Treats

Greater love hath no woman.... I sat and watched Braveheart on TV with my mum!

Now she's gone home, and I took advantage of the trip into Hereford, to see her onto the train, to treat myself.

So I got the graphic novel Ms Marvel Super Famous, Ann Leckie's Ancillary Mercy (the third book in the trilogy - I will be sure to read it while drinking good tea), and Paul Cornell's Who Killed Sherlock Holmes?, the latest of his Shadow Police novels (because I feel the need for something to tide me over until the next Peter Grant novel by Ben Aaronovitch comes out - good as the comics are, they are quite quick reads).

And cake, at Patisserie Valerie, of course.

Remembering Space:1999

On 13th September, 1999, the moon was blasted out of Earth's orbit, thereafter travelling implausibly quickly to visit other planets....

Trowelblazers - Alice Kober and Linear B

The first name that springs to mind when talking about the decipherment of Linear B script is Michael Ventris. Linear B is the name given to Mycenean Greek script which was found in excavations at Knossos, Mycenae and other sites and is the earliest written form of Greek known. There is also Linear A, which recorded Minoan, and has not yet been deciphered, out of which Linear B developed.
No-one ever mentions Alice Kober, without whose work, Michael Ventris would have had a much more difficult time.

She was an academic, an assistant professor of classics at Brooklyn College and in the 1930s she started studying Linear B inscriptions in her spare time, creating a massive card index system. She even had to make the index cards herself, out of old greetings cards and so on, as paper was scarce in wartime America. What she was doing was cross referencing all the relationships between the characters of the script, and the frequency of their use - all essential work to find out the meaning behind the symbols. At the same time, she was learning a variety of ancient languages, including Hittite, Akkadian, Old Persian, and Chinese. She also studied field archaeology in New Mexico and Greece, and also learned Braille, to transcribe textbooks, library materials and exams for blind students at the college.
In 1946, she won a Guggenheim Fellowship, to study Linear B full time for a year. She spent some time in Oxford, copying inscriptions found by Sir Arthur Evans at Knossos, and she discovered that the language she was transcribing was an inflected one, written in a syllabic script.
She died in 1950, at the age of 43, possibly of cancer, as she was a chain smoker. She had met Michael Ventris once, and reportedly didn't like him, but she did leave him her archive when she died. Michael Ventris took over her work, and discovered that the inscriptions were lists of commodities in Mycenaean Greek two years later. Before he could write a book about how he did it he, too, died - in a car crash at the age of 34.

A Pair of Gaiters

I saw a pair of gaiters on a market stall in the Buttermarket in Hay today. They were only £10, and nice leather, so I took them home with me. Sadly, they were made for skinny little legs, and the buckles were purely decorative over a solid seam.
Fortunately, I have a little craft knife, so I unpicked the seam, cut the lining, and buckled them on:

I have a pair of suitable shoes in almost the same colour, and they'll go well with my brown trousers for a Steampunk adventurer look!

Women Warriors - Lyudmila Pavlichenko

Otherwise known as Lady Death, Lyudmila was a Ukranian Soviet sniper during the Second World War.

She was creditted with 309 kills, making her the most successful female sniper in history, and one of the top military snipers of all time.
Her hobby before the Second World War was shooting, and in 1941 she volunteered for the infantry, being assigned to the 25th Rifle Division, where she became one of 2,000 female snipers in the Red Army - only about 500 of whom survived the war.
In 1942, she was wounded by mortar fire, and taken out of combat. Instead she was sent on a publicity tour of the USA, meeting President Roosevelt (the first Soviet citizen to be recieved by a US President). Woodie Guthrie wrote a song about her.
She also toured Canada, where she was presented with a Winchester rifle which is now on display in the Central Armed Forces Museum in Moscow.
In the UK, she visited the cathedral ruins at Coventry, and several factories in Coventry and Birmingham, and collected over £4,000 from Coventry workers to pay for three X-ray units for the Red Army.
Back in the Soviet Union, she became an instructor, and trained snipers until the end of the war.
In 2015, a film of her life was made, called Battle for Sevastopol ("Unbreakable" in Ukranian), and her portrait has also been used on Russian postage stamps.
She died in 1974 after a career as a historian.

Steampunk Accessories

A friend shared this picture with me on Facebook. It's made by Broadarrow Jack Leather, and it's a fan holster!
It's just perfect for Li Bic, the main character in my Steampunk stories, to keep her fighting fan!

Goodbye, R2D2

Or rather, Kenny Baker, who operated the droid. He was 83, and had been ill for some time. Here he is at the opening night of the last Star Wars film:

This picture's from the Guardian.

But he was much more than just the operator of R2D2.
In his long career, he worked as the shadow ringmaster in Billy Smart's Circus, and with many famous British comedians of the 1960s and 70s. He was even a Diddyman with Ken Dodd! He also played the harmonica as part of the Minitones musical comedy duo, and he could ice skate, starting off in Holiday on Ice and appearing in ice shows for the next twenty years all over the world. He was one of those old-fashioned variety entertainers who could turn his hand to anything.