In 1923, a group of women in Washington, DC decided to form the Anti-Flirt Club, an organisation “composed of young women and girls who have been embarrassed by men in automobiles and on street corners”, its aim being to protect such ladies from any further discomfort. Its rules were simple:
Don’t flirt: those who flirt in haste oft repent in leisure.
Don’t accept rides from flirting motorists-they don’t all invite you in to save you a walk.
Don’t use your eyes for ogling-they were made for worthier purposes.
Don’t go out with men you don’t know-they may be married, and you may be in for a hair-pulling match.
Don’t wink-a flutter of one eye may cause a tear in the other. 6. Don’t smile at flirtatious strangers save them for people you know.
Don’t annex all the men you can get-by flirting with many you may lose out on the one.
Don’t fall for the slick, dandified cake eater the unpolished gold of a real man is worth more than the gloss of a lounge lizard.
Don’t let elderly men with an eye to a flirtation pat you on the shoulder and take a fatherly interest in you. Those are usually the kind who want to forget they are fathers.
Don’t ignore the man you are sure of while you flirt with another. When you return to the first one you may find him gone.
MARCUS AND MARCELLIANUS were twin brothers of an illustrious family in Rome, who had been converted to the Faith in their youth and were honorably married. Diocletian ascending the imperial throne in 284, the heathens raised persecutions. These martyrs were thrown into prison, and condemned to be beheaded. Their friends obtained a respite of the execution for thirty days, that they might prevail on them to worship the false gods.
Tranquillinus and Martia, their afflicted heathen parents, in company with their sons’ own wives and their little babes, endeavored to move them by the most tender entreaties and tears. St. Sebastian, an officer of the emperor’s household, coming to Rome soon after their commitment, daily visited and encouraged them. The issue of the conferences was the happy conversion of the father, mother, and wives, also of Nicostratus, the public register, and soon after of Chromatius, the judge, who set the Saints at liberty, and, abdicating the magistracy, retired into the country. Marcus and Marcellianus were hid by a Christian officer of the household in his apartments in the palace; but they were betrayed by an apostate, and retaken. Fabian, who had succeeded Chromatius, condemned them to be bound to two pillars, with their feet nailed to the same. In this posture they remained a day and a night, and on the following day were stabbed with lances.
In 1902 their graves in the catacombs of Saint Balbina were rediscovered.
History is replete with stories of acts of defiance carried out at the moment of death. Nikola Subió Zrinski defended the fortress of Szigetvár against overwhelming numbers of Turks in 1566. When his last tower was about to fall, Zrinski ordered the powder magazine to be exploded and led his men in a charge to certain death. In 1941 Konstantinos Koukidis, a Greek soldier, wrapped himself in the national flag flying from the Athenian acropolis and hurled himself off the precipice rather than surrender to the invading German army. The self-sacrificial spirit of Japanese samurai in the face of defeat is legendary, but only in that country could a tea cup play such a prominent role.
Matsunaga Hisahide (1508-77) was a prominent daimyo in the midst of a century of political turmoil in Japan. Regional warlords such as Matsunaga vied for influence, invaded each other’s territories, and contested for the shogunate. He was particularly noted for his schemes and treachery. On this date in 1565 he assassinated the incumbent shogun Ashikaga Yoshiteru and replaced him with his own nominee.
Late in his life he ran afoul of Oda Nobunaga, the so-called “Demon King”, the most powerful of the country’s great clan leaders. In 1577 Nobunaga besieged Matsunaga’s Shigisan Castle. Faced with capture, Matsunaga prepared for the usual ritual suicide but before disembowelling himself he destroyed a valuable teacup which Nobunaga coveted. Painters have captured the gesture of defiance.
To secure their hold on their North American colonies the French built an impressive fortress on the Cape Breton peninsula in what is now Nova Scotia. Designed by the Marquis de Vauban, Louis XIV’s military engineer, the fort with its ditches, thick walls, and cannon looked impregnable.
In 1744, Britain was drawn into conflict with France as part of the larger War of the Austrian Succession. The Anglo-French clash would be known in the British colonies as King George’s War. Until this time, Louisbourg had not participated in any military actions, although the fortress had provided refuge for Indigenous people allied with the French who raided English settlements. Louisbourg also offered a safe harbour for French privateers who preyed on fishing fleets and ships from New England.
