We have three doors in our home that have a glass inset, and they are each decorated with a coat of arms. When we moved in, we were told that these had some meaning for the family who built the house and lived here in the first place, but we never looked into it more.

This weekend, after being told that one is the coat of arms of Cologne City, we had a little rootle to try and find out more about the others. It was interesting, even though we remained unsuccessful - it's not so easy to look for specific arms when you don't know how to describe them, and even then it can get complicated.

I've always been half-amused and half-fascinated about the special language of description used when talking about coats of arms. Colours are not red and blue, but gules and azure; there's rules about using metal (white or yellow) and colours on each other; there's bits that are to be included in the description, as they are relevant for telling one variation from another, and bits that are down to artistic license. So I know enough about heraldry to know I don't know much at all - and not sufficient to use portals and search engines to track what we have on these doors.

If you'd like to have a look at some coats, you can do so in the wappenwiki.org, which lists coats of arms from Europe and beyond, starting from those dating back to 1100. It does not have the blazons, unfortunately.

An introduction in the different colours, arrangements, and motifs can be found here. More about the art of describing, also called blazoning, is offered on the website of the Heraldry Society.

There's a bunch more pages, and registers, and databases on the 'net. Enjoy the rabbit hole!

It's time for a link onslaught again - there's way too many tabs open here with things that are hopefully interesting for you, too!

If you understand German, here's a hilarious video about the (not-so-hilarious) ongoing debate in the EU parliament about the budget. It will be... interesting to see how this will end. I do hope that the 25 states who have not vetoed will not give in; that would not only be a bad thing but also the wrong signal for all bullies.

If you live in Germany and share my feeling that there's not enough happening to slow down the climate change, you can sign a petition for the Bayerischer Landtag asking for a greener distribution of funds. Here's the text of the petition, and here's where you can sign.

In case French in Medieval England (and learning it) sounds intriguing to you, take a look at this site, which is about the "Tretiz". There's also a Twitter account to go with it.

More old manuscripts, all digitised, can be found in the Virtual Library of Lauresham. The monastery in Lorsch once, in the Middle Ages, had a large number of books and was quite famous. It's not possible to bring the books back to Lorsch in reality, due to a number of reasons, but digitisation of manuscripts allows a virtual reconstruction of the medieval library - which is free to access.

And now on to some other, more textile-y stuff: There's a Research Center for Medieval Nubia, and it has an online textiles database. There's also an interesting article about textile analysis on the page, in case you're not familiar with this and would like to read an introduction.

More textile stuff: Eventbrite has tickets for several events by the Gawthorpe Textile Collection, taking place as online presentations. You can get insights into the collection for a very affordable 5 GBP per ticket, and the money goes right back to the collections, helping to keep them alive.

Are you a medievalist, and on your own? You might want to check out The Lone Medievalist, which is committed to support those of us not within a local academic network of medievalists, and help form a network.

And finally, if you're using graphs in any form or way, or colour-code things - here's an article about how to choose colours that will let your work be readable to colour-blind people as well. There's not only an explanation about what colourblindness is, and how it happens, but there's also graphics showing what the effects are (as in this is how the colour scale looks with condition X or Y).

That's it for now - hope there's something for you in the list!

Random pictures! No, not here - though speaking of it, you could actually have one:



The random pics I am talking about are actually on my phone... and are helping me to learn Finnish. I've posted a while ago about some of the things I learned about language learning over the years. One of the things that is a rather new tool for me, and that I enjoy a lot, is getting little images and charts and explanation pics via feeds on Instagram. There's a hashtag that I follow where a lot of these turn up, and if there's an especially helpful one, or funny one, I take a screenshot and save the image.

However, having the stuff is good, but not completely helpful yet - these things will only get more language into my brain if I can actually see them. So I've looked for a smartphone widget that picks random images from a folder and displays them.

There's a few of them in the GPlay app store, but most free ones that I tried had some trouble, or cut off the image if it did not by chance fit the frame, or were otherwise annoying. But a few days ago, by pure chance when looking again, I found one written by a German developer called Zufallsbild. This little thing does exactly what it should - you can select a folder or several folders and have it swap the image after a given time, or swap to the next one yourself. It scales the image to fit into the frame, too. Which means that I'm now very happy, and get to see all the nice and funny things on my phone home screen, one after the other.

So if you're looking for an android app for displaying images on your phone, because just having all those funny or nice or beautiful things is not enough... maybe it's the thing for you, too!

