Archive Category: Politics
An Incomplete Evolution of the Cartoon Political Map
Maps have always been good visual aids for political cartoons, since there’s no question about who is referred to. BibliOdyssey takes a look at political cartoon maps of Britain and Europe through history. Twelve maps are featured, including this 1793 map by Robert Dighton (portrait artist, caricaturist, and thief). Portraying Britain as a person, often riding a fish, is a recurring theme in such maps. Link -Thanks, peacay!
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Yay Sweden! Swedish Women Won Rights to Bathe Topless
God bless the feminists! Fighting what they deem as a sex discrimination of sorts, women of all shapes and sizes in Malmö bared criticisms to win the right to bathe topless in the city’s public swimming pool:
The breast issue has proved divisive, with political wranglings leading to the question being struck off the agenda at an earlier meeting in April.
These political cleavages remained on view right up until Wednesday’s meetings with disagreements on both the left and right sides. [...]
According to Forsberg, some on the council had lobbied for wording which would have required women to keep their nipples covered, but Forsberg explained that attempting to enforce such a rule would have been too complicated.
"We don’t define what bathing suits men should wear so it doesn’t make much sense to do it for women. And besides, it’s not unusual for men to have large breasts that resemble women’s breasts," he said.
I’m glad that the city’s sports and recreation committee has finally provided the proper support for this important matter. Rest assured, Neatorama will keep you abreast of the situation: Link
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Monkey Peed on Zambian President
Obama’s pesky fly has got nothing on this: Zambian President Rupiah Banda got peed on by a monkey during a news conference!
Mr Banda was not peeved, making light of the rude interruption as he sat under a tree in State House grounds.
Journalists laughed as Mr Banda jokingly remonstrated with the offender: "You [monkey] have urinated on my jacket."
"Perhaps these are blessings," he said, looking up at the animal in the tree.
BBC has the video clip: Link
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Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, Badass
I love a politician who has a sense of humor and can poke fun at himself — like Robert Reich, U.S. Secretary of Labor under the Clinton Administration. Here he is on The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien as a hard-boiled street cop eager to bite crime in the shins.
Via Bits & Pieces
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Diversity Through Photoshop
Toronto’s motto is "Diversity Our Strength" which makes it kinda awkward for the City to be busted for this exercise in forced diversity: they photoshopped in (badly) a token black guy for the cover of their Spring & Summer 2009 Fun Guide!
Allison Hanes of National Post has the story:
The smiling, ethnically diverse family featured on the cover of Toronto’s latest edition of its summer Fun Guide was digitally altered to make the photo more "inclusive," which city officials say is in keeping with a policy to reflect diversity.
A spokesman for the department that publishes the guide listing recreation activities confirmed the publication was doctored to insert the face of a different father.
"He superimposed the African-Canadian person onto the family cluster in the original photo. It was two photographs and one head was superimposed over the original family photo," said John Gosgnach, communications director for the social development division.
"The goal was to depict the diversity of Toronto and its residents."
The cover shot caught the eye of a National Post graphics editor, who ran it through a program called TinEye that detects visual enhancements to standard art.
To add insult to injury, none of the people are actually Toronto residents: Link - via Torontoist
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Election Decided by Luck of the Draw
A Cave Creek, Arizona city council race ended in a tie, with both candidates receiving 660 votes, confirmed by a recount. So they decided the winner by drawing cards!
Adam Trenk and Thomas McGuire, both in blue jeans and open-collar shirts, strode nervously into Town Hall with their posses. There stood the town judge. He selected a deck of cards from a Stetson hat and shuffled it — having removed the jokers — six times.
Mr. McGuire, 64, a retired science teacher and two-term incumbent on the Town Council, selected a card, the six of hearts, drawing approving oos and aws from his supporters.
Mr. Trenk, 25, a law student and newcomer to town, stepped forward. He lifted a card — a king of hearts — and the crowd roared. Cave Creek had finally selected its newest Council member.
“It’s a hell of a way to win — or lose — an election,” Mr. McGuire said.
(image credit: Joshua Lott/The New York Times)
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PETA Protests Obama’s Killing of Innocent Fly
By now, I’m sure you’ve all have heard the fly swat heard ’round the world. Late night talk show hosts had a field day making fun of President Obama’s artful swat of a persistent fly that bugged him during an interview.
