The ancient legendary creature called the basilisk was feared in Europe and North Africa. It was a combination snake,rooster, bat, and sometimes other animals, that was born from an egg laid by a rooster and incubated by a toad. And it was so venomous, birds flying over it would die! Pliny the Elder wrote about it, and accounts from the Middle Ages blamed basilisks for plague outbreaks and murders. Once a rooster was caught trying to lay an egg, and was convicted and executed for his unnatural act. But the most famous incident is the Warsaw basilisk hunt of 1587, which is a the best-documented of all the basilisk hunts. It started when two children and a maid fell down dead in a cellar.
Many people thought the air felt unusually thick to breathe and suspected that a basilisk was hiding in the cellar. Confronted with this deadly threat to the city of Warsaw, the senate was called into an emergency meeting. An old man named Benedictus, a former chief physician to the king, was consulted, since he was known to possess much knowledge about various arcane subjects. The bodies were pulled out of the cellar with long poles that had iron hooks at the end, and Benedictus examined them closely. They presented a horrid appearance, being swollen like drums and with much-discoloured skin; the eyes “protruded from the sockets like the halves of hen’s eggs.” Benedictus, who had seen many things during his fifty years as a physician, at once pronounced the state of the corpses an infallible sign that they had been poisoned by a basilisk. When asked by the desperate senators how such a formidable beast could be destroyed, the knowledgeable old physician recommended that a man descend into the cellar to seize the basilisk with a rake and bring it out into the light. To protect his own life, this man had to wear a dress of leather, furnished with a covering of mirrors, facing in all directions.
Benedictus did not, however, volunteer to try out this plan himself.
Read the rest of the fascinating story at Past Imperfect blog. Link -via Monkeyfilter
I must admit some guilt in this scenario, but the upstairs bathroom our three teenage daughters use is even worse! This Twaggie was illustrated by Dave Collier from a Tweet by 1BigMick. See a new illustrated Tweet every day at Twaggies! Link
Before he became famous, British novelist Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) worked as an architect. One of his more unpleasant projects was the relocation of an old graveyard to make way for the expansion of London. He arranged for the relocation of the bodies, but without their accompanying headstones. These he arranged in a circle around an ash tree in the St Pancras Churchyard. You can view more pictures of this tree, popularly known as the Hardy Tree, at the link.
In the 17th century, all Europe was mad to have the little brown nut from Indonesia- nutmeg. Especially the Dutch, who monopolized its cultivation and, in doing so, built their tiny nation into one of the wealthiest trading powers on the planet.
BACKGROUND
Spices have been used by human beings for millennia for food preparation and preservation, medicine, and even embalming. But until modern times they were largely an Asian commodity, and controlling their flow to the spice-obsessed West meant power and fortune for the middleman. Over the centuries, these hugely successful merchants were the Phoenicians, Persians, Arabs, and later, Venetians.
Many of the great European explorations of the 15th century were driven by the need to bypass the Arab and Venetian monopoly. Crying, "For Christ and spices," the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama shocked the Arab world when he sailed around Africa's Cape of Good Hope in 1498 and showed up in the spice markets of India. It marked the beginning of the decline of Arab dominance and the rise of European power. For the next 100 years, as Spain and Portugal fought for control of the spice trade, the tiny countries of England and the Netherlands looked on in envy, waiting for their chance to get a piece of the action. It came first for the Dutch.
THE DUTCH EAST INDIA COMPANY
Always in danger of being overwhelmed by their much larger neighbor, Spain, the Portuguese began subcontracting their spice distribution to Dutch traders. Profits began to flow into Amsterdam, and the Dutch commercial fleet swiftly grew into one of the largest in the world. The Dutch quietly gained control of most of the shipping and trading of spices in Northern Europe. Then in 1580, Portugal fell under Spanish rule and the sweet deal for Dutch traders was over. As prices for pepper, nutmeg, and other spices soared across Europe, the Dutch found themselves locked out of the market. They decided to fight back.
In 1602 Dutch merchants founded the VOC -the Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie, better known as the Dutch East India Company. Other trading nations had formed cooperative associations like it but none were more successful than the Dutch. By 1617 the VOC was the richest commercial operation in the world. The company had 50,000 employees worldwide, with a private army of 30,000 men and a fleet of 200 ships. Yet even with that huge overhead, the VOC gave its shareholders an eye-popping annual dividend of 40% of their investments. How'd they do it? With sheer ruthlessness... and nutmeg.
