ANST - previous threads ... keltoi / religion / holy-days

[Timothy A. McDaniel]

What a fascinating program that must have been, especially
the part about the nanny being burned in Salem.  The problem
is that nobody was burned due to the witch trials in Salem.
Hanged, certainly.  Crushed between stones, I think.  Not
burned.  The alt.folklore.urban FAQ (under
www.urbanlegends.com) says this, and adds "Mass. recanted
the Salem trials and freed the witches withing a few years",
so I guess some got prison.

I use Salem as a basic reliability meter -- if they get this
fact wrong, I take the rest with a grain of salt.  I suspect
the makers of the program were at best over-enthusiatic and
relying on teriariy sources of tertiary sources of ...

As for a broom on the mast of a submarine, I was told
elsewhere that (any) subs do that after returning from a
voyage in which it sank an enemy -- the custom supposedly
deriving from a fleet doing that to show that they'd swept
the sea clean of enemies.  (I'm thinking an English fleet
that had defeated a Dutch fleet in the 1600s, but that
memory is most unreliable.)

Cougar -- *please* believe me: in truth, nobody's gunning
for you.  You happened to ask about "thee" and "thou" in
your first note (I think), and/or said you were uncertain
about it, hence a reply.  I am very sensitive to "urban
legends", and I tend to try to add facts in such
discussions, which I hope isn't irritating to people

(BTW: I've now found a web page labelled Salem Witch Museum
at http://www.salemwitchmuseum.com/learn2.html, and at a
glance it looks not unreliable.)

Daniel de Lincolia
-- 
Tim McDaniel.   Reply to tmcd at crl.com; if that fail, tmcd at austin.ibm.com
is work account.  tmcd at tmcd.austin.tx.us ... is wrong tool.  Never use this.
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