October 2024 – Book and Sword

The Case of the Five Hitmen and Ten Oligarchs

News outlets such as the BBC have been retelling a story about a failed business hit in Nanning, China.

A group of hitmen have been jailed after repeatedly trying to subcontract a job to each other in Guangxi, China.

Businessman Tan Youhui hired a hitman to “take out” his competitor for $282,000 (£218,000), a court heard.

But the hitman hired another man to do the job, offering $141,000. That man hired another hitman, who hired another hitman, who hired another hitman.

The plan crumbled when the final hitman met the man, named only as Wei, in a cafe and proposed faking his death.

All six men – the five hitmen and Tan – were convicted of attempted murder by the court in Nanning, Guangxi, following a trial that lasted three years.

Some people might see this as a story about outsourcing, neoliberal capitalism, or the rough-and-tumble nature of some things in China. I have a classical education so this made me think of the fall of the Bacchidae of Corinth in the seventh century BCE. The story was told by Herodotus two centuries later, and he puts it in the mouth of someone telling the Spartans that it is terrible to be ruled by a monarch or tyrant, so beware:

How to Grip Bronze Age Swords (Response to Dimicator and Matt Easton)

a two-edged bronze sword with a bronze hilt and a bronze 'sun-hat-shaped' pommel — An ordinary Late Bronze Age European sword of the so-called Naue type II. It has a bronze hilt of hollow scales riveted to the tang and has a longer blade and wider pommel than some swords but a shorter blade and smaller pommel than others. The long ridge down the centre of the blade both makes it stiffer and helps the bronze flow all the way to the end of the mould (contact with the surface of the mould cools out the metal, and a long flat blade has a lot of surface of mould to contact). Metropolitan Museum of Art, Accession Number 54.46.8

Over on his website and social media, Roland Warzecha has been talking about how to hold European swords of the Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age, the so-called Naue type II. These swords have a broad flat blade, a broad tang with scales riveted to the sides, and usually a mushroom-shaped pommel. If you are at all interested in swords, these are worth studying, because they are the earliest swords that we can understand really well. Iron tends to shrink or expand in the ground or water, and especially after it is excavated, so the remains of iron or steel swords tend to be ugly misshapen things. Bronze swords can emerge from the ground looking like they just left a cutler’s shop, and sometimes they have bronze grips and pommels so all parts of the sword are preserved. In the worst case the handle and the area where the handle joins the blade are usually preserved. In most of Bronze Age Europe it was not customary to make detailed images of human beings. Nor was it customary to write things down. But the swords, spears, and shields in museums speak to us and tell us how they want to be used if we can learn to hear them. They were carefully designed by sophisticated people for sophisticated people.

Remembering Kelly Bert Manning

a colour photo of a young man with dark curly hair and a beard bent forward over a device shaped similar to a CRT monitor but wider — Is this a young Kelly Bert Manning at BC Systems Corp circa 1980? A former staffer thinks so. The device is probably an IBM 026 keypunch or a model of the same vintage.

My father died four years and three months ago after a struggle with cancer. None of us had the heart to write an obituary in the early days of the COVID epidemic. This is my attempt to tell the story of his life and describe what a person he was. Any one person’s life is tangled up with other people and other stories. I have chosen to leave specific living people out of this story as far as possible.

Month: October 2024