Today over thirty volcanoes are erupting.

My new favourite website of the minute… Volcanoes of the World. It’s a chaotic mish mash of volcano photos, volcano web cams, volcano news and maps of erupting volcanoes, advertisements, possibly malware and of course maps! Sometimes I forget just how active our earth is and how our planet is constantly being reshaped.

Source: NASA Earth Observatory image created by Jesse Allen, using EO-1 ALI data provided courtesy of the NASA EO-1 team (https://flic.kr/p/8boLrf)

To the gentleman at the SAH, thank you for your act of kindness and generosity. Thank you for making a hard day brighter for my parents and I wish you and your new family member all the very best.

On the Origins of Fuck Part 2: But what about the D?

so long as it's words

Last week I got to visit the manuscript that started it all. The one with the brilliant little note in the margin insulting some unpopular cleric with one of the earliest recorded instances of the word fuck:

Brasenose College MS 7, f.62v [photo mine, with thanks to Brasenose College, Oxford and Llewelyn Morgan]

What this picture shows is one full page of a fifteenth-century manuscript. The two main columns are a section of Cicero’s De Officiis – a moral treatise on good behaviour – which was the second-most frequently copied text of the Middle Ages. And at the bottom of these two columns someone has come along and written the following:

1.  false are the works wich this Abbot writ in the abbie of Osney alias Godstow 1528
2.  O d fuckin Abbot

This handwriting is found on several pages throughout the manuscript and, very unusually, it gives us…

View original post 1,150 more words