Thoughtless for the Day

Since this site was undergoing some technically difficulties this past week, I've got some catching up to do; so, here's a potpourri post which should, hopefully bring us all up-to-date:

Regulars readers of RATYHTL are no doubt familiar with the backseat of a squad car my decade-long attempt to win the Biblical Archaeology Review's bi-monthly cartoon caption contest. You can view a small sampling of my past failed efforts here, here, here, here, and here. While I have yet to win, I was honored/shocked to learn that I was a runner up in the most recent contest. The amazing thing is that I came in second by submitting a caption which implies that the God of Abraham is occasionally given to indulging in crude graffiti. By the way, "Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin" usually translates into "I have weighed your kingdom, and found it wanting". It's from the Book of Daniel and it's where we get the term "The handwriting is on the wall" from.

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If you have IFC on-demand, and if the films are still available, I implore you to rent The Red Riding trilogy. Just trust me on this one.

Peter Hunter: You don't like the police much, do you?
Martin Laws: No love lost, no.
Peter Hunter: So when someone kicks down your front door, kills the dog and rapes the wife, who you gonna call?
Martin Laws: Well it certainly wouldn't be the West Yorkshire Police - they'd already *be* in there, wouldn't they!

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The New York Times magazine recently ran an excellent piece (featuring an appearance by crazy Don McLeroy) on the question of the religious beliefs of the Founding Fathers.

"It's the 21st century, and the rest of the known world accepts the teaching of evolution as science and creationism as religion, yet we continue to have this debate here," - Kathy Miller, president of the Texas Freedom Network

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Millard Fillmore is back in the news, and if you find a stray gun it was probably lost by someone working for Homeland Security.

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Image via Wikipedia

"People have waited nearly 2,000 years for Christ to return, so we can wait a while longer for John Frum" - A village chieftain from Tanna

Happy John Frum Day! Look to the skies, gentle reader, because I've the feeling that this is the year in which John Frum's plane will descend...

What? You haven't heard the good news about John Frum? Well, get comfy, because have I got a story to tell you...

John Frum is not only an American G.I., but also the King of America. His prophets built a landing strip on the Pacific island of Tanna island where on day (February 15th - hence John Frum Day) his plane will land and shower his followers with milk and ice cream.

John Frum is the deity at the center of a cargo cult. Here's a wonderful, lengthy article about John Frum from Smithsonian Magazine that does a much better job of telling the John Frum story than I could here.

Like most of the more important things in life, I first learned about John Frum from the book Cows, Pigs, Wars and Witches, which devotes an entire chapter, Phantom Cargo, to the John Frum phenomenon and smarty refuses to dismiss it as just another wacky religion - because it's not. Look a little deeper and you'll realize that the John Frum Experience is an attempt to answer the question as to why some countries are wealthy and others are not. After all, "Why does the white man have so much cargo and the New Guinean so little" is the question which lead to the writing of Guns, Germs, and Steel.

Speaking of New Guinea and cargo, in 1933 a group of New Guineans took over a Lutheran Church. They were convinced that the the white man was hiding "the Secret of the Cargo" and that not only had the Bible been mistranslated (either by accident or design), but it was also missing its first page, which revealed the true name of God. As the New Guineans saw it, Jesus had given cargo to the Europeans, but not to them. In fact, the New Guineans were convinced that Jews and Christian missionaries were holding Jesus Christ captive in Sydney, Australia.

I'll leave you with this inspirational exchange between a John Frum believer, named Prophet Fred, and a somewhat stymied Anthropologist.

Anthropologist: What does John Frum look like?

Prophet Fred: He looks like an American.

Anthropologist: Have you ever seen him?

Prophet Fred: Yes, John comes very often from Yasur [the local volcano] to advise me, or I go there to speak with John.

Anthropologist: What does he look like?

Prophet Fred: An American!

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"Evolution is what it is. The upper classes have always died out; it's one of the most charming things about them." - Germaine Greer

Happy 201st birthday, Charles Darwin.

