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A scenario for a triphibious assault on Long Island and New York City.

Zootie has a very personal question. Can Rebo Help?

From Axes & Alleys

Celebrating the moderate success of our short film, Conversations with Fiona Apple.

Original Post
1. Pick up a random public phone; answer it and announce “London Calling.”
2. Attempt to impress British girls by explaining that if not for the U.S. they would be speaking German.
3. Attempt to impress British historians by explaining that if not for William I they
would all be speaking a sort of modified Welsh.
4. Purchase tweed.
5. Go to William Bligh’s house and put a Pitcarin Island flag on the door.
6. Point out your fanny pack to the locals.
7. Ask the cab driver to take you to see the Eiffel Tower.
8. Put Christmas decorations on the statue of Cromwell.
9. Collect prostitute calling cards. Trade them with your friends for a complete set.
10. On the road, look over at who’s sitting in the passenger seat of the car. Children
or dogs can be especially disconcerting.
11. Head over to 11 Downing Street and say hello to the Chancellor of the Exchequer.
12. Giggle like a school girl when things cost “pee.”
13. Sneeze on the Magna Carta.
14. Don’t even bother trying to make the Beefeaters laugh.
Just punch them in the nose and run away.
15. Go to Westminster Abbey and dance on Isaac Newton’s grave.
16. Point out that the sculptor of Nelson’s Column forgot about the other arm.
17. Get some of those famous Fish & Chips.
Discard after three bites because British food sucks.
18. Ask random people why “Big Ben” isn’t digital yet.
19. Smoke marijuana while strolling down High Street.
20. Order a pint of bitter. Send it back complaining that it’s too bitter.
21. Sew a picture of yourself into the Bayeux Tapestry.
Make it so that you’re riding Haley’s Comet.
22. Dress up in a sheet and scare people at the Tower.
23. Go to Buckingham Palace and protest the impressments of American sailors.
24. Ask people if they know Danger Mouse.
25. Insist that the proper way to pronounce it is Thaymes, not Tems.
26. Show Britons pictures of your television for which you didn’t have to get a license.
27. Call for a vote of no confidence on your waitress.
28. When you see a Londoner down on his luck, sit down and remind him of
how thoroughly they kicked William Wallace’s ass.
29. Talk about how they just let Americans through customs with their guns.
30. Enjoy some Smarties, but say they’re not as good as M&Ms out of patriotism.
31. Mention how much worse your terrorist attack was than theirs.
32. Wonder aloud if the band Queen was named after Queen Elizabeth II.
33. Ask why they can’t get a decent domain name, like .com or .america.
34. Congratulate Londoners on their performance in the Falkland Islands.
35. Go to Euston Station and sing Catatonia’s “Londinium” loudly and annoyingly.
36. Respond with a Vicky Pollard impression to every query.
37. Complain about the beer being too cold.
38. Taunt them on their performance in the French and Indian War.
39. Declare peace in our time.
40. Organize a protest against the execution of Thomas Moore.
41. Point out how different Kew Gardens, London is from Kew Gardens, Queens.
Then make fun of them for ripping off the names for Chelsea and Soho.
42. Complain about so many nearby highways being named after the
Messier catalog designations of globular clusters and galaxies.
43. Act really impressed when looking at the London Stone.
44. Laugh at barristers and their silly wigs.
45. Sarcasm is absent from British culture. Use this to your advantage.
46. Stock up on Euros so you can enjoy London’s famous gambling dens and
corner craps games.
47. Ask a bobby if he keeps his lunch under his big helmet.
48. Set up your very own official turnpike in London City.
49. Wear a hoodie to obscure your face from London’s plethora of surveillance
cameras. Claim to be a monk when questioned by police.
50. Find an old-fashioned call box. Get in and then tell people your Tardis isn’t working.

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Grand Canyon, AZ – So, here it is. I’ve come to the most well-known geological feature in the United States and I’m looking over the edge. There’s a river down there at the bottom. There’s some very high canyon walls. It’s most impressive. But, you know what? I’ve got a problem with it. All the stupid families.

I’m visiting one of the things in nature which holds the most impact for visitors, and there’s a bunch of snot-nosed, whiny little brats running around. How the hell am I supposed to enjoy this grand, natural beauty with these rug rats everywhere?

