Hey, I like vests.  They are not as formal or warm as a jacket, yet they step things up a bit.

On to my sock problem.  Ten years ago, I had grown increasingly frustrated with my socks.  Back in the day, I just never wore socks (it was an 80s/Miami Vice sort of thing).  When I started teaching, though, I had to start dressing more professionally, so I bought a bunch of different styled socks.  Well, then I drove myself crazy, because I could never find the right match for each sock.  So I decided to limit myself to two styles of socks…tan and dark navy blue.  That way, it would be easy to match them and I could just throw them in a drawer.

As a historian, though, I should have been mindful of the “Law of Unintended Consequences.”  What I didnt realize is that by purchasing all of my socks at the same time would mean that they would likely all wear out at the same time.  So a few months ago I went to Target, and lo and behold they only sold them in bunches of threes.  That, coupled with the fact that not all my socks wore out, means that I am back to square one with my socks.

In short, I have become the professor that people likely make fun of for not having matching socks.

I have been wondering since my filming last Spring how they were going to present this episode.  It really seemed out of place with the rest of the series.  At the same time, their take on Tolkien was fairly spot on. I also suppose that most medievalists (at least in America) were introduced to things medieval by reading LOTR.  In that sense, the story and the mythos that Tolkien created out of a hodge-podge of a number of different sources becomes a bit of a “common language” of sorts.

I read The Lord of the Rings when I was in sixth grade.  My oldest brother, Tony (who teaches at St. Louis Priory School)  had read the first book as part of an epic literature course at Harvard.  I was reading The Chronicles of Narnia, and while I enjoyed them, it didn’t really click with me.  He threw LOTR at me, and I never turned back.  I’ve always had, I think, sort of a geographical mindset.  When I saw the maps that Tolkien provided in The Fellowship of the Ring, I thought this was the greatest thing ever.  I had a very bad habit in grade school, high school, college…well, always…of reading stuff that I wanted to read and not what I was supposed to read.  I dont think I passed too many quizzes on Tom Sawyer semester because I was too busy reading about orcs and battles and swords and kings.

At the end of that semester, which would have been the Fall semester of 1978, Tony came home for Christmas with some of his books.  One of them was a book called Táin Bó Cúailnge, or the Cattle Raid of Cooley, one of the great epic myths of Ireland.  It was the edition done by Kinsella, and it took me well over four years to read (I mean come on, I was 12 years old).  Again, I think I failed a few quizzes on Catcher in the Rye and Julius Caesar because I was spending my time reading the Tain.  The thought that kept running through my head at the time was “I can’t wait to go to college so I can read THIS stuff and quit reading boring stuff…”  It wasnt until 1992 that I took a class that focussed on the Tain and other Irish medieval literature at Catholic University.  And yes, it was like heaven.

But I also have to say that when push comes to shove, if you want somebody to give a dramatic description of the trenches of World War I in northern France, you can call me, your friendly neighborhood historian.

Of course the story is somewhat timely in that as I wrote this I was thinking Beowulf or the Irish epic The Tain…

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So I took out a diaper bag to the dumpster after dinner, and as I always do I said to Shady, my flat coat retriever, “got my back Shady?”. We went out and heard some rustling and before I could stop my great black hound she had charged into the bushes and attacked a fearsome foe hiding in the dark. She threw the demon beast out and I dragged her away despite her willingness to do battle against the ghastly greyness. I went back to look at the beast and I saw a spot where the head should be…”my God…she took it’s head clean off…”. That was when I saw the devils own tail, a hideous giant rat-dragon thing.

I went inside and told my wife and she said “OUR Shady? WHAT?”

I went back out to get rid of the carcass with a shovel. I kept my distance thinking that blood my spurt out at me and I don’t want to have to get those twenty rabies shots in my stomach. It was then that I noticed…it had moved. I did what any guy would do: I poked it with my shovel-sword, and then it reared it’s hideous hell face, with a foul tongue hanging out between it’s jaws. I poked it again and thought it’s neck had to be broken. I tried to get the shovel under it, all the while keeping my distance.

Then it opened it’s eyes…little black eyes with the flames of hell. It looked at me with dark disdain, while I quickly came up with plan B. I continued pushing it out into the alley, but the damnable beast had to weigh at least as much as a fully grown boar. But as I pushed it I could tell that it was growing more and more ready to do battle with me, a battle that I would certainly win, but what if I lost my right arm, my writing hand, in the process?

When I got it out into the alley my insticts told me that this would likely be dangerous, with all that room. So plan C (smack it with the shovel) turned to plan D (lift it and throw it in the
dumpster). I propped the lid of the dumpster open (not turning my back, because I know these foul beasts can jump on your back and bite your jugular if your not careful). Then the beast totally opened and reared it’s snarling hissing head. I held it at bay and thought “Demon-beast oppossum, go back to your hell-home and do not return, or you shall feel my wrath.”

