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!

Write text here...

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

I picked a terrible time to focus on songwriting and neglect my duties here at RATYHTL, as the last two weeks have been packed solid with fascinating news: Pat Robertson blamed the Haitian earthquake on voodoo, whereas Danny Glover blamed it on Global Warming; James O'Keefe, the man behind the ACORN videos, was caught tampering with a Senator's phone, and a plane was forced to land at Philly International because the passengers had never seen a Jew before [OK, that's an oversimplification, but it looks good in print]. Oh, and there may or may not have been a cover-up of three murders at Gitmo.

But, for me at least, the most interesting piece of news to surface over the last few weeks was the arrest of one Charles Dyer for child rape and sodomy.

Dyer, a twenty-nine-year-old former Marine Sargent who lives in Oklahoma, had appeared in a number of videos on YouTube using the handle "July4Patriot": often openly referring to himself as a terrorist. Here's one Dyer's more interesting rants:

Dyer was also one of the founding members of a group called Oath keepers (Did they mean "oaf keepers"?) and spoke at several Tea Party events. As mentioned above, Dyer was arrested a couple of weeks ago for raping a seven-year-old girl. Which is twisted enough, but the icing on the obviously vanilla cake is that when the police raided Dyer's no doubt tastefully decorated home they found a 40-millimeter grenade launcher, which was apparently stolen from Fort Irwin, although Dyer claims it was "a gift from a friend" (and all I ever get are ties).

It was with Dyer's arrest that his Teabaggin' buddies shifted into high gear, reportedly threatening the Sheriff who arrested Dyer as well as anyone who reports on the story [Come and get me, you pansies!]

I will say one positive thing about Mr. (soon to be "Ms.", if those stories I've heard about what goes on in prison are true) Dyer; he vicariously managed to reacquaint me with a word I'd long forgotten. I was discussing the Dyer case with a friend who said, "You know what they out to do to that guy?", and - before my friend could offer up the punishment he had in mind - I blurted out a word I hand not used, or even thought about, for that matter, in many years: Rhaphanidosis!

Rhaphanidosis was the punishment in ancient Greece for adultery. Basically, it involved hammering a radish (which used to be ...um... larger and pointier than the ones we're used to seeing) up the accused adulterer's backside. It's where we get the sadly too seldom used verb raphanizein - meaning "to insert a radish into the fundament" - from. Come to think of it, the word fundament doesn't get used often enough either.

Posted by Rodney Anonymous at 8:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

A few days back, I needed a new drill bit, so I swung by the hardware store around the corner. When the clerk informed me that the drill bit I required was out-of-stock, I quipped, "Well, it looks like little Billy won't be getting his fillings this week." The clerk then gave me that look: the look that says. "What sort of sick individual would even think something like that, let alone actually say it."

It's the same look I get whenever I mention that I have a deep-seated hatred for NPR's Car Talk.

I like to think that I'm a nice guy. I'm kind to animals; I never talk down to kids; my wife says that I'm a good husband; and I enjoy the simple pleasures in life, like a cup of yerba mate and reading my friend Brian's thoughts on that day's episode of Divorce Court. So why is it that I all I have to do is even hint that Cah Tawk is the least funny thing to grace the airwaves since FDR's wheelchair ignited during one of his fireside chats, and suddenly I'm having that "Joe Pesci in Goodfellows" conversation:

Friend: How can you hate Car Talk? I love Car Talk. Everybody loves Car Talk!

Me: Why? Why do you like it?

Friend: I dunno. 'Cuz it's funny?

Me: Funny how?

Friend: I dunno. It's just...funny.

Me: Oh, I see. So it amuses you. It's your clown.

Now, it's usually at this point - right about when I'm ready to pull a gun - that someone feels the need to remind me that humor is subjective and rarely, if ever, do two people see eye-to-eye on what is funny. I couldn't agree more. I'm am not an expert on what is funny. What I am is an expert on what is not funny: Schindler's List, for example is not funny (despite the presence of some very silly German accents). Puppy mills are not funny. Cardinal Bernard Law getting away scot-free was not funny. And Car Talk is not funny.

Unlike the people who enjoy Car Talk but can never seem to provide a coherent reason as to why they find it amusing, I can tell you exactly why it isn't funny: Car Talk labors under the misguided notion that "regular people" laugh at dumb humor in much the same same way that the Yuppies behind A Prairie Home Companion have deluded themselves into thinking that residents of rural communities have a rustic, folksy charm that those of us who have actually encountered them refer to as "Cretanism".

In other words, and I'm sorry if this offends any of my friends, I suspect that the people who laugh at Car Talk are, in a way, saying, "'Dewey, Cheatum, & Howe!' Hahaha! See? I'm not so stuffy and well educated that I'm not above laughing at dumb jokes." It's like when a nuclear physicist laughs at a Three Stooges short. He or she knows damn well that the Three Stooges are slightly less funny than Stevie Wonder performing a colonoscopy, but they laugh anyway in a fruitless attempt to connect with... I dunno...people who laugh at the Three Stooges, I guess.

The truth is that you are above laughing at dumb jokes. That's nothing to be ashamed of. In fact, you should take pride in that. It doesn't make you a stick-in-the-mud or a snob if you don't laugh at fart jokes. It just makes you an adult.

And who the Hell takes automotive advice from people who live in Boston anyway? Have you ever been to Boston? If so, did you see how the people there drive? It's like asking a Scotsman for culinary tips.

Normally, I would just ignore Car Talk in much the same manner as I ignore American Routes (AKA "The White offspring of the Privileged Class listen to The Blues), but the problem is that, here in Philly, Car Talk immediately follows On The Media and This American Life (two shows that are roughly six billion times more funny and informative than Car Talk could ever hope to be) - which is like following Monty Python and The Young Ones with Benny Hill. This means that as soon as TAM ends, I have to leap across the room and turn off my radio before either one of the humorously-challenged hosts of Car Talk can utter a single syllable. Silencing them is well worth the effort.

Posted by Rodney Anonymous at 2:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

A few months back Vienna and I noticed that we were washing clean dishes. Often, when one of us was out of the house, the other would look at the dishes in the dishwasher and, not knowing whether or not they were clean or dirty, run them through the wash cycle again, just to be on the safe side.

In order to combat this wasteful tendency, we developed an iconographic method for keeping track of the state of our dishes. What makes this method fun is that it's based entirely on Vienna's great respect for Catherine of Aragon ... and her deep hatred of Anne Boleyn (whom Vienna refers to simply as "The Great Whore"). When dirty dishes are placed in the dishwasher, a small framed portrait of Anne Boleyn with the word "Dirty" inscribed upon it is displayed on the counter top. Once the dishwasher is turned on, the portrait of Anne is replace by one of Catherine marked "Clean".

If it were up to me, by the way, I would've used Emperors Constantine for "Dirty" and Julian for "Clean".

For me, the best thing about this method of keeping track of cutlery cleanliness is explaining it to mystified house-guests who spot the portraits in our kitchen.

Posted by Rodney Anonymous at 5:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

After being forced to shut down for a few months while we upgraded our tiny plastic roman soldiers to tiny metal roman soldiers, RATYHTL is happier than Senator Ensign in the arms of his mistress to announce that we'll be returning before the end of the month with more of the stuff you love: History, Literature, Music, Mythology, Archeology, Atheism, and Hockey.

Posted by Rodney Anonymous at 6:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)