From the McGill University website: Psycholinguistics: studying speech processes.

Psychology professor Debra Titone's research is breaking ground in determining the key parts of the human brain that are involved in the relatively new field of psycholinguistics — the study of how people understand and use language. She aims to determine how the human brain processes speech by comparing language processing in non-schizophrenic and schizophrenic people. Most people use contextual clues, but many schizophrenics have difficulty with this. For example, the word "pen" has several meanings. The dominant association with this word is a writing tool, and the less frequently associated meaning is an animal enclosure. In her work, Titone has found that schizophrenics can only understand the more common usage of such multiple meaning words, regardless of the context.

Titone's latest project focuses on figurative language. Schizophrenics are generally capable of producing and understanding language very well, however figurative language poses problems. For instance, the figurative proverb, ‘a rolling stone gathers no moss,’ has both literal and idiomatic meanings. Schizophrenics always interpret this type of expression literally. As Titone further explains, "There are hundreds of different idioms, and some employ metaphors that have no plausible meaning, such as, ‘paying through the nose’." Interestingly, schizophrenics have no difficulty understanding expressions with only metaphorical meanings, but they become confused when an expression has multiple meanings. Titone has discovered that, different areas of a schizophrenic's brain are involved when processing idioms with both literal and metaphorical meanings. She plans to compare the brain activity of schizophrenic and non-schizophrenic people to determine how this processing occurs. [continue]

From The Guardian: Another dip in the Mediterranean in search of Atlantis.

A quest for the lost island of Atlantis began off the southern shores of Cyprus yesterday.

After a decade of intense study an American, Robert Sarmast, claims to have assembled evidence to prove that the fabled island lies a mile deep in the sea between Cyprus and Syria. He says he has detected "around 48" of the 50 geographical features Plato described the island as having before it was "swallowed up by the earth".

By August he hopes to have proved that Atlantis was not simply a figment of the imagination but a real empire with stone temples, bridges, canals and roads.

"What we have discovered is a hidden landmass that fits Plato's famed description almost exactly," he said in the Cypriot port of Limassol.

"For the first time we've been able to match that description with a real place which does, I think, prove what the ancient world believed, that Atlantis was founded in history and not a myth." [continue].

If you enjoy interesting words like lucubration, myrmidon, niddering, katabasis and hebetude, you might want to arrange for a word and its definition to arrive in your mailbox each day. (Who can resist?) Subscribing to any of these mailing lists will do the trick:

Word of the Day - dictionary.com
A Word A Day - wordsmith.org
The Word Spy - logophilia.org

(If it's French words you want, try word of the week from CBC Radio's C'est la vie.)

From Wired: Green Tea Good for Hard Drives.

For years, green tea has been believed by some to lower cholesterol, prevent rheumatoid arthritis and even stave off cancer. Now scientists think the warm green stuff has yet another benefit: the potential to save hard-drive manufacturers millions of dollars.

A team of researchers based in Tucson, Arizona, announced Monday that a study of the use of green tea extracts for polishing the magnetic heads in hard-disk drives has yielded a compound that works three to four times faster than conventional compounds. If the findings can be reproduced in an industrial setting, the compound could reduce the cost and environmental impact of hard-drive manufacturing, the researchers said. [continue]

Satellite imaging techniques are shedding new light on an ancient map of the northeast Atlantic. From innovations-report.com:

The ornate map, seemingly crude by today’s standards, depicts sea monsters off the coast of Scotland, sinking galleons, sea snakes, and wolves urinating against trees.

When oceanographers from Plymouth Marine Laboratory and the University of Rhode Island compared a large group of swirls, shown on the chart off the east coast of Iceland, with thermal images from an Earth observation satellite they found the swirls corresponded almost perfectly with the Iceland-Faroes Front - where the Gulf Stream meets cold waters coming down from the arctic.

The cartographer, Olaus Magnus, an exiled Swedish priest living in Italy, had a dislike of blank canvases and covered every available space with ink. But Professor Tom Rossby, from the University of Rhode Island, believes not every elaborate quill stroke was artistic licence.

‘Their location, size and spacing seem too deliberate to be purely artistic expression. Nowhere else on the chart do these whorls appear in such a systematic fashion, ’

‘They are the earliest known description of large scale eddies in the ocean - these are huge bodies of water, 100km in diameter, that turn slowly. It seems the lines were deliberately drawn to aid navigation.’

‘We know mariners were aware of these fronts but they would not have the tools to quantify them nor the means to express them,’ he said. [continue]

Related:
Carta Marina, the foundation of knowledge of Scandinavian countries - finland.fi

From the introduction to the Comparataive Mamalian Brain Collections pages at brainmuseum.org:

This web site provides browsers with images and information from one of the world's largest collection of well-preserved, sectioned and stained brains of mammals. Viewers can see and download photographs of brains of over 100 different species of mammals (including humans) representing 17 mammalian orders.

Also available are examples of stained sections from a wide variety of brains of special interest, including humans, chimpanzees, monkeys, various rodents and carnivores, California sea lion, Florida manatee, Big brown bat, Wisconsin badger, North American raccoon, Yellow Mongoose, Zebra, Cow, and the Atlantic bottle-nose dolphin. A complete list of all available specimens is available. How brain evolution has occurred is discussed.

Viewers will learn why these collections are important, why and how they were assembled, and why it is important to protect, preserve and maintain them. Moreover, a variety of issues in brain science are discussed. [continue]

The Unesco site offers some photos of illuminated manuscripts from Eritrea. I'm partial to the decorated page from a "Gadla Sama'etat" (Acts of Martyrs), of which the details page says
this:

Manuscript of "Gadla Sama'etat" ("Acts of Martyrs"), cm 45.5 x 36, copied in 1453 A.D., from the Monastery of Dabra Maryam, Qohayn district, Sara'e province, Eritrea. Beginning of the text of the life of "Gabra Krestos", or the "The Man of Christ". The page exhibits a typical example of mid-fifteenth century writing. As it is very frequent in precious manuscripts, the beginning of the text of each section is decorated with a series of linear interlacing and motifs, which are traditionally called "harag" ("vine-tendrill"). The text of the life of "Gabra Krestos" has been edited, but the present manuscript is by far older than the manuscripts used in the edition, and one of the oldest presently known.

Related:
Debre Bizen Monastery - Mirabilis.ca, December 2002.

From newscientist.com: Charred remains may be earliest human fires.

Archaeologists in Israel may have unearthed the oldest evidence of fire use by our ancestors.

The site, on the banks of the Jordan River, dates to about 790,000 years ago. There are older sites in Africa, but the evidence from these is much more hotly contested.

The moment that our ancestors discovered how to control fire has long occupied an iconic place in the popular imagination. Chimpanzees, our closest living ancestors, have demonstrated impressive feats of language and tool use, but fire use "is the most human skill that we have", says Nira Alperson an archaeologist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Finding direct evidence for ancient fire use is extremely difficult and the new study is applauded by Derek Roe an archaeologist at Oxford University, UK: "Any small fact you can find is a great triumph."

The oldest indications of fire use come from Koobi Fora in Kenya where researchers found patches of discoloured sediment. But suggestions that these were 1.6-million-year-old hearths have failed to convince many researchers.

Now Alperson and colleagues have found compelling, although not conclusive, evidence that one of our ancestors was using fire 790,000 years ago at Gesher Benot Ya'aqov. By comparison, the oldest evidence of fire control in Europe dates from around 500,000 years ago. [continue]

From china.org.cn: The History of Chinese Imperial Food.

Chinese imperial food dates back to slave society. Ever since there were emperors and palaces, there has been imperial food, which was served mainly to the emperors, their wives and concubines, and the royal families. Emperors used their power to collect the best delicacies and called upon the best cooks to make delicious food for them. Imperial food represented a dynasty’s best cuisine.

Although imperial food was made exclusively for the royal family, generals, ministers, and nobility, it was the peasants, herders, and fishermen who provided the raw materials, craftsmen who made the kitchen utensils, the cooking staff who provided the service, civil officials who named the dishes, and protocol officials who drafted the dietary and culinary rules. Imperial food comprised the dietetic culture of the Chinese palaces and it is part of China’s valuable cultural heritage.

Imperial foods often were improved dishes invented by the common people. The inventors were not princes, dukes, or ministers, but cooks and commoners. The original model for a dish might have been similar to a dish you once prepared for yourself.

Food preparation is impossible without cooks, so emperors in ancient times cherished excellent cooks. The Historical Records by Sima Qian, a famous historian of the Han Dynasty (206 B.C. - 220), reports that Yi Yin, the first famous prime minister in known Chinese history, helped Tang (the first ruler of the Shang Dynasty, enthroned 1766 B.C. – 1760 B.C.) destroy Jie (the last ruler of the Xia Dynasty, enthroned 1818 B.C. – 1766 B.C.).

Yi Yin had been a famous cook before he became prime minister. Yi Yin, whose original name was Ah Heng, was a slave of the Youxinshi family. He wanted to convince Tang of his good ideas, but lacked a way, so he brought his kitchen utensils with him and won Tang’s trust by demonstrating his cooking skills. Tang described him as cooking delicious dishes and having the ability to govern the country, so he appointed Yi Yin as his prime minister. [continue].

From Slate: Offal Good.

