Pardon my impromptu hiatus there. I’m back with 2 new fans and replaced DC jack. I had actually forgotten my computer could be this neat. As is usual with technology these days, I could have bought a new laptop with what I paid for the hardware fixes, but it wouldn’t be as pimped out as this one. Besides, this is my laptop. There are many like it but this one is mine. /Full Metal Jacket

As I catch up on my news alerts, I might just write up an ante-dated story or two, so if you see stories appear from a week ago, you’re not crazy. Not because of that anyway.

But enough about me. This week the internets bring us Executed Today, an engrossing blog which discusses the circumstances behind one execution which took place on that day. Some of them were cause célèbres in their time, including Nazi executioners, spies, witches and sodomites.

Here’s the witchy one, courtesy of 17th c. Sweden.

Accused by her own daughters of carrying their children — Malin’s grandchildren — to Satanic masses, “Rumpare-Malin” obstinately refused to cop to the charge. (Naturally, not confessing was a further indicator to the court that Satan was fortifying her defiance.) Without a confession, the authorities couldn’t assuage themselves by giving her the easy-ish death of decapitation; the law required burning at the stake.* A sack of gunpowder around the neck to speed things up was the best they could offer her.

Matsdotter maintained her innocence to the stake, frustrating the confessors, and when one of her daughters called on her to admit the crime, “she gave her daughter into the hands of the devil and cursed her for eternity.”

Some years later the daughter apparently was executed for perjuring herself in this case, thereby fulfilling mom’s dying curse. Oh, and Malin’s husband was also an executee. Sodomy.

Srsly if I were part of that family, I’d be courting any dark power I could think of to make me invisible to the authorities.