For the last several years, my Darwin Day posts have focused on punishing the ignorant, but this year is going to be different. This year I won't be spotlighting either of the two places on Earth where Evolution is not widely accepted: Fundamentalist Islamic countries and the Charlie Daniels Outhouse ("Home of the Extra Chromosome"). Shit Luther, I'm not even going to mention that Charlie recently posted another one of anti-Science rants. And I certainly am not going to bring up the fact that although Charlie doesn't archive his readers' comments, I do. For that reason, I definitely won't go into the two people who attempted to succinctly explain the facts of Evolution to the Skoal-chewing amoebae of the Outhouse, or that when one of these two posters mentioned that the last Pope was a firm believer in Evolution, it elicited the following response:

"The day that the pope speaks for Christianity is the day I hope I'm out of here.....You know as much about Christianity and as you do evolution, or you would know that the Whore of Revelations comes out of Rome and the next pope [sic] could very well be the anti-christ [sic].....In other words because someone calls themselves " christian" does not make it so....God Bless" - Plowboy

You heard it here first! A biblical scholar who goes by the handle of "Plowboy" has announced that next Pope could possibly be the Antichrist. By the way, Plowboy, it's the Book of Revelation - singular - not Revelations.

No, there will be no mockery of inbred dick-freckles like the aforementioned Plowboy today! Instead, we're going to take at look at one of the interesting ethical dilemmas that have arisen from our understanding of Evolution: cloning Neanderthals.

There's a fascinating piece in this month's Archaeology Magazine (which i read for the articles and not the centerfold) by son of Zorro, Zach Zorich, which asks the question: Now that we have decoded the Neanderthal genome would it be ethical for us to clone Neanderthals?

The pro-cloning side argues that since Homo sapiens were most likely the cause of the extinction of Neanderthals, we have a moral obligation to bring them back. And since Neanderthals had relatively large brains and were capable of speech (the FOXP2 gene was found in the Neanderthals' genetic sequence), it's quite possible that they could be eventually be integrated into society.

"Modern humans, he says, are as different from Homo sapiens who lived in the Neolithic period 10,000 years ago, as Neolithic people would have been from Neanderthals." - John Hawks, Paleoanthropologist at the University of Wisconsin

"I think there would be no question that if you cloned a Neanderthal, that individual would be recognized as having human rights under the Constitution and international treaties," - Lori Andrews, professor at Chicago-Kent College of Law.

The anti-cloning argument is, of course, that just because you can do something, that doesn't necessarily mean that you should. Despite a wealth of recent scientific discoveries which demonstrate that Neanderthals were not the brutish louts they had previously been depicted as, the word Neanderthal still remains a pejorative. Charlie Daniels' fellow corporate mascots, the Geico cavemen, understood this. If you think that Gays, African-Americans, Muslims, and Gay African-American Muslims face a lot of prejudice, just imagine what life would hold for a bunch of reconstituted Neanderthals. Now imagine what it would be like to be hated by someone who thinks that you never existed.

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"I tried to read 'Twilight' but it got boring, like, the second page. There are no pictures, so I'm not reading it." - Snooki

A few weeks ago, Vienna told me she'd had a dream in which a new horror movie was not only selling out in theaters but also causing its audience to go insane. Despite this, in her dream, Vienna was really psyched about seeing the film. I can't say I blame her as it did sound much more exciting than Avatar.

"I guess it was kind of like that episode of Masters of Horror, you know, Cigarette Burns." Vienna added, referencing a TV show in which a man searches for a lost film which causes everyone who comes in contact with it to lose their minds. Except, of course, for Udo Kier, who has been typecast as a nutjob since his first kindergarten play; so he just ended up wandering over to another section of the Disenchanted Kingdom.

"I imagine," I said (and these are the sorts on conversations that go on in our house), "that you could also make a case for the movie in your dream being like London After Midnight. After all, some guy strangled a woman in Hyde Park after seeing it; he claimed that Lon Chaney's make up drove him insane. And London After Midnight is a lost film, so that ties it to Cigarette Burns"

"Then," Vienna said, "you could also argue that the movie in my dream was like the book in The Mouth of Madness."

"Well, the plot of that movie was just a rip-off of The King in Yellow."

"The what?"

"The King in Yellow. It's a book about a book, also called The King in Yellow, that causes widespread insanity. I read it about twenty-five years ago, and I don't think that I've met anyone else who has ever read it. I think in was written between-the-wars, around 1920 or so: which is really creepy because one scene takes place in the 'future' New York of the 1930's, which has been ethnically cleansed, and is now free of 'all Semitic peoples'. Antisemitism wasn't just popular back then, it was endemic."

