…for a belated holiday present for your favorite steampunk/airship pirate wannabe/pulp aficionado/Edwardian engineering fan/over-the-top Burner who’s gonna out-do that damn motorized dragon, might I suggest that you could do worse than get them a copy of D’Orcy’s Airship Manual: An international register of airships with a compendium of the airship’s elementary mechanics?

How could you go wrong? It has the word ‘compendium’ in the subtitle!

Hey… does this belong under DIY, too?

[via The Stranger, from an article that's also worth your while about a Seattle-area bookstore that has installed a print-on-demand Espresso Book Machine.]

Chapter 11
(more…)

…if we failed to observe the 200th anniversary of Edgar Allan Poe’s birth.

Happy Birthday, Edgar.

(a red-faced thanks to Evil Mommy for reminding us…)

Early in June I woke at dawn to let my dog out and found a wooden crate, the type used decades ago by a tea importer, outside the back door. The box was nearly identical to one I had found in an old barn in Ohio years earlier. The Ohio crate had contained diaries and journals of several people as well as newspapers and photographs – all from the 1890s – and a previously unknown story from author William Hope Hodgson that appeared to have been written in 1913 shortly before he left for the war that claimed his life. I had published several of the diary entries and the Hodgson story online as The Mystery of the Haunted Vampire.

My dog sniffed the box outside the back porch door with a suspicious air before she walked off to do her business under the trees.

I looked around, but did not see anyone. On top of the crate was an envelope with a handwritten note inside. The writer claimed to have tracked me down and left the chest to me because of my previous interest in the contents of the other crate. I carried the crate inside with my dog following at my heels. I set it on the kitchen table. Inside I found letters, notebooks, folders holding sheaths of yellowed, typewritten manuscripts, and a photo album containing dozens of images from the 1920s and 1930s.

As my morning coffee brewed, I glanced through the contents of the folder on top. It appeared to have been a manuscript written in the style of a 1930s pulp magazine story. My first guess was, of course, that the story was fictional. But as I went through the box and read the notebooks and what appeared to be investigation reports I began to wonder. I now suspect the story referred to actual events and the unknown author wrote up the account as a fictional story. I do not know if the author ever attempted to publish his or her stories, but I suspect from the writing style they were intended for Weird Tales or another pulp horror or adventure magazine such as Weird Spicy Tales.

In the initial story, with chapters posted on Fridays (photos on Wednesdays), and in other stories, there are references to other investigations, hidden pasts, dark deeds referenced only in passing, and secret organizations. I shall do my best to fill in the blanks where possible, but those secrets might be hidden away in other crates, perhaps to be unveiled at a later date.

Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15

Written on the back of a photo found in the mysterious crate: “My friends celebrate a victory.” Other references refer to Beau Jackson as having volunteered to fight for the Loyalists in the Spanish Civil War in 1936.

Ghoulville?

LEAVENWORTH, Kan. — Some Leavenworth residents have been unknowingly walking around above an underground city, and no one seems to know who created it or why.

Windows, doors and narrow paths beneath a title company at South Fourth and Delaware streets lead to storefronts stretching several city blocks and perhaps beyond.

snip

Some speculate the underground town was created in the 1800s and could have been used during slavery or for fugitives.

“We know that it was pretty secretive, whatever it was that was down here, because not too many people know anything about it,” Lemons said.

From The New York Times:

After a closer examination of the Antikythera Mechanism, a surviving marvel of ancient Greek technology, scientists have found that the device not only predicted solar eclipses but also organized the calendar in the four-year cycles of the Olympiad, forerunner of the modern Olympic Games.

The new findings, reported Wednesday in the journal Nature, also suggested that the mechanism’s concept originated in the colonies of Corinth, possibly Syracuse, in Sicily. The scientists said this implied a likely connection with the great Archimedes.

Archimedes, who lived in Syracuse and died in 212 B.C., invented a planetarium calculating motions of the Moon and the known planets and wrote a lost manuscript on astronomical mechanisms. Some evidence had previously linked the complex device of gears and dials to the island of Rhodes and the astronomer Hipparchos, who had made a study of irregularities in the Moon’s orbital course.