Should you be whipping up a platter of crispy pigs' tails for a cocktail party any time soon, you might find, after persuading your butcher to order the tails for you and getting the squiggly things home, that they're bristling with little, unappetizing hairs. Fear not. In his new cookbook, The Whole Beast: Nose to Tail Eating, British chef Fergus Henderson, of London's trendy St. John restaurant, advises, "By the by, dealing with any slightly hairy extremities of pig, I recommend a throw-away Bic razor (hot towels and shaving cream not required)." If you can't imagine hacking away at the peach fuzz on the curlicue tail of a dead swine, think again. The publication of Henderson's book heralds a new fashion in food, already discernable in various hot restaurants in New York: offal, the organs and extremities (nose, cheeks, tail, feet) of butchered animals, has become chic.

Foie gras, truffles, and other traditional staples of gastronomic excess now find themselves cheek by jowl on upscale menus with, well, cheeks and jowls. When diners at Babbo, Mario Batali's elegant New York Italian restaurant, fork out $10 for "Testa," they're paying top dollar for a substance made by boiling the head of a pig, skimming off bits of brain, gristle, and other effluvia that bubble to the surface, and turning it into a salami. Is this irony? Slumming? Or a culinary example of "The Emperor's New Clothes"? [continue].

Related:
St John Restaurant, London

From Ananova: Trolley helps you shop till you get fit.

A supermarket trolley that helps you get fit is being introduced into the UK.

The Trim Trolley features equipment normally found in gym equipment with a resistance wheel letting customers increase or decrease the effort needed to push the trolley around.

It can monitor your heart rate, check the number of calories you're burning and set the speed and length of your session. continue.

Posted at 12:54 PM on April 28, 2004. | Filed under: strange stuff. | Permalink |

Canadian Geographic's Historical maps of Canada pages invite you to "Wander through the history of Canada and watch the map of the country transform." The site's timeline ranges from 1700 to 1999; clicking on a date brings up the associated map and historical information. (Requires Flash.)

From sciencedaily.com: Spiders Make Best Ever Post-it Notes.

Scientists have found that the way spiders stick to ceilings could be the key to making Post-it® notes that don't fall off – even when they are wet. A team from Germany and Switzerland have made the first detailed examinations of a jumping spider's 'foot' and have discovered that a molecular force sticks the spider to almost anything. The force is so strong that these spiders could carry over 170 times their own body weight while standing on the ceiling. The research is published today (Monday 19 April 2004) in the Institute of Physics journal Smart Materials and Structures.

This is the first time anyone has measured exactly how spiders stick to surfaces, and how strong the adhesion force is. The team used a scanning electron microscope (SEM) to make images of the foot of a jumping spider, Evarcha arcuata (pictures available – see notes). There is a tuft of hairs on the bottom of the spider's leg, and each individual hair is covered in more hairs. These smaller hairs are called setules, and they are what makes the spider stick. [continue]

Thanks to Boing Boing for pointing out this story.

Related:
Spiders inspire eight-legged Post-it notes -theregister.co.uk
Spiders get a grip - physicsweb.org

Related Mirabilis.ca content:
Why don't spiders stick to their own webs? - May 2003
60-acre spider web - November, 2002

From Aljazeera.net: Experts hail Egyptian coffin discovery.

Two sarcophagi, one wooden with a mummy inside and the other stone, both from the Ptolemaic period (323-30 BC), have been discovered at an ancient burial site near Cairo.

Antiquity officials immediately hailed the wooden sarcophagus, found at the bottom of a 50-metre shaft in Saqqara, 20km south of Cairo, as the best preserved of its kind in the world.

Guy Lecuyot, from the dozen-strong French team from the Louvre Museum in Paris, said he had spotted the finds side by side when he was trying to extricate other mummies.

"It was when I was extricating the mummies, which had been looted, that I found the head of the wooden sarcophagus and a gilt head that seemed intact, from the Ptolemaic era," he said.

Secretary general of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities, Zahi Hawwas, was delighted with the wooden sarcophagus.

"I have found hundreds of mummies and I can say that it is the best conserved dating from this period," he said. [continue]

Some very cool nuns have been profiled in this article from star-telegram.com: Songs of the ages.

At 5 p.m. in a pine-paneled church on a Connecticut hillside, a bell tolls, a door opens and a black-and-white flock of Benedictine nuns files silently behind the altar. They bow toward the altar and to the abbess, then take their places in the choir stalls.

One is a former Wall Street lawyer. Another gave Elvis Presley his first onscreen kiss. A third managed the careers of opera singers, and a fourth is one of the world's foremost experts on the fungi that can ripen or ruin cheese.

At this twilight vespers in the Abbey of Regina Laudis, they fuse themselves into a vibrant, silvery chorus intoning melodies more than a millennium old.

Gregorian chant — known to many as a vaguely lugubrious, mystical music sung in a dead language and enveloped in an echoey haze -- gives each day in this cloistered monastery its spine and shape. The nuns sing together seven times a day, celebrating the divine office on an ancient schedule that begins with lauds at dawn, stretches through compline after dinner and, for the hardiest women, continues with matins at 2 a.m. This is perhaps the only religious community in the United States that practices "the chant," as the nuns call it, in all its Latin glory and liturgical purity. From star-telegram.com [continue].

Anyone interested in learning Gregorian chant should order the nuns' Gregorian Chant Master Class textbook and CD. I bought a copy a few months ago, and it's been very helpful.

Women in Chant CDs from the Abbey of Regina Laudis:
Gregorian Chants for the Festal Celebrations of the Virgin Martyrs and Our Lady of Sorrow
Recordáre: Remembering the Mysteries in the Life of Jesus, Son of Mary

(Both CD pages include sound samples in .mp3 format.)

Related Mirabilis.ca content:
The Cheese Nun - January, 2004.

From the International Herald Tribune: Wireless: The expanding vision of Vatican's Holy See.

The wireless Internet has arrived at the gates — literally — of one of Europe's oldest institutions. For the past month, Swiss Guard officers at the entry and exit points of Vatican City have added the latest in telecommunications technology to their centuries-old arsenal of halberds and swords.

The pope's official corps of 100-odd bodyguards has been equipped with a small number of Wi-Fi-enabled laptops and personal digital assistants courtesy of Motorola as part of an open-ended trial sponsored by the company.

The high-speed wireless network supports real-time video streaming from closed-circuit television monitors near the Vatican's gates and allows for instant remote access to a database of registered automobile license plates. (...)

Because it is for police use, the system in place in the Vatican is a closed network, equipped with state-of-the-art security software to prevent unauthorized access. So visitors to the city-state should not expect to be able to use their Wi-Fi enabled laptops to send an e-mail home from St. Peter's Square ... [continue]

From Scotsman.com: Ding-dong dispute as Belgians lay claim to historic kirk bell.

A historic church bell is at the centre of an Elgin Marbles-style ownership row between Scotland and Belgium.

For more than 300 years, parishioners of Kettins Parish Church near Dunkeld in Perthshire, have believed the 16th century bell, which proudly sits in the church graveyard within a stone turret, is their rightful property.

However, representatives from the Our Lady of Troon monastery in Grobbendonk, near Antwerp, claim the bell originally belonged to their abbey and was stolen in 1572 by mercenaries.

A delegation from Grobbendonk recently visited the kirk in Kettins in an effort to resolve the dispute. Paul van Rompaye, a Grobbendonk councillor, and Martine Paelmon, a member of the Belgian parliament, want the bell to complete the restoration of the 600-year-old monastery.

But although the bell’s inscription reveals a Flemish connection, the Kettins parishioners are reluctant to part with the 485-year-old antiquity.

The inscription, which reads ‘My name is Marie Troon and Mr Hans Popenuyder made me in 1519’, identifies it as the work of the famous German cannon-maker who armed the Mary Rose, Henry VIII’s favourite warship, and had connections with Grobbendonk.

Now a compromise has been reached which may prevent the row souring relations between the two congregations. The Belgian delegation is willing to accept a copy of the bell made from a cast. [continue]

From Japan Today: Modern high-rises resist quakes using ancient concepts.

The Japanese construction industry is said to employ the world's most advanced and sophisticated quake-resistant technologies for high-rise buildings, but the origins of such technology can be traced back as far as the Asuka period (593-710).

The Toshodaiji, a temple built in 759 in the ancient capital of Nara, is under repair. The solid colonnade structure has been dismantled for reassembly, with a ceremony to mark the completion expected to be held in the summer of 2009.

"The structure is suppler than we expected, and is resistant to tremors," said Tadashi Nagase, deputy head of structure development of Takenaka Corp, a major construction company.

Nagase made the comments after analyzing the temple's main hall, or Kondo.

The temple was built using beams of wood fitted around pillars, which allows the parts to shift slowly during earthquakes and the structure to absorb seismic vibrations, he said. [continue]

Shakespeare's Coined Words Now Common Currency. From National Geographic:

While William Shakespeare died 388 years ago this week, the English playwright and poet lives on not only through his writings, but through the words and sayings attributed to him that still color the English language today.

So whether you are "fashionable" or "sanctimonious," thank Shakespeare, who likely coined the terms. [continue].

Related:
Shakespeare's Coined Words - theatrehistory.com
List of words coined by Shakespeare - rhymezone.com
Review: Coined by Shakespeare - quinion.com
Coined by Shakespeare: Words and Meanings First Used by the Bard - amazon.com

Bubble Bees is a fun little flash game. It's a perfect Friday afternoon diversion, and I bet your score will be way higher than mine.

From National Geographic: Archaeologists Uncover Maya "Masterpiece" in Guatemala.

Archaeologists working deep in Guatemala's rain forest under the protection of armed guards say they have unearthed one of the greatest Maya art masterpieces ever found.