Enter PETA to the fray: the animal rights group decried Obama’s display of unchecked executive power and suggested that next time he used a humane fly catcher instead:
“We support compassion for the even the smallest animals," says Bruce Friedrich, VP for Policy at PETA. “We support giving insects the benefit of the doubt."
Friedrich says PETA supports "brushing flies away rather than killing them" and was disappointed that the President had gone ahead and squashed the pesky fly.
This afternoon PETA sent a Katcha Bug, a device which traps bugs and allows their safe release back into nature to the White House.
Good thing it didn’t happen to Cheney - he’d have used his shotgun fo’ sho’: Link
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The Best of School District Bureaucracy: No Summer Break For You!
Summer is nearly here and school’s out! Except for hundreds of poor students in Chino, California, who got an unwelcome surprise news that they have to sit for 34 more days of school because of a clerical error. If they didn’t, the school district would lose millions in funding.
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the mindboggling bureaucracy and arcane rules that is the school system:
"We made an error on the minimum days of about five minutes," said Dickson Principal Sue Pederson. "Realistically, that’s our accounting mistake as adults. We’re unfortunately making the children pay for it by making them give up their summer."
Students at each school exceeded the state’s requirement of at least 54,000 minutes of annual classroom time, but the problem arose in the district’s minimum days. Schools typically have one shortened day per week, allowing teachers to use the remaining time for planning and parent conferences. Under state law, these days must be at least 180 minutes, and the daily average classroom time over 10 consecutive days must be 240 minutes.
An internal audit in early May discovered that 34 minimum days had been 175 minutes at Dickson and 170 at Rolling Ridge, said district spokeswoman Julie Gobin. That adds up to a shortage of 170 and 340 minutes, respectively, which could be made up in one or two school days. But under state law, these too-short days do not count at all, meaning that all 34 must be made up to avoid a state penalty of more than $7 million.
Seema Mehta of the Los Angeles Times has the report: Link
(Photo: Christine Cotter / LA Times)
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Saudi Princess Refuses to Pay $25 Million Shopping Bill by Claiming Diplomatic Immunity
It’s good to be a princess! You can run up a £15 million (US$24.7 million) shopping bill and then refuse to pay it due to "diplomatic immunity"!
One of the most senior members of Saudi Arabia’s royal family, Princess Maha al-Sudairi, is claiming diplomatic immunity in France after running up unpaid shopping bills of more than £15 million including £60,000 on designer lingerie.
She has ignored her furious debtors and locked herself in her £2,500-a-night suite at the George V Hotel in Paris.
When a royal aide was approached about settling the underwear bill he replied: "I’m afraid we can’t go around settling bills for the Princess’s knickers."
Princess Maha, whose husband, Prince Nayef, is interior minister and second-in-line to the Saudi throne, is said to have spent millions on designer clothes, jewels and other luxury products in the French capital over the past year. Her weekly dry cleaning bill alone was said to be £30,000.
Every time the Princess and her entourage visited a shop a representative would offer staff an embossed document stating "Payment to Follow".
Link - via Arbroath | The BBC reports that she has paid up after a judge ordered bailiffs to confiscate the knickers
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Man Ripped Politician’s Wig Off, Got Jail Time for Depriving His “Freedom To Look Pretty”
Politics in Taiwan have always been rough, but this is downright dirty. A man was sentenced to 5 months in jail for tearing a wig off Taiwan legislator Chiu Yi. The sentence was for depriving Chiu of the "freedom to be pretty."
Yes, you read that right:
The Taipei District Court sentenced Huang Yung-tien, 50, to jail for snatching the toupee off the head of ruling Nationalist Party lawmaker Chiu Yi. Chiu has become a household name for his media-friendly offensives against the political opposition.
"The judge thought Chiu Yi had the freedom to wear what he wanted, and Chiu felt the wig made him look prettier," court spokesman Huang Chin-ming said. "The judge thinks that to remove it intentionally was to take away that right."
