“Same old game!”

An 1890 cartoon by John Tenniel, in which the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street– the Bank of England, so called for the City of London street where it was and still is located– doles out free money to silly, naughty boys, AKA bankers. The more things change the more they stay the same, and all the other appropriate sayings…

Two nice details: firstly, the boys have been playing at cards (emphasising that they’re just gambling and can lose just as easily as they win, no particular skill involved) and secondly, the Old Lady’s costume is made of money bags and bank notes.

“SAME OLD GAME”
OLD LADY OF THREADNEEDLE STREET. “YOU’VE GOT YOURSELVES INTO A NICE MESS WITH YOUR PRECIOUS ‘SPECULATION!’ WELL – I’LL HELP YOU OUT OF IT, – FOR THIS ONCE!!”

Dragons and spheres and chimeras, Oh my!

Some lovely and surreal Renaissance images of marvels and unexplained phenomena, from Taschen’s The Book of Miracles.

Pew pew pew! Malevolent forces play Space Invaders with trembling Christian folk.

This happened to a friend of a friend. He went to the shops to get a paper and some milk, but he found the whole area blasted into desert, then he was gnawed by a dragon and he went to heaven. Ker-razy.

It’s raining icebergs and sort of lion mask things, Hallelujah.

Flying duck-eel-Muppet creatures wearing crowns, obviously. Eh, happens all time round our way.

Wow, such sky beams, very dazzle, many falling over towrs, much giant sea doge.

An alarmingly massive comet makes the towers and spires go all wonky again.

Nobody could deny her crimefighting prowess, but Donkey Lizard Bearded Arse Bird Leg Woman just wasn’t working as a superheroine name.

Don’t hate you those days where huge golden spheres hover on the edge of town and shine ominous beams into your windows?

 

“Drugs and psychological brain-washing”

Just two more images I scanned from the old British boys’ magazine/comic Eagle, posted here very belatedly purely because I just found them on an old HD and I don’t know why they never got published.

Coincidentally, the “colour-reflex conditioning” to which Mike is being subjected (above) looks very much like the Zoom ice lolly being advertised below. It’s like he’s being frontally aggravated by the business end of a massive Zoom lolly, which can happen when you’re tripping your tits off like young Michael here. Mike Lane = Migraine?

Perhaps some of those special sugar cubes on the coffee table made their way into the Lyons Maid factory. It might explain where they got the idea that being Commander in Chief of the Galaxy Patrol would be fab. Only Zoom fans are in it, baby. Fab was (and I think it still is, in Britain) another ice lolly, by the way.

I also love the delightfully gauche and virtually meaningless “New Zoom is great” as a marketing line. Product is great. It just is.

What to do if it happens

Advising the Householder on Protection against Nuclear Attack. Ninepence!

Scans from a nuclear war information booklet issued by Her Majesty’s Stationery Office in 1963. People of Britain, gather your Vaseline, paper handkerchiefs, teaspoons and aspirin so we can get on with a proper British apocalypse. I’m more into the mod design than the details of people being killed instantly. “HEAT”, “BLAST” and “FALL-OUT” each have exciting logos. Which is nice.

“There still remains some risk of nuclear attack”

“Seek safer and more comfortable surroundings before the fall-out comes down.”

I haven’t scanned them, but some of the other pages mention living in a hole in your back garden with a dustbin lid as a hatch, or building a “fall-out room” made of doors and sandbags inside your house. It’s grim. The booklet’s main achievement is making it seem lucky if you’re one of the people vapourised or incinerated during the initial blast. Most of the advice for survivors comes down to staying indoors with your family and waiting for help that may never come. It’s like an even more depressing and futile than usual episode of Eastenders. Her Majesty’s Stationery Office does allow that there may be an interruption of water supplies and electricity; many people in British cities had experienced this during WWII, so it wasn’t too scary to admit the possibility. As for absurdities like putting out your rubbish to be collected after an H-bomb has dropped nearby or using Sellotape and a raincoat against radioactive fallout, I’m not sure if the government really thought that after a nuclear exchange everyone would be resuming their normal lives within a few days or weeks, or if this was just the impression the authorities hoped to give people.

There’s a method* in his madness

* J. Karwowski’s Method of Preserving the Dead

Found on an old hard drive. In 1903 a gentleman named Joseph Karwowski (“a subject of the Czar of Russia, residing at Herkimer”, New York) took out a patent on “certain new and useful Improvements in Methods of Preserving the Dead”, to wit encasing them in cubes of glass. He claimed that excluding the air would preserve them “for an indefinite period in a perfect and life-like condition.” The process would involve encasing the body in a layer of sodium silicate which was dry heated to solidify it, then further surrounded by a cube or cylinder of molten glass. Evidently a man of thrifty instincts, he also allowed for the cheaper and less labour-intensive possibility of preserving just the head “if preferred”, Futurama style.

