Burglar caught in glass window

Here's an article that gleefully begins:

You’ve heard of a pain in the arse? Well here’s an arse in the pane! This would-be burglar was caught in the act as he tried to break into the London offices of coin dealers and auctioneers A.H. Baldwin.

The attempted theft took place on Sunday, March 2, but as the crook tried to force his way through the broken window the smash and grab went wrong – it was he who was grabbed by the reinforced security glass.

One of the proprietors was on hand, and snapped the picture reproduced with the article.

James Watt's stuff at auction

I'm continually amazed at how collections that have been together for hundreds of years continue to emerge at auction. The Antiques Trade Gazette, for example, reports on a recent Sotheby's sale of items formerly belonging to James Watt and his son, James Watt Junior (yes, that James Watt).

Beatrix Potter paintings sold for £40,000+

Two early watercolours by Beatrix Potter, that hint at the children's stories she was to create later in life, have been sold for more than £40,000. The illustrations, created in 1892 or 1893 but never published, were sold at Bonhams' New Bond Street salesroom in central London.

The paintings were probably intended as Christmas cards and show a pair of snow scenes both involving two rabbits wearing blue and red jackets.

A better place to put one's money than a license plate, I think. From the BBC.

Record price for license plate

Unlike in the USA, British license plate numbers can be bought and sold. And some are more desirable than others:

A County Fermanagh businessman has paid more than £50,000 for a car registration plate. The plate, WIL 1, reached the Northern Ireland record price of £40,000 at an auction near Belfast on Wednesday. The man also paid an extra £12,000 in VAT and other fees on top at the Cherished Registration Auction at Wilsons Auctions in Mallusk.

OIL 1 was the previous most expensive plate bought in Northern Ireland, going for £25,000.

From the BBC.

Black slaves in 18th-century Scotland

From a Sunday Times review of James Robertson's Joseph Knight , to be released by Fourth Estate on April 7:

. . . the massive campaign for abolition, in which Scots would be prominent, did not gather real pace until the 1780s. Slavery, out of sight, thousands of miles away in the Caribbean and North America, could also be conveniently out of mind in the coffee houses of Edinburgh. It took one black man’s appearance in 1778, at the Court of Session, in Parliament House right at the heart of the capital, to bring the Scots face-to-face with their own involvement in the trade in humans. We do not know his original African name, but he is immortalised in the legal records as “Joseph Knight, A Negro of Africa”. . .

Joseph Knight was born about the year 1750, and at the age of 10 or 11 was taken by slave ship to Jamaica, where he was sold by a Captain Knight (from whom he got his new name) to a Scottish planter called John Wedderburn. In 1768, Wedderburn brought him to Scotland as his personal servant.

We know very little about Joseph, but he must have been of determined character: after two or three years he had had enough of being another man’s chattel. Having got one of the housemaids pregnant, he married her against his master’s will, then demanded a living wage to keep his new family. When this was refused, he set off for Dundee to find himself a job. Wedderburn, through his friends the local justices of the peace, promptly had him arrested. . .

In spite of the ups and downs of his own life, Wedderburn considered Joseph an ungrateful Negro whom he had treated well, had educated and Christianised, and who lived a relatively easy life, of which many white Scots could only dream. Among these were the colliers and salters, still held in a state of serfdom, bound for life to the landowners whose coal or salt they worked.

Partial emancipation for these people would come in 1775, but the motivation was not altruistic: the coal field proprietors needed to open up the labour market so the costs of extracting coal could be driven down. In comparison with the backbreaking work of the colliers, or of the Africans he had left behind in Jamaica, Joseph Knight might have been thought a lucky man.

Clearly he did not accept this notion. Supported by lawyers who waived their fees, he appealed successfully against his arrest to the sheriff of Perthshire. When Wedderburn took the case to Edinburgh, Knight refused to give in.

After five years of wrangling, the case was heard before the “haill Fifteen”, the Court of Session, which was then composed of some of the greatest names of Scottish legal history. Among them were Lords Kames and Hailes, both significant figures among the Enlightenment literati, Lord Gardenstone who kept a pig in his bedroom, Lord Monboddo the eccentric philosopher who held, against all contemporary opinion, that humans and apes were related, Lord Braxfield the so-called “hanging judge” on whom Robert Louis Stevenson based his character Weir of Hermiston, and Lord Auchinleck, James Boswell’s father.

Orsanmichele restoration news

From La Repubblica, an update on the progress of restoration work inside and outside Orsanmichele in Florence. Among other things, it has been decided that after the current work on the statues from the external tabernacles, there will be one last series of copies made and thereafter no more casts, in the interest of preservation. I would have thought, however, that a digital tomographic scan would be state of the art now, obviating any need for taking direct molds.