Earlier in the day I paid for a mule ride tour and hike of the canyon. Things were okay for about the first ten minutes, but then this noise kept bothering me. Finally I looked around for it and it turns out a kid two mules behind was playing some handheld game. That was the noise. Okay, I can deal. I’ve been a bored kid before. But then we get to the bottom and these two elementary school kids start whining. They’re tired. They have to pee. It’s no fun for them. One of them kicked their mule, which was great because the thing totally kicked him back. That kid got knocked right into the Colorado River. It was hilarious. So hilarious it made up for all his crying.

Then I took a whitewater rafting trip down the river. This was so awesome, I couldn’t believe it. Yeah, no nachos, but it was really exciting and the guide was so cute. Of course one of those stupid kids had to ruin all the fun.  We stopped near some of these awesome Navajo adobe ruins and camped out in front of them. While me and the guide are having some adult fun in one of the upper storeys of the Navajo city, this little bastard starts up crying about his lost cards. They were from some cartoon show and he wouldn’t shut up. So of course Jeb, the guide, had to go down and help out. And I didn’t get any action!

They couldn’t find his cards, so the kid had a huge tantrum. He’s whining into the night, throwing smores at his parents. Then, all of sudden, he runs off towards the adobe structures. We didn’t pay him any mind, but ten minutes later we hear some crackling. As we look over, we notice that stupid kid kicking the city and beating it with a huge branch. That whole building came down.

Well, about ten miles down the river the next day, I got him back. My raft came up right next to his, and I sent it tipping over with my oar. They couldn’t find that little pissant for two hours. He got stuck between to boulders in the river about a mile downstream. It was awesome. Made up for the whole trip.

So, yeah, I would recommend the Grand Canyon. It’s beautiful. Just go in the winter when there aren’t any families around and you won’t have to deal with all the crap that I did. 

They're just a fabrication of 19th Century romanticism, Roman propaganda, and 150 years of poor teaching.

Children’s stories are chock full of knights, squires, castles with moats, and damsels who require a healthy amount of rescuing. Of course, these elements have about as much basis in historical fact as the wizards, witches and dragons that also populate the same stories. That is to say that there were real witches, real dragons, real knights and real castles, but the real ones have little in common with their romantic, faerie-tale counterparts.

This is the true story of the Dark Ages, as some call it. Yes, there was a period of time from 500—1000 AD, but what we’ve been told about it is based in 19th Century Romanticism, Roman propaganda and other fictional generalizations. The Dark Ages, while certainly dark, weren’t any less well-lit than any other period in history. No matter what was going on, the lives of the vast majority of people didn’t change a bit, despite the varying empires and cultures which rose and fell. For Jimmy, the peasant with leprosy and his fellow diseased, poverty-ridden ilk, it didn’t matter if you had a consul, an emperor or a lord oppressing you. You were still being oppressed.

The schoolmarm’s old yarn is that the Roman Empire, grand as it were, collapsed and that Barbarism spread throughout Europe. Knowledge was lost, learning stopped, and poverty and superstition reigned for a thousand years until some enterprising artists decided to start painting with perspective and to make really big versions of Greek
statuary. Here we hit the Renaissance and have a happy ending for Jimmy the Leper. As always, the truth is just a bit more complicated.

First there’s one major fallacy to dispel: the classical glory and grandeur of the intellectual paradise of Greece and Rome. Despite what Mrs. Rowland taught you in middle school, the Roman Empire was full of squalor, filth, disease and hunger. In the Greco-Roman world, as in the Dark Ages, practically everyone lived in filth and poverty. Which is better: the cramped, dark tenement or the cramped, dark hovel?

They were poor people, they were diseased and they were oppressed by people who, while not being particularly healthier or cleaner, were certainly richer. If you want to know how truly grand life was in Rome, don’t ask Pliny the Elder, ask Jimmus the Galley Slave.

To put this in perspective, let’s say you put all the people who ever existed into a large bag and pull out a million at a time. Your chances of retrieving one rich, healthy and clean person are about the same as those of procuring a bag large enough to hold every person who ever existed.

The Greeks’ main claims to fame, though, are their culture, learning and art. Well, not all of the Greeks. Only a handful excelled at this and for the most part they weren’t highly paid or not killed. Some weren’t both (look up Socrates some time). They did invent geometry. But then they made it a religion and refused to allow any practical applications of geometry. You know, it would cheapen rectangles and whatnot if everyone knew about them. Some people were so upset with the Pythagoreans for hiding the wonders of the perfect solids that they lynched them upon discovering these great truths were being kept from them. How enlightened.