Not that I or anybody else in their right mind is considering actually carrying out this operation, but I can see a number of potential snags here. I’m going to leave aside the notion that the chap illustrated above looks as if he was in the middle of objecting to being encased in sodium silicate when he was rudely cut off in his prime.

Firstly, you’re “dry heating” a corpse in glass, then surrounding it with more, even hotter glass? Surely this means you’re cooking dear mad old uncle Joe sous-vide? Secondly, an eight foot tall cuboid of solid glass plus a dead body will be impractically heavy. What would you do with it? Leave it out in a cemetery, or put it in your living room? In the latter case, anybody who lived above the ground floor would be wise to go for the head only option, although even that would be rather hefty.

Last but most disgusting, bodies don’t go moldy like bread, because spores land on them. They rot primarily from the inside, as autolysis causes the tissues to die and liquefy, while microbes that have lived harmlessly inside the body are let loose, unchecked by the living body’s defences. Some of these microbes are anaerobic, meaning that lack of contact with the air is not a problem. If you feel up to it, check out some of the Bronze Age people sacrificed and thrown into anaerobic, acidic bogs in Northern Europe. Or the bodies of dead Everest mountaineers and people in the Andes who were similarly mummified by cold, dry air. I warn you that searching for information or images on this subject can be quite upsetting, so the more squeamish reader should just take it from me that these people are quite well-preserved, but they’re not “life-like”. Nobody would be at all impressed if you had them in your house. This is probably an understatement. You should expect a Jodie Foster in Silence of the Lambs kind of reaction if you’re keeping dead people in glass cubes. I imagine the people at the patents office were relieved that they received “no specimens” of Karwowski’s method.

It’s sad, though, that when Mr. Karwowski died he was probably buried or cremated like everybody else instead of being magnificently, vitreously entombed. For all eternity, the world’s heaviest paperweight.

2,000,000 dots and 325 animals

Le capitaine Costentenus

Poster for a sideshow type act at the Folies-Bergère, circa 1880s.

Recently I was at the ethnographic Musée du quai Branly in Paris. A post about some of the museum’s permanent collection of lovely, demented and/or terrifying masks will follow shortly, but the museum also currently have an exhibition on (until the middle of October 2014) called Tatoueurs, Tatoués (Tattooers, Tattooed) which is worth seeing if only to be reminded that there can be more to tattoos than spelling error tramp stamps, nonsense kanji, the ubiquitous badly drawn pseudo-tribal sleeve, and permanent disfigurements that are just plain wrong.

The exhibition has modern examples and historical images from all over Asia, Europe and Oceania, but for some reason the image that stuck with me was the one shown above, of ‘Captain Costentenus’. Maybe it’s just my general prediliction for Victoriana. He was an attraction at the Folies-Bergère, the Parisian cabaret that remains in operation to this day. The caption says “Tattooed by order of Yakoob-Beg, chief of the Tartars, with two million dots and 325 animal figures.” Did somebody actually count the dots? Maybe Costentenus did, as they were being poked into him.

Another colour lithograph, in English (below)– from the reliably kinky Wellcome Collection– gives further information about Captain Costentenus, describing him as a “Greek Albanian, tattooed from head to foot in Chinese Tartary, as punishment for engaging in rebellion against the King”… the king presumably being the aforementioned Yakoob-Beg. Chinese Tartary is an obsolete term, referring broadly to the areas such as Tibet, Mongolia and Manchuria, which doesn’t quite match up with him being Greek Albanian although I guess he could have been travelling when he committed whatever transgression caused Yakoob-Beg to mandate such an elaborate punishment. Either that, or we’re looking at what we’d call nowadays creative PR.

19th century aquaria were evidently as much sites for general oddity as they were display facilities for fish.

The worst of Adoxoblog

HALLO, THERE! This is the 200th post on Adoxoblog. Choosing to celebrate that milestone with call backs to the ten least read articles on the site is not as perverse as it might seem. Many posts have tens of thousands of views– which I think is pretty good for a blog that isn’t really about anything in particular, never has cat GIFs on it and almost never mentions tits– but some pages have almost no views, and there are hundreds of other things to read here as well besides the greatest hits. So may I present to you the top ten least wanted on this blog in the hope that you’ll be encouraged to seek out some of Adoxoblog’s less frequented areas.

Mushuda I and Mushuda II. Almost no text here, which is probably why hardly anybody ever finds these pages. However, if you read this blog regularly then you are probably the sort of person who would enjoy seeing a bunch of Japanese furries laying seige to somebody’s house with insecticide packages and a turquoise bear marrying a doll who is also obsessed with insecticide. MUSHADA MUSHADA MUSHUDA.