The artifact—a 100-pound (45-kilogram) stone panel carved with images and hieroglyphics—depicts Taj Chan Ahk, the mighty 8th-century king of the ancient Maya city-state of Cancuén.

The panel was excavated in perfect condition from a royal ball court. Exquisitely carved in precise high relief, the 80-centimeter-wide (31.5-inch) stone depicts the Maya king seated on an earth symbol and throne with a jaguar skin, installing subordinate rulers in the nearby city-state of Machaquila. [continue]

Oooh, I found a fun thing! Epact: Scientific Instruments of Medieval and Renaissance Europe. The intro page explains:

Epact is an electronic catalogue of medieval and renaissance scientific instruments from four European museums: the Museum of the History of Science, Oxford, the Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza, Florence, the British Museum, London, and the Museum Boerhaave, Leiden. Together, these museums house the finest collections of early scientific instruments in the world.

Epact consists of 520 catalogue entries and a variety of supporting material. All European instruments from the four museums by makers who were active before 1600 have been entered in the catalogue. They include astrolabes, armillary spheres, sundials, quadrants, nocturnals, compendia, surveying instruments, and so on. Examples range from ordinary instruments for everyday use to more extravagant and often lavish pieces destined for the cabinets of princes. [continue]

Much happy browsing here.

Researcher Hopes to Find "Secret of Life" with Monks’ Lifestyle

Variety is the spice of life, or so the saying goes, but now a University of Missouri-Columbia researcher believes the true secret of living a long, healthy and satisfying life might be at a nearby monastery.

"Through a systematic review of the scientific literature, we found that individuals who regularly participate in organized religious activities live longer and healthier lives on average," said Daniel Longo, MU professor of family and community medicine. "This effect may be more significant among those who have made a life-long commitment to a religious lifestyle in an organized religious community. For example, a Dutch study found that Trappist and Benedictine monks between 1900 and 1994 experienced a 12 percent lower mortality rate than the general population of Dutch men."

Based on that information, it is likely that monks who live by The Rule of St. Benedict, which includes both Benedictines and Trappist monks, might provide the key to a lifestyle that has numerous benefits to the public, Longo said. Because so many lay people are following The Rule, it’s likely the benefits could be far-reaching outside of the monastery. While in existence for more than 1,000 years, the religious movement of following the Rule of St. Benedict as an "oblate," or a layperson affiliated with a monastery, has grown tremendously during the past several decades. A recent study finds that lay oblates outnumber monks 3 to 1.

The Rule of St. Benedict encourages people to live a life of moderation, obedience, humility and respect for their fellow person. It is focused on a balanced life and provides individuals with guidelines for spirituality that also include behaviors and attitudes conducive to good health. Longo has analyzed The Rule and found more than 50 different references to health, health behaviors, hygiene and a balanced life. Longo presented his findings at the 50th Anniversary Symposium of the Monastic Institute in Rome. [continue]

Related links:
The Holy Rule of St. Benedict - Christian Classics Ethereal Library
Rule of St Benedict - Catholic Encyclopedia
Daniel R. Longo - Family and Community Medicine Faculty, University of Missouri

The folks at Opera have come out with a new version of their excellent web browser. Opera 7.50 is now available for Windows, Mac, Linux, FreeBSD and Solaris. Whee!

Things I love about Opera:
tabbed browsing
popup adverts are automatically blocked
full screen view (F11)
keyboard shortcuts for everything
zoom
handy features for web designers
other cool features
still more cool features

This new version of Opera has a built-in RSS aggregator. (If you haven't discovered how handy RSS is for keeping up with lots of websites, read this). To get to the RSS aggregator within Opera 7.50: click the mail icon on the left of the screen. In the mail panel, click newsfeeds.

Related:
Opera's new features - opera.com

My other favourite web browser, also available for Windows, Mac, and Linux platforms:
Mozilla Firefox

From arabicnews.com: St. Catherine Monastery Mosque.

St. Catherine Monastery in South Sinai is the only monastery in the world to embrace a church and a mosque.

The mosque, of Fatimid origin, drew the attention of the German traveler Febri who visited Sinai in 1483 and the Swiss traveler Borkhart in 1816.

The later discovered patterns in the mosque that indicate that the mosque was completed in 1106.

A text was also found revealing that Emir Anoshtakin had ordered the building of the mosque during the reign of Abu Ali AI Mansur, the tenth of the Fatimid caliphs, who gave the mosque a six-step wooden pulpit.

During the Ayubid and Memluk ages, only little was known about the mosque through travelers hat visited the monastery.

The mosque, however, remained in use up till the 14th century AD, although it was neglected for a long time during the Ottoman age when it became a store- house for grains and fruits.

According to the manuscript preserved at the library of St Catherine, monks of the monastery used to confer in the mosque round 1508 AD. However, King Fuad provided the mosque with carpets and decorated the pulpits with green flags. [continue]

More on the Monastery of St. Catherine from Mirabilis.ca:
Ancient monastery opens library
At The Monastery of The Burning Bush
Ancient monastic manuscripts gain digital life

From icwales.com: Divers locate pirate Morgan's lost ship.

An international dive team shivered in excitement when they spied the timbers of a wreck belonging to one of the most famous buccaneers of all time.

They discovered the remains of Welshman Captain Henry Morgan's lost frigate, HMS Oxford, off the coast of Haiti.

Oxford sank in 1669 as the result of an explosion believed to have been ignited by a celebratory pig roast.

The 34-gun ship had been sent to Morgan by King Charles II following his appointment as Admiral in Chief of the Confederacy of Buccaneers.

Having previously gained a fearsome reputation as a naval strategist and ruthless pirate operating against Britain's enemies, Spain, France and Holland, Morgan eventually become Lieutenant Governor of Jamaica. He died there in 1688. [continue]

From discovery.com: Fabled Etruscan Kingdom Emerging?

The fabled kingdom of the Etruscan king Lars Porsena is coming to light in the Tuscan hills near Florence, according to an Italian University professor.

Known as Chamars, where the lucumo (king) Porsena reigned in the 6th century B.C., this was the leading city-state of the Etruscan civilization that dominated much of Italy before the emergence of Rome.

It was from there that Porsena is said to have launched his most successful attack upon Rome in order to restore the exiled Tarquinius Superbus to the throne. Porsena laid siege to the city, but accepted a peace settlement and withdrew.

If confirmed, the discovery could help shed new light on one of Europe's most mysterious people. It would also raise the possibility of locating the fabulous tomb of the Etruscan king.

Porsena's tomb was said by the historian Pliny the Elder to consist of a labyrinth 300 feet square with pyramids on top. According to legend, it was adorned with a golden carriage, 12 golden horses, a golden hen and 5,000 golden chicks. [continue]

From the introduction page of the Sancti Epiphanii ad Physiologus website:

In Antwerp in 1588, Christopher Plantin printed a book with the imposing title Sancti Patris Nostri Epiphanii, Episcopi Constantiae Cypri, ad Physiologum. Eiusdem in die festo Palmarum sermo. That book survived the turmoil of the next 415 years, traveling from Antwerp to England to North America and finally to Victoria, British Columbia, by a route that has only been partly traced. The book is now part of the Special Collections of the University of Victoria McPherson Library. This web site is an exploration of that book.

The Sancti Epiphanii ad Physiologum is a collection of texts about Saint Epiphanius (the Vitae, a life of Saint Epiphanius) and texts supposedly by him (the Physiologus, a set of moralized animal stories which were the basis of the medieval bestiary; and the In die festo Palmarum sermo, a homily on the Christian feast of Palm Sunday), along with notes and commentary by the editor, Consalus Ponce de Leon. That Epiphanius actually wrote any of the works printed in this book is in considerable doubt, particularly in the case of the Greek Physiologus, which has been attributed to several other early-Christian Greek writers. J.-P. Migne collected all of the works by and about Epipanius in his Patrologia Cursus Completus, Series Graeca, but listed both the In die festo Palmarum sermo (which he took from the Sancti Epiphanii ad Physiologum) and the Physiologus as "doubtful or spurious." Most of the text of the book is in both Greek and Latin, with Greek being the original language.

This is the sort of site that could keep a person busy for hours.

From the BBC: Franciscan friars petition Gibson.

Franciscan friars have asked Passion of the Christ director Mel Gibson to make a movie biography of the founder of their order, St Francis of Assisi.

The Franciscan Friars of the Renewal have posted a letter to Gibson on their website, along with an online petition.

It praises the director for his "work of sacred art" and asks him "to produce a sequel about a man many acclaim to be the Church's greatest saint".

St Francis is the patron saint of animals and the environment.

In the letter to Gibson, the friars say they believe the film, if made, "would show the world what happens when a person totally and unequivocally responds to the Passion of the Christ."

It goes on to suggest Gibson could call the film Man of the Passion. [continue]

Related:
St Francis of Assisi - Catholic Encyclopedia
The petition - from the Community of the Franciscan Friars of the Renewal and the Franciscan Sisters of the Renewal
Franciscan Friars of the Renewal

From an AP article at the Seattle Post Intelligencer: Ancient bones may be those of royal pet.

LONDON -- Corgis, the little dogs with the short legs, may have a long royal history. Archaeologists from Cardiff University said Wednesday that ninth century bones unearthed in Wales may be those of the first Welsh corgi to be kept as a royal pet.

They have been analyzing bones found at a ancient royal dwelling in a bog in the Brecon Beacons, a hilly area of southern Wales.

"We have the foreleg of a corgi-sized dog, which, dare we suggest, might be a much-favored ancestral royal companion," said Alan Mulville, of the university's School of History and Archaeology, who is leading the study.

