19 September: Nails

Today is the feast day of St Januarius of Benevento, the patron of nail makers - so here are ten things you might not know about nails:

1. Most nails are made from metals such as aluminum, steel, Copper, brass and Silver, but some are made from wood and are called tree nails or trunnels.
2. In ancient Egypt, nails were made from bronze. Bronze nails dating back to 3400 BC have been found there.
3. Nails are pretty commonplace these days since there are machines which can churn them out by the thousand but that wasn’t always the case. At one time they had to be made by hand, cut from wrought Iron by artisans known as nailers. This, incidentally is where the surname Naylor comes from.
4. Nowadays nails are made from coils of wire which are fed through machines which manipulate the wire into the shape of a nail. This method can produce as many as 500 or 700 nails per minute.
5. In fact nails were such a rare commodity in the early American colonies that when people moved, they’d burn down their houses in order to retrieve the nails they’d used to build them. Eventually this became such a problem in Virginia that they had to pass a law against it.
6. When the Romans evacuated the fortress of Inchtuthil in Perthshire in 86 or 87 CE they left seven tons of nails behind.
7. The human body contains enough iron to make a 3 inch long nail.
8. In most of the world, nails are measured using the metric system, so a 50 × 3.0 nail will be 50mm long and 3mm in diameter.
9. Needless to say the USA is the exception. There, they measure nails in “pennies”, with sizes like 8d or 16d. Why “d”? The d stands for an old Roman coin, the denarius. This measurement is thought to have originated in England and was to do with how much a hundred nails cost. British people of a certain age will recall that before decimal currency, the symbol for a penny used to be “d”.
10. Nails are mentioned a few times in the Bible. There’s the crucifixion, of course, but they’re mentioned in the Old Testament, too. In the book of Judges, a woman named Jael killed her husband, Heber, by driving large nail into his temple, and in Chronicles, they’re mentioned in connection with David’s preparations to build a temple.

Killing Me Softly

Sebastian Garrett is an assassin. It wasn’t his first choice of vocation, but nonetheless, he’s good at it, and can be relied upon to get the job done. He’s on top of his game.

Until he is contracted to kill Princess Helena of Galorvia. She is not just any princess. Sebastian doesn’t bargain on his intended victim being a super-heroine who gives as good as she gets. Only his own genetic variant power saves him from becoming the victim, instead of Helena. 

Fate has another surprise in store. Sebastian was not expecting to fall in love with her.

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