Creepy

History, Weirdness

Skimming through a random selection on Project Gutenberg–the July 2, 1853 issue of Notes and Queries–I came across this weird little incident:

Curious Posthumous Occurrence.—If the following be true, though in ever so limited a manner, it deserves investigation. Notwithstanding his twenty-three years’ experience, the worthy grave-digger must have been mistaken, unless there is something peculiar in the bodies of Bath people! But if the face turns down in any instance, as asserted, it would be right to ascertain the cause, and why this change is not general. It is now above twenty years since the paragraph appeared in the London papers:—

“A correspondent in the Bath Herald states the following singular circumstance:—’Having occasion last week to inspect a grave in one of the parishes of this city, in which two or three members of a family had been buried some years since, and which lay in very wet ground, I observed that the upper part of the coffin was rotted away, and had left the head and bones of the skull exposed to view. On inquiring of the grave-digger how it came to pass that I did not observe the usual sockets of the eyes in the skull, he replied that what I saw was the hind part of the head (termed the occiput, I believe, by anatomists), and that the face was turned, as usual, to the earth!!—Not exactly understanding his phrase ‘as usual,’ I inquired if the body had been buried with the face upwards, as in the ordinary way; to which he replied to my astonishment, in the affirmative, adding, that in the course of decomposition the face of every individual turns to the earth!! and that, in the experience of three-and-twenty years in his situation, he had never known more than one instance to the contrary.'”

A. B. C.

I suspect the gravedigger had no idea what had happened and, rather than appear ignorant in front of our nameless correspondent, invented this totally specious bit of insider knowledge on the spot. The only other possibility–discounting zombies–is that some medical authority in Bath had, as often as possible for at least twenty-three years, been overenthusiastic about declaring people dead. Stupid though it is, that idea will probably still keep me awake tonight.

The Secret History

Books, History, Weirdness, , , ,

Emperor Justinian

Procopius was a respected historian back in his day. Upright. Sober. The go-to guy if you wanted to know what was up with Emperor Justinian.

So everybody was kind of surprised when, a few centuries later, somebody dug up The Secret History. Procopius hated Justinian. Hated him. Hated hated hated hated hated him. Not as much as he hated Empress Theodora, but still a lot. It wasn’t that Justinian was stupid. It wasn’t that he was corrupt. He managed to be stupid and successfully corrupt at the same time: “never of his own accord speaking the truth to those with whom he conversed, but having a deceitful and crafty intent behind every word and action, and at the same time exposing himself, an easy prey, to those who wished to deceive him.”

The Secret History was where Procopius vented the bile he couldn’t pack into his official histories without getting executed. He starts out… what do they call it these days? “Shrill?” As the pages go by he gets shriller and shriller until he reads like a steam whistle. Look at the chapter titles from the Penguin edition—I think they were added by the translator, but they give you the flavor. They start with “Belisarius and Antonina,” and progress to “Justinian’s Misgovernment,” and then “The Destruction Wrought by a Demon-Emperor,” and by “Everyone and Everything Sacrificed to the Emperor’s Greed” Procopius’s face is bright red and he’s muttering to himself and steam is jetting out of his ears and you’re sort of afraid he’ll pull out a couple of pistols and shoot up the room like Yosemite Sam. (Then you remember he’s been dead for over fourteen centuries. We’re safe!)

Continue reading The Secret History →

The Littlest Presidential Biography

Books, History

Project Gutenberg has an RSS feed of new and updated titles. I check it sometimes; you never know what’s going to turn up. The best title I’ve seen recently is Lives of the Presidents Told in Words of One Syllable, by Jean S. Remy. “Wow,” I thought. “This is the kind of historical reference you could give a Fox News commentator!”

I thought Jean had given herself (himself? Was s/he French?) quite a challenge—like writing a novel without the letter E. I mean, “president” itself has three syllables. So does “Washington.” “Lincoln” has two. Maybe Jean was just very informal. She would call Washington “Wash,” and Lincoln “Link,” and the President would be “The Prez.” Just like drinking buddies. (I dunno how things were in 1900, but that’s what people look for in a President these days, right?)

But the actual book looks like this:

At this act Eng-land was up and in arms, and sent o-ver great ships and ma-ny men to help fight the French. The first step that Eng-land took was to send men to warn the French a-way from the Eng-lish forts in Penn-syl-va-ni-a; and Wash-ing-ton, who knew bet-ter than a-ny one else the rough wild woods, and who was a friend of the In-di-ans, led a lit-tle band of sev-en men through the dense, dark woods and o-ver riv-ers filled with float-ing ice, up to the French lines. He told the chief man of the French troops just what the Eng-lish said, but this French man would not give up one inch of ground that he had won from the In-di-ans, and gave Wash-ing-ton a note to take back with him, in which he said as much.

Jean didn’t use words of one syllable—she stuck hyphens in polysyllabic words and redefined them as multiple single-syllable words. Man, that’s cheating.

Bonus Fun Fact!

On the whole, Jack-son’s term was a good one for the land; and so well did the peo-ple like him, that he is the on-ly pres-i-dent of whom it has been said that he was bet-ter liked when he went out of of-fice than when he went in.

I am not totally sure this is a compliment.

A Couple of Torchwood Books

Books, Doctor Who, Speculative Fiction, , , ,

Recently a couple of Torchwood books were recommended to me on the Jade Pagoda mailing list. I’ve now read Slow Decay, and decided to review it. I’m going to begin by talking about Another Life. I read Another Life, and tried to read Border Princes, not long after they came out. This is why I’ve only now read Slow Decay.