Experts believe the crannog - a lake or bog dwelling built on stilts or a man-made island - at Llangorse Lake was the royal residence for the Welsh kingdom of Brycheiniog, dating from around A.D. 890. Tree ring dating of oak planks from the crannog indicate that it was built between 889 and 893. [continue]

Oh wow, there's a Museum of Antique Rosaries page! I love old rosaries, so this is fascinating. Where else can one see photos of a 17c wood and filigree rosary, a 17c rosary necklace or a 18c medallion rosary?

Thanks to Quiddity for pointing out this site. [Update: Quiddity seems to have vanished.]

Stanford researchers use today's technology to understand yesterday's treasures. From the Stanford University website:

Nearly every leading Italian archaeologist interested in ancient Rome sat in the chandeliered room of the German Archaeological Institute on March 18 to hear Marc Levoy, associate professor of computer science and electrical engineering at Stanford, describe efforts to build an online archive of what remains of the Severan Marble Plan, or Forma Urbis Romae — a massive marble map of third-century Rome.

But it was Levoy's soft-spoken doctoral student David Koller who stole the show. Koller did much of the work to scan pieces of the map and write computer programs to search for matches among the fragments. A typical academic paper about the map might propose a new match between two or three fragments, a new placement for a fragment within the city or a new interpretation of the incised lines on a fragment. When Koller put up a slide listing his proposed new matches — at least seven of high probability and dozens more worth investigating — there was an audible gasp from the audience, according to Levoy.

In his efforts to piece together the map's fragments, Koller has averaged nearly one match per month since 2003. This is a dramatic acceleration of a task that has tantalized scholars for centuries. [continue]

Related:
Stanford Digital Forma Urbis Romae Project

Update:
Computer helps map ancient Rome - BBC, April 28th, 2004.

From nature.com: Old records saved by particle physics.

Particle physicists in California are swapping bosons for basslines in a bid to breathe fresh life into the earliest sound recordings. A technique developed at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory allows researchers to create digital copies of old records without damaging the fragile discs.

The technique uses a light sensor, originally designed to track the paths of subatomic particles such as bosons, to capture images of the record's groove. A computer then uses these to reconstruct the recording, filtering out any background noise to produce a blemish-free digital version. [continue]

Expotition of the 100 Aker Wood is a clickable map of Winnie the Pooh's neighbourhood. Locations include Pooh Bear's House, Rabbit's House, Eeyore's Gloomy Place, and Where the Woozle Wasn't.

Related:
Winnie ille Pu (Winnie the Pooh in Latin) - Mirabilis.ca, August 2002.

From the BBC: Rock art hints at whaling origins.

Stone Age people may have started hunting whales as early as 6,000 BC, new evidence from South Korea suggests.

Analysis of rock carvings at Bangu-Dae archaeological site in Ulsan in the southeast of the country revealed more than 46 depictions of large whales.

They also show evidence that humans used harpoons, floats and lines to catch their prey, which included sperm whales, right whales and humpbacks. [continue]

From a United Press article at The Washington Times: Turkmen diggers find ancient temple.

Archaeologists have made a sensational discovery in Turkmenistan -- a temple of water dating back to the third millennium B.C.

The Margianskaya expedition has been digging on the site of an ancient settlement called Gonur in the delta of the Murgab River in the eastern Mary region, some 200 miles east of the country's capital, Ashgabat, Turkmenistan.ru reported Tuesday.

Victor Sarianidi, a prominent Russian archaeologist, leads the expedition, which discovered a rounded hollow about 55 yards in diameter and between eight and nine feet deep. The hollow is a short distance away from the royal palace dug out earlier. [continue]

From the BBC: Golden Boadicea necklet found.

The final link of what is believed to be a necklet owned by Queen Boadicea has been discovered in Norfolk.

The 2,000-year-old treasure is part of a gold torc, a type of Iron Age necklet, and was found by archaeologists in a field in Sedgeford.

The Sedgeford Historical and Archaeological Research Project believe it is the end of an Iceni tribe gold torc.

The torc, unearthed 40 years ago, is displayed at the British Museum.

Archaeologist Chris Mackie said the find, near Hunstanton, was "almost like a fairy tale".

"There is this 2,000 year-old torc which at sometime in its life was cut in two, and in 1965 we found one part of it - and after all these years, 40 years later, we have found the other and they will be joined together again - reunited." [See BBC page, which includes a photo.]

For photos of related objects and information about them, take a look at this splendid page from the British Museum's site.

From the New York Times: Vast and Deadly Fleets May Yield Secrets at Last.

The Persian Wars may be famed in history, but few artifacts and material remains have emerged to shed light on how the ancient Greeks defeated the Asian invaders and saved Europe in what scholars call one of the first great victories of freedom over tyranny.

It is well known that a deadly warship of antiquity, the trireme, a fast galley powered by three banks of rowers pulling up to 200 oars, played a crucial role in the fierce battles. Its bronze ram could smash enemy ships, and armed soldiers could leap aboard a foe's vessel in hand-to-hand combat with swords and spears, an innovation that merged land and sea tactics in a bloody new form of combat.

Yet no wreck of a trireme has ever come to light, and questions abound about the ship's design and operation, leaving much room for scholarly debate and wishful thinking.

Now, the first big expedition has gotten under way to look for the lost fleets of the Persian Wars, seeking to bring triremes back to life and retrieve some of the vast treasure of arms and armor believed to have gone down with the warships.

A team of more than two dozen Greek, Canadian and American experts is seeking the remains of 1,000 or so triremes, both Greek and Persian, as well as hundreds of support vessels. The hunt is alluring, they say, because the sea is far more likely than land to have preserved artifacts from the Persian Wars. The victorious Greeks, who named them, saw the series of battles as a defining moment: the defeat of a ruthless state that had enslaved much of the known world from the Balkans to the Himalayas. [continue]

You'll need a password if you want to read the rest of the article.

Related Mirabilis.ca content:
Trireme replica

From iol.co.za: Ancient inscribed slab brought to light.

A team of German and Egyptian archaeologists working in the Nile Delta has unearthed "quite a remarkable" stele dating back 2200 years to Ptolemaic Egypt which bears an identical inscription in three written languages - like the famed Rosetta Stone.

Announcing the find on Monday, University of Potsdam chief Egyptologist Christian Tietze said the stone fragment was "quite remarkable and the most significant of its kind to be found in Egypt in 120 years".

The grey granite stone, 99cm high and 84cm wide, was found "purely by accident" at the German excavation site of the ruined city of Bubastis, a once important religious and political centre 90km north-east of modern-day Cairo.

It shows a royal decree, written in ancient Greek, Demotic and Hieroglyphs, that mentions King Ptolemy III Euergetes I along with the date 238 BC.

"The decree is significant because it specifically mentions a reform of the ancient Egyptian calendar which was not in fact actually implemented until some 250 years later under Julius Caesar," Tietze said. [continue]

From Mosnews.com: Smirnoff vs. Smirnov: Whose Vodka Is More Russian?

When people think "Russia," they think "vodka." When they think "vodka," they may quite often think "Smirnoff" — or "Smirnov," depending on what they know of vodka history. The Smirnoff brand has been produced in the U.S. since 1934; the Smirnov brand reappeared on the shelves of Russian liquor stores in 1992 for the first time since before the Bolshevik revolution. Both brands are variations on the Cyrillic spelling of the last name Smirnov, after Pyotr Smirnov, who was the Russian Tsar’s official vodka supplier; both were originally created by Pyotr Smirnov’s descendants; both wanted exclusive rights to Pyotr Smirnov’s legacy and Russian heritage.

Yesterday, the two were finally reconciled. Smirnoff agreed to remove the Cyrillic and the Russian coat of arms from the bottle labels, and Smirnov agreed to tolerate the presence of a similar-sounding brand on the Russian market. But, seeing as there Pyotr Smirnov left quite a number of progeny behind, the Battle of Smirnoff was even more complicated than that.

Pyotr Smirnov’s vodka distillery produced some of Russia’s highest quality vodka, and its name and label became quite familiar to all vodka lovers. After his death, three of his sons continued to run their father’s vodka business until the revolution put an end to private entrepreneurship. One of the sons, Vladimir, took the usual emigre route out of Russia — through France, where, like many other Russians, he gave his last name a Frenchified twist by spelling it as Smirnoff. He started up the vodka business once again, but in 1934, was forced to sell it to American Rudolph Kunnett, who resold it to Heublein Co. in 1939. [continue]

From The Moscow Times: Biggest Bell Is Hoisted Up to a Belfry. [Update: article now available only to subscribers. Phooey.]

SERGIYEV POSAD, Moscow Region — A gargantuan church bell that will be the biggest ever to ring in Russia was blessed Friday and hoisted up to a belfry in Sergiyev Posad, one of the holiest sites of the country's dominant Russian Orthodox faith.

After a blessing ceremony led by Russian Orthodox Patriarch Alexy II, a huge crane raised the 72-ton Tsar Bell to a platform near the spot where it is to hang in the tower at the Trinity St. Sergius Monastery in the Moscow region.

The 4.55-meter-high bell was modeled after a slightly lighter bell that was made in 1748 and destroyed during Stalin's campaign against religion in the 1930s.