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Tiananmen Square Anniversary
People around the world are marking the 20th anniversary of what became known in China as the June 4th Incident. In April of 1989, students and intellectuals gathered in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square to mourn the death of communist party secretary Hu Yaobang, who advocated government reform. The gathering grew into an anti-government protest and lasted until June 4th when government forces cleared the square. Official Chinese records say 241 died in the incident, but the Chinese Red Cross initially put the figure at 2,600. Frontline aired a 2006 documentary about the protest and its aftermath called The Tank Man. That episode is now available online, along with a timeline and other features. Link -via Metafilter, where you’ll find more links
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Secret Weapon in the War on Terror: Boy Scout SWAT Team
Photo: Todd Krainin/NY Times
Boy Scouts’s motto "Be Prepared" apparently extends all the way to modern day’s terrorism. In this post 9/11 world, you can’t be too careful, so the Border Patrol in Imperial County, California, has a - shall we say, unique - program for the Scouts:
The Explorers program, a coeducational affiliate of the Boy Scouts of America that began 60 years ago, is training thousands of young people in skills used to confront terrorism, illegal immigration and escalating border violence — an intense ratcheting up of one of the group’s longtime missions to prepare youths for more traditional jobs as police officers and firefighters.
“This is about being a true-blooded American guy and girl,” said A. J. Lowenthal, a sheriff’s deputy here in Imperial County, whose life clock, he says, is set around the Explorers events he helps run. “It fits right in with the honor and bravery of the Boy Scouts.”
The training, which leaders say is not intended to be applied outside the simulated Explorer setting, can involve chasing down illegal border crossers as well as more dangerous situations that include facing down terrorists and taking out “active shooters,” like those who bring gunfire and death to college campuses. In a simulation here of a raid on a marijuana field, several Explorers were instructed on how to quiet an obstreperous lookout.
Jennifer Steinhauer of The New York Times has more: Link
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The Strangest Anti-Drug PSAs Ever
YesButNoButYes blog has a post about anti-drug PSAs that look like they were made by people who were under the influence themselves!
The post includes such gems PSAs by Hanna-Barbera, Pee Wee Herman (I half expected him to giggle by the end), and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
Link - via Rue The Day!
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Big Pharma Loves You: Free Viagra for the Unemployed!
Don’t ever say that Big Pharma doesn’t care about you … Pfizer is offering free Viagra (and other drugs) to Americans who have lost their job:
Pfizer Inc. said Thursday it will give away more than 70 of its most widely prescribed drugs, including Lipitor and Viagra, for up to a year to people who have lost jobs since Jan. 1 and have been taking the drug for three months or more. The announcement comes as the unemployment rate topped 8.9 percent in April.
Pfizer stands to benefit, too _ by keeping its customers, and with a tax write-off that will cover much of the cost of the donations. The move also buys the world’s largest drugmaker some good will as Washington looks to overhaul the health care system.
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Croatians Voted for an Honest “Rip-Off” Politician
Croatian politican Josko Kraljevic Risa was elected as mayor in Prolozac with a uniquely refreshing political strategy: he opted to tell voters the truth that he’ll rip them off at every opportunity!
Bare-faced Josko Risa was voted in as mayor in Prolozac with a landslide victory using the slogan: "All for me - nothing for you."
"I just told them the truth. This town will be like my family business. If I get a little something, so do they," he explained.
Locals who backed Risa said they would be happy to have him as mayor, despite his bizarre campaign pledge.
Ivan Vjisnic, 57, said: "We know what we’re letting ourselves in for.
Link (Photo: Slobodna Dalmacija, Google’s translation of the article)
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Delfina Delettrez Fendi’s Skeleton Jewelry
Delfina Delettrez Fendi (yes, of that Fendi) has a new line of to-die-for jewelry. This skeleton wrist jewelry was part of her debut at the Paris Fashion Show. WWD has the gallery (what’s up with the taxidermied animals as props?): Link - via Haute Macabre
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Star Trek as a Liberal/Progressive Vision of the Future
Michael Westmoreland-White sees the Star Trek universe as a liberal or progressive vision of the future, featuring things such as racial and gender equality, free universal health care, and an absence of imperalism. I’m neither liberal or progressive, but I think that he’s right.
