Category: History

History, Humor, Movies

For My Future Spawn: Conscience

“Oh, confound all this.  I’m not a scholar, I don’t know whether the marriage was lawful or not but dammit, Thomas, look at these names!  Why can’t you do as I did and come with us, for fellowship?”
“And when we die and you are sent to Heaven for doing your conscience and I am sent to Hell for not doing mine, will you come with me, for fellowship?”
– A Man for All Seasons

Truth is that while fairy tales (not of the gruesome original variety, the Disney-fied kind) like to depict people getting rewarded for sticking to their principles, quite often the blessing one gets for standing by one’s standards, ideals, and beliefs is a public flogging, or worse.  And the measure of our character is whether we will endure the blacklisting, loss of status, loss of friends, back-against-the-wall-ness of it all with dignity and come out with our convictions still in place.

And so! A Man for All Seasons is required viewing.  Paul Scofield gives a a subtle but brilliant performance of a man who managed to be both conflicted and steady and who ultimately decides to stand by his faith, but more importantly his conscience.  The movie could easily have been a trite morality play, but it isn’t.  It’s as complex as the idea of conscience and morality itself.

The story is set during one of the most tumultuous centuries for faith and conflict in Western history and England.  Henry VIII has thrown over Katherine of Aragon for Anne Boleyn, and the Catholic Church for one of his own making.  None of which sits right Sir Thomas More (Scofield) who, quietly but firmly, says he cannot change his religious beliefs to suit even a king, cannot change his legal opinion to flout the law, and will not go against his conscience even to save his life.

I do not mistake this film for history.   The historical Thomas More was a Catholic zealot who saw six “heretics” burned to death under his administration as Lord Chancellor, but he was also a humanist who thought women were just as academically capable as men and gave his daughters the same classical education as his sons.  I don’t mind the simplified, or rather focused, view of a certain part of his life, historical accuracy isn’t the point of this film.  A man having his friends, protectors, and even household turn against him, while he sticks to his moral guns is.

Ideals are seldom complex and people never are.  More defends bad laws made by men because the universal concept of Law gives protection, he encourages humility to an ambitious friend while being named Lord Chancellor, he insults another friend to keep him distant in order to protect him from the political fallout of being friends with a “traitor,” and argues for justice at his unfair and mock trial.

Moral of the story: decide what you hold dear, and defend it.  Even if it costs you.

Dork, History, Humor

Who Else Finds This Funny? …Anyone?

“Difficile est saturam non scribere.”
– Decimus Iunius Juvenalis

In continuing C.-is-a-history-dork news, I’ve discovered an entire internet meme genre I didn’t know existed, based on the Bayeux Tapestry.  How could I not have known of this?!

Oh, remember when this was a sassy comeback? In the 11th century?

Ye Olde CSI
Fresh Prince of Bel Air-ford.
The pun appropriately named Sir Mix-a-Lot.
J. likes Soviet Russia jokes.
My favorite! An old childhood computer game, "The Canterbury Trails!"
Books, Family, History, Humor

For My Future Spawn: History

“History: gossip well-told.”
– Elbert Hubbard

Hands down my favorite family holiday was trekking along this thing. Glean from this confession what you will.

In case you forgot, I love history.  I find it fascinating.  I joyfully memorized dates in school and wrote fantastic papers.  Not that I had a hope or prayer of doing otherwise – my family’s library is a massive thing divided into Theology, my father’s collection of Modern Library first editions, classics, children/young adult literature, and history with an emphasis in the development of Western Culture.  Our family vacations are not to theme parks as much as hiking Hadrian’s Wall, Normandy, Colonial Williamsburg, museums, castles, palaces, and ruins (true story about how all four kids, aged 20, 14, 12, and 10 climbed all over a Roman fort that was partially submerged in a stream looking for the carved symbols hidden at the base meant to protect it – which may or may not have been relief carvings of genitalia – because it was something we had never seen before in our many adventures in various Roman piles of rocks) .  We are DORKS.