The Tsar Bell — decorated with icon-like depictions of religious figures in relief and an inscription saying it was created during President Vladimir Putin's rule — was cast at a shipyard in St. Petersburg and hauled slowly to Sergiyev Posad on a special truck. [continue]

Related:
Church blesses giant Tsar Bell - BBC
Huge Bell Lifted on Orthodox Belfry - mosnews.com

Kew Gardens has an interesting project underway. It's the Electronic Plant Information Centre, and The Guardian has just published an article about it:

Kew scientists are compiling the first volumes of the cyber book of life. In the next few years — in some cases already — researchers, farmers, foresters and gardeners anywhere in the world will be able to click a mouse and call up via the internet a high—resolution image of a rare plant preserved in the herbarium of London's Royal Botanic Gardens for more than 200 years.

They will also be able to study plants in the garden's living collection, examine the field notebooks of Victorian botanists or rare pages from 18th century collections of plant paintings, sift a collection of plants adapted to survive in arid lands, comb through the flora of the Zambesi Valley, sample the economic uses of flax, cannabis or willow, or compare the DNA of orchids.

"What we want to do is make all of the information that we have — an enormously wide and varied amount of information about different types of things to do with plant science — available," says Mark Jackson, architect e—PIC, Kew's electronic plant information centre. "Once you start totting it all up you do get into some pretty big figures. Someone coming to the site may only have a plant name, and that may be all they have. They may wish to know what it was used for; they may want to know if we have any specimens of it." [continue]

From The Scotsman: Priest's crusade to return African treasures.

When a Scottish priest returned a 400-year-old carved wooden object he found in the back of a vestry cupboard to Ethiopia, he thought it might have some religious significance to the people of the African nation.

But he didn’t realise quite how important it would be.

It turned out to be a tabot - a consecrated altar slab and symbol of the Ark of the Covenant stolen by British troops - and when he returned it two years ago, a million jubilant Ethiopians lined the streets of Addis Ababa to welcome it home.

Now the Rev John McLuckie, formerly of St John’s Episcopal Church in Edinburgh, has launched a fresh crusade - to return hundreds of similarly looted items now scattered throughout Britain’s museums and art collections to their rightful place in the African continent.

Among them are more than 1,200 artefacts seized from the treasury of Emperor Tewodros and Ethiopian churches after the bloody battle of Magdala in 1868. [continue].

From Ananova: Batman and Robin fighting crime - in Whitley.

Two mystery men dressed as Batman and Robin have been fighting crime and saving damsels in distress in a small English town.

The pair have been spotted springing into action a number of times in recent weeks on the streets of Whitley, near Reading.

The Reading Evening Post asked readers for news of the duo after they dealt with a pair of streakers at a local football cup final.

And the newspaper was besieged with calls from residents who claimed to have seen the ‘superheroes’ in action.

Michelle Kirby was stranded when her Peugeot 206 ran out of petrol on Easter Sunday - until Batman and Robin appeared out of nowhere and pushed her car to the nearest petrol station.

She said: "They just appeared. I saw them running down the road in Batman and Robin outfits - I was laughing so much. [continue]

Related:
Who was that masked man?

From The Telegraph: Ice Maiden triggers mother of all disputes in Siberia.

High in the Altai mountains of southern Siberia, where Shamans still practise their ancient rites and most people are descended from Asiatic nomads, there is a whiff of revolt in the air.

Local officials, urged on by the increasingly militant electorate, are collecting signatures, writing petitions and demanding audiences with regional political leaders.

Their demands are simple and have nothing to do with the inept rule, poverty, corruption and ecological disasters dogging the region.

They want a 2,500-year-old mummy, found by Russian archaeologists 11 years ago and being studied in the Siberian capital of Novosibirsk, to be reinterred without delay.

Egged on by powerful shamans who local people believe act as go-betweens with the heavenly spirits, they say only the mummy's reburial will put an end to a rash of earthquakes and other problems assailing the region.

The mummy in question is an archaeological jewel. When her ornately tattooed body was found entombed in ice in an ancient burial chamber, the find was acclaimed as one of the most important in Russia's recent history.

The Ice Maiden, as she was dubbed, had survived almost intact in the permafrost of the southern Siberian mountains, surrounded by a burial sacrifice of six horses in gilt harnesses. [continue]

From Wired.com: Winemakers Get Juiced About Tech.

Once, wine meant horse-drawn plows and barefoot workers stomping in a tub. These days, winemakers are more likely to depend on the juice running through their personal computers as they turn grapes into premium vintages.

From software in the cellar to GPS-equipped tractors in the vineyard, a new crop of vintners are getting wired, and shortening their learning curves.

"I don't have hundreds and hundreds of years," says Bill Murphy, who has installed several high-tech tools of the wine trade at his Clos LaChance winery. "The technology allows you to learn and understand about the terroir faster.

"It's the big guy upstairs that's still in charge of all this stuff," he added. "Our idea is to be able to learn about it as fast as we can — to measure as many things as we can, to control the things we can control and understand the things we can't control." [continue]

From National Geographic: Himalaya Honey Hunters Cling to Cliffside Tradition.

Twice a year high in the Himalayan foothills of central Nepal teams of men gather around cliffs that are home to the world's largest honeybee, Apis laboriosa. As they have for generations, the men come to harvest the Himalayan cliff bee's honey.

The harvest ritual, which varies slightly from community to community, begins with a prayer and sacrifice of flowers, fruits, and rice. Then a fire is lit at the base of the cliff to smoke the bees from their honeycombs.

From above, a honey hunter descends the cliff harnessed to a ladder by ropes. As his mates secure the rope and ladder from the top and ferry tools up down as required, the honey hunter fights territorial bees as he cuts out chunks of honey from the comb. [continue]

From The Guardian: Dancing girls and the merry Magdalenian.

The people who created the first surviving art in Britain were committed Europeans, belonging to a common culture spanning France, Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands, according to the man who discovered the cave art in Creswell Crags, Nottinghamshire.

And the essential preoccupations of this single market in ice-age art, it seems, were hunting and naked dancing girls.

The discovery of 13,000-year-old rock paintings in Nottinghamshire last year rewrote ice-age history in Britain. Today, archaeologists from all over Europe are in Creswell to discuss how the finds form part of a continent-wide culture known as the Magdalenian.

Paul Pettitt, of Sheffield University's archaeology department, said: "The Magdalenian era was the last time that Europe was unified in a real sense and on a grand scale." [continue]

From nature.com: Ancient jewellery found in African cave.

Diamonds are a girl's best friend, but shell necklaces were all the rage in the Stone Age. So say archaeologists who have unearthed what may be the oldest jewellery ever discovered.

The 75,000-year-old beads were found in the Blombos Cave on the southern tip of South Africa. A team led by Christopher Henshilwood of the University of Bergen, Norway found over 40 pea-sized shells with bored holes and worn areas showing that they had been strung on a necklace, bracelet or clothes.

The beads predate jewellery excavated from sites in Europe and Africa by at least 30,000 years, they report in Science.

Much like a wedding ring or priest's collar, such ornaments are thought to have indicated people's social status, and suggest that the cave dwellers had a relatively modern culture. [continue]

Related:
Ancient Beads Push Back Birth of Human Creativity - Reuters UK
Oldest Jewelry? "Beads" Discovered in African Cave - National Geographic
Cave yields ‘earliest jewellery’ - BBC

From Scotsman.com: Microchips Guard Dartmoor's Historic Crosses.

Ancient granite crosses which have stood on Dartmoor for centuries are being microchipped in a pioneering move to beat thieves, it emerged today.

Dartmoor National Park Authority archaeologists are attaching tiny chips to about 200 crosses and other granite artefacts across the 365 square mile wilderness in Devon. [continue]

Related:
TV shows spark ‘gardening’ crime

Ancient whalers leave their mark on the north. From Stories In The News:

The high arctic is one of the farthest places from most of the 6.3 billion people on Earth, but Canadian researchers have found that the far north holds some of the oldest evidence of people altering a lake's ecosystem.

John Smol of Queen's University in Ontario is a frequent visitor to Canada's high arctic, a treeless world of tundra, lakes, and constant winds. The Thule people — descendents of the Native whalers of northern Alaska — lived in the area from about A.D. 1200 to A.D. 1600, making homes out of rocks, peat, and whalebones. Though the Thule people left the area about 400 years ago, Smol and his colleagues found that the ancient people have changed the water chemistry of local lakes and Thule homesites are still affecting lakes today. [continue]

Related:
Inuit changed Arctic ecosystem long before Europeans: study - CBC
John Smol - Department of Biology, Queen's University

From Scotsman.com: Literary treasures drip with the bile of ancient feuds.

A piece of literary vitriol from a writers’ spat nearly two centuries old graced the walls of the National Library of Scotland yesterday.

An assault by Lord Byron on Sir Walter Scott in 1809 is the centrepiece of an exhibition of manuscripts from the John Murray archive that will run until 10 May. It faces, across the room, Scott’s gentlemanly response.

The library is gearing up to buy the publisher’s archive for Scotland for £33 million. The exhibition marks the latest effort to highlight the attractions of the unique literary treasure trove.

The exhibition includes the original manuscript of English Bards and Scotch Reviewers.

Byron penned the poem of over 1,000 lines after an unfavourable review of his Hours of Idleness in the Edinburgh Review of January 1808.

In it, he singled out Scott as a "prostituted muse and hireling bard" who dared to "foist his stale romance" on an unsuspecting public for "half-a-crown a line". [continue]

Ancient Islamic texts crumble in Africa. From the Seattle Post-Intelligencer:

TIMBUKTU, Mali -- Lit by a sunbeam slanting through his broken roof, a 16-year-old Islamic student chants verses from a brittle, yellowing page - one of an estimated 1 million ancient texts that experts say are crumbling to dust in this once-thriving city of Islamic learning.