But I do think that Star Trek is a fairly progressive/liberal science fiction franchise. It’s a basically hopeful vision of the future. It offers up a future earth that has survived war, terrorism, and ecological disasters and forged a global government of representative democracy (we are never told this, but it must be some form of federalist system to avoid tyranny). Hunger and poverty have been overcome. Most diseases have been conquered and high quality universal healthcare is available for all. Education is free and the world is highly literate with most people going beyond secondary education. It’s a clean energy society that is eco-friendly. (In Star Trek IV, the Enterprise crew in their stolen Klingon ship actually go back in time to the 20th C. to keep whales from going extinct–and in the process save the earth of their future.) There is finally global racial harmony. And, despite the micro-mini-skirted uniforms that reflected the fact that the original series was made in the ’60s, we finally have gender equality, too.
Image by Flickr user Tim Williams used under Creative Commons license
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Anti-Elephant Begging Graffiti
Australian artist Brooke Bobridge, who is currently living in Bangkok, Thailand, took a series of graffiti by local and international artists imploring passer-bys NOT to feed the elephants. They want to discourage "elephant begging" where the pachyderms are used to part tourists from their dollars (or technically, bahts).
Link - via amy sol blog
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FEMA’s Coloring Book of Disasters
It’s often difficult to help children cope with crises and disasters, so FEMA came up with this idea (brilliant or silly? Your call): a children’s coloring book of disasters. Now, the coloring book has been yanked from FEMA’s website after some people complained:
The coloring book, titled “A Scary Thing Happened,” was created after the tornadoes in Glenville as a tool for children to use with a responsible parent or adult to help cope with the disaster, said Rose Olmsted, coordinator of the Freeborn County Crisis Response Team, on Wednesday. It has since been widely distributed across the country to aid children in other disasters.
Olmsted said she has not received a clear explanation from FEMA about why the coloring book is being taken down from the FEMA Web site, other than that the organization is redesigning its Web site and that there was a complaint from a parent about some of the images in the book. The cover features an image of the Twin Towers, with one tower already on fire and a plane approaching the other tower. A similar image is inside the book for children to color.
Sarah Stultz of Abert Lea Tribune has the story: Link - via On Deadline
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Why Is It So Difficult To Fire Bad Teachers?
Putting a man on the moon, solving Fermat’s Last Theorem, or firing a tenured teacher because of incompetence or even criminal behaviors: which is harder?
While most teachers are good, decent people with the thankless jobs of teaching unruly kids with dwindling resources and ever-increasing class sizes, there are a few bad apples that really ruined school for a lot of children. But why is it so difficult to fire them?
Jason Song of the Los Angeles Times investigates:
Joseph Walker, a former principal of Grant High School in Van Nuys, was sued by a special education teacher whom he tried to dismiss for alleged repeated sexual harassment. A civil jury sided with Walker — but the review commission decided the teacher shouldn’t be fired. The case, now in the courts, has dragged on seven years.
Confronting uphill battles like this, Walker said: "You’re not going to fire someone who’s not doing their job. And if you have someone who’s done something really egregious, there’s only a 50-50 chance that you can fire them."
Walker is now principal of Discovery Charter Preparatory Academy in Pacoima, where he said he had fired three teachers so far this year. None were fired during his three years as head of Grant. The difference: His school’s teachers are not unionized and can be fired at will.
(Photo: Joseph Walker. Photo credit: Liz O. Baylen / LA Times)
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Churchgoers Are More Likely to Support Torture
The Pew Research Center conducts a lot of surveys - but this one yielded a very surprising result: churchgoers, especially Evangelicals, are more likely to support torture than those unaffiliated with any religious organization.
The more often Americans go to church, the more likely they are to support the torture of suspected terrorists, according to a new survey.
More than half of people who attend services at least once a week — 54 percent — said the use of torture against suspected terrorists is "often" or "sometimes" justified. Only 42 percent of people who "seldom or never" go to services agreed, according to the analysis released Wednesday by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.
White evangelical Protestants were the religious group most likely to say torture is often or sometimes justified — more than six in 10 supported it. People unaffiliated with any religious organization were least likely to back it. Only four in 10 of them did.
(Photo: sduffy [Flickr])
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Liz Hickok’s The First 100 Days: The White House in Jell-O
Image: Liz Hickok
Our favorite Jell-O artist Liz Hickok wrote to us about her latest project - and yes, it does have a distinct political message:
The piece is called "The First 100 Days: The White House in Jell-O". The White House starts out as Obama inherited it on day one of his administration: a bit old and moldy. Set to the tune of “America the Beautiful,” the iconic structure slowly transforms into a fresh, glowing, and proud symbol of hope.
