...Or so they would have if there were clinics, or useful doctors, or any theoretical conception of how disease worked. H1N1 is getting people down up here in Canada, but put yourself in the place of a 15th century Englishman. Henry VII has just established himself, but he seems to have brought some little friends with him. Microscopic friends, in the form of a previously unknown disease that can kill you in an afternoon.

This week's Passing Strangeness: The English Sweate

(And on a wheeee! note, I'm at the halfway point of the book. The next Passing Strangeness will get me over 50,000 words)

This week Nathan Filion's new series, Castle, starts with the titular character "trying on his halloween costume". The costume? Space cowboy. Ahem. Oh, and then there's the shout-out to Buffy just before the opening credits.

The first few lines are pretty metatextual too. Made me laugh and everything.

A calabash is a kind of gourd used for making containers, but in Hawaii, for whatever reason, the name is used for a kind of wooden serving bowl. I'm not entirely sure (not to the point of putting it in this week's Passing Strangeness), but I'm pretty sure calling the very brief period of Hawaiian colonialism "The Empire of the Calabash" is derogatory to the point of calling, say, an African kingdom "The Watermelon Empire".

The reason people used the term in the 19th century is that I'm not talking about the United States taking over Hawaii when I say "colonialism". I'm talking about Hawaii's last ditch effort in 1887 to round up the other still-independent islands of the Pacific to stave off European colonialism by means of an Oceanian superstate. If they'd pulled it off, they'd have controlled an area bigger than the former Soviet Union. As the putative confederation consisted almost entirely of salt water and had a total population of probably under 200,000 people, the social-Darwinist mood of the times led to a certain amount of derision.

But it's the sort of visionary madness I like to talk about, hence this week's chapter: The Empire of the Calabash.

www.whereisballoonboy.com is already up and running.

So, after a month of looking at my computer screen with my brain telling me "This stuff is terrible! No-one will ever want to read it!" -- a mood which comes across me at times as projects get longer -- I've finally got a new Passing Strangeness up.

It is, of course, terrible and no-one will want to read it...actually, it's not that bad. Maybe not history per se, but I've always liked archaeology with a side order of undeciphered writing, and this serves well. The early history of New World civilization is a lot less settled than the Old World's, and some fairly fundamental things are still to be discovered. Or, possibly in this case, recently discovered. The oldest writing in the Americas may have turned up in the late '90s, and was only announced in 2006 because there's some problems with it.

Problematic history? I'm so there, to talk about The Cascajal Block.

Maps of the United States subdivided into "states" based on identity politics. Most importantly, the category of "Sports Teams":

http://www.commoncensus.org/sports.php

Nicholas Gurewitch, of Perry Bible Fellowship, does Marvel:

http://www.truthandbeautybombs.com/bb2/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=1428

Yep, pretty much like you'd expect them to be. Glad to see his sense of humour hasn't changed.

Dear Sir,

While admittedly I am on the other side of the intellectual aisle from you in this matter, simple humanity requires me to offer you counsel. I understand that the cute be-legged fish labelled "DARWIN" has hit a nerve -- through truly, you should have expected some mockery. The Ichthys is a noble symbol, but writing "JESUS" on one is akin to painting "SUPER SEKRIT" in fifty-foot high letters on the side of NSA headquarters.

That said, replying with a larger Icthys eating a Darwin fish is not perhaps the image for which you are reaching, it being approximately the opposite of denying natural selection. Might I suggest that you would be better served, both symbologically and in terms of historical awareness, by showing the Darwin fish being burnt at the stake, or being banished to the Aquarium Prohibitorum, or perhaps even being vanquished by a school of crusaders under the spell of a tiny piscine Pope Urban II? I grant that the latter may be difficult to fit on your bumper.

I remain yr. obd't servant, etc., etc.

A highly detailed map, made in 1855, of London as it was in the 1530s (or so):

http://www.oldlondonmaps.com/oldenmappages/oldenmain.html

When I started Passing Strangeness I pictured it as exploring odd stories connected with the supernatural and mysterious, from a historical perspective. It's drifted away from that quite quickly, but a few of the entries (like the Angel of Mons, or the Vela Incident), but it's become more about odd history itself than I initially intended.

