some peculiar ancient shop signs

a thousand years ago when reading was a skill on par with alchemy, shopkeepers needed a way to alert customers to the types of goods they were peddling without using writing. they did this through iconography (a loaf of bread meant a bakery and a shoe represented a cobbler’s shop). as literacy became a hot new fad, many of these icons were lost to time though a few still survive today: consider the barber pole of the barbershop, the cigar store indian of the tobacconist, and the snow globe of the pharmacist. other emblems have faded over time, but fortunately for you, i have been able to discover a few highly peculiar icons from our bygone days of blissful illiteracy.

• a goat signified the store of the perfumer
• the french king’s head signified the sword-cutler’s shop
• a rampant lion with a cornucopia on each side signified the shop of a silk-weaver
• a baptist’s head signifies a cook’s shop
• three balls signify a pawnbroker
• a dog licking a porridge-pot was a usual sign at ironmongers
• an ivy bush signified an alehouse
• a woman without a head was a common emblem at oil-shops

i don’t know about you, but when i see a dog licking a porridge-pot, my first thought is: “where can i get me some iron?”

__

other peculiarities

obama’s hang loose diplomacy

more politics on the ragb dot ag today! actually, i was just tricking you, i’m not really into politics because i don’t see how power struggles are relevant to how we live our lives.

what i really want to talk about is not obama, but obama’s hand. his hand is in the same formation as your hot coworker’s hand when he signals for you to call him. the same gesture is also featured in the king’s speech when king henry viii needs to measure the distance from his chapped lips to his wireless microphone before he records his historic beat boxing rap about how oliver cromwell was a total jerk.

what all of these hands are modeling is the ancient unit of length known as a span. depending on whose hand is working the span, this measurement varies between 6 and 6½ inches (15.25 - 16.5 cm). it was later standardised (as much as archaic anglo-saxon measurement based on a body part can be) to equal exactly a ½ foot.

i would be in violation of my journalistic oath were i not to also report that the distance between thumb and pinky is a schoolyard metric of the supposed length of one’s willy when at its most tumid. if you ever wondered why i purposely dislocated my thumb in front of jennifer reynolds in the sixth grade, it was because i was hyper-extending my span to a whopping 8 inches.

__

update: a shaftment is the distance from the end of the extended thumb to the opposite side of the hand. (thanks emily)

medici medicine

i’ve been popping a lotta medicines lately: benzocaine for my meth teeth, blackmarket “kraken bile” which helps reduce the discolouration of my armpits, piperonyl butoxide to exterminate my pubic fleas, and reversitol for my prolapsed belly button. but none of my medications rivals the luxuriously idiotic remedy prescribed for the ailing lorenzo “il magnifico” de’ medici:

[His] end, in 1492, was certainly hastened by his medical treatment. [A] famous Milanese specialist…was called into consultation by [his] resident physician…but the case was hopeless. As though to mark the high human value of the patient’s life they lavishly prescribed a potion of crushed pearls and rubies!

gag! can you imagine convalescing all day in a puddle of your own humours riding a nauseous wave of feverish chills and abdominal pain and your doctor is like, “look bro, because you are like the biggest i-banker in all of europe, i’m gonna prescribe you something befitting your stature. what i’m gonna do is crush up some rubies, pulverize some pearls, mix ‘em together with the dopest chianti in all of florence and you are going to chug-a-lug until everything is rad again. capisce?”

i suppose that if i knew that my death was imminent, i would most likely skull the gritty concoction just for the thrills that it would give my coroner. he would be yanking out my entrails and weighing my gallbladder when all these bits of jewels would clangle to the floor like the payout from a slot machine. and my coroner would be like, “cha-ching” and dollar signs would roll into his eyes (euro signs if he is originally from europe) and he would cash in my organs and buy property in (the non-panhandle part of) florida and live the good life until one day when a swat team from the internal revenue service comes a’ knockin’.

sorry for moralizing, but if some idiot coroner ever sells my ruby-studded viscera, HE WILL GET WHAT IS COMING TO HIM. 

__

sauce: the guilds of florence by edgecumbe staley (1906).

he has 2 and they dangle nicely

as many of you know, i spent my formative years living in a trappist priory. while i am no longer affiliated with that order or the religion that it practices, i am still besieged from time to time with mnemonic flashes of arcane catholic lore. take yesterday for example when a friend of mine who restores antique furniture showed me his chaise percée, and all i could think of was the pope and his dangling holy testicles.

according to catholic rumormill, after the [potentially] mythical pope joan started giving birth to a baby during a papal mass and everyone realised that they had a reverse crying game situation on their hands—the college of cardinals had to devise some scheme to authenticate the masculinity of the next pope »

All subsequent popes were then supposedly subjected to an examination whereby, having sat on a dung chair containing a hole called sedia stercoraria, a cardinal had to reach up and establish that the new pope had testicles, before solemnly announcing “Duos habet et bene pendentes” — “He has two, and they dangle nicely.

while two such papal chairs do exist (one is in the louvre and the other is still in st. peter’s basilica), nobody—not even snopes dot com—can say whether or not this comically absurd practice is true, untrue or mega-true. 