Whether you agree with Liz’s politics or not, it’s spiffy to see the White House sculpted out of Jell-O (and here I thought that jiggliness went out with Bill Clinton oh so many years ago!): Link [with embedded YouTube clip] - Thanks Liz!
By the way, if you’re in San Francisco this weekend (April 25 - 26), be sure to attend the Mission Open Studios (or the Mission Studio Stroll) - a neighborhood crawl to visit 8 artists’ groups including more than 100 working artists in the Mission District of San Francisco: 1890 Bryant St. at the corner of Mariposa (Liz is in Studio #211 - say hello to her
for me if you’re there). More info: 1890 Bryant | Mission Artists United
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“Faulty” Genes Make Jews Smarter, Said Scientists
Gregory Cochran, physicist and professor of anthropology at the University of Utah, was puzzled at the unusually high prevalence of deadly genetic disorders in European Jews. Shouldn’t natural selection flush these dangerous genes from the gene pool or at least not make ‘em appear in such high frequency in that population?
Then one morning, Cochran came upon his solution - and with the help of population geneticist Henry Harpending, he immediately touched off a charged debate in the scientific community: some genes make Jews smarter.
Cochran, 55, and Harpending, 65, say there’s no question that as a whole, Ashkenazi Jews — those of European descent — have an abundance of brain power. (Neither man is Jewish.)
Psychologists and educational researchers have pegged their average IQ at 107.5 to 115. That’s only modestly higher than the overall European average of 100, but the gap is large enough to produce a huge difference in the proportion of geniuses. When a group’s average IQ is 100, the percentage of people above 140 is 0.4%; when the average is 110, the genius rate is 2.3%.
Though Jews make up less than 3% of the U.S. population, they have won more than 25% of the Nobel Prizes awarded to American scientists since 1950, account for 20% of this country’s chief executives and make up 22% of Ivy League students, the pair write.
"People are perfectly willing to admit that some people are taller or some people are shorter," Cochran said. "But no one wants to say ‘This group is smarter.’ "
That, said another scientist, is the rub:
"What are their theories about those on the opposite end of the spectrum?" asked Neil Risch, director of the Institute for Human Genetics at UC San Francisco, who finds the matter so offensive he can barely discuss it without raising his voice. "Do they have genetic theories about why Latinos and African Americans perform worse academically?"
Karen Kaplan of the Los Angeles Times has the rest of the story: Link
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Ten Gifts For The New Obama Dog
I love this list of 10 gifts for the Obama family’s new dog. This one is the best, every first dog needs some fine formal wear for those extravagant evenings with the leaders forgien countries. Some of the other toys and things are just neat.
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Twittering Towards Gomorrah
Add this to the list of social ills blamed on web 2.0 social networking sites Twitter and Facebook: they could harm your moral values!
Today’s fast-paced media could be making us indifferent to human suffering and should allow time for us to reflect, according to researchers.
They found that emotions linked to moral sense are slow to respond to news and events and have failed to keep up with the modern world.
In the time it takes to fully reflect on a story of anguish and suffering, the news bulletin has already moved on or the next Twitter update is already being read.
As activities such as reading books and meeting friends, where people can define their morals, are taken over by news snippets and fast-moving social networking, the problem could become widespread, researchers warn.
Children could be particularly vulnerable because their brains are still developing.
"If things are happening too fast, you may not ever fully experience emotions about other people’s psychological states and that would have implications for your morality," said Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, from the University of Southern California, and one of the researchers.
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Decriminalizing Drug Use in Portugal: 5 Years Later
While people in the United States endlessly debate what should be done with the country’s drug problem, Portugal went ahead and decriminalize the use and possession of illicit drugs 5 years ago.
Here’s what the country learned:
In the face of a growing number of deaths and cases of HIV linked to drug abuse, the Portuguese government in 2001 tried a new tack to get a handle on the problem—it decriminalized the use and possession of heroin, cocaine, marijuana, LSD and other illicit street drugs. The theory: focusing on treatment and prevention instead of jailing users would decrease the number of deaths and infections.