It hissed once more then stormed down the alley. I went in and told my story. I now sit writing this to you with my weary battle-dog at my feet.

Some comments from friends and family:

Wow that was bloody.  (Well, if you read Beowulf, its a pretty bloody story)

Do you always wear black?  (No.  The producers wanted me to wear black to look “on the edge”)

Did they fly you up for five minutes of dialogue?  (I actually taped around three hours of dialogue.  Its amazing how the video editing process works.  And actually, I thought they didnt use my best line, which had to do with the death of Beowulf.  When Beowulf dies, the dragon’s treasure is worthless because Beowulf’s warriors turn their backs on him.  So the death of Beowulf is not just sad, it is a tragedy of epic proportion because the basic warrior-warlord bond, the basis of society, has collapsed.  But I think they didnt want to end it on a downer…but it is a downer.).

Having seen a few episodes already, I have to say the production quality is excellent…Im pretty psyched.

The Staffordshire hoard was found by a metal detector enthusiast in July.  The site was further excavated over the last couple months.

Here are some images:

 http://www.flickr.com/photos/finds/sets/…

Unbelievable.

And no.  We didnt find anything like this at Kilteasheen…!

Lt. Comm. McGrane talked about the history of NATO, and I think some of our students were actually a little shocked to hear that a) the United States is, in fact, part of NATO, and that b) if Estonia was ever attacked by an external threat the United States would come to Estonia’s protection.

But I suppose the thing that I always find fascinating about the military, particularly folks like Lt. Comm. McGrane, is how they actually manage massive transport of troops and material quickly around the world.  So if NATO gets a call from the UN to supply ten ships to combat piracy off of Somalia, they basically get them there in like 24 hours.  Just the ability to manage such operations from the top down is amazing.

I had mentioned to him that I sometimes wish universities worked like that…he replied that of course there’s that whole issue of “orders” that really wouldnt work well within a university!

President Vicente Fox of Mexico, the speaker last night, certainly falls within that category.  Last night’s talk, I think, was very well received by the SLU community, and while you have to admit sure, the guy is a politician so he knows how to work a crowd, Fox presented a vision of the world built upon collaboration and community.  What is more, Fox noted that this vision results from his experience in the Jesuit tradition.

In fact, he opened his discussion with what I thought was a very meaningful discussion of leadership within the Jesuit tradition.  He said that leadership is not something limited to presidents and prime ministers, but is a trait that we all have to develop, master, and use in our lives in any number of scenarios.  Leadership in families, among friends, in neighborhoods and of course in politics…it is an idea that we have heard before, but his presentation gave me pause to think on the drive home.

When I showed up at Mizzou in 1985, I had around two bags of clothes and box filled with toiletries.  There was a guy I knew on the floor of my dorm who had a small black and white TV that we used to huddle around to watch three channels in Columbia.  There was a phone in every room (which was a recent advance), but you had to pay extra for long distance service.  I didnt have a typewriter, but another friend had a quasi-word-processor thing that had a single line of text on a small screen.  You would type into the screen, and then when you liked it, you would hit ‘enter’ and it would print on the page.  This did not diminish the age old problem of playing chicken with the bottom of the page as you type…”Oh, Im sure I can fit just one more line, and one more footnote…DAMN!” and then you have to type it all over again.  Reading international newspapers meant going to library where they kept all the musty recent newspapers from around the world that were two months old.

What made me think of this?  I needed a copy of an article on one of the learned families of medieval Ireland, the O’Mulconroys, who were historians of the kings of Connacht in the thirteenth century.  The article was in a journal that we own…but its on microfilm.  I hate microfilm.  I have memories of trying to string the film incorrectly, transcribing whats on the screen, etc etc.

So imagine my surprise when I got the microfilm on the second floor of Pius, walked down to the viewers in the lower level, pulled up the article, and then a computer next to it made a PDF of the article which I then copied to my flash drive?  I was shocked, and told the kind librarian on the second floor that I feel like I’m on an episode of Star Trek.

Anyway…I got to talking with a colleague in Sociology and Criminal Justice (Katie McKinnon…an expert on monkeys…and who doesnt like monkeys?) who was talking with someone that she had met in the Medical School.  To make a long story short…Jason Organ (another monkey person) happens to have done some research into dental micro-wear analysis.  We got to talking…I said hey, we have 150 skeletons in Ireland…hmmm.

So we are going to do a collaborative research project on these skeletons doing dental micro-wear.  Thats basically a process whereby Dr. Organ can look at microscopic grooves and pits in teeth and then, by running some statistical-computer-mumbo-magic, can make significant statements about the dietary patterns of the people.

We have skeletons ranging in date from seventh to fourteenth century…we will likely be able to assess changes in dietary patterns over that time.  We may even try to find another sample from an exclusively Anglo-Norman context, because we have somewhat assumed that our population is ethnically Gaelic…did they eat differently?  I dont believe anything like this has been done in Ireland.

So thanks for that party last year, Fr. Biondi.