And everyone knows the best way to grow a dork is to start young!  Ergo I bring you, Horrible Histories: a humorous, outrageous, and engrossing (emphasis on the “gross”) medium for bringing history to the masses.  “It’s history, with all the horrible bits left in.”  Timelines, explanations, and facts interspersed with tidbits of the unusual, gory, or just plain bizarre.  And Britishly funny!

Titles such as The Savage Stone Age (Horrible Histories), Villainous Victorians (Horrible Histories), and The Vicious Vikings and the Measly Middle Ages (Horrible Histories) virtually speak for themselves.  Illustrated by the delightful Martin Brown and others, there are puns, jokes, incredible stories, side-splitting captions, and all manner of fun.  I’d recommend them to anyone who wants to stuff their kids’ heads with something without the child catching on to the parent’s nefarious scheme to make them enjoy getting smarter.  You can buy them on the cheap, often starting as low as $.01 on Amazon, I already own a sizable (and growing) collection that still makes me laugh.

It’s history, almost as if told by Monty Python.  Oh, I own that too.
Terry Jones’ Medieval Lives

Books, History, Home, Movies

Liberal. Education

“A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.”
– George Santayana

We here at Small Dog Syndrome got some fun  emails from a previous post (the post about things one’s kids ought to know.  Not the post about beating one’s kids.  Very different).  And so, because it’s summer and I need something to do on my lunch breaks and weekends, I think I’ll start up a bit of a series on the subject (again, about what’s one’s children out to be exposed to, not domestic violence.  Just so we’re clear).  Nothing formal, and certainly not organized; that’s just not the way we do things around here.  Let’s think of it as an ongoing project that will intermittently interject into our regularly scheduled reading.

Do you have something to share with the class?

I’m opening this up for discussion as well, be free with your comments, accolades, scathing rebukes towards my taste, etc.  And by all means, add your own suggestions!  I’m looking for books, movies, TV shows, vacation spots, and the like, all I ask is that you keep it culturally-minded.  Meaning while Spongebob Squarepants may have been your favorite drivel growing up, I’m looking for the quality things that you’d truly want your future spawn to know of.  More importantly, why.

Angst, Friends, History, Humor, Office, University, Work

Making a Cake of Myself

“If you wait a few minutes you can have a piece of cake.  Baked it chock-full of love, actually chock-full of unrelenting, all-consuming rage and hostility.  But still tasty.”
-Grey’s Anatomy

I made light of it but yesterday’s brush off (you know, when I delivered fifty years of an otherwise undocumented perspective on the growth of the university, state, and country through some of the most turbulent social decades of the previous century…nothing big) was a crushing blow.  I’ve been coasting along blissfully at work ever since my rage stroke without caring too much about the administrative snafus that I seem to see everywhere.

But then this happened and my entire academic life flashed before my eyes.  I wondered if all my education even mattered, if I’d ever be able to use it again, what would become of me, blah blah blah.  It was rough.  To make it worse it was compounded with hormones and J. wanting to talk about our future (grad school, loans, working now, internships).  The overwhelming sense of uncertainty blended nicely into the tempest already brewing in my teapot.

Cue minor meltdown.  I started baking immediately.  I hate cooking of all forms so for me it’s the ultimate cathartic experience: I can take out my emotions by beating eggs, shredding carrots, and pummeling dough into submission, and come out with something sugary at the end.  Perfect.  Luckily Venice and I met somewhere in the middle – she needed butter, I needed Midol – and I got a nice heaping dose of perspective, as she’d had a pretty wretched day too.

She’s been suffering at work for years now.  And unlike me, she doesn’t have lots of really great co-workers and supervisors to make the stupidity and drudgery less irksome.  (Don’t go, Venice!  Er…ahem…)  Twenty minutes complaining about work, mutual resolve to learn to cope better, and I was ready to talk grad school with J.