Five years later, the number of deaths from street drug overdoses dropped from around 400 to 290 annually, and the number of new HIV cases caused by using dirty needles to inject heroin, cocaine and other illegal substances plummeted from nearly 1,400 in 2000 to about 400 in 2006, according to a report released recently by the Cato Institute, a Washington, D.C, libertarian think tank.
Brian Vastag of Scientific American has more on the story: Link
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10 Examples of Royal Weirdness
I’m sure this isn’t the first time you’ve been told that certain members of the ruling classes are weird, but this might be the first time you’ve heard some of these exceptionally strange tales of royal weirdness.
The Cucumber King of Burma
In 931, King Theinhko of Burma ate the cucumbers of a local villager without asking first. The angry farmer murdered Theinhko and then took over the throne as King Nyanng-u Sawrahan. The queen welcomed him, in an effort to prevent political unrest. Nyanng-u was forever after known as ‘The Cucumber King.’ He reigned over Burma for 33 years until he was overthrown.
Nine Months of French Bastards
King Philip Augustus of France was married to his second wife, Ingeborg of Denmark, in 1193. Sadly, Augustus found Ingeborg to be absolutely revolting and filed for a divorce on the grounds that the marriage was not yet consummated. His wife, however, argued that they had consummated the marriage. As a result, Pope Celestine III refused to grant the king a divorce.
Philip was not easily defeated. He ignored the decision and went on to marry Agnes of Marania.
The pope ordered him to return to Ineborg and to make his point, he imposed an interdict on December 12, 1199. During this time, all churches were closed and the pope determined that as long as the king wasn’t sleeping with his wife, his subjects were not allowed to sleep with theirs. As a result, all children born in this period were deemed illegitimate. The interdict continued until September 7, 1200 –resulting in nine months of bastards born in France. Augustus eventually did return to Ineborg, but not until 1213.
A Dead Woman Crowned Queen
Ines de Castro was a loving mistress to Dom Pedro, heir of the Portuguese throne. Unfortunately, the current ruler, King Alfonso, was paranoid that the pair was plotting against him and ordered Ines to be assassinated in 1355.
When Pedro was crowned as king in 1357, his love for Ines had not yet faded. He sought revenge on the assassins and made them suffer through horrendous tortures. That wasn’t enough though, Pedro was still determined that Ines should take her seat beside him as queen. He had her body exhumed, dressed in proper royal attire and the entire candlelit coronation ceremony proceeded as usual. Ines’s body was anointed and crowned, the subjects were made to swear allegiance to her, and the nobles were required to kneel and kiss her cold, two-years-dead hand.
The Ghastly Death of Mary Queen of Scots
If you ever played Bloody Mary in the mirror as a youth, you know that it is quite a terrifying ghost story. While there are many proposed “Marys” that could be referenced in the story, Mary Queen of Scots has a terrifying ghost story thanks to her botched execution.
On February 8, 1587, Mary was led to the execution block. The executioner, likely drunk, failed to knock off her head on the first blow. Instead, he hit the back of her head, at which time, her servants reported that she muttered “Sweet Jesus.” He managed to remove her head on the second blow and he lifted her head up by the auburn hair on her head, right then, her head fell from his hands, revealing that she actually had short gray hair covered by thick wig. Also strange, her lips continued moving for the next fifteen minutes, likely caused by a nerve damaged during the first execution attempt.
As if all this wasn’t enough, Mary’s dog was discovered to be hiding under her skirts. When the pet was pulled out, it insisted on lying between the shoulders and decapitated head of her body. Eventually, Mary’s servants took the dog, but not until it was thoroughly soaked in its dead master’s blood.
Even for the people of the time, jaded from by frequent public executions, Mary’s beheading was full of exceptionally terrifying surprises.
A Strange ‘Divine Right’
Normally a king’s “divine rights” seem to include things like violating virgins and taking food and money, however, in 1627, Charles I decided to declare rights of a much different nature. He ordered all of his subjects to turn in their urine to official collectors once a day in the summer and once every other day in the winter. These collections were to help the country create saltpeter, a component of gunpowder.
Charles also claimed rights to all soil loaded with animal waste. The so-called ‘Saltpeter Men’ were permitted to dig up the floors of stables, slaughterhouses and other areas without permission of the property owners.