Twice in the past eight years, conservationists working to save the manuscripts have come to this fly-buzzed home of sand floors and outdoor toilets, hoping to buy the disintegrating pages.

But while the family earns no income and lives on handouts, it refuses to part with its sole possession of value - about 40 volumes with ripped bindings and torn pages, heaped in a medical supplies box.

The student, Alhousseini Ould Alfadrou, cites the Prophet Muhammad to explain that holy writ cannot be sold for money.

"So we're obliged to keep them," Alfadrou says. "We're the ones who read them. It's written in these books: Those who read them must protect them."

But scholars say irreplaceable Islamic texts representing a historic era of Muslim culture, including West Africa's unique part in it, are decaying to oblivion in sweltering homes. [continue]

Do you have a Palm Pilot or some other PDA? If not, skip this posting. If you do have a PDA, this update applies to you.

I've changed the PDA-friendly version of Mirabilis.ca so that it will take up less space on your handheld computer. This will be of interest if you use Avantgo, iSilo, Plucker, or some similar thing to put Mirabilis.ca on your PDA.

I've just downloaded the PDA version and the pages it links to, and put it all on my Palm. File size today is only 55k if I exclude images. If I include images (to get those photos on the BBC news article pages, etc) then file size today is 684K. This is much more manageable than the previous version!

If you do read this blog on your PDA, please let me know how this works out for you.

From the BBC: Taming Ethiopia's hyenas.

I Seyyid Abdiweli Abdishakur, a traditional leader who also doubles up as a farmer and a pastoralist, has made a mark within his community by achieving what many men dread to even attempt.

He has trained a hyena to look after his livestock and four hawks to guard his grain farms from destructive birds.

The Hyena and Hawk man lives in the small town of Qabri Bayah about 50 kilometres from Jigjiga town the headquarters of the Somali region in eastern Ethiopia.

When I visited him in his house, he was busy tending crops at his green garden - a rare sight in this arid neighbourhood.

A group of young men were playing with the male hyena, which seemed to enjoy all the action. [continue]

A New York Times article tells about an excavation in Netanya, Israel, where archaeologists have uncovered "a Christian community from the Byzantine era, dating from either the fifth or sixth century..."

After two months of digging at the site, archaeologists have produced increasingly intriguing finds. Limestone foundations of a religious site have been unearthed, built around a series of well-preserved tile mosaics. The Israel Antiquities Authority believes that it was either a church, or possibly a convent, according to written records from the period.

The site includes the base of a baptismal font and a crypt that was presumably for a holy person, the archaeologists say.

Nearby, they found foundations of buildings that were used for storing agriculture products. Items like pottery, coins and bones have been removed, but archaeologists would like to spend several more months on the project.

"We would still have to dig much more to get the full picture of life here," said Gili Hillel, one of two archaeologists from the Antiquities Authority in charge of the excavation. "It is a large site, but we don't yet know how large." [continue]

Related:
reprint of NYT article at iht.com (No password required)

Here's an explanation of Smigus Dyngus from NewPoland Traditions:

There is one day in the year when the consumption of water in Poland shoots up. This is Easter Monday, and it is due to an ancient custom which is still observed both in villages and cities. It is a delightful tradition, Dyngus or Smigus as this custom is called. There are two versions: one amiable and elegant when it is only a matter of a gentle sprinkling with water or scent, the other quite merciless when whole bucketfuls come into play.

The custom of pouring water is an ancient spring rite of cleansing, purification, and fertility. The pagan Poles bickered with nature — Dingen — by means of pouring water and switching with willows to make themselves pure and worthy of the coming year. Tradition also states that the first Polish ruler Prince Mieszko The First (960-992), along with his court was baptized on Easter Monday in 966.

The first recorded Polish writing on Dyngus dates back to the Middle Ages. A Polish historian wrote of what he called the Oblewania. "It is the universal custom, among the common masses as well as among the distinguished, for men to soak the women on Easter Monday. On Tuesday, and every day thereafter until the time of the Green Holidays — Pentecost — the women doused the men."

Dyngus began somewhat around five in the morning, and the custom demanded that the house where the women slept be secretly invaded. The men crept through a window or through a chimney. Sometimes the male head of the house himself, in collusion with the perpetrators, let the men into the house himself to have his women folk abruptly awakened and doused liberally with water. The spirit of Dyngus is described in this lively description from the Poznan region during 1800s:

"Barely had the day dawned on Easter Monday when I woke the boys and gathered some water to start throwing it on the girls. Up with the Piwezyny! (eiderdown)! There was screaming, shouting, and confusion. The girls are shrieking and hollering, but in their hearts they are glad because they know that she who isn't gotten wet will not be married that year. And the more they are annoyed, the more we dump water on them calling, Dyngus — Smigus! Then we had to change our clothes because there wasn't a dry thread on the girls and we boys were not better off."

Related:
Easter Traditions - warsawvoice.pl
Smigus Dyngus and other Polish old Easter Traditions -bellaonline.com
Dyngus Smigus - ppld.co.uk
Krakow Info - Easter - krakow-info.com

From SeattlePI.com: Documents may prove ancient runestone fake.

Scholars who believe the Kensington Runestone is a 19th-century prank — and not concrete evidence that Norsemen beat Columbus to America by 100-plus years — say they have found the smoking gun to prove it.

The latest in the century-old controversy centered in Minnesota came in documents written in 1885 by an 18-year-old Swedish tailor named Edward Larsson. He sometimes wrote in runes — an ancient Scandinavian language that differs from the English alphabet. But Larsson's runes were not the usual runes used over the centuries.

The scholars contend that parts of his documents seem to be written in a secret runic alphabet used by tradesmen in Sweden in the late 1800s, rather like codes that tramps have used over time to leave secret messages for one another.

Swedish linguists happened upon Larsson's documents recently and found that his writing corresponds to pieces of the Kensington Runestone inscription. They say that the journeymen's code did not exist in medieval times, when the Kensington Runestone is purported to have been carved. [continue]

Related:
The Story of the Kensington Runestone
Kensington Runestone
Kensington Runestone Goes to Sweden
Debunking the Kensington Stone Mystery

From discovery.com: Turin Shroud Back Side Shows Face.

The ghostly image of a man's face has emerged on the back side of the Turin Shroud, the piece of linen long believed to have been wrapped around Jesus's body after the crucifixion, according to new digital imaging processing techniques.

The discovery adds new complexity to one of the most controversial relics in Christendom, venerated by many Catholics as the proof that Christ was resurrected from the grave and dismissed by some scientists as a brilliant medieval fake.

The study, which will be published on Tuesday by one of the journals of the Institute of Physics, the Journal of Optics A: Pure and Applied Optics, examined the back surface of the famous handwoven linen.

The front side of the shroud, on which the smudged outline of the body of a man is indelibly impressed, has been investigated by a multitude of scientists. But the reverse side has remained hidden for centuries beneath a piece of Holland cloth that was sewn by nuns in 1534, after a fire had blackened parts of it. [continue]

Related Mirabilis.ca content
Shroud of Turin
New shroud theory

From The Cracking Of The Eggs! at D'Agostino.

Nothing celebrates Easter in a Greek home like the traditional cracking of eggs! In fact, I bet as much excitement is stirred up in Greek households over red hard-boiled Easter eggs as in Western homes over the Easter Bunny. Cries of "Christos Anesti" (Christ is Risen) fill the room, as children and adults alike hit another's egg with their own. (...)

So if your family wants to have a crack at the Kokkina Avga, or red eggs, here's how it goes: You need enough red eggs for each person to have one (recipe below). Seated around the dinner table, egg in hand, each person turns to the one next to him or her, and saying "Christos Anesti," hits that person's egg. The one whose eggs survives the crack turns to the next person and repeats the ritual (that's right, if your egg cracks you're out!). This repeats around the table until only one person's egg remains uncracked.

The hope is to be the possessor of the strongest egg/shell, which, if unbroken wins. There are a few rules: eggs must be struck directly on top, not on the sides; and the pointed end must attack the other's pointed end, or the round end, the round end.

The reward for having the unbroken egg at the end? Good luck for the year… that, and the pride of boasting about your secret way of holding the egg so that it didn't break, pretty much makes you the star of Easter for the rest of the day.

The page includes a recipe, although I'd rather use a food-based dye than the one the recipe mentions.

From The Telegraph: Christening spoon found in grave of Saxon king.

An ancient silver spoon buried in the grave of an early Christian king may be one of the earliest christening spoons found in Britain, archaeologists said yesterday.

The spoon was discovered alongside a lyre and copper box for holding relics in the burial chamber of the so-called Prince of Prittlewell, a high-ranking aristocrat who lived in Essex 1,400 years ago. [continue]

From Scotsman.com: ‘Sensational’ discoveries unearthed in Roman armoury.

Archaeologists in Germany have described a Roman weapons dump discovered near the city of Göttingen as a "sensational find" that is yielding valuable military artefacts.

Excavations on the site have just started, but more than 250 metal objects, most of them weapons or tools used by Roman legionnaires in 10BC, have been found. They include several rare examples of a soldier’s axe, an all-purpose Swiss army knife of its day.

"We are particularly pleased with these: they are a rare find because they were usually so prized by the legionnaires that they rarely left their sides," said the chief archaeologist, Klaus Grote. "It is a sensational find for research purposes."

The site served as an ordnance depot for Roman troops fighting Germanic tribes farther north. [continue].

From abc.net.au: Rome church opens after 12 centuries under rubble.