Summary: Friends and muffins make everything, even the occasional crisis of faith, better.
History, Humor, Life, Office, University, Work

Top. Men.

“We have top men working on it right now.”
“Who?”
“Top men.”
– Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark

Pictured: a villain immediately preceeding his revalation of exactly how badly he has been behaving for the last hour and a half.

In almost every movie there is that incredibly silly moment when the villain is confronted with the fruits of his or her destruction and, looking over the rivers of lava/ looming black hole/ annihilation of an entire civilization/ etc., murmurs in despair, “My god, what have I done?!”

I had one of those moments today.  After getting all the archives into chronological order (which you’d think they’d already be in, right?  Hah!), tagging them by date, pulling original photos and making notes on when/where they originally occurred in print, and hauling it one massive armload at a time to the library, I asked for the archivist.  Student employees helped me carry the stacks of papers and binders and asked what I was doing.  I couldn’t very well shout, “Saving history!” in the library, so I quietly whispered the tale of the iniquitous order to dispose of fifty years of information.
“He told you to shred it!” one girl squeaked in horror.
“I know,” I squeaked back.

We were all awash with the enthusiasm of the young until the archivist appeared.  He looked like Eeyore the donkey in human form: droopy, awkward, exhausted, and less than thrilled to see me with my arms full of documents.
“Hi, I’m C. from the police department.  We talked on the phone and–”
“Oh, right,” he sighed, “Follow me.”

The whole cavalcade meandered down some halls and through secured doors…to a lonely room, lined with shelves and piled with papers.
“Here’s a project for you,” he mumbled to what appeared to be a heinously overworked student employee, and ordered us to drop the whole pile on her (already covered) desk.

My project is somewhere alongside the Ark, I'm sure.

Which is when I had my cinema-villain-is-confronted-by-what-she’s-done moment.  I’d committed the most rookie of cardinal sins: I’d just turned over fifty years of history to a bureaucracy!

I’ve gained all sorts of skills and experiences at this job, but law enforcement is not my calling, to say the least.  But history!  Oh, yes.  And this project is the first thing in over a year and a half that’s come close to the things I’ve studied and feel passionate about.   Certainly it’s the only thing that’s got me excited enough to annoy my co-workers with my near constant cries of, “Read this!”  And now, I’ve an awful premonition that my precious bundles are only going to slowly decompose in the bowels of the library.  There is no justice in the world.

History, Humor, Office, University, Work

It Was a Simpler Time

“All the ancient histories, as one of our wits say, are just fables that have been agreed upon.”
-Voltaire

Yesterday Lt. Citrus called me into his office and waved his hand at a pile of binders.  It was the media files archives of our department, newspaper clippings mostly, and it went back to 1960.
“We don’t need these anymore,” he said.  “Can you get rid of them and save the binders?”

?!?!?!?!

I stretched out my hands dumbly and let him plop a stack in my hands and then tottered back to my desk where I opened them up.

The Civil Rights movement, the Vietnam War, the first female officer to graduate from the state’s police academy…the earliest documented complaints about parking (an as yet unresolved problem!) when we had a fraction of the student number we do now…a completely unique perspective on the history of the campus was sitting on my desk and I was supposed to just shred it?!  Clearly they forgot I majored in history!

I begged off my other chores and began putting things in order.  I’ve spent the last day and a half scanning articles and photos that document the history of the department (beginning back when we had an ex-LA cop fish a bunch of wallets out of the campus pond and search for the owners, all the way to the 40+ full time, state-certified officers we have now along with nearly 200 student employees).  And come across some real gems!

Throw this stuff away.  Pfft!  I’m already in contact with the university archivist.

Showing off items abandoned in the Lost and Found. The one on the right kind of looks like Peggy Olson from Mad Men.
Contrary to popular belief, we neither live in Mayberry, nor whistle frequently.
History, Humor, Office, Work

Prometheus. Bound.

