(
from M.Christian's Meine Kleine Fabrik)
This is very, very cool: a brand new
Welcome To Weirsville piece
I wrote just went up on the excellent The Cud site.
Here's
a tease below - and, of course, if you want to read more pieces about
fun and odd and strange and (yep) weird history check out my book
Welcome To Weirdsville
The Imitation Of Those Who We Cannot Resemble
Almost all absurdity of conduct arises from the imitation of those who we cannot resemble. –Samuel Johnson
"Stop fidgeting, everyone ... Jimmy, that'd better not be gum in your
mouth! No, Betty you can't go to the bathroom – you should have
thought of that before we started ... now you'll just have to wait for
the break. Okay, class, today we're going to be discussing possibly one
of – if not
the -- most important literary figures of the
twentieth century: a woman who pretty much single handedly created what
we consider to be modern literature..."
It's quite sad, really, that so many of us have had the juices
systematically squeezed out of history, reducing it to nothing but
powdery, gagging facts and bland, pasty figures – or, even worse, giants
carved in marble, hands on hips, forever steadfastly glaring out at us
in the future, their destinies unquestionable.
But, believe me, do some digging and there's juice a plenty in those dusty heroes – and while many of them certainly deserve to
be
on their lofty pedestals you'll quickly learn that more than a few of
them might be wonderfully, delightfully, fun ... if not totally
nuts.
Sarah Bernhardt, for instance, the legendary light of the stage, not
only had a wooden leg, liked to sleep in her coffin, but also had quite a
few ... involvements, shall we say, with people such as Victor Hugo and
Gustavo Doré; Tycho Brahe, one of the brightest stars in astronomy not
only had a fake metal nose (having lost his original in a duel) but kept
an on-staff dwarf for the entertainment of his guests as well as
himself; Richard Feynman, a Nobel Prize to his name, was an notorious
humorist and prankster -- as well as quite the established cracksman,
even claiming to have once easily got into the safe containing the plans
for the first atomic bomb; Georges Simenon, the master French mystery
author, not wrote over 200 novels but also claimed to have made love to
10,000 women; and let's not even get started on what M.Christian likes
to do with balloon animals...
Which takes us to 1910, back when Britain quite literally ruled the
waves: the time of what has been called by many to be the date of the
greatest prank in all of history ... and the literary light who had a
major part in it.
Now pranks were nothing new, especially for students of Cambridge,
but this one – orchestrated by the infamously witty Horace de Vere Cole –
set the bar. Horace tried afterward to top himself several times
afterward, including infamously dumping horse ...
leavings in
the canals in Venice (to confuse the non-horse city residents), or
arranging a group of bald men to sit in strategic places at the theater
so that their domes, when viewed from the balcony, would spell out a
rather (ahem) rude word, but his crowning achievement involved the pride
of the British Navy, a few of his close friends, some costuming skills,
the flag of Zanzibar, and a brilliant degree of planning – all of which
rocked the world and nearly got one of them a sentence of ten of the
best with a cane.
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