Louis The XIV’s Enema Obsession
Photo Via Curious Expeditions [Flickr]
Imagine trying to hold a conversation with someone receiving an enema. Now imagine that someone was King and he was holding court throughout the experience. King Louis XIV was known for performing this type of activity regularly. The enema was a quite popular medical procedure at this time, but few people seemed to love the activity nearly as much as the king who is said to have received over 2,000 enemas throughout his lifetime – many of them in public.
The King of Debt
King Theodore of Corsica wasn’t much of a king. For one thing, he wasn’t nobility by birth, he was merely a soldier who asked to be king in exchange for helping aid the Corsicans in a revolt. When the revolt had proven to be ineffective and a the Genovese government put a price on his head, Theodore started to lose popularity amongst his people. He decided that he would be better off ruling overseas.
Unfortunately, once he left the country, he was never able to return to his kingdom. Eventually, he ended up in debtors prison in Amsterdam, and later, London. He was freed from Holland’s prison easy enough, but the only way he could earn release from the London jail was by giving Corsica to his creditors.
When he died in London in 1756, his epitaph read:
Theodore this moral learned ere dead:
Fate poured its lessons on his living head,
Bestowed a kingdom, and denied him bread.
After his death, an opera was made from his tale in 1784. Additionally, ‘King Theodore of Corsica’ started to be used as a nickname for gin, joining the ranks of ‘Cuckold’s Comfort’ as a slang for the drink.
Madness Doth Not A Kingdom Make
Nouvelle France was a South American territory also called the Kingdom of Araucanìa and Patagonia. The area’s first (and only) king, elected in 1860, was Orelie-Antoine de Tounens, a French lawyer. He supported the local people’s efforts to resist takeover by Chile and Argentina. The people of the area, called Mapuche, thought that Tounens may help aid their cause as he was a skilled European negotiator. He helped the locals draft a constitution and mint coins, but Chile largely ignored him. Tounens tried to convince France to come to his aid and after a short investigation, they determined him to be crazy.
He was arrested by the Chilean government within two years of becoming king. France managed to secure his release from prison by convincing his jailers that he was insane. After his release, he was deported back to France and Tounens then spent the rest of his life trying to take over his kingdom again. In 1869, he made it back to the country, but soon returned to France to gather more money. Tounens attempted to return two more times afterward, but both times he was captured by Chilean authorities and deported. He eventually died in squalor in France in 1878.
His relatives periodically continued to claim their rightful place as ruler of the country, although the most recent heir has renounced the claim. Since the establishment of Nouvelle France, no sovereign state has ever recognized the territory as a legitimate country.
The Long-Lasting Legacy of Nobility
In 1888, Charles-Marie David de Mayrena elected himself Marie the First, King of the Sedang. Marie was an eccentric French adventurer and he arranged his kingdom to rule over a number of small tribes. King Marie declared the official religion of the country to be Roman Catholic although most of its residents were Muslims and he later adopted the Islamic faith himself. He awarded titles of nobility to his supporters during his two-year rule. He attempted to trade his kingdom to the French, English and Belgium governments in exchange for a trading monopoly, but he received little interest. When he tried to return to his kingdom though, the French prevented him from entering any port in Indochina. He died in 1890, and the details of this death remain a mystery –some sources claim it was by duel, others say it was poison and yet other reports argue he was bitten by a snake.
Over 100 years later, the Assembly for the Restoration of the Sedang Nobility was established in Montreal in 1995. This group consisted of descendants of those who bestowed with titles of nobility by King Marie. The organization claims it seeks to “re-establish and promote the social institutions of monarchy and nobility and practice their principles in a world which has largely forgotten them: chivalry, honor, duty, loyalty, respect, enlightenment, tolerance.” At the same time, they are glad to renounce their claims to the territory, admitting it is undisputedly part of Vietnam. Three years later, they changed their name to the Sedang Royalist Assembly. Although genealogists helped the group find an heir of King Marie, the descendant was uninterested in claiming his title. This organization is still around and is headquartered in Montreal.