After 12 centuries under rubble and 24 years of restoration, Rome has opened the doors to Santa Maria Antiqua, the oldest church in the Roman Forum's ancient ruins and its rare collection of early medieval art.

An earthquake buried the church and its numerous Byzantine and early Christian frescoes in 847 and it remained untouched until excavation and reconstruction began in 1900. [continue]

The Department of Archaeology of Rome's Project Santa Maria Antiqua site has information about the church, and photos, too.

Related:
Churches of Rome: Santa Maria Antiqua

This afternoon I browsed through a book called Ukrainian Easter Eggs And How We Make Them. It includes directions and designs, and also some information about the tradition and history of making pysanky. This part was particularly interesting:

Before a Ukrainian woman could make pysanky, she was supposed to be in a perfect spiritual state of mind. The previous day was spent peacefully: She would avoid gossip, deal with her family patiently and cook a good dinner.

Pysanky were made at night after the children were asleep. Only women in the family could work together and no one else was allowed to peek, since the purpose of creating pysanky was to transfer goodness from the household to the designs and push away evil. This was a mystical expression and not a social event. The fresh eggs were gathered from hens where a rooster was in residence, for, according to belief, if pysanky were made on non-fertile eggs, there would be no fertility in the home.

The women in the family asked different blessings for each egg, for they felt their good wishes travelled with the pysanka. Special songs were sung quietly, so the souls (dukhe) which were said to inhabit the night, would not be disturbed.

Related:
Pysanky: Ukrainian Easter eggs - Mirabilis.ca, April 8th, 2004.

Today I learned how make Ukrainian Easter eggs, which are called pysanky. The process requires beeswax, pots of dye, a little stylus thingy called a kistka, and some patience. But what fun! Here's how it's done, step by step, and here are more directions. Very, very cool.

If you'd like to make your own pysanka, you'll need some supplies - check out the links below or do a websearch for pysanky supplies in your area. (By the way: pysanka is singular, and pysanky is plural.)

And oh! If you live in Vancouver you can do what I did, and take a Baba's Beeswax pysanky workshop.

Related:
UkrainianEgg.com (Watch as initial graphic changes.)
The traditional Ukrainian Egg
Psanky Eggs - Ukrainian Egg Dyeing
Psankyshowcase.com

Pysanky supplies available through:
UkrainianEgg.com - supplies made in BC
Ukrainian Egg Art Supplies - Nova Scotia
TerenCanada.com
Baba's Beeswax Richmond, BC
Ukrainian Giftshop - Minnesota, USA

From The Guardian: Holy week around the world. 8 snapshots.

From nature.com: Birds catch flies with bendy beaks.

Hummingbirds have bendy lower beaks to help them catch insects, research reveals. The flexibility allows long-beaked birds to open their mouths wide enough to hunt on the wing.

Hummingbirds use their long, narrow beaks to probe flowers for nectar, but they also need insects for essential nutrients. It wasn't clear how they could catch them; birds that hunt flying insects usually have short beaks to help them open their mouths wide. [continue].

From Chapter 1 of Ghost Town, which is the account of a woman named Elena who rides her motorcycle through the Chernobyl area.

I have ridden all my life and over the years I have owned several different bikes. I ended my search for a perfect bike with a big Kawasaki Ninja that boasts a mature 147 horse power, some serious bark, is fast as a bullet and comfortable for a long trips.

I travel a lot and one of my favorite destinations is through the so called Chernobyl "dead zone", which is 130kms from my home. Why my favorite? Because one can take long rides there and not see any single car or any single soul.

The people there all left and nature is blooming. There are beautiful woods and lakes.

In places where roads have not been travelled by trucks or army vehicles, they are in the same condition they were 20 years ago - except for an occasional blade of grass that discovered a crack to spring through. Time does not ruin roads, so they may stay this way until they can be opened to normal traffic again........ a few centuries from now. [continue]

Thanks to Marja-Leena Rathje for writing to tell me about this site.

Update, May 27th, 2004:
"Girl Photoblogs Chernobyl on Motorcycle" thing a fraud? - BoingBoing.net

From The Jakarta Post: Capt. Sedana sails ancient trade route.

Some people considered Navy Captain I Gusti Putu Ngurah Sedana brave for attempting a voyage from Jakarta to Ghana aboard a traditional wooden sailing ship. Others just thought he was crazy. But everyone will be amazed by the stories he has to tell.

The captain recently commanded the Borobudur Samudraraksa, a ship designed based on reliefs from the Borobudur Temple in Central Java, to retrace the cinnamon route taken by Indonesian merchants in the eighth century to sell spices to Africa.

Fourteen or 15 seafarers, half the crew foreigners and half Indonesians, were on board at all times. The Indonesian crew included three boatmakers and 10 inexperienced civilians, who took turns on the four legs of the journey.

The ship, 4.25 meters wide and 18 meters long, contained no iron or nails, with coconut fiber binding it together. Although it contained state-of-the-art equipment -- a global positioning satellite and NavTex to broadcast information on navigation routes -- the ship was at the mercy of nature, with only two sails to catch the winds, its sole driving force. [continue]

Related content on Mirabilis.ca:
Borobudur Ship replica, January 04 update
Borobudur Ship replica, July '03 update
Borobudur Ship replica

There are three types of health related articles I love to see on the web. They are: coffee is good for you, wine is good for you, and chocolate is good for you.

In the chocolate is good for you category, the latest contribution is from New Scientist: Chocolate in pregnancy keeps baby happy. That must mean that chocolate is good for us all, don't you think?

(If you disagree, just keep it to yourself. No point spoiling my happy fantasy.)

From the Guardian: How to fight the gorilla war at work - use chimp talk.

Don't be a chump, be a chimp. Don't hail the boss with a meaningless greeting, try a thoughtful grunt instead. If that doesn't get a rise, try grooming your dominant colleague and see if it smartens up office relationships. If things start to go wrong, don't swear, just emit a short, high-pitched "oo oo oo" call and watch your colleagues swing into action.

Zoologists want a few hundred volunteers to ape humanity's nearest relative, the chimpanzee - and perhaps learn to get along a little better. "When we as keepers are working with the chimps, we use their language to communicate with them," said David Field, curator of mammals for the Zoological Society of London. "Our feeling is that if we can communicate this way with the chimps and build bridges, there is a chance we can build bridges within the work environment as well." [continue]

Oh right. You do it and I'll watch, ok?

From The Art of Second Language Conversation, Linda Besner's article at The Dominion.

When I talk to my new friend Tom, we're not just talking-- we're metatalking. When I ask him how he's enjoying the weather, he tells me he is not enjoying it at all because it has too many future tenses. "Will it rain?" he asks me. Then answers himself, "In the afternoon it may begin to rain." "It will soon be raining." [continue]

I loved this article, especially the bit about the best part of a flower.

The other day I was noodling around on the web and came across The Classics Pages, which is Andrew Wilson's website. He's the guy who translated Harry Potter into ancient Greek! Andrew's Greek Harry Potter page explains how he got the job, and gives interesting details about the translation, such as this:

Quidditch becomes i)karosfairikh/ (on the analogy of podosfairikh/ for football and kalaqosfairikh/ for basketball- with which Quidditch is compared). Lucian calls Menippus the philosopher Icaromenippus after his alleged trip to the moon - that's where I got the idea. The quaffle has the near homophone (with the sort of metathesis that Greeks often applied to foreign words) kolofw=n which means a ball in Greek, and a bludger is r(opalosfai/rion, reminding us of a ball which acts like Heracles' club! The snitch is fqaste/on, meaning "that which must be anticipated" from fqa/nw, a fantastic Greek verb with no English equivalent, meaning "I do something before someone else realises that I'm doing it". The philosopher's stone (why the apostrophe before the s, I asked myself?) becomes h( tou= filoso/fou li/qos - if you are worried about the gender of l/iqos, I assure you it becomes feminine when referring to a special stone. [continue]

Mosts excellent. (Sorry the Greek text doesn't display properly; it's the same on Andrew's page. You people who read Greek will have to use your imagination a bit.)

While at the Harry Potter in Greek page, do note the links on the left side of the page. There is much to explore on this site, and it's fascinating.

Related:
Harry Potter's Greek Odyssey - CBC
Harry Potter becomes Warrior Cup in Ancient Greek - Mirabilis.ca
Harry Potter in ancient Greek - Mirabilis.ca
Medieval Christian symbols in Harry Potter - Mirabilis.ca

Related book:
Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (Ancient Greek Edition)

From the Toronto Star: Trying to go with the slow.

An egg is never just an egg, especially at this time of year. It is a symbol in an edible oval package.

The egg is linked to the budding of spring. On the Passover table, a roasted egg represents a ritual offering and rebirth. At Easter, children play with brightly decorated eggs, oblivious they are participating in a tradition that traces back to a time when early Christians dyed eggs red to symbolize the blood of Christ. (...)

Paula Wolfert takes a keen interest in slow eggs. She explores their nature in her latest book, The Slow Mediterranean Kitchen: Recipes For The Passionate Cook (John Wiley & Sons, $53.95, 2003).

Wolfert's Sephardic Oven-Roasted Eggs mimic an old Mediterranean tradition of burying eggs overnight in the ashes of a dying fire. Drops of albumen seep from the shell and blacken, hinting of the subtle smoky flavour within. Peeled, the eggs are tea-coloured, with mottling and, sometimes, darker veins of colour.

But slow doesn't necessarily mean better.

For Huevos Haminados, a Sephardic Passover specialty, eggs are simmered up to 12 hours in a bath with red onion skins or Turkish coffee grounds. Wolfert re-creates this in a slow cooker, adding to the water handfuls of dried red onion skins, olive oil, sea salt and ground cumin. She keeps the lid off to lower the temperature.

