Rigor Mortis

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Image: Flickr

When Victor Noir died in a Paris duel in 1870, sculptor Jules Dalou reproduced the fallen journalist in bronze — a bronze that seems unusually hard in the trousers, if you see what I mean.

That feature has made the statue a sort of fertility shrine for Parisian women. It’s said that kissing Noir’s lips, leaving flowers in his hat, or rubbing his, um, press credentials will bring a husband, enhance one’s sex life, or ensure fertility.

Whether that’s true is open to question, of course — but when the cemetery installed a fence around the statue in 2004, local women reportedly protested until it was removed again.

| Art · Oddities · Society

All in the Family

A gentleman was chiding his son for staying out late at night, and said: ‘Why, when I was your age, my father would not allow me to go out of the house after dark.’–‘Then you had a deuce of a father, you had,’ said the young profligate. Whereupon the father very rashly vociferated: ‘I had a confounded sight better one than you have, you young rascal!’

— Paul Emilius Lowe, ed., After-Dinner Stories, 1916

Mr. N. was on bad terms with his wife, and his eldest son was by no means a favourite; for when he paid a visit to his father, the old gentleman turned to a friend, and said, ‘Now you shall see me kill two birds with one stone. William, go and tell your mother, from me, you are a son of a b—-h.’

— The Nic-Nac; or, Oracle of Knowledge, 1823

| Society

Perspective

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“If you can count your money, you don’t have a billion dollars.” — J. Paul Getty

“Nobody who has to ask what a yacht costs has any business owning one.” — J.P. Morgan

“A man who has a million dollars is as well off as if he were rich.” — John Jacob Astor

| Society

In a Word

acephalist
n. one who acknowledges no superior

“In America everybody is of the opinion that he has no social superiors, since all men are equal, but he does not admit that he has no social inferiors, for, from the time of Jefferson onward, the doctrine that all men are equal applies only upwards, not downwards.” — Bertrand Russell

| Language · Society

Big Love

This is the first screen kiss, shared in 1896 by May Irwin and John C. Rice in a scene from the play The Widow Jones.

Accustomed to stage dramas, many viewers were shocked at the closeup. “Neither participant is physically attractive,” wrote reviewer John Sloan, “and the spectacle of their prolonged pasturing on each other’s lips was hard to bear. When only life-size it was pronounced beastly. But that was nothing to the present sight. Magnified to Gargantuan proportions and repeated three times over it is absolutely disgusting.”

Only 30 years later, John Barrymore would bestow 127 kisses on Mary Astor and Estelle Taylor in Don Juan.

| Entertainment · Society

Low Tech

http://www.sxc.hu/photo/877451

This is inspiring: In 2005 the National Toy Hall of Fame inducted the cardboard box.

“I think every adult has had that disillusioning experience of picking what they think is a wonderful toy for a child, and then finding the kid playing with the box,” said chief curator Christopher Bensch. “It’s that empty box full of possibilities that the kids can sense and the adults don’t always see.”

In the same spirit, the museum honors alphabet blocks, rocking horses, teddy bears, and jump rope alongside Monopoly, Etch A Sketch, and other registered trademarks.

Among the 44 toys in the hall of fame, the most sophisticated is the Nintendo Game Boy. The simplest, charmingly, is “the stick.”

| Society · Technology

International Relations

Indeed this tendency to shift the responsibility for the disease on others by giving it their name, appears all through the early references to it. The Italians called it the Spanish or the French disease; the French called it the Italian disease; the English called it the French disease; the Russians called it the Polish disease; the Turks called it the French disease; the Indians and the Japanese called it the Portuguese disease. And, as we shall see, the first Spaniards who recognized the disease called it the disease of Española, which meant at that time the disease of Haiti.

— W.A. Pusey, “The Beginning of Syphilis,” Journal of the American Medical Association, June 12, 1915

| Society

Barren

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Trinity College provost John Pentland Mahaffy was arguing with a women’s rights advocate when she asked him, “What is the difference between man and woman?”

He considered and said, “Madam, I can’t conceive.”

| Society

Small Talk

A gentleman sitting in one of the boxes in company with the late Lord North, not knowing his lordship, entered into conversation with him, and, seeing two ladies come into an opposite box, turned to him, and addressed him with, ‘Pray, sir, can you inform me who is that ugly woman that is just come in?’ ‘O,’ replied his lordship, with great good humor, ‘that is my wife.’ ‘Sir, I ask you ten thousand pardons; I do not mean her, I mean that shocking monster who is along with her.’ ‘That,’ replied his lordship, ‘is my daughter.’

— M. Lafayette Byrn, The Repository of Wit and Humor, 1853

| Society

Strike Three

After cataloging her disappointment with Europe, Asia, and Australia, xenophobic travel writer Favell Lee Mortimer finished her world survey with Far Off, Part II: Africa and America Described (1854). What did she discover about the intriguing people and exotic customs of these remote continents?

  • “It is a rare thing in Egypt to speak the truth.”
  • “Those who wish to visit Nubia ought to go there in a boat, for there is no other pleasant way.”
  • “Perhaps there is no Christian country in the world as ignorant as Abyssinia.”
  • “Cruelty is the chief vice of the Caffre.”
  • “Newfoundland is a dreary abode.”
  • “Though Mexico is so beautiful at a distance, yet the streets are narrow and loathsome, and the poor people, walking in them, look like bundles of old rags.”

“Washington is one of the most desolate cities in the world: not because she is in ruins, but for the opposite reason — because she is unfinished. There are places marked out where houses ought to be, but where no houses seem ever likely to be.”

| Literature · Society