Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

Soviet’s practice for the German advance: Soviet officer and partisan child. Goes without saying that neither are likely to have survived the war….

Beach has been wondering more about the legend of snakes as milk stealers: the satisfyingly bizarre idea that snakes suck milk both from nursing mother’s breasts and from cows’ and other ruminants’ udders. Beach has given examples of this belief and also speculated about the origins of this belief: was the idea Paleolithic or Neolithic […]

Watch that spider…

Obviously this never happened. But credit to the hack who came up with it. Note the event took place in France, the favourite land of madness for 19C English journalists… A curious duel has taken place in a travelling circus temporally stationed in village outside Paris. Two acrobats quarrelled and resolved to fight a duel. […]

Thinking of poor Carrie Fischer today. The crew before filming began.

Mmmmm….

From 1060-1091 Christian warriors, ‘Normans’, defeated the Islamic powers in Sicily and returned the island to the Catholic flock. For most historians this is the end of Arab civilization there, with the exception of some starbursts of Arab architecture and Arab art through the next two to three generations. However, there is one final Arab […]

Frankel, High Noon: The Hollywood Blacklist and the Making of an American Classic As long as it is not too political (ahem)….

An autobiographical post. For the last months I have been invited by a friend to help with her shiatsu training. Shiatsu, for readers who might not know, is a form of Japanese massage where the body is pressed in certain key locations. It is frequently described, in fact, as acupuncture without the needles: the shiatsu […]

Carolyn Purnell, The Sensational Past. Beach hates the enlightenment, but loves senses… What to do?

Edith Turner (deceased 2016) was a well-known British anthropologist. She is honoured here as a rogue researcher* for an experience in 1985 among the Ndembu in Central Africa. She was particularly interested in spirit healing and was allowed, at the very end of November of that year, to attend a healing ceremony where Meru, an […]

Bloody Sunday was an atrocity (simply no other word) that took place in Derry, Northern Ireland, 30 Jan 1972. On that day British paratroopers opened fire on groups of protestors and killed, over several minutes, fourteen men. Who was to blame, the individual British soldiers, their officers, the politicians who had tried to put down […]

Soviet artillery dragged into the Oder.

Here is a nice immortal story from late seventeenth century Italy. It appears in a very curious book entitled: Johann Heinrich Cohausen, Hermippus redivivus, or, The sage’s triumph over old age and the grave. If you want to be immortal you should probably give it a read. In any case, Beach introduces Signor Gualdi. There […]

Night-time Soviet Women Flyers…. Note the medals.