As it turned out, I was wrong (hey, it happens) about two things: The first was that The King in Yellow was not published in the 1920's, but in 1895: you'll find out why this is remarkable shortly. The second was that, in the book, all Semitic peoples are not banned from New York City in the 1930's. No, America just passes a law forbidding all foreign-born Jews from entering the country: which was actually a pretty liberal attitude for 1895; especially when you consider that it was that year when Alfred Dreyfus was sent to Devil's Island.

The King in Yellow usually gets categorized as Horror fiction or, occasionally, as Fantasy, but I think the best to description is "just plain weird". The book is a collection of plays and short stories all loosely tied together by the King who can either an actual person, a book, or a symbol. While I highly recommend that you read all of the stories in the book, I implore you (I'm begging here) to read the first story in the book, The Repairer of Reputations (you can read it online here), which is a truly twisted tale that was decades ahead of its time, not only in its perspective on madness, but also for its ability to slowly build an atmosphere of terror while also creating a very convincing alternate history. It even manages to brilliantly juggle two competing narratives. And it did all of this thirty years before H.P. Lovecraft began putting pen to paper.

"In the following winter began the agitation for the repeal of the laws prohibiting suicide which bore its final fruit in the month of April, 1920, when the first Government Lethal Chamber was opened on Washington Square." - From The Repairer of Reputations.

By the way, Robert W. Chambers, the author of The King in Yellow ended his career writing romance novels. Which, if you think about it, would be a much more appealing delivery system for mass madness than a horror novel. After all, there's something wonderfully joyous about the idea of a suburban mom reading The Viscount's Betrothal and then running amok with a meat cleaver.

Who knows, maybe Harlequin Romances or Chicken Soup for the Soul really are part of a secret plot to drive a large segment of the population crazy. How else could you explain this piece of spam that turned up in my inbox:

[Thanks, unknown spammer! Now Dr. Who and Viagra are forever linked in my mind.]

The again, I guess the idea of a book which could transform its readers into raving paranoid lunatics is a pretty far-fetched idea.

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I have what is known as a "restless mind", which is a polite way of saying "short attention span". While composing the previous post, I had a series of thoughts run through my head then attempt to escape out my right ear-canal . I've since tracked them down, and have placed them on display below.

Thought Number One: Who started covering women up and why?
Think about it (if I had to, you should too); the burqa and the Duggars' swimwear (yes, there is a link to that site on the Duggars' site. Marion, Don't Look At It - Shut Your Eyes, Marion!) didn't just appear out of nowhere*: for thousands of years, men have been covering women from head-to-toe. This seems counter-intuitive at fist; after all, if you've got a small Bronze-Age village run by men, wouldn't it stand to reason that all the women in that village would be dressed like Raquel Welch in One Million Years BC[E]? Clothes might make the man, but men make the rules.

So when and why did men start forcing women to "dress modestly, with decency and propriety" (Timothy 2:9-10)? I honestly don't have a good answer. What I do have is a theory.

Let's say you're a guy living in the aforementioned Bronze-Age village wherein all of the women have been running around in fur bikinis for a century or two. You may have begun to notice that the warriors from the village on the other side of the marsh have a nasty tendency to regularly raid your village and carry off your women. So, you call a meeting of the village elders wherein someone comes up with the bright idea that if you cover up all of the women, raiding parties won't know whether or not they're carrying off Angelina Jolie or Angela Lansbury until they get home and "unwrap the goods".

Maybe this is why, in the ritual of the wedding ceremony, which harkens back to the days of arranged marriage, the groom doesn't get to remove the bride's veil until after he's said "I do"?

Oddly, this led me to...

Thought Number Two: The Worst Wedding Night Ever
Norse mythology (which used to be Norse religion) gives us the charming and equally disturbing tale of Thor's attempt to appear on RuPaul's Drag Race.

Somehow Thrym, king of the Giants, managed to get his hands on Thor's magic hammer (Paging Dr. Freud, Dr. Sigmund Freud to the white courtesy phone), Mjollnir.** Anyhoooo, Thrym offered to trade the hammer for the hand of the goddess Freyja (for whom Friday is named) in marriage.