Curious, I try it. [continue]

The article includes many interesting tidbits about eggs, and some recipes, too. You must at least go see the photo of the mabled tea eggs.

Related book:
The Slow Mediterranean Kitchen : Recipes for the Passionate Cook

From abc.net.au: Roman gladiators were fat vegetarians.

Roman gladiators were overweight vegetarians and not the muscle-bound men protrayed by actors like Russell Crowe, anthropologists say.

Austrian scientists analysed the skeletons of two different types of gladiators, the myrmillos and retiariae, found at the ancient site of Ephesus, near Selsuk in Turkey.

"Tests performed on bits of bone taken from the skeletons of some 70 gladiators buried at Ephesus seem to prove that they ate mainly barley, beans and dried fruit," said Dr Karl Grossschmidt, who took part in the study by the Austrian Archaeological Institute

"This diet, which has been mentioned in the oral history, is rather sad but it gave the gladiators a lot of strength even if it made them fat," said Grossschmidt who is a member of the University of Vienna's Institute of Histology and Embryology.

The Austrian palaeoanthropologists relied on a method known as elementary microanalysis that allows scientists to determine what a human being ate during his or her lifetime. [continue].

So there's a replica of an ancient ship in Greece, and it'll be used to carry the Olympic torch. From sfgate.com: Ancient Greek ship replica repaired for Olympics.

The wooden trireme, with three levels of oars and a bronze ram used to sink rival ships, was put on display at the private Elefsis shipyards, near Athens, after an eight-month project to restore the vessel built in 1987. [...]

The warship's deadly speed and maneuverability helped Athens defeat the far larger Persian fleet at the 480 B.C. Battle of Salamis. [continue]

Three levels of oars! A bronze ram! OK, I want a trireme. We could take it out for voyages in False Creek and in English Bay, and give all those rowing teams something to think about.

Related:
Trireme - Wikipedia
Battle of Salamis - Wikipedia
The Ancient Greek Trireme and its Modern Equivalent - richeast.org (Thanks to Dappled Things for finding this last page.)

Duchess's poison dell will lure visitors. From The Guardian:

Provided that a duchess can see eye-to-eye with the Home Office on growing cannabis, strychnine and cocaine, Britain is about to get the most venomous and hallucinogenic garden it has ever seen.

Harking back to medieval times, but with a toxic arsenal that a witch or apothecary could only dream of, the project includes shrubs and creepers so potentially nasty that the designers have suggested growing some of them in cages.

Visitors will be kept at a distance from the flowerbeds, with marked boundaries and supervisors enforcing a no-touching policy.

The dell at Alnwick Castle in Northumberland will lie under a perpetual miasma of "deliberately spooky" mist, enlivened by a copper snake rearing from a grotto and hissing vapour, triggered by sensors as visitors creep past.

"It should be quite an experience," said Caroline Holmes, the garden's poison plant consultant, who takes a gleeful relish in her subject. [continue]

Related:
Alnwick Garden - AlnwickGarden.com

From Reuters: Jewish remains give clues on crucifixion.

Jesus is the best known victim of crucifixion. But thousands of other Jews were put to death on the cross by the Romans, trying to quash Jewish rebellions in the Holy Land in the first century.

Yet strangely the remains of only one victim have ever been found. He was Yehohanan Ben Hagkol, a Jewish man whose heel bone, excavated by archaeologists near Jerusalem in 1968, still had a nail embedded in it.

"It is the only case ever found in the world where there is indisputable evidence of crucifixion," said Joe Zias, a physical anthropologist who examined the remains of Yehohanan Ben Hagkol.

"We've looked at thousands of skeletons in Jerusalem. Some were decapitated. Others were mutilated. But we've never found another one that was crucified." [continue].

From NZoom.com: Ancient treasures at risk.

Across southern Iraq, often in the dead of night, tomb raiders and temple thieves are systematically looting ancient treasures that have lain undiscovered for thousands of years.

Using spades and working by the light of makeshift petrol lamps, armed gangs are digging into the shifting sands at the edges of the Euphrates river plain to spirit away priceless artefacts buried with the Sumerian dynasties 5,000 years ago.

Before archaeologists can properly identify and excavate the sites, scattered across the river valley south of Babylon, the looters have already torn apart ancient temples, palaces and tombs that hold clues to the foundations of civilisation.

And since archaeologists don't know precisely what was there, no one will likely ever know what's missing, meaning robbers are stealing history even before it's been discovered.

"It is a crime, it is a crime against humanity," said Abdul Amir Hamdani, director of antiquities for Iraq's Dhi Qar province, as he inspected fresh looting at Dubrum, an ancient Sumerian settlement near the village of Dhahir. [continue]

How Minimus the mus is helping revive a moribund language. From the Sydney Morning Herald:

If the enthusiasm these kids show is infectious, Minimus the mouse might do for a dying language what Harry Potter has done for children's reading.

Minimus is the lead character and title of a colourfully-illustrated Latin textbook created by British teacher Barbara Bell. The course has doubled the study of Latin in British primary schools and revived interest in the dying language in classrooms.

Most importantly, it's fun, say students from the Ravenswood School for Girls in Gordon, one of a rare few schools that teach Latin in primary. "Latin is new, it's different," says Adelaide Pratt, 9, holding her Latin scrapbook proudly. "It's one of my favourite subjects." (...)

Since it was published four years ago, more than 50,000 copies have been sold, with 20 per cent bought in the United States and Australia. Scholastic, the book's Australian distributor, said Minimus had been popular and was also being used in high schools. [continue]

Related books, etc:
Minimus Pupil's Book : Starting out in Latin
Minimus Secundus : Moving on in Latin [ABRIDGED] - audio cassette
Minimus Secundus Pupil's Book : Moving on in Latin
Minimus Secundus Teacher's Resource Book : Moving on in Latin

NZ's answer to Pamplona: the running of the sheep. From the Sydney Morning Herald:

A small New Zealand town reached for some of the glamour and danger of the Spanish bull-run city of Pamplona yesterday - by running 2,000 woolly sheep through the middle of town.

No one was chased, trampled or gored by the animals in the inaugural "Running of the Sheep". And instead of seeking cover, most spectators helped stop the shaggy mob from scurrying everywhere but the right direction.

As organiser John Grainger predicted, the result was pure chaos as sheep, people and dogs struggled along the planned route through North Island's Te Kuiti, a rural farming town 570 km north of the capital, Wellington. [continue]

From Wired: Full Frontal Antiquity:

Egyptologists have pieced together fragments of the first known ancient portrait of a pharaoh drawn from the front rather than in profile, a Spanish archaeologist said Thursday.

The archaeologist said the portrait, which appears to show either Tuthmosis III or his mother Hatshepsut, was painted on a wooden board buried in the courtyard in front of a tomb in the southern town of Luxor.

The piece is unusual because ancient Egyptians always portrayed Egyptians in profile. The only frontal portraits are of foreigners, underworld demons and other weird creatures, including the dwarf god Bes, widely believed to be a cultural import.

Related:
Bes - Wikipedia

From Sable Island: A Story of Survival:

Sable Island, 300 km south-east of Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, is renowned for its wild horses and shipwrecks. It is also an island with a fascinating geology and natural history that reflect the challenge of surviving wind, waves and isolation.

The site includes information on the island's history, nature, and other stuff, too. There's even a fun section for kids, which includes a Morse Code translation thing.

The Sable Island Preservation Trust offers more information about the island, and SableIsland.info has photos.

Net Hoaxes Snare Fools All Year. From Wired:

The infinite power supply does not exist. But for the past two years, that fact hasn't stopped people from trying to buy one.

In fact, ever since ThinkGeek, an online retailer of offbeat gadgets, put up the item on its website as an April Fools' Day prank in 2002, requests to purchase the item have continued to arrive at a slow but steady rate.

"We've had people e-mailing us from all over the world telling us they were very interested in it," said Scott Smith, a buyer for ThinkGeek, adding that no one who places an order actually gets charged for the $200 Desktop Zero-Point Infinite Power Generator. He said the site also receives queries on a regular basis, albeit in lower volumes, for other fake postings, including a USB George Foreman Grill and caffeinated meatloaf.

It's hard to say why some fake products are taken more seriously than others. Smith said he believes customers are fooled largely because the site's real inventory -- which includes such items as caffeinated soap -- is so odd. If a more mainstream site posted the same bogus products as ThinkGeek, customers would be more likely to spot the joke. [continue]

This year's April Fool's products at ThinkGeek: Gastron(tm) - Remote Controlled Hunger Eliminator, PC HabiCase, PC EZ-Bake Oven, CaffeDerm® Patch, The Magic Supersecret Binary T-Shirt (which you can decode here), and the Pet Computer Viruses - Starter Collection.

I love ThinkGeek. Their website is fun, and their service (I know because I order stuff from them) is fantastic.

From Wikipedia:

Some sources say that the special meaning of April 1 originates in the French change to the Gregorian calendar ordered by King Charles IX of France in 1582. Before that, New Year was celebrated from March 25 to April 1. With the change of the calendar system, New Year was "moved" to January 1. People who forgot or didn't accept the new date system were given invitations to nonexistent parties, funny gifts, etc. This was known in France as poisson d'avril (April fish).

Related:
April Fool's Day Has Serious Origins - infoplease.com

Last year's April 1st Mirabilis.ca postings:

Swiss spaghetti harvest
April Fool's Day fun in Norway