afraid) it's enough to complain about something to make it go away. As apparently the blogfeed problem did - I came back to a properly working feed this morning, with a stack of interesting bits and pieces. Most of them are German, though - still, you might want to take a look at the pictures.

Rainer Schreg blogs about a mikwah in Venlo that turns out not to have been a mikwah, and the long story behind it. It's real drama, archaeology-wise - complete with "input from experts" that was never given by these people. (Text German, most of the links Dutch)

Schauhuette publishes 14C-Dates from early medieval graves in the Amberg-Sulzbach area. (German, but if you want to see a photo of a nicely dug early medieval skeleton, go there anyways.)

Finally, from the V&A: Rapid Form Mannequins. This is a really, really cool idea - unfortunately it's (still) quite difficult to make. But who knows? Maybe this will be the norm in a few years?

Blogspot, you drive me crazy.

When I started out with this blog, it was an easy way to keep track of the blogs I follow (quite a list, actually) and post. Including the possibility to schedule pre-written posts.

Then, a good while ago by now, hitting that "publish" button did not always work. You might remember a few posts coming up belatedly, or a day late, if you are a regular reader here. In these cases, there was usually a notice saying "An error occurred while trying to save or publish your post. Please try again." but not always. No notice, no re-try. No re-try, no published post. But well, that's something I could live with. The worst... it's yet to come.

Over time, I have come to rely on the reading list of the blogs I follow showing up the newest posts of each blog, so I'd scroll through and see very quickly who had posted about what, and whether I might want to click over there and read the full piece. From time to time, this list appeared empty, which was fixed upon reloading. No pain.

For the last 4 or 5 days, though, I get to see one post. One. And clicking the "view more" at the bottom does... nothing. This irks me, and makes me wonder whether it might be time to look for another blogging solution. (The list of other blogs is one of my very cherished and valuable resources to find something bloggable on days when I have nothing bloggable on hand, and it saved me many a time. So it's not just a little convenience - it has grown to be a blogging tool for me.)

I won't be looking into it right away, though - there are two papers to finish, and other stuff to plan and prepare (the next market, for instance). Plus the weather here is making me sleepy. (The cat taking her morning nap RIGHT BESIDE ME does not help at all, by the way. Couldn't she channel my sleepiness and just nap it away for me, too? She stubbornly refuses to do that. Something about having to get her own 12 hours of nap-time in per day or so, I suppose.)

Solar System Graphics.

The weekend's over (already, sigh), the sun is shining, I have a pot of tea in front of me, and a heap of work lurking inside my computer, while the cat is taking her morning nap (lazy cat).

In case you, too, need something to procrastinate a little, I recommend this graphic of our solar system - the moon (our moon) is one pixel large, and you can scroll your way out to the other planets and get an impression of how much space there is in space. (Hint: I've yet to reach Jupiter. My scrolling finger needs a break.)

Did you know...

... that castrated sheep were prized for their wool growth? I didn't, until very recently, when I found this blog post at ossamenta. I stumbled across that blog through the Blogging Archaeology Carnival, by the way.

Also, you may or may not have heard about the treasure found in Vienna Wiener Neustadt (south of Vienna) - it has now been published, and you can take a peek into the book (in Geman) and order it here. For those of you who don't read German but are curious, there are several pictures of pieces from the treasure on that page (listed under "Bilder"). The treasure is a spectacular find from the Late Middle Ages, found by chance in Vienna Wiener Neustadt (the ground's owner was digging a pond in his garden), and it's been analysed and researched and published by a team of experts for three years - among them one study colleague of mine.

(Ahem, I didn't realise it was not Vienna in my original post. I now know better. Also thanks to Michaela, I now know that the treasure is on display until November 2014 at Asparn an der Zaya.)