That said, today's entry is about a series of events that was explicitly believed to be mystical by the people on the spot. The Roman Empire was shot through with mystery cults (not least Christianity itself), and one of the stars of those cults was a statue in the Karnak Temple Complex of Egypt--a statue that actually did engage in a repetitive miracle (though one with a pretty clear non-mystical explanation if you're inclined to skepticism). Please enjoy reading The Voice of Memnon.

...doing the SF planet thing, I despair. It's hard to keep up with the Earth itself:

50 Celsius, and surrounded by selenite crystals up to 11 meters long

At this afternoon's showing of Ponyo(*), the moment the Studio Ghibli title card was on the screen a little approximately four-year-old voice chattered "Totoro! Totoro!" excitedly. Well done, Mr. and Mrs. Parents of Four Year Old! I salute you.

(*) Well worth seeing, better than Howl's Moving Castle, not as good as My Neighbour Totoro or Porco Rosso. The boat-ride setpiece is a marvel.

There's too much "Weird War II" stuff out there, but I came across one that was new to me and sufficiently interesting that I wanted to write about it. File it in the same general category as The Great Escape--trying to strike a blow in clever ways. Today on Passing Strangeness, Proteus OX19: Fighting "Fritz" with MEDICAL SCIENCE(*).

(*) No, I did not use that subtitle for real.

Russell Davies and Warren Ellis might be mulling over a revival of Quatermass? Thanks for the early Xmas, Santa!

You know, there's a fundamental pleasure to be derived from (even sixty years on) reading about something that makes Nazis and other fascists look like arseholes.

Check this one out, which I ran across today:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_Red_Cross

(Yes, the entire article -- it has little to do with the Red Cross as a whole, but discusses in some detail an aspect of Enigma's birth. I wish for a better source, but all the others I can find are in Polish.)

Sakoku-era Japan, deliberately isolated from the rest of the world by the Tokugawa Shogunate, was a picturesque place, with charmingly dressed feudal lords and fascinating culture and romantically downtrodden peasants. Western writers like James Clavell don't keep returning to it for no reason, you know.

It's just that it wasn't really like that. The Dutch enclave at Deshima is rightly famous, but few people really realize what an effect that tiny little lifeline to the rest of the world had on the so-called isolated Japanese.

So relieve yourself of your ignorance, hairy barbarian from the Eastern Ocean! Come read this week's Passing Strangeness, Rangaku, or the Wonders of Samurai Science.

So New York City suffered a terrible, shocking attack one September day. The evil empire had fallen and Americans had thought they'd entered a new era, but then swarthy foreigners attacked their way of life in an attempt to advance their own violent agenda by killing as many people as possible. It was the worst terrorist attack the US had ever seen.

I'm speaking, of course, of the terrible events of 9/16 -- 1920, that is. Come have a read of the latest Passing Strangeness, if you're so inclined.

Tutankhamen was notable because his tomb wasn't looted. People visit all kinds of indignities on the dead when there's money to be made. In the particular case of Egyptian dead, though, tomb robbery was not their biggest worry. In the Middle Ages and down into the 20th century people found uses for the mummies themselves, and literal shiploads of them were sent to Europe.

The Egyptians were recyclers themselves when it came to mummies, though, which has also led to an important discovery about ancient Italy.

So with all that, please enjoy the latest Passing Strangeness: Liber Linteus, or 101 Uses for an Egyptian Mummy(*)

(*) I almost called it 101 Uses for a Dead Egyptian -- if you were alive in the early 1980s, you get this -- but I guessed that might be misconstrued.

The first photos of the Earth taken from space, by a captured V-2 launched from White Sands Proving Ground

East and west, how did they meet? The late middle ages saw a few Europeans head west into China -- most famously Marco Polo, but there were others. Today's Passing Strangeness is about what is, so far as anyone knows, the one and only journey in the opposite direction,