Frankish Cannibalism and Victory!

This blog is the No. 2 destination for the search term "frankish cannibalism." This sort of thing is significant generally, since instead of canceling this blog I leave my almost six years of posts up for the main reason that I appear to continue to be a resource for answers to certain obscure questions, mainly about Arab pop music but also about other things.

But I am celebrating today because the entry for Crusader Cannibalism, my fifth post from back in October 2005, is one of three that I re-edited later (I believe in 2006 or 2007) to reflect a bet from over a decade before.

As members of a group of around 25 fellow undergraduates in Olomouc, Czech Republic, on a semester abroad in 1995, we were learning a lot about obscure historical events. We learned about the Sorbs, a tiny Slavic-speaking minority in Germany with ancient roots. We learned about the large numbers of Vietnamese in Eastern Europe. And we learned about the Sudetenland, areas of German-speaking Czechoslovakia that were voluntarily absorbed by the Nazi state and then Czechified after the war.

We wondered what sorts of other alternative histories could have resulted in disappeared and forgotten communities. We came up with the Sudetenland Chinese. We made a pact to further the goal of creating a (pseudo) history of an imaginary immigration and its subsequent disappearance. It appears that I am the only one who carried out the dare; a search for "sudetenland chinese" yields 10 results, of which I am responsible for 4.