Thank you, Bill Maher, for rescuing Mitt Romney’s father-in-law from Kolob.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
Thank you, Bill Maher, for rescuing Mitt Romney’s father-in-law from Kolob.
Ah, the 19th century…when mad scientists were really mad, and not only that, they were popular at parties. In 1818, Dr Ure and Professor Jeffray obtained the freshly killed corpse of Matthew Clydesdale, only an hour from the hangman’s noose, and proceeded to experiment on it with a battery in the Glasgow University anatomy theater before a crowd of spectators. In my youth, I had to settle for recent roadkill, a 9 volt battery, and a dark basement, all by my lonesome — my jealousy is acute.
Here is a small portion of the account of that day’s fun.
The supra-orbital nerve was laid bare in the forehead, as it issues through the supraciliary foramen in the eyebrow: the one conducting rod being applied to it, and the other to the heel, most extraordinary grimaces were exhibited every time that electrical discharges were made, by running the wire in my hand along the edges of the last trough, from the 220th, to the 270th pair of plates: thus fifty shocks, each greater than the preceding one, were given in two seconds. Every muscle in his countenance was simultaneously thrown into fearful action: rage, horror, despair, anguish, and ghastly smile united their hideous expression in the murderer’s face; surpassing far the wildest representation of a Fuseli or a Kean. At this period several of the spectators were forced to leave the apartment from terror or sickness, and one gentleman fainted.
The account of galvanic experiments on dead bodies is taken from The Young Man’s Book of Amusement, which on the cover promises to teach card tricks and how to make fireworks. You’d think an amusement in which the first step is to obtain a dead body would be listed a little more prominently, but I guess playing with cadavers was just commonplace in the year before Queen Vickie was born.
(Also on FtB)
My wife just played the femdom role, and made me listen to that horrible Florida Republican debate while I cooked her dinner, so it was good of Dan Savage to provide some comic relief.
To "rick" is to remove something with your tongue—the "r" from "remove," the "ick" from "lick"—which makes "rick santorum" the most disgusting two-word sentence in the English language after "vote Republican."
To be complete, though, I need some bon mots to apply to Paul, Romney, and Gingrich.
I swear, next time I’m insisting on the whip and the spike heels grinding into my back — that debate was just too sadistic. I have my limits. And no, it wasn’t arousing at all.
(via Sara Mayhew, who I’ve mentioned on the blog twice)
There wasn’t much color photography in Darwin’s day, so all the photos we have of him are in black and white (or sepia). Here’s a site with some skillful retouching of old photos to add color…and a new version of a familiar image.
(Also on Sb)
Here is a page of WWII propaganda, from all sides. It’s weird to see it now with the distance of history making it more remote — it’s easy to judge it now fairly impartially. I have to say, from this sample, that Americans were rather crude and blunt; the Europeans in general had better design sense. And the Italians…whoa, fabulous! On the artistic merits of their propaganda posters, the Italians should definitely have won the war.
Here, for instance, is how the Italian fascists viewed American soldiers:
I’ve seen how US cartoonists caricatured the Germans and Japanese (short answer: full-on racist slander), but it’s eye-opening to see how the same was done to us.
(via Ptak Science Books)
I think you should print out this handy guide to quack medicine and give copies to your gullible relatives — you know, the ones who are fending off colds with homeopathy and worry about vaccines and go to chiropractors for their headaches.
If you really loved them you’d do it now.
I thought one mark of the superiority of cephalopods over cats was the absence of ungrammatical LOLspeak hovering over their heads. I was wrong. It turns out that octopusses do text like mad tweenagers. At least squid insist on proper English still.
People are always sending me porn, sometimes to harass and annoy (it doesn’t work), and sometimes because they think I’ll appreciate it. I suppose I’m unusual because much of the porn I get in my mailbox features cephalopods, and over the years I’ve become something of a connoisseur of cephalopod porn…and I’m sorry to say that 99% of it is crap, expressing a total lack of comprehension of why cephalopods have sensual appeal. I’ve put a couple of examples below the fold, and I’ll try to explain why they are so bad.