On 24 May 1744, a force of soldiers from Louisbourg aboard a fleet of 17 vessels, under the command of Captain François du Pont Duvivier, made a surprise attack on the small English fort and settlement at Grassy Island, near Canso (on the present-day Nova Scotia mainland), forcing the British garrison there to surrender. The French destroyed the settlement and took the British to Louisbourg as prisoners. While the British awaited transfer to Boston in a prisoner exchange, their officers were free to move about the town. They took note of weaknesses in the so-called “impregnable” fortress.
In Boston, the freed officers reported their observations to Massachusetts governor William Shirley. They told him that Louisbourg’s garrison was undermanned, and that morale among the French troops was low, largely because of poor food and because they hadn’t been paid in months. They also said that due to poor construction, parts of the seemingly formidable walls were crumbling. They also revealed the presence of nearby ridges and hills overlooking Louisbourg’s landward walls. And they made sketches of Louisbourg’s defences, which they gave to Shirley.
Shirley raised a force of more than 4,000 New Englanders, commanded by William Pepperell, for an expedition against Louisbourg. The colonial army would be supported by a Royal Navy squadron under Commodore Peter Warren. In April 1745, Pepperell established a base at Canso, where he met with Warren in early May to plan a land and sea operation.
The first siege of Louisbourg began on 11 May 1745. Pepperell had captured strategic points near the fortress, and Warren’s ships blockaded the harbour. The colonial army used sledges to haul artillery across marshy ground to high points from which the guns could bombard the town and batter the walls. The French warship Vigilant carrying vital supplies and reinforcements, was captured by Warren’s squadron. By 16 June, Louisbourg’s walls had been breached and Warren’s fleet was poised to enter the harbour. Short of supplies and ammunition, and under pressure from the town’s merchants to capitulate, French governor Louis DuPont Duchambon surrendered.
Arrangements were made for most of the population to be transported to France. Warren was promoted to rear admiral, and Pepperell was rewarded by Britain with a baronetcy. Under the terms of the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle of 1748, the British returned Louisbourg, and all of Île Royale, to the French, much to the disgust of the New Englanders, who considered it an act of betrayal by the British government.
Back in the days when JFK ruled in Camelot and Dief was the Chief in Ottawa, the Bowler family summer vacations were spent on highways in the American West. On our way in a Detroit land yacht to Deadwood, Mount Rushmore, or some fabled snake farm, my brother and I misbehaved in the back seat. Having exhausted all possible car games, and tired of comic books, we came alive when our parents spotted red signs by the road ahead. We sprang to the windows to read the Burma-Shave signs as we sped by.
The Burma-Shave company erected thousands of examples of sequential advertisements from the 1920s to the early 1960s when they were discontinued on the advice of lawyers who feared suits for causing distracted driving.
A Man A Miss
A Car - A Curve
He Kissed The Miss
And Missed
The Curve
BURMA-SHAVE
Saw The Train And
Tried To Duck It
Kicked First The Gas
And Then The Bucket
BURMA-SHAVE
A Beard
That's Rough
And Overgrown
Is Better Than
A Chaperone
BURMA-SHAVE
Every shaver
Now can snore
Six more minutes
Than before
By using
BURMA-SHAVE
Shaving brushes
You'll soon see 'em
On the shelf
In some
Museum
BURMA-SHAVE
2013 On this day nine years ago, Merle Haggard (1937-2016) is presented an honorary doctorate in fine arts by California State University, Bakersfield.
Mentioning this gives me a springboard to my real topic of the day: witty country and western song titles. Though I am not a huge fan of country music (especially in its latest and tamest iterations) I recognize that its lyrics come closest to being the best artistic expression of the thoughts of the average working-class American. It is also the genre that is least afraid to poke fun at itself and its audience as we can tell songs listed here.
