Remember - don't panic, be deadpan!

April 26, 1956 -

Godzilla debuted in American (Gojira premiered in Japan on November 3, 1954) :



With the ashes of World War II only recently cooled, Japan is plagued by a sudden wave of maritime disasters: Without warning, ships are exploding into flame and sinking beneath the waves. The few survivors are able to shed little light on the situation, as they quickly die from radiation and strange burns. (Hmmm, sound familiar) A group of investigators, including prominent paleontologist Dr. Yamane and American reporter Steve Martin, are sent to Odo Island to investigate. The natives warn that the ships are being destroyed by Gojira (Godzilla), a legendary monster. These claims are verified when a gigantic, dinosaur-like creature comes ashore and demolishes the native village. Dr. Yamane concludes that Godzilla is a prehistoric creature that has been awakened and mutated by atomic bomb tests. It's just the same conclusion you'd come to having just seen the ruins of a Japanese fishing village.




The military decides to use depth charges on the monster. However, the attack is unsuccessful, and Godzilla follows the ships back to Tokyo Bay. (Again, probably just what you would do - annoy a giant radioactive monster.) Coming ashore at night, Godzilla razes Tokyo. The destruction left in his wake is comparable to an atomic bomb. Military firepower proves useless against the monster. It is feared that Godzilla will continue to lay waste to the cities of Japan, and perhaps the entire world.

It is up to Emiko Yamane (Dr. Yamane’s daughter) to convince her former fiancé, Dr. Serizawa, to use his Oxygen Destroyer against Godzilla. Serizawa is skeptical; he fears that this terrible device might be more dangerous than the monster. However, he finally decides to make the ultimate sacrifice to rid the world of Godzilla.


So here in a nutshell, you have the greatest fever dream movie ever re-edited - a very good Sci-Fi film intercut with Raymond Burr, the undisputed king of deadpan delivery and nipple rouge entrepreneur.




(We take Godzilla very seriously in our home.).

And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?

Today's Word: Dionysiac ( die-uh-NIS-ee-ak ), (Latin Dionysiacus, from Greek Dionusiakos, from Dionusios.), adjective 1. Of or relating to Dionysus, the god of wine and of an orgiastic religion celebrating the power and fertility of nature. Of or relating to Dionysia, ancient Greek festivals held seasonally, chiefly at Athens, in honor of Dionysus. 2. Often dionysiac. Ecstatic or wild; Dionysian.

Keep it in mind (we'll come back to it.)

April 24, 1184 BC (this is an approximated date.)
Most of the people who could have verified this date were too busy smearing olive oil on each other and inventing Greco-Roman wrestling in the nude, so the creation of an accurate calendar wasn't a high priority. For years, I have been incorrectly saying this date was 1479 BC, which everyone knows was when Thutmose III ascends to the throne of Egypt.  I have to stop drinking when I blog.

Think Dionysiac

... Is this the face that launched a thousand ships? ....

OK kids, here's your quick Lit Hum course.

Once upon a time, a pretty naked Greek girl was lolling around a limpid pool (lots of pretty naked Greek girls were doing that back then) and she saw a beautiful swan.

Before you could said By Zeus, Leda lays an egg (psst, don't tell Rick Santorum but bestiality was involved) and out pops Helen - another pretty naked Greek girl. But Helen wasn't just any pretty naked Greek girl, she was the MOST BEAUTIFUL GIRL IN THE WORLD.

So when it was time for Helen to marry (at about 12), literally everyone who was anyone wanted to marry her, including Odysseus (who doesn't marry her but Penelope but that's another story), Menestheus, Ajax the Great, Patroclus and Idomeneus, Agamemnon (who doesn't marry her but her sister, Clytemnestra and lives (or dies) to regret it, but that again is another story). It doesn't hurt to mention at this point that her 'father' was the King of Sparta or the fact that he never noticed that she was hatched from a egg.



Yadda, yadda yadda, Helen marries Menelaus. Yadda, yadda, yadda, three more naked Greek goddesses, handsome naked Greek youth named Paris (how the French got into this story even I can't explain) and a golden apple.



Also, I bet you never realized how much nudity plays into this story.

Yadda, yadda yadda, an abduction and a promise extracted - bang zoom, you have the Trojan war. I have just saved you from reading Edith Hamilton's Mythology and most of the Iliad.

The Greek siege of Troy had lasted for ten years with no end in sight. The Greeks devised a new ruse: a giant hollow wooden horse. It was built by Epeius and filled with Greek warriors led by Odysseus. Meanwhile, a Greek spy, Sinon, convinced the Trojans that the horse was a gift despite the warnings of Laocoon (who gets to utter the line, "Beware Greeks bearing gifts" moments before being strangled by sea-serpents with his two sons - but that's another story)



and Cassandra (who has the gift of prophecy because of the God Apollo as a token of his love has snakes lick her ears clean but that again is another story) ;

;

Helen and Deiphobus (who won Helen in a game with his brother after the death of Paris but let's stay on course here) even investigated the horse; in the end, the Trojans accepted the gift on this date. In ancient times it was customary for a defeated general to surrender his horse to the victorious general in a sign of respect.