“Hear now a sorry tale of mortal man…”
– Aeschylus

The story of Prometheus is well known, but to recap…  He was a titan who apparently sided with the Olympians when they wandered into Greece, looked around, and said, “We’ll take it.”  Even though Zeus declares himself supreme-overlord-of-all-and-if-you-challenge-me-you-will-get-struck-by-bloody-lightning-I-am-not-kidding!, Prometheus demonstrates over and over again that he is far more clever than the majority of the pantheon.  While Zeus is sneaking around behind his wife’s back, preening in a mirror, and trying (unsuccessfully) to keep his growing horde of illegitimate children quiet, Prometheus decides that he feels like creating humans and developing agriculture, writing, and the other civilizing arts.

"That'll learn you, thinking you're smarter than me..." "Wow. You're a huge jerk. Ow ow OW!"

But when he decided to steal fire (usually symbolizing technology in general) for mankind and smuggled it off Mount Olympus, Zeus finally lost it.  Fed up with his tricks, overwhelming cleverness, and making him (Zeus) look bad, he chained Prometheus to a mountain and sent an eagle to eat his liver everyday, which miraculously regrew each night so he could be tortured in the same way daily, ad infinitum.  One of the pesky downsides to being immortal.

The modern retelling of this myth is currently taking place on our front counter.

In an effort to help transition patrons to the new parking system, an unnamed officer bought two tiny laptops that our employees could use to walk individuals through the online process of registering their cars.  Trouble was that for months the system was hovering in a state of semi-productivity limbo, even on a good day the internet connection on the laptops is shoddy at best, and the computers are almost never used.  Not money well spent, in my opinion.

Not aesthetically pleasing, I feel.

However, one of the more obvious problems with this idea has been the method devised for keeping them in place (as it would be embarrassing for computers to get stolen from a police department); to wit, a tangled mass of wires, power strips, and chains wrapped around one another, the computers themselves, and drawer handles.  Looking both ghetto and ridiculous.

Moral of the story: trying to bring enlightenment and ease to the populace will probably make you an object of aggravation, fit only to be tied up and left to rot.

History, Humor, Movies

Free the Kraken: Victim of Over-Marketing!

“I’m having a little trouble concentrating.”
“Oh, well I could sell you some of my Adderall if you want.”
“No, thanks, I’m off pills.”
“That’s a wise choice because I knew this girl who like had this crazy freak out because she took too many behavioral meds at once and she like ripped off her clothes, and dove into the fountain at Ridgedale Mall and was like, ‘Blah I am a Kraken from the sea!'”
“I hear that was you.”
“Well, it was good seeing you, Su-Chin.”
– Juno, 2007

I’ve been doing some thinking, and I’ve decided that the stupidest line that could ever possibly be shouted out at any given time is, “Release the Kraken.”

For one very good reason: it’s overused.  Which is too bad really, it’s a potentially great line completely slaughtered by pop culture.

There are the hordes of annoying people trying to celebrate this year’s remake of Clash of the Titans, by trying to make “Release the Kraken” happen.

This phenomena is not new.  One of the oddest utterances of this phrase occurred in 2004, during a pre-season friendly between Liverpool and Celtic held in Connecticut.  Max Bretos on the Fox Sports commentary team shouted the following…

In fact, the only time I’ve ever heard the word “kraken” without its seeming obligatory introductory “release the-” has been in Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean series (which is also, incidentally, dying the slow death of cultural over-exposure).

I’m shallow enough to admit that the constant barrage of this phrase, overheard in grocery stores, at malls, on campus, and in parking lots (in the last week alone), is the main reason that I have no interest in seeing this movie.  Also, I remember seeing the original at some point in my childhood and, being something of a wunderkind with mythology (read: nerd), feeling absolutely disgusted with the creative liberties they took.  Mechanical owl?  Medusa spitting scorpions from her decapitated neck?  Acidic blood?  Please!  I’m a purist.