Torchwood is strange. It has moments of genuinely good drama, sometimes, but for the most part it’s fun for reasons the producers did not intend and will never fully understand. At heart it’s a series about dumb, horny college kids who somehow got the keys to the most powerful paranormal investigations agency in Wales… basically a Battlestar Galactica-style dark reimagining of Scooby-Doo, Where Are You?, except instead of a talking Great Dane it has Ianto.

Continue reading A Couple of Torchwood Books →

I Want to See This Movie

News and Politics

The Conservative Political Action Conference is one of the biggest deals in Republican politics, and one of this year’s biggest stars isn’t old enough to drive. So this weekend New York Times ran a story on precocious 14 year old pundit Jonathan Krohn. Two stories, in fact. There’s the story about how the conservative movement, desperate for heroes, inexplicably latched onto a fourteen year old boy. And there’s the story Jonathan’s parents are living.

Jonathan said he became a political enthusiast at 8, after hearing about a Democratic filibuster on judicial nominations. “I thought, ”˜Who goes to work saying, ”˜I’m going to filibuster today?’ ” he said.

Mr. Krohn, looking bleary-eyed by recent events, muttered, “And now he can filibuster with the best of them.”

Mr. and Mrs. Krohn–themselves conservative, though apparently not crazy-conservative–are in a weird place. They’ve got a son who’s going through this politically-obsessed phase, arguing with a new convert’s zeal. Not that unusual; the stereotype is the new liberal who wonders whether ANYBODY cares about SAVING THE WHALES, MAN, but in real life you get this with conservatives, too.

Now, surreally, other adults have started taking their kid seriously. He’s speaking at conferences and getting interviewed on the radio and palling around with Bill Bennett. This isn’t supposed to happen in real life. This is the plot of a movie. A comedy. A gonzo political satire, probably from the late sixties or early seventies, crossed with a Wes Anderson film.

His voice rising to a wobbly squeak, he grabs any opening to press the cause. “Barack Obama is the most left-wing president in my lifetime,” he said.

Mr. Krohn buried his face in his hands. “Oh, Jonathan,” he sighed.

My mental image of Mr. Krohn precisely resembles Walter Matthau.

Dear Atlas: Please Shrug!

News and Politics

>A 63-year-old attorney based in Lafayette, La., who asked not to be named, told ABCNews.com that she plans to cut back on her business to get her annual income under the quarter million mark should the Obama tax plan be passed by Congress and become law.

>”We are going to try to figure out how to make our income $249,999.00,” she said.

–ABC News, [Upper-Income Taxpayers Look for Ways to Sidestep Obama Tax-Hike Plan] [abc]

Now, some people, reading this, will nod sagely. “How true!” they will say. “We, the sage nodding people, must cut our incomes as well!” But the vast majority of you will blink and say “Huh?”–or some variation on “Huh?”, such as “Wha?” or “Buh?”–because you do your own taxes and you know damn well *it doesn’t work like that*. When you jump into a higher tax bracket, the higher rate applies *only to the money you earn past that point*.

Imagine, for one moment, the perfect, impregnable obliviousness necessary to make it through college, through law school, through decades in the legal profession, and not know this. This woman’s skull must have grown from some very high-grade premium lead, the kind Lex Luthor uses for the boxes he keeps his chunks of Kryptonite in. Take your new information, encode it in the tiniest sub-atomic particle you can smash a thing down to–it hasn’t a prayer of penetrating.

This is why I’m begging you, please: if you know any of these people–these big-money blockheads, the high-rolling bowling ball brains of our economy–please, *please don’t enlighten them*.

The less the Anonymous Lawyers of the world work the better off we are. These are not the people we need to have running the world. For every one of these airheads who cuts back or steps aside, someone else–someone *smarter*–is ready to take their place. The sooner they do, the sooner the rest of us can get on with rebuilding the country.

(Found via [Hullabaloo] [digby].)

[abc]: http://abcnews.go.com/print?id=6975547
[digby]: http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2009/03/too-stupid-to-fill-my-teeth-by-digby.html

“You got your Gervase Fen in my Albert Campion!”

Books, Mysteries

I recently read Swan Song by Edmund Crispin, one of his Gervase Fen mysteries. At one point a journalist asks Fen for an interview. She’s doing a series on famous detectives: “I’m hoping to do H.M., and Mrs. Bradley, and Albert Campion, and all sorts of famous people.”

I didn’t immediately recognize the first two names, but Albert Campion is Margery Allingham’s series detective, who in 1947, when Swan Song was published, was still appearing in new books. Google revealed that “H.M.” was John Dickson Carr’s Sir Henry Merrivale (which I should have known), and Mrs. Bradley starred in a nearly forgotten (but intriguing-sounding) series by a third author.

This was interesting. I’ve seen writers make use of public-domain characters, and I’ve seen covert in-joke references to their colleagues’ work. (For example, as I recall at least one of Randall Garrett’s Lord Darcy stories had characters obviously based on Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin.) I haven’t often seen a writer explicitly and unilaterally connect his own fictional universe with one created by another contemporary writer. In fact, I can think of hardly any. Two things come to mind: a Star Trek tie-in (Ishmael, by Barbara Hambly) which is apparently a crossover with an old TV show I’ve never seen, and a recent post on The Valve about a 19th century hack who tried to latch onto Charles Dickens’s coattail by taking his melodramatic trunk novel, slipping in a couple of cameos by Dickens’s Paul Dombey, and calling it Dombey and Daughter. (This kind of thing must have happened more often in the days of loosely-observed copyrights; it’s possible I’ve heard of, and forgotten, similar incidents from the period. Not that it’s a great example in any case; it’s a cynical appropriation by a hack. The line from the Crispin novel was friendlier, and came from an equal.)

If anyone comes across this post and knows of other examples, let me know in the comments.