[Updated - see below if Neatorama looks unformatted in your browser]
Hello, Neatoramanauts!
I'd like to welcome you to the new Neatorama (all you RSS readers, come
and take a look). We've been working
on this version for quite some time and we're excited that it's finally
here. The new blog is not simply a redesign - it is actually the biggest
change since the inception of this blog. Our developer Rommel
Santor has built a new blogging engine from the ground up. As a result,
we now have a custom software system that will enable us to do new and
neat things in the coming months.
There are quite a few changes, so let me give you a tour:
1. Larger photos and easier to read text We've made the blog column a bit wider, the typeface a bit bigger
and the leading (that's line-height to you CSS geeks and line spacing
to you word processor users) a bit more for easy readin'.
2. Love a post or a comment? Heart it!
Click on the grey heart in the post or comment to show your appreciation
- we'll use this metrics to help improve Neatorama's postings and reward
great comments.
3. Built-in Poll
New built-in polling capabilities will let us do quick and fun surveys
to see what you guys are thinking.
4. Comments on the homepage
This is quite nice: you can read and leave comments straight from the
homepage. Click the to
open the comment window:
The comment thread is nested two levels deep. You can reply to an existing
comment, or start a new comment thread on a different topic. We've also
updated our Comment
Policy, so please take a minute to read it.
To begin with, you can only post text comments, but with participation,
you'll be able to post links and images, as well as embed video clips
in your comments.
5. Keyboard shortcuts
If you're reading this on a desktop or a laptop, give this a try: Hit
J/K to go forward and backward a post, and hit C to open and close a post's
comment window on the homepage.
6. Neatorama Account
In order to leave a comment and participate in giveaways and contests,
you'll need to have a valid Neatorama account. Because we've changed our
blogging engine, we require that you register a new account (even if you've
registered one in the past - the system will recognize if you've had an
account with us before, and your past comments will then be associated
with the new account.)
Registration is easy, and you can use a pseudonym/screen name or real
name if you'd like. You do, however, need a valid email address as we
will email you an activation code to verify your account.
After you register an account, we'll send you an activation code via
email:
You can also sign in with Facebook or Twitter. If you sign in with Twitter,
you'd have to provide a valid email address afterwards so we can send
you the activation code.
One big benefit of registering an account is that you won't see
banner ads when logged into the blog ;)
7. User Dashboard
Your Neatorama Dashboard includes a neat Chartbeat counter showing real-time
visitors on Neatorama this very instant (yes, there are that many of you
on this blog right now), as well as your comment statistics and NeatoShop
orders and wish lists:
The Dashboard also has a feature called "My Discussions," which
lists all replies to your comments in one place. You can reply to these
comments there (just hover your mouse over the comment), so it's easy
to maintain conversations going across different posts:
You can change your commenting preference - for example, whether to get
email notification when someone replies to your comments and whether to
automatically follow a discussion by replying to a comment, at the Dashboard's
Preference page.
8. User Profile You can update your user profile in the Dashboard to tell other
Neatoramanauts a bit about yourself. Other users can view your user profile
by clicking on your Name in the comment, then initiate a conversation
with you either publicly or privately:
9. More Neat Stuff to Come!
That's just the beginning - we've got plenty of neat new features in the
pipeline. Stay tuned for a system to reward our best commenters with free
NeatoShop stuff, niche blogs under the Neatorama umbrella, and so on!
-----
There will, of course, be bugs. Layouts of many of the blog posts will
be off, and many comments will be missing (we're working to fill them
all back in).
If you found a bug, please email bugs neatorama dot com.
Please let us know in as much detail as possible what you encountered,
as well as a screenshot (if appropriate) and browser details. That will
help us out a great deal.
I'd like to thank Rommel for the
long hours and great effort that he has put into the project. I'd also
like to thank a lot of other people who helped as well. Robert Nienhuis
of Nienstudios
provided input on some of the styling elements in the new blog. Many Neatoramanauts
who participated in the alpha release helped us tremendously by testing
it out.
Lastly, I'd like to thank all of you who read this blog regularly - your
continued support makes this blog possible.
Update 8/5/12: Neatorama looks unformatted? You probably need to clear your browser's cache. Here is Google's guide on how to clear your cache in Chrome, Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, and Opera. If this doesn't work for you, it maybe an issue with our static content server not resolving for your browser. We're on it!
Update 8/6/12: Static content server issue is fixed - if you still see Neatorama not formatted correctly after clearing your cache, please email us!
