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.

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!

"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.

"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.

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.

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...

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.

If you dare to brave the cold weather this Sunday, Decontrol, the Tough Shits, Hellbent Hookers, and many others will be playing at Fishstock at the El Bar.

Take us out international superstar Erika LaMoore...

One of the more interesting aspects of End Times Mania has been the Right's new-found obsession with the bad investment opportunity that is GOLD. Now, I had intended to write a piece about why so many Right Wingers are shilling for gold companies, and why putting your hard-earned cash into gold is the worst idea since Charlie Daniels decided to make his deepest thoughts public, but I was beaten to the punch by Politico who recently published this piece

...and by The Colbert Report

Since I was feeling sort of lazy today, finding out that my work had already been done for me (and done much better than I ever could've) was like striking gold.

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.

Now, in the case of VH1, replacing Poison videos with a cruel social experiment involving Brett Michaels and a group women who were found hanging around the Modesto Free Clinic actually improved the network. Come to think of it, Teen Mom is much more of an "alternative" show than MTV's 120 Minutes ever was. And anyone who was surprised that, in the land of anti-intellectualism, a network called The Learning Channel would eventually morph into a Freak Show would also be shocked to learned that we almost elected a Vice President who didn't know that Africa was a continent.

But The History Channel? The History Channel was something different. It was the lifeboat many of us crawled into once PBS, suffering from a lack of government funding, began ceding airtime to thinly veiled infomercials and WASPs Gone Wild (aka The Antiques Roadshow). And while The History Channel still presents many wonderful programs like Cities of the Underworld, Ancient Discoveries, and Bad Girls Club, The History Channel has also become home to such as moronfests as MonsterQuest, UFO Hunters, and countless "specials" (as in short yellow bus "special") about Nostradamus and the Antichrist (AKA Ronald Reagan, Mikhail Gorbachev, Pope Benedict XVI, Emperor Nero, and/or Barack Obama) .

And that (along with about a million other things) is what really melts my s'mores. Look; you don't have to make up History in order to make History interesting. Mount Vernon is a fascinating place - it's where the Father of Our Country grew hemp and made booze. You don't need to send a couple of cretinous "Ghost Hunters" out there in the dead of night to help the spirit of Thomas Jefferson find his bong. that's not exploring History. That's not popularizing History. That's polluting History.

If the general public thinks History is dull, then that's only because no one has told them that Francois Rabelais used to wipe his butt with a live goose (Let's see that on Animal Planet. The guy made Michael Vick look like Betty White). If you can find a way to make that tidbit more interesting by tossing in two old farts and a Ouija board, I'm all ears.

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.

Until a few weeks ago, when I stumbled upon WAtLDiS (or "WaltDis", as I like to call it) at a flea market, I was completely ignorant (and as the Rozz Tox Manifesto clearly states, "Ignorance of one's own culture is not considered cool") of the slow-motion dioxin-car-carrying train wreck that is the life story of Lance Rentzel. If, like me, you were also absent from school on the day when your classmates were ushered into a crowded auditorium to hear The Cautionary Tale Lance here's the scoop:

• Lance Rentzel was a professional football player who had been a wide receiver for the Vikings, the Cowboys, and the Rams (coincidentally, the original Vikings employed a device known as the "cowboy ram" to batter down the doors of the Alamo).
• Lance Rentzel was briefly married to "entertainer" Joey Heatherton. For you youngsters, Joey Heatherton was not a dude. Joey was a sort of proto-Paris Hilton who was "famous for being famous". Today, Joey is best remembered for inspiring the SCTV character Lola Heatherton. Bring da noise, Joey:

• Lance Rentzel would also, on occasion, expose his private parts to children. This proclivity for show and tell led to Lance getting busted on two occasions. The fist offense was quietly swept under the rug, but the second killed Lance's marriage and nearly ended his career

Now, by today's NFL standards, that last item item may not be so shocking, but what you need to remember is that Lance was arrested in 1970 - long before the public's begrudging acceptance of the fact that the overwhelming majority of America's star athletes are raincoat clad monsters who hang around playgrounds. Which brings us to the book itself...

To call WAtLDiS "unflinching" is like calling Joey Heatherton "a bit of a ham". Whereas contemporary ballplayers, attempting to redeem themselves in the eyes of the public, might have a biography ghostwritten for them in which their misdeeds are tersley dispensed with in two small paragraphs on page 179, Lance Rentzel dives right into the muck and mire from the start and keeps returning to the trough with delirious regularity. Here's Lance, just a mere six pages into WAtLDiS describing how his second arrest for public indecency triggered memories of his first arrest for public indecency:

I got dressed and the fear dwindled, replaced by speculations,. I wondered what might happen, trying to figure out an approach, but my mind kept referring to the past. I'd been in this exact spot before. In 1966, when I was playing for the Minnesota Vikings, I was at practice, and it wasn't my mother, it was Coach Norm Van Brocklin who broke the news. He brought me into his office, trying to figure me out. It was one of the few times I ever saw him ill at ease. He said to me, apologetically, "I hate to ask you this, but did you expose yourself to two small girls?"

Talk about your yes or no questions. And with that, WAtLDiS establishes its own habitual pattern of exposure. On page 56, Lance regales us with a tale of young love:

My first affair was with a lady of my choice - an attractive girl from another school. Once we bagan (and it was the first time for both of us), we made love frequently, wherever [sic] we could find the time and privacy. Inevitably there were problems [emphasis mine], like the time we were in the back room of my house and heard someone coming; we quickly gathered our clothes and rushed into the bathroom. We dressed hurriedly, frantically, silently, only to come out and see my mom holding up a forgotten pair of panties.

While we never learn whether the panties belonged to the young lady or to Lance, we do get a glimpse (on page 29) into Lenny Bruce's dark legacy:

"Say, did you hear that Lance Rentzel's problems have been solved?" Henny Youngman began telling audiences. "Sure, he's just been traded to the Montreal Expos."

"There's no doubt about it anymore," said singer Don Cherry at a nightclub in Oklahoma City , "Lance Rentzel can really handle the fly pattern." My older brother, Del, was in the audience with his wife, Kay, and some business associates.

Ahhh, you can almost hear the rim shots over the weeping of Del and Kay.

While you have to admire Rentzel's brutal honesty (if you doubt he's got a pair of balls, just ask the kids at P.S. 154 - they've seen 'em), you also have to be equally dismayed at Lance's repeated naming of the father of the young victim, as well as his decision to have his psychiatrist, Dr. Louis Jolyon West, pen the book's epilogue.

In the end, WAtLDiS is best enjoyed as a mildly deranged historical curiosity (not unlike The Malleus Maleficarum or Going Rogue): a strange time-capsule from the dawn of the era of celebrity tell-alls and power couples.

I'll let Lance's mother have the next-to-last word:

I am convinced that civil rights are only for minorities and mass muderers.

Phun Phact: Cyclist Lance Armstrong was allegedly named after Lance Rentzel.

Here's a completely random listing of interesting things I found on the web:

• Slate has a piece about my favorite TV show of the moment: Hoarders
...as well as a look back at the accomplishments (and lack thereof) of The Replacements [Phun Phact: I once saw the Butthole Surfers open for the 'Mats at City Gardens in Trenton. I think Jon Stewart was still bar-tending there, back then]
• The Onion has created the greatest "Area Man" piece of all time
• Same-sex marriage is now legal in Mexico City!!!
• and the genomes for two different types of cancer have been mapped

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.