It should be noted here that the horse was the sacred animal of Poseidon; during the contest with Athena over the patronage of Athens, Poseidon gave men the horse, and Athena gave the olive tree. It should also be noted that after living ten years under a siege, one's reasoning seems to go out the window.

The Trojans have a huge orgy, I mean, party (think sodomy but on a grand scale - think dionysiac) to celebrate the end of the siege, so that, when the Greeks emerged from the horse, on this date, the city was in a drunken stupor. The Greek warriors opened the city gates to allow the rest of the army to enter, and the city was pillaged ruthlessly, all the men were killed, and all the women and children were taken into slavery.

And so ends the Iliad. Oh yeah, Brad Pitt ends up dead but Orlando Bloom is alive.

Discuss amongst yourselves.

Better a witty fool than a foolish wit.

Today is believed to be the birthday of William Shakespeare, born in Stratford-on-Avon, England (1564). He was a playwright and poet, and is considered to be the most influential and perhaps the greatest writer in the English language. His tragedies have been celebrated for centuries. For example, there’s the Tragedy of Julius Caesar, in which a Roman general thinks he’d like to be emperor, other people disagree, and everyone dies in the end. There is the Tragedy of Macbeth, in which a Scottish Thane thinks he’d like to be king, other people disagree, and everyone dies in the end. There is the Tragedy of Richard III, in which a hunch-backed noble thinks he'd like to be king, other people disagree, and everyone dies in the end. There is even the Tragedy of Hamlet, in which a young prince thinks and everyone dies in the end.



(That last is naturally set in Denmark, where the relationship between thinking and dying has been most famously chronicled by Soren Kierkegaard, who called life itself the sickness unto death. He was a very happy fella.)

He gave us many beloved plays, including Romeo and Juliet (1594), A Midsummer Night's Dream (1595), Gay Boys in Bondage (1601), Othello (1604), and King Lear (1605). Only a few scattered facts are known about his life. He was born and raised in the picturesque market town of Stratford-on-Avon, surrounded by woodlands. His father was a glover and a leather merchant; he and his wife had eight children including William, but three of them died in childbirth. William probably left grammar school when he was thirteen years old, but continued to study on his own.


He went to London around 1588 to pursue his career in drama (or to sleep with actresses or men who dresses like women) and by 1592 he was a well-known actor. He joined an acting troupe in 1594 and wrote many plays for the group while continuing to act. Scholars believe that he usually played the part of the first character that came on stage, but that in Hamlet he played the ghost.



Some scholars have suggested that Shakespeare couldn't have written the plays attributed to him because he had no formal education. A group of scientists recently plugged all his plays into a computer and tried to compare his work to other writers of his day, such as Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, and the Earl of Oxford. The only writer they found who frequently used words and phrases similar to Shakespeare's was Queen Elizabeth I, and although Shakespeare had been seen in women's clothing several times, the Queen was eventually ruled out as well.


Shakespeare used one of the largest vocabularies of any English writer, almost 30,000 words, and he was the first writer to invent or record many of our most common turns of phrase, including foul play, as luck would have it, your own flesh and blood, too much of a good thing, good riddance, in one fell swoop, so is your mother, play fast and loose, up your nose with a rubber hose, dyn-o-mite, I know you are but what am I and in the twinkling of an eye.


Shakespeare wrote a lot of other plays and died in the end—on April 23, 1616. His accomplishments are all the more remarkable when you consider that he died on the same day he’d been born.

I wish I could be this funny

One of the places I check out weekly is The Young Turks. In a recent posting, they showed an actual video created by the group The American Life Leagues' screed against Planned Parenthood and their nefarious plan to ensnare children into the evils of SEX through the gateway drug of masturbation.



The amazing thing about the actual video, is how howlingly funny it is. It's almost the perfect SNL skit. And you know that the guy in the video is hoping to get some penis cupcakes.

US enters the Great War (for the first time)

On this day in 1917, the United States formally declared war against Germany and entered World War I. At the time, the war had been going on in Europe for three years, but there was no real immediate threat to the United States. Up until then, Woodrow Wilson had been opposed to the war. His campaign for president in 1916 included the slogan, "He kept us out of the war," though Wilson never used that phrase himself.



But two things changed Wilson's mind. The first was that Germany had declared unrestricted warfare on American merchant vessels, and began torpedoing any ship they thought was carrying munitions to the British and the French. At that point, the United States was the biggest supplier of munitions to the British and the French. And the second was that the United States intercepted a telegram from Germany to Mexico, asking for an alliance against the United States. If Mexico was willing to attack the U.S., the Germans said they would help Mexico regain Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona.



The war was extraordinarily expensive for the United States, costing about $1 million per hour in the last 25 months of the war. The amount of money the U.S. government spent on World War I was more than the combined total of what it had spent in the previous 100 years. Woodrow Wilson hoped it would be the war to end all wars, but instead it was just the beginning of the United States' policy of military intervention in world affairs.