Here is the news

A fantastic collection of Broadside Ballads, 2,300 of them, which were the equivalent of TV and radio news programmes in the 19th century. Sung or raed on street corners, in markets and yards they were the way that the poor and working folks heard about the news of the day. I could, and probably will, spend endless hours rifling through these. Some worth checking out...
The Earthquake Did Not Arrive
The Happy Couple
The Extraordinary Life and Death of Mary Anne Pierce
Oh, and there are lots more of them. Welsh ballads can be found here and the Bodleian's collection can be found here. There's fricking thousands of them. A good list of links to get at them all can be found here.

God above

What will happen when extraterrestrial intelligence makes itself known to us?. That debate has been had in films, TV, books and even some of the most learned gentlemen in our midst have opined on the subject - Stephen Hawking wonders if they will plunder the Earth for its raw materials.  Hmm, not sure. There might be more for them to plunder elsewhere.

The debate has also been aired in learned journals which tried to reach a consensus on whether it will be a good or bad thing. The good news? They probably won't destroy us. Probably. And all this might be moot because we might not be able to communicate. The bad? We don't know what impact it will have. We can prepare, but its not clear how much help that will be when the flying saucers land.

I'm currently wondering what would happen if a Cthulhic deity or two came to Earth. What if they were unleashed by accident on Earth and we had to live under their shifting, tentacled shadows. I like the idea of Yog Sothoth or one of the other Great Old Ones hovering over a city, bathing the metropolis in sunlight sifted through its hideous form.

Their arrival is similar to that of the ETIs in that they are alien exccept they are explicitly interested in destruction and sacrifice for their own cyclopean, and unknowable, ends. I also like the idea of a world slowly being ground down by the blubbery gods, no immediate worldwide cataclysm just the slow and sure warping of life as it starts to revolve around their maleficent.

It would mean the end to most of Earth's religions and the rise of many new ones - though its worth wondering about the value of faith if your god is hanging in the air only a few thousand feet overhead. 

Physicists would also have to ask themselves a few questions. Not least about non-Euclidean geometry and how these entities can even exist. Does physics leave room for them anyewhere? Under a quark or behind a black hole, perhaps?

The most interesting part is the form of the resistance. The arrival would throw human values into sharp relief. Which values, though? Would those who like the gods be like the fascists in the 1930s, except more convincing because, with a little human sacrifice or two, they can fulfil the promises they make?

Resistance would be about sympathy, empathy and compassion. It would see people fight for a greater good even if they knew it was hopeless. Resistance would be about fighting and dying almost certainly for a lost cause.

Past plastics

I've always wanted a list of plastics used in Victorian times and here it is. Thank you, internet. I knew about shellac and gutta percha but not the other seven. Following the root of the link yields other useful stuff such as the Shadwell forgers and info about Jettons.

Looking back

I've learned not to let my kids decide which of their old toys they want to throw away. All that pawing through a crate of old toys does is re-acquaint them with favourites they forgot they had. End result? No toys thrown away and lots more kipple distributed about their room. Gah.
I got a similar feeling today when pruning old bookmarks. I found lots of stuff that seemed so precious at the time but have forgotten I found and had lived without for a long time. There are quite a few links that I now want to remember...
Ideas illustrated on word origins - great visualisation of where the words come from.
Joined up thinking about genre literature and culture
A plot generator for pulp fiction
Full text versions of many old commentaries, translations and dramatic works
Book title analyser
An automatic text analyser

Rome and roads

I've just spent far too long playing around with the raw fabulousness that is Stanford's interactive map of the transport network in Roman times. Going from Rome to Londinium starting in January would take about 42 days. I would have thought that journey would be almost all by road but it's shortened, at least initially, by taking a boat along the coast. Then it's a long trek across France. Too, too fab.

Title tale

Just about every single one of the paper titles at the Society for Cultural Anthropology meeting about Life and Death makes we want to be there. So many of them make me think wtf and get my brain whirring about what they could be about. It's like a future features list for a Sunday newspaper.

Some highlights

Shrimp Boats, Swing Sets and Voodoo Dolls: Cemeteries of Coastal Louisiana

The Giant of a King’s Second Body at Kim Jong-Il’s Funeral

From Monuments to Megapixles: Remembering the Dead in Modern America

Italy’s zombie-workers and the Contested Soul

Logics of Military Suicide

Animals as Instruments: Biomimetic Noses and the War on Terror 

Necropolitics, Exception, and the Production of Docile Patriots

How do Beets and Pantyhose Make Water (Un)Affordable?

Family Retrieved: Single Motherhood and Posthumous Sperm Donation in Israel
  

Top 10

As a fan of Bertrand Russell I couldn't help but record the existence of his own version of the 10 commandments. My personal favourite is "Do not feel absolutely certain of anything".