The Antikythera Mechanism, sometimes called the first analog computer, was recovered more than a century ago in the wreckage of a ship that sank off the tiny island of Antikythera, north of Crete. Earlier research showed that the device was probably built between 140 and 100 B.C.

snip

The mechanism’s connection with the Corinthians was unexpected, the researchers said, because other cargo in the shipwreck appeared to be from the eastern Mediterranean, places like Kos, Rhodes and Pergamon. The months inscribed on the instrument, they wrote, are “practically a complete match” with those on calendars from Illyria and Epirus in northwestern Greece and with the island of Corfu. Seven of the months suggest a possible link with Syracuse.

Inscriptions also showed that one of the instrument’s dials was used to record the timing of the panhellenic games, a four-year cycle that was “a common framework for chronology” by the Greeks, the researchers said.

“The mechanism still contains many mysteries,” Dr. Freeth said, citing questions about some of the remnant gears and a star almanac at the front that has confounded the experts.

It even predates DOS!

The good question down lower in the story is why the technology disappeared.

University of Maryland:

College Park, Md. – The modern Olympic ideals differ dramatically from the way the games were actually played in ancient Greece, says a University of Maryland classicist who has heavily researched the Olympic past. The ancient games featured professionals with a “winning is everything” philosophy.

“Ancient Olympiads were more like the modern PGA golf circuit than the amateur ideal advanced for most of the 20th century,” says Hugh Ming Lee, a professor of classics at the University of Maryland. “The Greeks and Romans awarded honors to the most accomplished athletes and paid them for their efforts. These professionals traveled a competitive circuit. The Vince Lombardi notion of winning is much closer to the original Olympic spirit.”

Ancient athletes resorted to various “potions” to gain a competitive edge. “The dung of a wild boar was honored for the powers it conferred on charioteers,” Lee points out. “Even the emperor Nero tried it.”

Modern-day ‘Ultimate Fighting’ resembles the Greek’s pankration, where almost everything short of eye-gouging and biting was permitted. “If it weren’t for the nudity, the ancient games would have played well on modern TV,” Lee says.

The ancient Greeks played the games under a flag of truce to give athletes safe passage. The games offered a respite from war, according to Lee. The athletes ran the final race of the Olympiad in armor, perhaps to acknowledge the coming end of the truce.

Will they be drug testing for wild boar dung at the Beijing games?

From the Truth is Stranger Than Fiction department comes this item from the Telegraph UK: The original Indiana Jones: Otto Rahn and the temple of doom

Like Jones, Rahn was an archaeologist, like him he fell foul of the Nazis and like him he was obsessed with finding the Holy Grail – the cup reputedly used to catch Christ’s blood when he was crucified. But whereas Jones rode the Grail-train to box-office glory, Rahn’s obsession ended up costing him his life.

However, Rahn is such a strange figure, and his story so bizarre, that simply seeing him as the unlikely progenitor of Indiana Jones is to do him a disservice. Here was a man who entered into a terrible Faustian pact: he was given every resource imaginable to realise his dream. There was just one catch: in return, he had to find something that – if it ever existed – had not been seen for almost 2,000 years.

[O]ne day in 1933 he received a mysterious telegram offering him 1,000 reichsmarks a month to write the sequel to [his book about his 1931 attempt to find the Holy Grail in caverns linked to the Cathars, called] Crusade Against the Grail. The telegram was unsigned, but he was instructed to go to an address in Berlin – 7 Prinz Albrechtstrasse.

When he arrived, he was understandably surprised to be greeted by the grinning figure of Heinrich Himmler, the head of Hitler’s SS. Not only had Himmler read Crusade Against the Grail; he’d virtually committed the thing to memory. For the first time in his life Rahn met someone even more obsessed with finding the Grail than he was. Indeed, so confident was Himmler of finding the Grail that he’d already prepared a castle – Wewelsburg in Westphalia – for its arrival. In the basement, surrounded by busts of prominent Nazis, was an empty plinth where the Grail would go.

[...]

What gives Rahn’s dilemma peculiar piquancy is that there’s evidence to suggest that he was Jewish himself – although it’s not clear if he was aware of it. He was also gay. Bravely, if naively, Rahn began to move in anti-Nazi circles. Nigel Graddon, author of a new biography of Rahn, Otto Rahn and the Quest for the Holy Grail: the Amazing Life of the Real Indiana Jones, believes that Himmler’s disenchantment with Rahn was a result of his failure to find the Grail.

Read, as they say, the whole thing.