Excuses, Excuses

"You need my what?"

Blogging this week has largely consisted of alternations of CTRL-C and CTRL-V, with the usual 45 minutes consumed finding the perfect image to poach without attribution. Family obligations are to blame. In addition to yesterday's anniversary, my father — who in his retirement seems to have decided to go all LBJ on us and grow his hair long — has been visiting Juneau for the first time, so I've been entertaining him and his wife by taking them to all the usual destinations. Today will be no different. Instead of coming up with something interesting to say on my own, I give you weasel testicles:

Today Prof. Blogger found the following 13th century contraceptive remedy in Martha A. Brozyna's Gender and Sexuality in the Middle Ages:

"Item: testicles of a live, male weasel, castrated by a woman, and wrapped in the skin of a goose or similar, avoids conception" (p. 168).

The Professor wonders what woman has been so desperate for pregnancy-free sex that she attempted the castration of a live weasel. He suspects that the weasel might not be cooperative.

Answers to all the obvious questions about this may be found here.

And speaking of history and blogs, we read a cautionary tale from Ralph Luker at Cliopatra:

I continue to be amazed at what some people will post on the net, even under cover of anonymity or pseudonymity. I got into trouble once for remarking about a female history blogger who posted photographs of herself hefting her bosoms at the camera's eye. In the last two months, we've had a similar situation of a young male history blogger. He speculated about the adequacy of his -- ah -- his male organ, complained about the lack of direction from his graduate school professors, and confessed to indiscretions with privileged information about his fellow graduate students. Such candor won him favor in some sectors of the blogosphere, but just within the last 24 hours acquaintances from his institution guessed his identity. Suddenly, his blog was no more.