Signals for passing pilots. Just in case you ever need to say NO to an aircraft.

Smells Like Papal Spirits. Pope Leo XIII was crunk.

Beautiful Spam III: “This is the carrot on a stick”. Buy stem cells off the internet! What could possibly go wrong?

Cook me Amadeus. Boys: identify nine ovens and win yourself a record player. I know, it’s almost too exciting to contemplate.

Visit Edinburgh: “A downright necrological purgatory.” I used to live there. In Edinburgh, not Purgatory. If you’ve ever been to Waverley Station you’ll know exactly what Robert Louis Stevenson was talking about.

The Devilphone. Actual villagers with real pitchforks.

HALLO, THERE! the robot, answering your vital questions about Walschaerts’ valve gears.

Yeah that’s the perfect roll roll roll perfect roll Product horror. “These poor models are clearly at the very nadir of their careers and we should pity them for having to feign ecstatic delirium at the prospect of their mouths (and at about 00:50… eyes) being stuffed with gelatinous tubes of randomness.”

Shunga? I hardly even know her!

Erotic Japanese prints at The British Museum

See I WONDER IF THEY’LL BE HUMANS OR VEGETABLES? for an explanation of this image, at least in so far as any explanation is possible.

Last week I had the chance to visit the British Museum’s exhibition of shunga, which translates as the rather euphemistic “Spring paintings”: Japanese erotic prints and books from the medieval period up to the turn of the twentieth century. So it’s Spring as in sap rising, if you know what I mean.

Given the enduring popularity at this blog of James Joyce’s bum letters and the number of people who come here trying to find out (in English) what the octopus is saying in Hokusai’s Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife, I thought some of you perverts scholars may be interested to hear a bit about the exhibition. It’s worth a visit if you can get to London and you’re into Japanese culture and/or smutty pictures; therein lies one of the unintentionally funny things about it. Yes, every single day at the British Museum hundreds of respectable middle class people are spending a hour or more scrutinising vintage porn with no holds barred depictions of what goes where. I suspect many of them would say (like the complacent wife in Airplane!) that Jim never looks at porn when he’s at home, and many of them are Telegraph readers or Guardianistas who’d probably assert that pornography is demeaning and sordid. Yet here they are, earnestly checking out pictures of famous actors’ penises… albeit famous actors’ penises from over a century ago. It’s all strangely un-arousing anyway, at least to me.

There are also some inadvertently amusing pseudo-scholarly captions such as “the unusually large size of the colour print serves to accomodate the orgy”. Er, yes… it does. The print in question (circa 1785) shows a travelling salesman being set upon by six housewives who in true pornographic style are all absolutely gagging for it, proving that where (heterosexual/heteronormative male) sexual fantasies are concerned, plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

Complaints about pornography being unrealistic and damaging to the body images of “real” people are also nothing new. In 1254 a chap called Tachibana no Narisue wrote that “the old [shunga] masters depict the size of the thing far too large … If it were depicted actual size there would be nothing of interest. For that reason, don’t we say art is fantasy?”

If you’re on the front page this post has some rather explicit images and text after the “continue reading” link, so NSFW unless you work at a Japanese vendor of sexy prints during the Edo era, OK?

“A shock-fest for your scare endurance”

“DEMON-PROWLER OF MOUNTAIN SHADOWS… DREADED MAN-BEAST OF TIBET… THE TERROR OF ALL THAT IS HUMAN!!

A great poster for the 1957 Hammer film production ‘The Abominable Snowman of the Himalayas‘. I’ve not seen the film and I hadn’t heard of it before I found this poster, but look at the pedigree: directed by prolific Hammer hack Val Guest, written by Nigel Kneale of the Quatermass series, starring Peter Cushing. Apparently it was originally a BBC television play, which I should imagine was ineptly made for about £5 as was their wont.

It’s also fascinating how quaint warnings like “WE DARE YOU TO SEE IT ALONE!” are for things like this, half a century on. Most of these films wouldn’t frighten, shock or disturb anybody over the age of ten nowadays.

Nazo, Emperor of the Universe

See the first post about Japanese kamishibai (paper theatre) in the 1930s and the previous post about WWII kamishibai for more information and commentary about the origins and context of these images.

A postwar ‘Golden Bat’ serial. Nazo, the Emperor of the Universe, is apparently an overweight heterochromial cat with a black bag over his head. Sort of like a cross between David Bowie, the Baader Meinhof gang, and Bagpuss. Actually this sounds fabulous, but who knew? The expression of Nazo’s captive says it all: OH REALLY?

‘Mystery Train’, late 1940s or early 1950s. Mystery Train? I’ll say. Why did somebody in a man-sized glove costume just get on? Quick, put your bag down so he doesn’t sit next to you.