I've warned you about that kind of baseless assertion before, and now I've sent you a virus payload via your ISP's servers that will randomly add an extra space after you type a full stop, har har har*!
No, "Chmurny" is what Google Translate insists is the Czech for "Blimey", which rather floored me, as I didn't think there would be any such thing.
And I was thinking "Blimey!" because the blog is popular today, which I can only presume is down to mentioning Czechia,
 |
| Home to Jan Svankmajer, animator with a frightening imagination |
Who, of course, doesn't exist.
Unlike Marketa, our touchstone Angry Czech. Tell us, Marketa, what is next on your list of things that Really Really Annoy Czechs?
 |
| Not Our Marketa, though she does look angry, doesn't she? |
O. Well, there you go. Apparently beer is a big cultural thing in Czechia, and they drink a lot and all the time. Without, one can guess, the typically chavvy behaviour as seen in urban centres across the UK on a Friday and Saturday night.
Here an aside. I cannot find any evidence of this online, but Your Humble Scribe remembers a tale told in the Eighties, of a Sinister tank crew posted to Czechoslovakia, who sold their tank to a scrap-metal dealer for vodka money. They vanished for days and were eventually found in a forest, paralytically drunk. Nobody ever found the tank.
 |
| "I can cut you a deal for five gallons of 60% proof, squire." |
Motley! Run to the off-licence and fetch me a bottle or two of their finest Czech lagers!
"Telling Lies About Hitler" By Professor Richard Evans
This is a fascinating work by the expert witness brought in to testify on behalf of the defence team for Deborah Lipstadt, who was being sued for libel by arch-bloviator David Irving. In a detailed and gradual process, the Prof. breaks down Irving's lies and deceits that he'd practiced for decades, and it's a skilled forensic critique.
The case ruined Irving financially and academically, since he was required to pay costs of nearly £3 million and defaulted on paying a penny.
Anyway, I wanted to show you one of the deadpan demolitions that the Prof. came out with, when Irving had been trying to use forgeries to unsmirch the reputation of his beloved Herr Schickelgruber. He had obtained a forged official document (TB47) and was trying to claims that letters written to a contact had a similar style.
"I thought it unlikely that Frau Grosse's emotional nourishment during the painful period of uncertainty and separation from her husband consisted of letters written in the style and expression of a bureaucratic police document such as TB47."
 |
| Irv, on the other hand, is not amused. Not amused AT ALL! (He can't be making that gesture, can he?) |
Maybe it's just me, but that made me laugh out loud.
"SLIGHT"
It was a cryptic crossword solution to "Trifling snub (7)" and cast my mind back to the several mentions of "Slighting" that I've come across in Christopher Hibbert's "Cavaliers and Roundheads". Back during the English Civil Unpleasantness, when it was over and on some occasions during the fighting, one side would capture a castle from the enemy and decide they weren't going to allow it to remain as formidable as it had been, so it would be partially or completely destroyed - slighting.
This brought back memories of a castle in Yorkshire that Darling Daughter and I looked at but didn't enter - I think we needed to head back. The castle, after a little digging, turned out to be Skipton Castle. Art?
 |
| Note the crenellations |
 |
| More of the castle |
Well, I was going to wow you with an item about gunpowder, except more than one reference to the English Civil Unpleasantness risks losing reader attention as your brains glaze over. Maybe tomorrow. What can I prate about in the meantime?
Aha! Seeing as how I mention "astronomy" in my Facebook profile, and we've not had any such same for a while, and since I just saw a Twitter feed for "NASA's Exoplanets" I think I have an inkling -
Tyrian Purple
It seemed fitting, somehow, since we were going on about the Mayans and mining for ochre yesteryon. Tyrian purple was a dye used in antiquity, revered because over time the colour didn't fade; it got richer. No heavy metal band puns, please.
Thing is, getting hold of the dye was no easy matter. It came from a particular species of shellfish, harvested in the Mediterranean, and you needed enormous amounts of shellfish to get even a tiny bit of dye.
 |
| Thousands of these |
To obtain one ounce of Tyrian purple, you needed to crush and process over 200,000 shellfish, in what was a very labour-intensive process. Or, you could poke live ones with a stick and harvest the dye they secreted, which was even more labour-intensive.
There is a corollary to the crush method: the city of Tyre (hence "Tyrian") used to leave the crushed Murex in giant pits to decompose and render up the dye.
Okay. Tens of thousands of crushed, rotting shellfish. In the heat of the central Med. Left for days. You could, if you so wished, find your way to Tyre blindfolded thanks to the incredibly appalling stench the city's environs gave off.
Your Humble Scribe has occasion to thank his lack of a sense of smell at times, and this would have been one of those times!
| Tyre; thankfully offshore where the winds carried the scents out to sea. Mostly. |
Finally -
Excuse me, I need to go away and come up with an Interesting Fact for my conference call later on. Perhaps I'll go with the Tyrian purple stats ...
* You don't think I've gone too far here, do you?
No comments:
Post a Comment