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My brain hurts

May 24, 2006

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Thinking about problematical fossils makes your brain hurt. Don't do it, kids!

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The Shrivelled Hands of Margaret Clitherow

I like a saint with a good honest name. I don't care for any of that soft southern Latin nonsense, like Inviolata Assumpta or Incontinentius Maximus. No, I like a saint with a good honest Northern name. There can't be many better, therefore, than York's own St Margaret Clitherow , beatified in 1970 as one of the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales . St Margaret Clitherow, as depicted on Wikipedia. As is usual for Catholic saints, well-named or otherwise, St Margaret Clitherow lives on in a pretty dubious way. If you go to the Bar Convert Museum , at the crossroads of Ploxwangate and Baggergate , you can admire her shrivelled hand , on display in a glass case. My dearly beloved did so recently. It is her right hand (Mrs Clitherow's, not my dearly beloved's), reputedly cut from her corpse by supporters after she'd been executed * in 1586. As you'd expect for such grisly relics, it is also reputed to have produced miracles**. All of which mea...

The York Insider - Who The Fawkes Was Alice?

As I noted in my recent post about reclaiming the old names of York's streets, Lund's Court used to be called Mad Alice Lane. Mad Alice Lane Numerous sources state that the Alice in etymological question was Alice Smith, and that she was executed in York Castle in the 1820s for being mad: Travel Lady Magazine - "poor mad Alice Smith! The lane was her home until 1825 when she was taken to the castle and hanged for the ‘crime’ of insanity" Wikipedia - "Mad Alice Lane... named after a woman hanged in 1823 for poisoning her husband" Original Ghost Walk of York (as quoted in the Guardian ) - "Alice Smith... confessed to crimes she didn't commit and was hanged" Even the excellent Snickelways of York book claims that "Alice Smith lived here until 1825, when she was hanged at York Castle for being mad." York Castle. (It's only a model!) Sadly, like so many strange and fascinating local tales, this one has no b...

Sign in a cake shop window

Ignoring the obvious grammatical error, this is a very odd thing for a cake shop to proclaim. Surely a successful business model would be founded upon predicting that people entering the shop already wanted cake? Stating baldly that they hadn't made any cakes because they didn't know a cake-wanting customer was going to arrive is naive at best, and fatal at worst. It might explain why the shop was closed. More deeply, I find the reference to the song disturbing. I had to endure it on a 1950s triple-cd that a friend of mine bought in a service station in Kent, and then played incessantly during a continental road-trip. It is twee and awful and lyrically baffling. To be reminded of its existence is not a good thing.

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