The mystery of the medieval fighting snails

Three Recs: February 8, 2024

I’m looking forward to the Super Bowl this weekend. I don’t have much of a rooting interest at all, but it’s always a fun spectacle. It’s also usually a bit of a grieving process too, as it’s always sad for the football season to end.

I really don’t know who will win! Seems like San Francisco has the stronger team, but Kansas City is on a tear and has the second coming of Tom Brady leading their offense (in terms of playoff clutch). So it’s hard to say. I guess I’ll predict the Chiefs to win. But it will be no surprise either way. Only a blowout by either team would be shocking for me.

Soon: baseball.

Anyway, a few recs for this week.

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1) Boys Like Girls — The Great Escape

I’m a seasonal music listener, meaning that there are certain bands or kinds of music I can only listen to at certain times of year (Radiohead in rainy fall, rap in the summer, etc.). Despite that quirk—which I’ve learned is actually kinda common—I pretty routinely listen to early 2000s emo pop-punk year-round. However, I do find myself gravitating toward it amid the dreary gray of midwinter as often as any other time. so I’ve been listening to it a lot lately.

One of my favorite playlists on Spotify is called PHASE — 2000s emo throwbacks (Tom from Myspace is featured in the cover image), and “The Great Escape” came up on it while I was working the other day. I was never a Boys Like Girls “fan” though I had plenty of their songs on my burned CDs and iTunes playlists in high school.

I thought to myself, “Man this song really captured the early 2000s emo zeitgeist about as well as any,” and then I promptly looked up the music video on YouTube.

It is a glorious music video, so I’m sharing it with you here.

When my children ask what it was like to go to high school in the early 2000s, I’ll show them this video. The styles. The flip phones. Glory.

2) Pocket Moleskine Cahier Journals

Just a few weeks ago I filled yet another one of these journals and pulled another one out of my desk to begin again. I have written in these Moleskine journals almost daily for over a decade. Lately, I’ve been writing in them far more than I ever have. My daily to-do lists go in there. My reflections on life and faith go in there. Everything goes in there. The ones linked here and pictured below are pocket-sized and soft-covered, so I am usually carrying mine in my front pocket with a pen clipped onto the covers. They are pretty cheap—like $4-5 per journal—and you can even find them in Target or Barnes & Noble, usually.

3) The mystery of the medieval fighting snails—BBC

This is fascinating!

Click here to read the whole story, but here’s a quote:

Many interpretations have been put forward – including the idea that the snail fights represent the struggle between the upper and lower classes, or even the resurrection.

One leading idea is that the knights portrayed tackling snails represented cowardice – and their addition to religious texts may have been satirical. As Randall pointed out, many snail scenes involve a knight kneeling in prayer in front of his slimy attacker, or dropping his sword, with some showing a woman begging the gallant fighter not to engage such a deadly enemy.

Building on the theme of the gutless knight, Randall suggested that the snail motif may have been a  political commentary – with the knights representing the Lombards, a Germanic people who ran the Lombard Kingdom in modern-day Italy until the late 8th Century. "[The Lombards were shown] as this group who were collecting taxes, but also involved in usury," says Clarke.