Middleton

So the cardinal of Avignon sent the bishop of Cavaillon to do something about them. In front of a huge crowd, the bishop sprinkled some holy water into the waters of the port and told the dolphins to begone. Whereupon the dolphins indeed turned tail in terror and fled, and were never seen again.

So to avoid the creation of a cockatrice (or basilisk), the rooster was tried, found guilty, and burned at the stake along with its egg. A huge crowd was present.

The “rooster” in this case was likely a hen that had developed male characteristics (it happens).

Her piglets, however, were judged to have been innocent of the murder, and so were returned to the owner, with the caveat that he had to surrender them to the law if they were later found to have eaten any of the boy.

Not to be confused with a whole bunch of other, similar porcine trials.

Felix Hemmerlin’s treatise on exorcism, cited by e.g. Wagner’s Historia Naturalis Helvetiae (1680), informs us that around 1221-1229, eels once infested Lake Geneva in huge numbers. So Saint William, bishop of Lausanne, excommunicated them and banned them from the lake, forcing them to live in only one part of it.

… the Cadaver Synod.

Pope Formosus (“Good-looking”) was pope from 891 to 896, and apparently accumulated a few enemies. After his successor Boniface VI enjoyed all of a 15-day papacy, the next pope elected was Stephen VI.

And he hated Formosus.

How much? He had the corpse of Formosus exhumed, dressed up in papal vestments, and put on trial for his failings as a pope.

End result? Formosus was found guilty of papal fail. The corpse was stripped of its clothes, three fingers on its right hand were severed (no blessings for u), and it was tied to weights and dumped in the Tiber.

Needless to say Stephen VI came to a sticky end. An angry mob deposed him, he was strangled in prison, and Formosus’s corpse was fished up and reburied with honors. And the later popes passed edicts ensuring this kind of silliness would not happen again.

When the town of Autun was infested by rats in the early 1500s, they were accused of eating the province’s barley crop and were duly summoned to be judged in an ecclesiastical court of law. Chasseneuz was the defense attorney.

How do you defend an entire swarm of rats? You don’t, is the answer. You delay. Chasseneuz’s original defense was “my clients live all over the place, one summons won’t be enough”. So he got a court summons to be posted in all the infested parishes.

When the rats didn’t show up after the elapsed time delay, Chasseneuz proceeded to explain at length why. The rats didn’t come to court, he said, because of their enemies the cats, which are everywhere and always vigilant and hungry. “You cannot expect my clients to undertake a journey which would put them in mortal danger”, he argued in complete seriousness. “Thus they have the legal right to turn down a summons that endangers them”.

As far as we know, the rats never did appear in court, and remained unprosecuted.

timeowt

Gale’s Moving Castle

When a young elf named Astarion was cursed by a Vampire Lord, he decided to pay a visit to Gale—the most powerful wizard in Waterdeep, rumoured to be stealing hearts.

every time i make a new rf4 save, i come up with an entire headcanon version of Frey for my playthrough...... so i drew them all. and wrote down their character traits

jason, suffering from blood loss and getting stitched up by alfred in the cave's medbay: worth it 🙏

lets talk about something else, lets go into how Jason’s reaction to dying and coming back is to go ‘hey you failed me. not because i died but because you can’t love me in any way i recognize and that’s killing me, you failed me so i’m going to do better than you ever did. i saved myself except i didn’t because i’m still drowning and i don’t trust that you’ll ever be capable of saving me again’

so I think this is worth exploring. especially because on most levels I agree with you, Bruce doesn’t think the Joker is a good person or will ever be a good person. and I absolutely think Bruce is stubborn enough to refuse to give the Joker what he wants (and as a side note that’s hilarious thank you for pointing it out) (second side note YES PLZ his own trauma over death IS a good enough reason to refuse to kill the Joker on it’s own). “everybody loses” is a good enough reason not to kill the Joker and it’s one that I think is overlooked a lot, but the thing about redemption and rehabilitation is that if you give up on it because it’s personal what right do you have to stop anyone else to whom it’s personal? why do you get to chose who is redeemed and who isn’t based on who hurt you? this is important because Bruce is in a position of power that helps decide who is receiving support. he cannot abuse it, he cannot make it personal.

Bruce does his best to help Harley, he does his best to help Two-face, both of whom have killed people and probably someone’s son at one point. the parents of the people they’ve killed likely also think there’s no redeeming them, that there’s nothing good about them. redemption has to be an internal choice, Bruce recognizes that. part of his “we don’t get to decide who lives and who dies/we’re not judge, jury, and executioner” IS “i don’t get to decide who deserves redemption.” because it CANNOT be personal when you’re the one deciding who gets help. and that’s really hard!!! that’s so fucking hard!!! compassion and belief in redemption is easy when someone hasn’t hurt you and I admire the fuck out of Batman for continuing to extend his hand to the people that bite him. this is at the heart of Jason’s conflict with Bruce. Jason Todd is a very emotional person who feels things very deeply and is very bad at separating himself from the situation (this isn’t a bad thing! and you are wrong if you think it is!) and his inability to see redemption as impersonal is part of his conflict with Bruce and the Joker. Also, obviously, by the fact that he is the main victim.

Bruce doesn’t want to think the Joker is redeemable but in his position he has to.

The Museum of Science is a wonderful organization. They support local programs, they’re partnered with the New England Aquarium, they hand out free passes all the time (I got a bunch at the Dyke March last year), they tell the truth and strive to be diverse and accessible (they let people borrow wheelchairs and ECV’s for free!) and they run on community support. Please share their fundraiser!

During the shutdown, they offered free passes to all people with EBT benefits. This means every school child (we were all eligible for EBT) and their families in had free access to the museum.