While we're all waiting to see how things pan out - both the development of the elections in the US of A, and the development of the pandemical numbers now that restrictions are in place about everywhere in Europe - here are a few things to keep you amused, occupied, or distracted:

I've recently discovered that Eventbrite offers a lot of events (oh thank you Captain Obvious), including quite a lot of free ones where you can join and enjoy a show, or listen to an academic talk, or take part in a course to learn something. Some universities run their course bookings via Eventbrite, too. You can check out the portal here; a search for "archaeology", for instance, gave me 14 pages of hits with events from a flintknapping demonstration to info about aerial archaology.

Alex Makin has a new installment on her blog "Early Medieval (Mostly) Textiles - Christina Petty talks weaving 2/1 twill on a warp-weighted loom here.

If all that is not enough, there's more: The Being Human Festival is also offering a number of events online, with all kinds of different things from quizzes to films, from many different disciplines within the humanities.

Enjoy!

This seems to be the week of happy discoveries: The Bryggen Papers are available for free, online, as pdf files. These volumes include (you may have guessed that from my enthusiasm) the one about textile equipment and its working environment!

There's a bunch of other interesting topics as well, such as children's games, fishing tackle, ropes and cordage, and locks and keys. Go have a look at the Bryggen Papers Archives!

In case you're looking for (research-y) summer reading stuff, you might want to check out JSTOR, who have expanded their free reading scheme from six to one hundred articles per month, to support researchers during the COVID-19 crisis. This is very nice, and very generous!

You need to register with them for access (which is free), and then you can read up to 100 paywalled articles; there is also a number of open-access articles on their page.

Happy reading!

Status of things here: The cat is lounging on my arms (and half on the keyboard) again, and if I have not cuddled her for too long, I get admonished that her ear needs kneading, or her belly needs rubbing, or that she generally needs some more attention. There's a package waiting to be packed and brought to the post office together with the already-packed one (which will happen very soon), the usual stack of emails to be answered and taken care of, and there are way too many tabs open in my browser. Which, as you well know, means:

Time for a link post!

If you like to look at weird design choices for... stuff, check out the Instagram account "uglydesign". It's curated by two designers who are trying to find the ugliest thing there is (just like the name hints) - but obviously, beauty and ugliness are in the eye of the beholder, and I find some of the things not predominantly ugly, but more "cool in a weird way". (Some are utterly horrible to my personal aesthetic sense, though.)

EXARC has a new section about textiles, with a collection of interesting articles that will be extended with new ones as they come up. I especially appreciate that someone else also writes about the "it depends" thing, something that has come up again and again in my personal research and crafting, and that I think is very important when discussing time needed to do something (which, in turn, is a frequent topic both in Experimental Archaeology and in explaining aspects of medieval or historical craft to the wider public).

Now some bits in German:
Here's an interesting article about how much food gets thrown away in Germany, and how much of that would be avoidable. Especially bread, one of the staples, and considered a Very German Thing Indeed, gets binned in a horribly high percentage. Altogether, a third of the food produced ends up in the trash. A THIRD!!!
We've recently had some more trouble than usual with bread getting mouldy, reasons as yet unknown (different types of bread, or the weather, or contamination of our bread box, or a mix of things, or something else, possibly), and it always makes me really sad to have to throw it away. I have a general tendency of seeing food going bad as a personal failure, and I consider throwing away still-edible things as a kind of disrespect towards all the people who have worked on making this food.
This is a combination that you might call... interesting. On the down side, it leads to much chagrin for every bit I have to bin because it's really not edible anymore, which includes those where there was no way of avoiding the outcome (such as fruit that was damaged during transport and instantly changes from "unripe" to "covered with greenish fur"). It also includes me eating dodgy stuff, or things I don't really enjoy anymore because they have to be used, on occasion. On the up side, it means that relatively few food gets thrown away here, and that I have a good amount of creative approaches to leftover foods and their use.

On to something more positive: A medieval shipwreck was found in a German river, the Lippe. The wreck was found by chance by a hobby diver, and now gets checked out by archaeologists. It's about ten metres long and probably about 1000 years old; whether and how it will be excavated is still being evaluated.

And a last German link - there's an Interessengemeinschaft Zugpferde! I didn't know that until a while ago, when I stumbled across it via an article about sustainability in field- and forestwork. For small fields and in some circumstances, it makes more sense to invest in draft animals instead of trying to go "all western, all modern" and get a tractor, or other machinery. The IG Zugpferde tries to keep the draught horse and draught cattle use alive and offers all kinds of stuff around this - from competitions to workshops and courses to learn how to care for and use draught animals. I'm utterly delighted - and I hope there will be more draught animals in use in the future!