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.

Posted by Rodney Anonymous at 2:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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...

Posted by Rodney Anonymous at 2:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Once again, I have failed miserably to conceive a caption which has even the slightest chance of winning this month's Biblical Archaeology Review Caption Contest.

Posted by Rodney Anonymous at 12:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

You might be aware of the fact that Edvard Munch's The Scream was returned to Norway's National Gallery, located in Oslo (a city I had the unique "pleasure" of visiting during the month of February ), in 2006 after having been stolen two years earlier, but did you know that Munch actually created multiple versions of The Scream? Two are in the Munch Museum, one is owned by a Norwegian billionaire (don't tell the teabaggers that there are billionaires in Socialist countries), another hangs in the aforementioned National gallery, and the fifth (below) may be found on a shelf in the Super Fresh on 10th and South.

Posted by Rodney Anonymous at 1:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)