It's medieval news day here at I Blame The Dingos. The first story: Charlotte Allen writing for the Weekly Standard goes to the 43rd International Congress on Medieval Studies" (seriously) in Kalamazoo, Michigan to listen to some of the best work (or, let's face it, all the work) on medieval studies over the previous year. What does she learn?

For one, medieval waste studies is a growing field. And by waste studies, I mean they're talking about crap. Literal crap. Dung. Feces. "Bourgeois fecal habitus," meaning the middle-classes growing aversion to excretion starting the middle ages.

And another: medievalists know how to get down: there's a Saturday night dance for attendees, which is pretty wild, but not as wild as some of the Congress' dances in the 90s, where "...flocks of leather-clad gays took to the floor to celebrate their academic coming-out in a congress session on 'Queer Iberia.'"

And this: "There turned out to be more papers at the congress about the forgettable 2001 movie A Knight's Tale (three) than about Chaucer's Knight's Tale (one). In one of those papers, delivered with much help from PowerPoint and titled "Knights, Dykes, Damsels and Fags: Gender Roles and Normative Pressures in Neomedieval Films," Wayne Elliott, a graduate student at Kent State University, argued that the film Knight's Tale had a homoerotic subtext because it starred Heath Ledger. Poor Ledger. He made the double career mistake of (a) playing a gay cowboy in Brokeback Mountain and (b) dying before he had a chance to live it down."

Our second story: "Researchers retrieve authentic Viking DNA from 1,000-year-old skeletons." Says the article: "...a reliable retrieval of authentic DNA opens the way for a valuable use of prehistoric human remains to illuminate the genetic history of past and extant populations."

Sure. That and cloning an army of Viking warriors.