Also, they invented democracy. Well, they invented something sort of like democracy. That is to say they invented something close enough to democracy that we took their name and used it to describe the idealized version of our current system. No slaves, women, or people busy finding food, please.

The people who made up the bulk of the population? They didn’t care. Rectangles, perfect forms and democracy didn’t help get the dung smell out of a tunic. And you were in real trouble if you lived near the city’s sewage system, if your city was lucky enough to have one. Nope Jimexanos the Leper didn’t get an iota of relief from The Republic. It’s ever so slightly difficult for your people to appreciate your culture’s great literary works when the vast majority of your people are illiterate wretches.

The Romans, however, were the real masters of culture and learning, which they mastered by ripping off other people’s ideas. The Romans’ ideas were “adopted” from the Greeks, Phoenicians Carthaginians, and Etruscans. The Romans were famous for their roads, many of which they found intact after the Persians had forgotten to take
them when they left. Those famous Roman roads were a great benefit to the common people, who were able to utilize them as they were forcemarched in chains down the roads so that they could be whipped as they built the next section of road.

No, the truly unique cultural achievement of the Romans was murder. They loved murder; it was their favorite. While the slaves and Plebeians watched other slaves and Plebeians being murdered in the Coliseum, the Patricians were busy murdering each other to see who could win the right to be the next consul or emperor to get murdered.

Eventually the so-called Barbarians got into the game by murdering lots of Romans and the Empire collapsed. All the while, Jimmus the Galley Slave was still a leper living in filth who got to see an occasional sculpture and mighty temple on those few occasions when his galley would dock. But, in the end he was still a leper and a slave.

And then around 500 AD the Dark Ages began. Actually, it was 476, but it’s easier to just round up. So, the crux of the issue is this question: did the collapse of the Roman Empire cause regular folk roundabout Northern Europe any more problems than they already had?

Northern Europe hadn’t quite benefited from all this prosperity, enrichment and enlightening. Actually, it kept on doing its dirt-strewn, illiterate best throughout the existence of Rome. It was cold, heavily forested and inhabited by bloodthirsty drunks. We call these people Celts. There were also some Goths involved who eventually founded Austria. Good for them. No matter what was going on or which empire happened to be in ascendancy at the time, they remained bloodthirsty, drunken farmers. Occasionally one of their leaders got the bright idea to ravage those enlightened softies to the South. You see, the real benefit bestowed upon Northern Europe by the Roman Empire was centuries of warfare and enslavement. The collapse of Rome actually improved these peoples’ lives slightly, as it meant they could go south and bring more loot back home.

A good example of how the collapse of the Roman Empire affected Northern Europe might be the city of Aachen. From Neolithic times up to the era of Greece and Rome it was a minor, backwoods village where farming and stone quarrying happened. Then, a few centuries after Rome fell, Aachen became the capital of a large empire, home to massive palaces and cathedrals and, under Charlemagne, a center of learning and culture.

It doesn’t exactly seem to follow that the collapse of Rome caused a Dark Age in Aachen, especially since the so-called Dark Age turned it from a stone pit to a powerful cultural and political center.

The supposedly backwards people of Northern Europe in the Dark Ages turned out to be fairly skilled engineers and structural designers. During a period devoid of learning, they managed to go from building wooden forts called mot and baileys, to building huge walled cities, massive castles and ridiculously intricate and enormous cathedrals. Granted, they didn’t have 100,000 seat capacity coliseums, but they certainly knew how to stack their stones. Of course the person stacking the stones would have been Jimmy the Peasant, who besides having no rights or money, also had to grow food for everyone, give up a few months out of the year to be trampled by knights in battle and spend another few months hauling stones to build those mighty cathedrals. He probably had leprosy, too.

Speaking of cathedrals, the Dark Ages were known for theocracy and superstition. Though it’s not exactly fair to single them out in that respect. After all, the Romans believed in a pantheon of fickle gods (ooh, Janus god of doorways!) and the Pythagoreans actually believed that dodecahedrons were sacred (though they didn’t give a fig about parallelograms). Of course the Renaissance and “Age of Reason” mark the end of all this. Europe spent those couple of centuries celebrating Reason by fighting religious wars, burning suspected witches, and lynching smart guys.

