Split-leaf psalters

One thing I learned about at the conference today.

The thing I was charmed by on the internet!

Closing tabs

Lauren Klein's data visualization syllabus.

A very good stargazy pie.

Main task for the day is to knock off as many of the errands on my list as I can. Including some major tidying up at home - I finally got it together yesterday to transport eight or nine boxes of teaching stuff from home office to work (the hotel-style luggage rack I borrowed from my building lobby is not really designed for that kind of load, but I got it there safely and arranged with department administrator to let me in through the secret handicapped-access door...). The accumulation of stuff in life is a great problem, and really I wish I could live in a monastic cell!

Jakkes of Dover

Tom Nealon on eating Chaucer.

Snakes, pies

More on the snake dress (FT site registration required, plus no squeamishness about public self-revelation).

More appealingly, Melton Mowbray's Pie Olympics!

Pies of the imagination

The life of pie!

Andrew Stephens on Janet Clarkson's Pie: A Global History:

There were those filled with living, affrighted birds (and, presumably, their droppings) — and those stuffed with vast quantities of dead ones (such as pigeon pie, with the birdies' feet poking dolefully out the top). Indeed, where there is a pastry case and a filling — Clarkson debates the finer points of this structure — there is bound to be a pie.

Take the pie whipped up by a Mrs Kirk at the Old Ship Inn in 1835. It weighed 108 kilos and held within its sturdy pastry walls "one rump of beef, two legs of veal, two legs of pork, three hares, three couple of rabbit, three geese, two brace of pheasants, four brace of partridges, two turkeys, two couple of fowls" and loads of flour.

Or there is the daunting 17th-century "bride pie", several distinct pies constructed upon one bottom, that housed "beautiful little things" such as cocks' combs, lambs' testicles and goose giblets, as well as oysters, marrow, interlarded bacon, live birds (or a snake), plus many minced larks.

"They were reduced to despair"

Via the Times Archive Blog:
Curiously, just the other day I was contemplating The Tale of Two Bad Mice: