pauldrye

In the 1970s and 80s the inhabitants of Chelsea in London were called Sloane Rangers -- a UK equivalent of "preppy".

"The fervor over San Francisco’s glorious new baseball park was cresting. It didn’t matter that the first game was delayed several weeks by a tough winter. When Opening Day at Ewing Field came on May 16, 1914, thousands of fans traversed up to Lone Mountain and poured into their new baseball home."

This flint axe was found in 1912 in West Tofts, a now-abandoned village in the UK between Cambridge and Norwich, It was made by a Homo heidelbergensis or possibly a Neanderthal, somewhere between 300,000 and 500,000 years ago.

This kind of tool is fairly common throughout western Europe and Africa, but this specimen is unique for having a Cretaceous-era fossil of a spiny oyster in the centre that suggests the axe's maker wanted the shell on it as an adornment.

It's kept in the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Cambridge, and you can see more details on their web site.

Kung Fu Fighting to Kung Fu. Not a major hit on release but made some waves after it was used in the end credits and bloopers of Jackie Chan's US breakthrough Rumble In the Bronx. The fighting noises at the start are a sample of Sammo Hung.

Some psychedelic soul, released in December 1967 as a much-cut-down version of an 11-minute 1967 album cut that had been released as a previous, shorter single version to not a lot of fanfare in 1966. And there were two versions of this later single -- this is the longer one with a breakdown that was dropped in the other one. It went to #11 on the US charts.

Enjoying a bit of new attention after showing up during the credits of Agatha All Along.

Both songs are produced by Brian Burton AKA Danger Mouse.

Previous song opens its lyrics with 4 3, 2, 1, so let's go the other way now. I resisted the urge to post her Sesame Street version.

The Stranglers sued Elastica over this one, for having its riff be too similar to "No More Heroes". Elastica agreed to credit them as co-writers as part of a settlement.

From unlimited we go to limited.

Made of barracuda jawbone(*) and wrapped in red-dyed barkcloth, this scarifier was used by mourners to draw blood from themselves in honour of a dead chief. You can see the original here along with a second picture and some curator's notes.

(*) The source contradicts itself by saying both barracuda and porpoise -- googling for images suggests it's a barracuda, but I could be wrong.

This image is used under an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license and requires this attribution: © The Trustees of the British Museum

Originally posted to Reddit by me in 2023.