Troll Bridge

If you’re familiar with Terry Pratchett’s Discworld books you’ll love this. This is a fan made animation of a short story he wrote in 1992.

If you aren’t familiar, this is a good intro.

Enjoy!

The Forgotten Medieval Habit of ‘Two Sleeps’

 

Nearly 300 years later, in the early 1990s, the historian Roger Ekirch walked through the arched entranceway to the Public Record Office in London – an imposing gothic building that housed the UK’s National Archives from 1838 until 2003. There, among the endless rows of ancient vellum papers and manuscripts, he found Jane’s testimony. And something about it struck him as odd.

Originally, Ekirch had been researching a book about the history of night-time, and at the time he had been looking through records that spanned the era between the early Middle Ages and the Industrial Revolution. He was dreading writing the chapter on sleep, thinking that it was not only a universal necessity – but a biological constant. He was sceptical that he’d find anything new.

So far, he had found court depositions particularly illuminating. “They’re a wonderful source for social historians,” says Ekirch, a professor at Virginia Tech, US. “They comment upon activity that’s oftentimes unrelated to the crime itself.”

But as he read through Jane’s criminal deposition, two words seemed to carry an echo of a particularly tantalising detail of life in the 17th Century, which he had never encountered before – “first sleep”.

Perhaps insomnia is normal?

Source: The forgotten medieval habit of ‘two sleeps’

On anarchism

“My political opinions lean more and more to Anarchy (philosophically understood, meaning the abolition of control not whiskered men with bombs) — or to ‘unconstitutional’ Monarchy. I would arrest anybody who uses the word State (in any sense other than the inaminate real of England and its inhabitants, a thing that has neither power, rights nor mind); and after a chance of recantation, execute them if they remained obstinate! If we could go back to personal names, it would do a lot of good.

Government is an abstract noun meaning the art and process of governing and it should be an offence to write it with a capital G or so to refer to people … The most improper job of any many, even saints (who at any rate were at least unwilling to take it on), is bossing other men. Not one in a million is fit for it, and least of all those who seek the opportunity …

There is only one bright spot and that is the growing habit of disgruntled men of dynamating factories and power-stations; I hope that, encouraged now as ‘patriotism’, may remain a habit! But it won’t do any good, if it is not universal.”

– J.R.R. Tolkien, letter to his son, 1943 (from The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien).

Source: Tolkien on anarchism

Report: British Study Says Post-Vaccine Heart Damage Worsens With Each Vaccination

“The risk of serious heart problems called myocarditis in men under 40 soars with each dose of a Covid mRNA vaccine — and is sharply higher than the risk from a coronavirus infection itself,” Berenson wrote in his summary:

The findings call into sharp question the efforts by American colleges and universities to make their students receive booster shots before returning to school this January — especially since other studies have shown that the risk of post-vaccine myocarditis is concentrated not merely in men under 40 but in those aged 16-25.

The study, which British researchers released in late December, showed that the risk of myocarditis almost doubled after the first Pfizer shot in men under 40. Then it doubled again after the second and doubled again after the third — to almost eight times the baseline risk.

Source: Report: British Study Says Post-Vaccine Heart Damage Worsens With Each Vaccination