Technicalities Galore
What happens when your country’s official constitution and other historical documents fail to mention one small town? If that unmentioned village happens to be Seborga (flag shown above), you may end up with an “independent principality” smack dab in the middle of your country. The area, that should be part of Italy, declared its independence in 1967 and elected the head of the flower growing collective, Giorgio Carbone, to be the country’s head of state or “Giorgio I, Prince of Seborga.” Giorgio is officially addressed as “Your Tremendousness” by his followers.
Giorgio and other members of the village claim that Seborga was never incorporated into Italy. Although it was sold to the king of Savoy and Sardinia in 1729, the sale was not registered. On top of that, the Congress of Vienna in 1815, the 1861 Act of Unification and the constitution written in 1946 all fail to mention Seborga. Scholars have proven that regardless, the area is still part of Italy, but Seborgians defy this logic.
The principality mints its own currency, the luigino, currently valued at $6 - meaning if it were recognized as a legitimate legal tender, it would be the most valuable currency in the world. Regardless of the area’s claim to independence, most of the residents follow the laws of Italy, pay taxes and vote in national elections.
In 2006, a woman named Yasmine von Hohenstaufen Anjou Plantagenet, who claims to be heir to Roman Emperor Fredrick II and the rightful ruler of Seborga, tried to return the ‘country’ to Italy. The majority of villagers were notably upset and Prince Giorgio commented “The girl cannot give away something she does not own.”
Sources #1, #2, #3, #4, #5, #6, #7, #8, #9 All Images come from listed sources unless otherwise noted.
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Saudi Arabia: Cheeky License Plates Banned, Child Marriages Still OK
To protect public propriety, Saudi Arabia has recently banned license plates whose Arabic characters spell out lewd words:
Saudi plates normally have three Arabic characters and three numbers, but the growing fashion is for auto owners also to display a version using the Latin alphabet and some buyers of personalised "vanity plates" deliberately choose Arabic letters which turn into words like "SEX", "ASS" and "NUT".
The authorities in charge of issuing vanity plates have released a list of nine prohibited three-letter combinations, and ordered all branches to stop renewing plates that include them, according to Watan.
Link (Photo from The Geekiest License Plates at Geek24 - lots of fun stuff there!)
In other news, a Saudi judge reiterated his decision that the marriage of an 8-year-old to a 47-year-old man is valid and refused to annul the marriage:
The issue of child marriage has been a hot-button topic in the deeply conservative kingdom recently. While rights groups have been petitioning the government to enact laws that would protect children from this type of marriage, the kingdom’s top cleric has said that it’s OK for girls as young as 10 to wed.
"It is incorrect to say that it’s not permitted to marry off girls who are 15 and younger," Sheikh Abdul Aziz Al-Sheikh, the kingdom’s grand mufti, said in remarks last January quoted in the regional Al-Hayat newspaper. "A girl aged 10 or 12 can be married. Those who think she’s too young are wrong and they are being unfair to her."
Al-Sheikh reportedly made the remarks when he was asked during a lecture about parents forcing their underage daughters to marry.
"We hear a lot in the media about the marriage of underage girls," he said, according to the newspaper. "We should know that Sharia law has not brought injustice to women."
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Green or Greenwash?
Green is in, and big corporations left and right are jumping on the bandwagon … but are they really trying to be environmentally-conscious or is it just a case of "greenwashing"?
WebEcoist takes a look at the world’s worst offenders - take, for example, BP:
BP’s ad campaign with the theme ‘Beyond Petroleum’ led the public to believe the company was headed in the direction of cleaner, renewable fuels. But, it turned out the company was spending more money on advertising than on green efforts, leading Treehugger to ask, “What does BP stand for these days? Beyond Propaganda? Bye-Bye Planet? Bad Pollution?” After all those greenwashing ads, BP went and dropped $3 billion to buy into oil from the Alberta Tar Sands. Each barrel of oil out of the tar sands generates about two thirds of a ton of CO2, meaning BP’s 200,000 barrels a day will generate about 127,000 tons per day.
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Find the Ladies (the Israeli Cabinet Version)
Take a close look at the two photos above. Notice anything different?
Well, the original photo (top) is of Israel’s new cabinet. Problem is, it contains two female ministers. Since publishing pictures of women are considered a no-no for many ultra-orthodox Jews as a violation of female modesty, the Yated Neeman newspaper decided to do a little photoshoppin’: Link
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