Random Medievalist Bits

Apparently Homeland Security Cheif Michael Chertoff recently promised that his discourse would be unambiguously clear, in Anglo-Saxon prose.
What exactly does this mean? Acephalous dissects Chertoff's word choice to find out. Subsequently, and somewhat more tolerantly, Dr Nokes applies George Orwell to the situation.

Meanwhile, J.J. Cohen offers suggestions on how to raise a medievalist.

For some amusement, Dr Nokes offers "Stuck In the Mead Hall", to the tune of the old Stealer's Wheel song.
I've got Celts to the left of me
A Saxon on my right, here I am
Stuck in the mead hall with you
I sent this to my anglo-saxonist mailing list. I believe at least one unsuspecting housecat was subjected to a rendition thereof. That poor cat- first it gets scared off the couch by its owner's distress at my footnote punctuation, then I cause bad filk songs to be sung at it.

Here's a sight you don't see every day: 700 year old church on the back of a truck.

Sydney University are currently ripping up one of the main streets on campus and moving a lot of dirt around in apparently random fashion. Last week mangelbojangel and his crazy theatrical friends sat out on the main road proper for an hour and a half and watched them dismantle a pedestrian overpass. As you do at 4 in the morning. Apparently it was very boring.
School renovations in Twyford, England, are rather more interesting. News via the Cranky Professor.

I love Mr Bill Griffiths

To the modern critical mind it is not only most convenient to study Anglo-Saxon England positively in the light of a Christian state, it becomes almost possible, for the period, to dispense with paganism altogether. For if thereis no self-documentation from the pre-Christian ambit, how can its identity or influence be seriously asserted? What is pagan almost becomes what we are reluctant to let Christianity take the credit for...
- Bill Griffiths, Aspects of Anglo Saxon Magic, (Anglo Saxon Books: Frithgarth, England, 1996), p. 77

YAY!
this is exactly what i think, about all medieval christianity. We want to draw our own dogmatic lines- this is christian, this is not- and somehow expect that this explains a medieval belief system.