More medieval toilets

This really isn't an obsession -- we just report what we read:

Archaeologists have unearthed where monks at Chester Cathedral spent a penny. They located a latrine discharging into a medieval stone drain which still serves the cathedral to this day. . .

Chester Cathedral stands on the site of a Benedictine monastery and a extra storey is being added on top of the former monks' dormitory where the school will be housed.

Archaeologist Simon Ward said: 'Medieval abbeys were renowned for their elaborate water and drainage systems in an age when sanitary arrangements were usually very basic. St Werburgh's Abbey obtained a well in Newton in 1278 from which they built a conduit.

'Then in 1282 they were granted a spring at Christleton (still known as the Abbot's Well) and the following year they were granted permission to lay pipes to the abbey. These led to the cistern or tank in the centre of the cloister from where the water could be piped around the abbey.'

Other finds include Roman buildings believed to be parts of timber barrack blocks from the legionary fortress.

Read more here.

Roman villa found in Wales

Two hundred years ago the famous Pembrokeshire antiquarian Richard Fenton claimed to have discovered a Roman villa in the county.

However, his published account was largely ignored. Fenton, after all, had been known to be wrong before. And it was commonly accepted for many years that the Romans had never ventured so far west. . .

And now, almost two centuries after Fenton's account, a Roman villa appears to have been discovered in the very place he pinpointed all those years ago. . .

The discovery could change our understanding of the Roman presence in Wales and certainly suggests that their influence over this remote part of Wales was much greater than once thought.

Read the full story here.

Larger-than-giant squid caught

A colossal squid has been caught in Antarctic waters, the first example of Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni retrieved virtually intact from the surface of the ocean.

"All we knew prior to this specimen coming through was that this animal lived in the abyssal environment down in Antarctica," New Zealand squid expert and senior research fellow at Auckland University of Technology, Dr Steve O'Shea, told BBC News Online. "Now we know that it is moving right through the water column, right up to the very surface and it grows to a spectacular size. . . now we can say that it attains a size larger than the giant squid. Giant squid is no longer the largest squid that's out there. We've got something that's even larger, and not just larger but an order of magnitude meaner."

This squid has one of the largest beaks known of any squid and also has unique swivelling hooks on the clubs at the ends of its tentacles.

The specimen, which was caught in the past few weeks in the Ross Sea, has a mantle length of 2.5 metres. That is a larger mantle than any giant squid that Dr O'Shea has seen and this specimen is still immature, the NZ scientist believes.

"It's only half to two-thirds grown, so it grows up to four metres in mantle length." By comparison, the mantle of the giant squid, Architeuthis dux, is not known to attain more than 2.25 metres.

From the BBC.

UPDATE: Here's more, with a few pictures, at Discovery News.

From city walls to toilets to city walls

A group of Beijing residents have given up their only public toilet to help rebuild the historic city walls.

The project to rebuild the walls from the time of the Ming Dynasty is being hampered by a shortage of old bricks, according to a Beijing Morning Post article translated by China Daily.

But residents of Wenshuihe Hutong remembered their public toilets were built with bricks from the old city wall and offered to give them up.

From Ananova (which makes the loss of the wall seem like a matter of prolonged deterioration, instead of the huge Maoist demolition project it actually was).

The spear that killed Captain Cook

A gruesome souvenir of explorer Captain James Cook has fetched £135,000 at auction. The gold-tipped cane, said to be made from the spear which killed the famous Middlesbrough-born explorer, had been expected to attract bids of up to £20,000.

The historic walking stick went under the hammer at a sale on Wednesday in Edinburgh. A private buyer from London, who wishes to remain anonymous, fought off rivals telephone bids from America, Australia and Hawaii to secure the relic.

The cane has a gold tip and the inscription "From Admiral C B H Ross to Admiral Sir David Milne: Made from the spear which killed Captain Cook".

From the BBC.

"Copy" of Temple of Concordia found in Spain

La Repubblica reports that excavations at Merida (Roman Emerita Augusta) have uncovered a temple with "extraordinary similarities" to the temple of Concordia in the Roman Forum. Also found were remains of vases used for temple rites, and various coins -- including 20 gold coins of the Visigothic era of a type previously unknown in Spain.

Xian terracotta warriors: slaughter of the sculptors

Once again, La Repubblica beats the English-language press in reporting on a rather grim discovery by Chinese archeologists. It seems that the workmen responsible for the celebrated terracotta army were slaughtered after their work was done, their bodies dumped unceremoniously in a common grave a mere 300 m from the mausoleum of the emperor they so thanklessly served, close by the furnaces where the statues were fired.

Flipper goes AWOL

. . . is the headline in this Australian story on the travails of relying on cetaceans for military matters (note that we haven't heard of any problems with the sea lions).