I came across this last image and it just hit me hard. How dedicated a society must be in order to organize, fund and construct such an magnificent edifice. I suppose it helped that everyone belonged to the same church and everyone went to church on Sunday.
Google Earth (first image) has become a real pain to use. You can still rotate the view, but the center of rotation is six feet in back of the viewer so you turn the image a couple of degrees and then slide it back and then repeat a zillion times and you can finally get the view you want. There is probably a better way, but it's too early to be learning new tricks.
One does well to examine the Song of Roland (the French, XIth century, chanson de geste) before jumping to conclusions about war. I particularly recommend Scott Moncrieff’s translation (1919), which had an introduction by G. K. Chesterton that has been anthologized elsewhere. He neither glorifies nor condemns war, and actually, neither did Roland in the “splendidly inconclusive conclusion.” War contains both good and evil characters and events, and is never finished in this world. Any final victory must wait patiently on God. So long as there are insane barbarians (the present regime in Iran offers an unambiguous example) they will have to be fought. It is inappropriate to “make peace” with such a vicious and deceitful enemy. And when there is fighting, there are casualties. The Lord — and Christ is not a milquetoast — does not require us to omit this task, and did not condemn it in His Bible. Those who fight for the right, deserve honour; those who insist on “peace, peace” regardless of circumstances are cowards who deserve contempt.
It is sad that there are people, even Catholics, who don’t understand this.
Probably should go read the Song of Roland (translation by Jesse Crosland), but I probably won't because it is 78 pages long.
The Voynich Manuscript is a hand written book from the 15th century. It is written in an unknown language using unknown characters. People have been trying to decipher it since forever, but as yet there has been no success. There are a couple of theories on what it is, one of which is that it is just gibberish written by a madman. Another theory is that it is an encryption of a text in another language like Latin. Today I found this post on Schneier on Security:
Abstract: In this article, I investigate the hypothesis that the Voynich Manuscript (MS 408, Yale University Beinecke Library) is compatible with being a ciphertext by attempting to develop a historically plausible cipher that can replicate the manuscript’s unusual properties. The resulting ciphera verbose homophonic substitution cipher I call the Naibbe cipher can be done entirely by hand with 15th-century materials, and when it encrypts a wide range of Latin and Italian plaintexts, the resulting ciphertexts remain fully decipherable and also reliably reproduce many key statistical properties of the Voynich Manuscript at once. My results suggest that the so-called “ciphertext hypothesis” for the Voynich Manuscript remains viable, while also placing constraints on plausible substitution cipher structures.
The first problem anyone attempting to decipher this manuscript runs into is deciding just which symbols are letters, since the symbols tend to run into each other. And then there is the problem of assigning tokens. Only after that is done can you begin trying to decipher it using a computer.
Bon Appétit, Your Majesty | Official Trailer | Netflix [ENG SUB]
Netflix K-Content
Silly Korean historical drama / romance. Modern day woman has just won a prestigious cooking competition and is flying home to Korea. She opens an ancient book she is carrying, some of the characters on the page start magically glowing and presto! She magically gets transported back a thousand years in time to the Joseon Dynasty.
Because this is TV, she escapes being executed (happens in every episode I think) and ends up running the kitchen in the king's palace. Meanwhile, the king is writing the book that she was carrying.
Stand out element of this show is what happens to people when they taste our girl's concoctions. It is like a psychedelic experience and their faces glow with rapture. There have been times when I have tasted foods that were exceptional. I enjoyed them, but seeking out these flavors has never been a high priority with me. I can see that for some people it could become a bit of an obsession. I mean witness all the cook books and all the cooking shows. Some people are really into this fancy food thing. Kind of like some people are into football, cars, or opera. People are just weird, man.
Have you ever tasted something that reminded you of a taste from childhood? That has happened to me on occasion and even now it influences my food selection. For instance, tuna fish. My wife fixes hers with Miracle Whip and celery, I fix mine with mayonnaise and sweet relish. I put a dash of catsup on my scrambled eggs. I can eat tuna or eggs prepared other ways, but it just isn't the same.
David Warren (Essays in Idleness) got me started. He's talking about John Cabot arriving in Bonaviasta, Rumor has it there is a statue of John Cabot, the English, er Italian, explorer in Newfoundland. But is there really? Google Maps thinks there is and gives me a placemark, but this is as close as Streetview will go.
Cabot sailed across the North Atlantic to Newfoundland in 1497, five years after Columbus 'discovered' the New World.
It is the best-preserved medieval royal residence in Portugal, being inhabited more or less continuously from at least the early 15th century to the late 19th century.
I'm reading The Verge about European exploration from around 1490 to 1530. Seems that one of ideas that inspired the Portuguese to venture around the Cape Horn was the legend of the Christian King Prester John ruling over a kingdom somewhere in Central Asia. Or Africa. Or India. Nobody seems to have pinned it down, nor are we even sure he existed. It may just have been a case of Rubber Baby Buggy Bumpers passed down over the centuries. But Robert Silvergberg wrote a book about him. Robert Silverberg, the prolific science fiction writer, though this one was non-fiction. I read a bunch of his stuff a long time ago though I can't remember a single one. I did read one of his stories not too long ago.