As you can see, Jimmus, Jimexanos and Jimmy weren’t doing too well regardless of what period in history they lived or which culture happened to be waxing or waning. Whether they were forced to build a Parthenon, an aqueduct or a castle, they were still whipped if they didn’t go fast enough. Whether they were being marched off to war against the Persians, the Parthians or the Muslims, they were still put out in front and armed with farm equipment. Whether their home was Athens, Rome or Aachen, they were still living in filth, disease and squalor.

None of this though, should be taken as an attempt to defend the Dark Ages as a wonderful period in human history. The point is that the Europe your teachers taught you about during the Dark Ages was rife with disease, poverty, oppression and superstition, just like every other time period for which we have records. Remember that the next time you see a story about the Middle Ages. Also, remember that everything your teacher told you was wrong. You don’t listen to that woman, you listen to me.

Found here.

Original Post

An Editorial by a Plastic Mannequin

I am not a historian of the comic strip Cathy. As a child I read the strip regularly. As an adult, I’ve glanced over Cathy from time to time. Because of this unique experience with the work of Cathy Guisewite, one could say I am more like Heinrich Schliemann finding a frozen moment in the development of Troy.  Like Schliemann, all I see is ruination.

As a child I loved Cathy. Each week I would eagerly open the funny pages to read about her looking for a date, being fat, wanting to exercise, eating too many chocolates, talking to her cat, talking to her mother on the phone; virtually any of the boring things a young professional woman might do.

I wanted to meet Cathy. Not the character, but the woman who created her. In fact, I will admit to having a small crush on Cathy Guisewite at the age of seven. She seemed to know something about all the normal things in life, stuff a seven year old didn’t know yet. And since the strip was drawn very much as a seven year old would draw, I thought her character was cute and figured she would be, too.

I thought she lived nearby. Then again, I thought all the comics writers lived nearby. Dick Browne wrote Hagar the Horrible from up the street. Bil Keane lived in town with the Family Circus. Lynn Johnston owned the awesome house near my elementary school, pouring out For Better or For Worse. This was reinforced by the fact that Peanuts creator Charles Schultz really did live in my town. So I thought Ms. Guisewite was probably somewhere in the neighbourhood and I desperately wanted to meet her.

Things haven’t changed much in the last twenty years. The visual style of Cathy is surprisingly still very much familiar to elementary school students. It’s amazing that after two decades, she hasn’t been able to control her urge for sweets. She finally got that man she was after, but their dialogue isn’t much different than it was before. Her concerns are still quite parochial. For instance, Cathy still thinks she’s fat and makes jokes about exercise.

This last is difficult to wrap one’s head around. Everyone in the Cathyverse is the same size, so one assumes either Cathy has never been fat or she only knows fat people. Both propositions are quite sad. The former suggests Cathy as the victim of a persistent body dismorphic disorder. The latter is a dystopian proposition that Cathy lives in a dark, gritty world of people unable to control their urges, doomed to an early death from heart disease, high blood pressure, or diabetes. Diabetes seems most likely as insulin is never mentioned.

I no longer wish to meet Cathy Guisewite. Her concerns are parochially vapid and her output offers no deep analysis on the human condition. Probably a woman in her late twenties or thirties when I was a child, she must now be in her late forties or fifties. If Cathy suggests anything about her, on top of being too old for me she’s incredibly dull. I would make her angry when she showed me the latest strip and I told her how bad it was.

I’m not her demographic and that’s okay. I am not, of course, seven years old any longer. I am not a stereotypical young professional woman sitting in my apartment with my cats reading the comics in my sweatpants. I am not a middle-aged biddy wont to chuckle at the latest stereotypically male thing Cathy’s companion does.

I’m sure me, aged seven, would be disappointed with this outcome, but I won’t listen to him. He didn’t know how to tie his shoes then. He couldn’t recognize that Cathy is filler; one of the worst comic strips ever to be granted a syndication contract, and one upon which can be saddled all the accusations of decadence and boorishness ever levied against our culture.

Cathy was and is the early warning sign of a culture about to fall, of a grand civilization tottering toward its grave. When historians look back at the United States, Cathy Guisewite will be held up as one of the first signals that something was wrong. They will shake their heads at our folly and ask, “Why was nothing done?”