At this point the god Loki gets involved in the story: Which, if you know anything about Norse mythology, means that something weird is about to happen. Loki somehow convinces Thor to put on a wedding dress, complete with veil (I don't know a whole lot about Thor's personal life, so maybe it didn't take much convincing), and off they go to the Land of the Giants, where despite the phony Freyja scarfing down an entire ox at a wedding banquet, nobody catches on until it's too late and the hammer is handed to Thor/Freyja as a wedding present (???).

"I'm an action transvestite really, so it's running, jumping, climbing trees... putting on make-up when you're up there!" - Eddie Izzard

All this talk of clothing and lack thereof led to...

Thought Number Three: The Emperor's New Clothes
The great irony of the fable of The Emperor's New Clothes is that it has been told to generations of school children as an example of the virtue of questioning authority, yet not once, to my knowledge, has some little child, upon hearing the story, raised his or her hand and said "Wait just one Odindamn minute! While the kid in the tale did manage to point out the emperor's swinging scepter, and no point did he also point out that it was a stupid idea to have an emperor in the fist place and that, perhaps, a parliamentary form of government might be a better idea. And while we're on the subject, if the same kid had pointed at either the Pope, the Dalai Lama, or J. Edgar Hoover and said 'Hey, look at that guy in a dress', his brains would be all over the sidewalk. Now where's my box of juice?"

* I should point out that the Muslims swiped the idea for the burqa from the Byzantine Christians, and the the Duggars' swimwear was probably inspired by...hmmmm...LSD in their water supply, perhaps?

** I don't know how Thrym did this. Yes, I've getting at least four books on Norse Mythology sitting only a few feet away, but I'm feeling too lazy to bother to look this up.

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Is it just me, or has the cast of Cinemax's late-night series Naughty Cheerleader Academy just been "phoning it in" this season? I swear, that show jumped the shark shortly after the sorority rush episode in season two.

OK, now that the members of the Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice have left the room in order to report me to Focus on the Family we can have a serious chat about a creepy subject. And like most creepy subjects, this one begins with me watching an episode of Antiques Road Show (Which I like to call "Rich people getting richer as saps, like me, watch") .

So, I'm watching the UK version of AR on BBC America and there's this woman with a 19th Century brass microscope and a collection of slides. The appraiser takes a look at the antique scientific equipment and basically says (and not only paraphrasing, but translating into "Philly Speak"), "Look lady; this microscope ain't worth squat. Get it out of my sight before I brain ya' with it. What I'm really interested in are these slides. In fact, I really only care about this one slide here..."

At this point, the appraiser holds up a glass slide with what appears to be a tiny brown square on it, and asks the woman if she knows what it is. OK, the unspoken truth about Antiques Roadshow is that "antiques" could be used to describe either the majority of items brought in to be appraised, or the majority of people who bring those items in for appraisal. The average "guest" on AR is 104 years old and has been mummified at least twice; add to that the fact that most of these ancient coots come from "old money" and it's easy to see why if you showed one of 'em a toaster and asked what it was, they're more likely than not to say, "I think Michelangelo carved that". So there's no way in Hell the old bat was going to get the question right, but at least she had the good sense to shrug rather than offer an opinion.

As it turned out, that tiny brown square was a mid-19th Century version of the microdot. In other words, it was a minuscule photograph that could only be viewed under a microscope. Well, that made the slide a little more interesting. And then the appraiser dropped the bomb: many of these tiny photographs were pornographic.

Shut the front door!

Apparently, upper-class Victorian men of Science would say to their wives, "Darling, I'll be retiring to my study now, in order that I may continue my research into the mysteries of Nature in the hope that I may cure Aunt Gertrude's dropsy", and then they would look at dirty pictures under a microscope. Let that sink in for a moment.

I should point out that I have no idea what Victorian porn consisted of (most likely, a glimpse of woman's ankle), but I do know one other disturbing fact about the Victorian mindset: They used to cover the legs of tables in order to keep men from having "unwholesome" thoughts.

By the way, during my research for this piece, I came across the following:

...in 1874, the Pimlico studio of Henry Hayler, one of the most prominent producers of such material was loaded up with 130,248 obscene photographs and five thousand magic lantern slides.

It seems that the same Henry Hayler was also the author of a secret journal.

Next time, I'll connect Victorian porn and the god Thor. Oh yeah, you'll want to read that!

Write text here...

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