The King - Timothée Chalamet | Official Teaser Trailer | Netflix Film
Great movie about Henry the 5th, based on stuff written by Shakespeare. Well, that's what the dialog sounds like. There is a great depiction of the battle of Agincourt. What makes the movie great is the way it handles the conflicting motivations of the characters, which I suspect is also what makes Shakespeare so great.
I just realized I used the word 'great' four times in the preceding paragraph. Maybe I need to use other words, but none come to mind that I find suitable. Any one of the women whose blogs I link to could probably write a better summary, but they aren't here, so this is what you get.
I heard about the fire, and I got to wondering if I had posted anything about this cathedral before. I did:
The Wolves of Paris were a man-eatingwolf pack that killed forty people in Paris in 1450. The animals entered the city during the winter through breachesin its walls. A wolf named Courtaud, or "Bobtail", was the leader of the pack. Reports of the animal suggested it was reddish in color. Eventually, the wolves were killed when Parisians, furious at the deaths, lured Courtaud and his pack into the heart of the city. There the Parisians stoned and speared the wolves to death in front of the Notre Dame Cathedral.
This was 200 years after the cathedral was finished. Those were different times.
P.S. I originally got the quote from Wikipedia, but that article has vanished. The new link is not quite so sure that this is a true tale.
Okay, half of the movie is set in the present and half is set back in 1492 in Spain back when the Templars were trying to kick the last of the Moors out of Spain. Naturally the Templars are the bad guys. The Assassins are with the Moors. Whether they actually were ever in Spain is something for people to argue about.
There is a good scene where The Inquistion is putting on a big public show of burning some heretics. The have a huge audience. People can accept anything if they are properly introduced to it. Executions used to be public. Not so anymore. Not quite sure why that is. There is also a good scene of a cathedral under construction, and another of the inside of the cathedral where Christopher Columbus was interred.
Assassin’s Creed: 125 Feet Free Fall Stunt - Michael Fassbender | ScreenSlam
ScreenSlam
I came across this video while looking for stuff about the movie. They filmed a guy jumping from 125 feet because they wanted the realism of a real person jumping as opposed to a computer generated character, BUT they didn't do it on the set, which means they had to fill in the background, and they certainly used the computer for that. I supposed they could have taken a picture of the set and then merged the two, but if you have the set why not do the jump there? Which makes me think the background is computer generated. There was a lot of CGI in this movie, but it was very good CGI. Some of stunts in the fight scenes were a little over the top.
Update August 2026 replaced missing video with one on the same topic.
We've been watching the Medici: Masters of Florence series on Netflix. It's not the greatest show, the portrayal of the characters is a little heavy handed, but given the amount of story they are trying to cram into the allotted time, understandable. You could stuff all the information into a dry, tedious documentary, but we want an entertaining story, so we take some shortcuts. The history portrayed is compelling.
How an Amateur Built the World's Biggest Dome
All this happens in the 1400's, which seems to be lost in time, but when Cosimo visits Rome, he is entranced by the Pantheon, which was built over a thousand years before that. At this time, the Florence Cathedral is unfinished, it lacks its dome. Cosimo commissions Brunelleschi to finish it. The techniques used to finish the dome are amazing, especially since the math that modern engineers would use to guide them in their design did not yet exist. James Gillick has an interesting story On the Economics of a Cathedral.
Some things are a little unsettling, like riding horses on the polished interior marble floors of buildings, but why not? Marble floors are easy to clean, the doors are big enough, and why should I have to walk outside to get my horse?
We also have all the standard elements of a good drama: love, hate, intrigue, betrayal, conflict, disaster and successes. We also have some words of wisdom that are truly at odds with our modern, secular, the individual-is-king philosophy. Reminds me of the old saw about how the poor save for Saturday night, the rich save for four generations.
"Bells on Bob's Tail Ring" is almost identical to the line from Jingle Bells, which leads me to wonder if 'bobtail' means what I think it does, which leads to Bobtail, leader of the pack:
The Wolves of Paris were a man-eatingwolf pack that killed forty people in Paris in 1450. The animals entered the city during the winter through breaches in its walls. A wolf named Courtaud, or "Bobtail", was the leader of the pack. Reports of the animal suggested it was reddish in color. Eventually, the wolves were killed when Parisians, furious at the deaths, lured Courtaud and his pack into the heart of the city. There the Parisians stoned and speared the wolves to death in front of the Notre Dame Cathedral.
We've started watching Season 2 of Borgia: Faith and Fear on Netflix, not to be confused with The Borgias on Showtime. In the last couple of episodes there has been a priest making trouble in Florence, and we recognized the actor as the advisor to the dragon lady from Game of Thrones. I'm trying to track this guy down and I'm looking for a summary and I'm not finding one. How can this be? Is this show really that far out on the fringe? I finally locate one in French. Google translates, and then I edited it. All I really needed were the names.
Borgia, Season 2, Episode 4 - Pax Vobiscum
Cesare arrests Savonarola and has him tortured until he "confesses". Pope Alexander VI sentences him to death by hanging, and Cesare carries out the sentence. Savonarola uses his last breath to curse Cesare Borgia and his whole family. Cesare attends Midnight Mass and lights the traditional fireworks Florentine. Alessandro, his lifelong friend, wishes him "peace of God", but the peace of God no longer interests Cesare.
