bonus points for rare/unusual ones

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/2253076

Big oof.

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/2183944

Heheh

His name was... Snorri.

Heheh

For millennia, solar eclipses have inspired awe, wonder and fear. After all, it's not often that twilight descends in the middle of the day. And just as we plan for and anticipate their occurrence — like the total solar eclipse that will be visible to millions of North Americans on April 8 — ancient cultures across the world, from the Mayans to the ancient Greeks, developed their own mythologies and traditions around eclipses.

So what did these people think when they saw the sun darkening during the day?

On a surface level, people from ancient cultures knew exactly what they were looking at. "Anybody who pays attention to the sky would be well aware that the moon is blocking the sun," Anthony Aveni, a professor of anthropology and astronomy at Colgate University in New York, told Live Science. But the significance of that event would have been very different to ancient peoples. "Cultures other than our own, both present and past, had a very different take on the natural world," Aveni

In 1897, one Mr Burgess, the Clerk of Works at Oxford University, donated two shrivelled potatoes to the Pitt Rivers Museum. He usually kept them in his pockets. They were the ultimate “jacket” potatoes.

The Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford is dedicated to categorising and displaying a “democracy of objects” not according to time or nation, but according to human usage. Since the potato is fairly ubiquitous in human culture, it means there are many in the museum’s collection.

In addition to Burgess’s donation, 11 other wrinkled specimens are catalogued in the museum’s collections, and are neatly labelled. The names of the previous owners are usually not identified because most of the potatoes were stolen before they were donated.

But why would someone would want to steal a wrinkly potato? The answer is these were not just any purloined spuds. They were medical charms thought to be cures for rheumatism – and if they were stolen, they were thought to be even more effective.