Early Modern Notes

Fucking hackers.

Or, more accurately, “Noted ages ago (was it really less than 2 weeks?) after That Election and sadly neglected in my drafts folder”…

I Have Until January 20!
  Rob MacDougall rounds up some 'good crazy' responses to That One's election

Obama’s Disastrous Gaffe-Laden Press Conference
  Jon Swift is really, really, really enjoying himself this week

On centrism
  the 'centre' can shift: for real change, it has to…

Nominations for The Cliopatria Awards for the best history blogging are open until the end of November.

The award categories are: Best Group Blog, Best Individual Blog, Best New Blog, Best Post, Best Series of Posts, Best Writer.

Forgetful types may find the following resources useful for memory jogging:

Cliopatria’s History Blogroll
The History Carnival Archive

Final selections will be made by judging panels of history bloggers and announced at the American Historical Association Annual Meeting in early January.

Niche interest? Fetish? Perversion? Mustaches of the Nineteenth Century

Many of the following pages have graphic and clear images of the masculine mustache in all its forms, both sublime and grotesque. My intent is not to shock or titillate, but merely to inform on the subject. The Nineteenth Century gave us many things, but above all it was a hotbed of facial hair experimentation and this is but a poor sampling of those many lost forms.

Stop Worrying About Obama Losing Already
  because he's going to win. *bites nails, sacrifices another chicken, does rain dance*

OMG!!! Exclusive!!!! Must Credit LGM!!!
  "If Obama were some sort of secret, DFH terrorist front candidate, who exactly would he be signaling with this logo? Is America filled with Weatherman sleeper cells, just waiting for a sign of the revolution?"

Philosophy in the news ….
  more on the Bill Ayers ghostwriting scandal! (not)

Malcom X II and the Fuschia Fascists
  is it satire? is it lunacy? who can tell any more?

More seriously: of course it’s not over until it’s over. But think about these polling numbers.

2 November 2004: RCP Electoral College Count: Bush 227 - Kerry 203 - toss-up 108. (270 EC votes needed to win: result on 4 November: Bush 286, Kerry 252.)

3 November 2008: RCP Electoral College Count: Obama 278 - McCain 132 - toss-up 128.

This is 1997, not 1992. (Except I don’t want to push the 1997 analogy because we all know how that turned out…)

This story is going around, but I’ll repeat it just for the fun of it:

The Welsh actually means: “I am not in the office at the moment. Please send any work to be translated”.

Oops.

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"