Thoughtless for the Day

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!

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