__

see also: deuteronomy 23:1

for bestiary: the worm of lagarfljót

hugleikur dagsson is a talented illustrator who has a cult following in his native iceland and is responsible for one of the most demented collection of comics that i have read at the gym. he also works with the reykjavík grapevine drawing up creepy crawly beasts from icelandic folklore. here, we get to see the origin and nature of the lagarfljótsormurinn—the loch ness monster of lagarfljót.

the story goes that a young girl from the Lagarfljót area received from her mother a fine golden ring. When asked how to best keep it, the mother responded that she should place the ring in a chest underneath a worm, something which would cause the gold to grow as the worm did. When checking on her stash shortly after, the girl saw that the worm had grown to such a gargantuan size that the chest could barely fit it. Growing frightened, she tossed the chest, gold and all, into Lagarfljót.

The worm apparently took a liking to the cold, cold lake, stayed there and kept on growing. After a while, it started making a name for itself, wreaking havoc on the entire region, spewing poisonous bile on passers-by, killing men and sheep that ventured close to the lake and generally being a big nuisance. The local farmers wouldn’t have it, so they summoned the help of two Finnish Saami shamans …to kill the beast and retrieve the gold. They fought the thing for a long time, but ultimately failed in their quest. However, they did manage to neutralize the risk it posed by tying the worm’s head and tail to the bottom where it would remain harmless for the rest of eternity. Its midsection was still free to flex and roam and bulge above the surface from time to time, and that’s apparently what people have been seeing every now and then since 1345. 

here are more of dagsson’s beasts. other favourites are grýla (a she-troll with goat hooves for feet who dines on naughty neighbourhood kids who act up) and the huldufólk (hidden people that watch you as you are bandying about in sexual union).

__

source: this

face merkins

everywhere i go, people are always telling me about their trendy new merkins, but nobody is paying much attention to the pubic wig’s northern cousin—the chin wig. yet, the fake beard is almost as old as beards themselves (with a history just as lush).

egyptian pharaohs (and even she-pharaohs) donned gold plated chin wigs (called atefs) despite the cultural penchant for hairlessness. the charming specimen above was recovered from the 4th century b.c. frozen grave of a central asian chieftain by indiana jones.

and then medieval europe caught onto the chin wig craze:

False beards crop up again in medieval Spain. By the mid-fourteenth century they were so much in fashion that a wealthy gentleman might have possessed a whole range of them in various colors, shapes and sizes to suit different moods and occasions. In fact the abuse became so widespread that the king of Aragon banned them. At Rouen, in France, false beards were made illegal in 1508, but the edict had to be repeated in 1513. The fact that there were two official efforts to ban them in such a short space of time suggests that they were immensely popular.

our 16th century rallying cry: they may take our lives, indeed they may even take our beards, but they will never take our face merkins.

__

source: ancient inventions (1994) by james & thorpe
an additional account of anti-facial hair legislation can be found here.

on the wickedness of bakers* -or- moldingbordegate

many people (even pimplefaces) enjoy a good scam story. one of my favourite scams is called the moldingborde gambit and was pioneered back in 1327. to understand the moldingborde gambit, you must first understand that in 1327, there wasn’t yet such a thing as a third generation ipod much less such a thing as a home oven. therefore, in order to bake the family bread, one had to take the family dough to a third party to bake it. this is how the scam starts:

and when his neighbours and others, who were wont to bake their bread at his oven, came with their dough, or material for making bread, he put such dough upon the moldingborde over an artfully concealed hole. He then had one of his household sitting in secret beneath such table. This person carefully opened the secret hole and piecemeal and bit by bit craftily withdrew some of the dough aforesaid, frequently collecting great quantities from such dough, falsely, wickedly, and maliciously, to the great loss of all his neighbours and persons living near, and of others who had come to him with such dough to bake, and to the scandal and disgrace of the whole City.

just imagine ALL THE FREE DOUGH that this wicked baker was able to nick over the years!!! what a scam! however, as testament to the fact that good always triumphs over evil, eight indictments were handed down to 6 bakers and 2 bakeresses in the subsequent moldingbordegate investigation. each party was wrapped with dough and then forced to stand in the pillory while the townspeople that they defrauded pelted them with moldy rolls and screamed disparaging things about their mothers.

__

*does not apply to all bakers.
source: memorials of london and london life (1868).

the htoed

4 hours ago, i came across this boner-poppin’ synonymicon: the historical thesaurus of the oxford english dictionary. consider:

• 40 years in the making
• the very first historical thesaurus to be compiled for any of the world’s languages
• the largest thesaurus resource in the world
• a comprehensive sense inventory of old english

so here’s the problem: i have now had a certifiable boner for the last 4 hours and i guess that it’s time to call my primary care physician to inform him about it BUT all he’s going to do is tell me to stop lurking in the bookstore reference section after chuggalugging gin-and-tonics and swallowing viagra pills like tic tacs. but c’mon doc, I WILL NEVER STOP IT, so you better think of some other way to fix my screaming purple priapism.