“She’s Out Doing What I’m Here Doing Without”
“Come Out of the Wheatfield Nellie, You’re Going Against the Grain”
“Run for the Roundhouse Nellie (He Can’t Corner You There)”
“Ever Since I Said ‘I Do,’ There’s a Lot of Things You Don’t”
“Tennis Must Be Your Racket ‘Cause Love Means Nothin’ To You”
“If I Had It To Do All Over Again, I’d Do It All Over You”
“Did I Shave My Legs for This? “
“Did I Shave My Back for This?”
“Get Off The Stove, Grandma, You’re Too Old To Ride The Range “
“I Fell Into A Pile of You and Got Love All Over Me “
“I May Be Used, But Baby I Ain’t Used Up”
“I Went Back to My Fourth Wife for the Third Time and Gave Her a Second Chance to Make a First Class Fool Out of Me”
“If the Phone Don’t Ring Baby You’ll Know It’s Me”
“She Got The Ring And I Got The Finger”
“She Got the Gold Mine and I Got the Shaft”
“She’s Got the Rhythm (And I Got the Blues)”
“It Took a Helluva Man to Take my Anne, but it Sure Didn’t Take Him Long “
“It Only Takes One Bar (To Make A Prison)”
“Meet Me In the Gravel Pit, Honey, cuz I’m a Little Boulder There”
“Messed Up In Mexico, Living On Refried Dreams”
“We Used To Kiss On The Lips, But It’s All Over Now “
“I’m Going to Put a Bar in the Back of My Car and Drive Myself to Drink”
“I’d Rather Have a Bottle in Front of Me Than a Frontal Lobotomy”
“Get Your Tongue Out Of My Mouth, Because I’m Kissing You Goodbye”
“Oh, I’ve Got Hair Oil On My Ears And My Glasses Are Slipping Down, But Baby I Can See Through You”
“I’m So Miserable Without You It’s Like Having You Here”
Time and trouble will tame an advanced young woman, but an advanced old woman is uncontrollable by any earthly force. – Dorothy Sayers
Dorothy Sayers loved to provoke. Born the daughter of an Anglican clergyman in 1893, she learned Latin at age 6, entered Oxford before women were granted degrees, and began writing poetry to shock traditional Christian pieties. She scorned popularity to the extent that she asked a friend to set off a scandal by writing a letter to the Church Times denouncing her new book. In her collection of essays entitled Unpopular Opinions, she included pieces such as “Are Women Human?” Speaking to an audience of British Christian leaders, she described her fellow believers as “tiresome, stupid, selfish, quarrelsome, pig-headed, and infuriating.”
Sayers’ unorthodoxy carried over into her private life. She conducted an affair with a Russian poet but dumped him when he proposed marriage. She then moved on to a relationship with a married car salesman who got her, at age 30, pregnant. Sayers gave birth secretly to a son whom she gave up to some relatives to raise – though she later adopted the boy, he never lived with her and never learned her secret until after her death. Two years later she entered into a troubled marriage to a shell-shocked war veteran .
It was in these tumultuous years that Sayers fashioned herself into a very successful writer of mysteries during the Golden Age of that genre. Her detective stories featuring the effete English nobleman/sleuth Lord Peter Wimsey and the unassuming travelling wine salesman Montague Egg were best-sellers, making her comfortably well off. But equal to her fame as an author of middle-brow fiction was her place as a defender of Christianity. Despite (or, perhaps, because of) her feisty character and challenging life circumstances, she was also a bold and effective expositor of religious truth.
Sayers believed that Christianity in the twentieth century had grown soft, undemanding, and compromised. People had come to believe they were practising their religion when they were merely conforming to local social traditions and being nice. “The people who hanged Christ,” she said, “never, to do them justice, accused him of being a bore – on the contrary, they thought him too dynamic to be safe. It has been left for later generations to muffle up that shattering personality and surround him with an atmosphere of tedium. We have efficiently pared the claws of the Lion of Judah, certified him ‘meek and mild’ and recommended him as a fitting household pet for pale curates and pious old ladies.” The solution, Sayers thought, was to shock them into reconsidering their position.
She did this first through the medium of radio. In her 1938 play about the Nativity of Jesus entitled He That Should Come, and The Man Born to be King, a cycle of 12 other BBC productions about the life of Christ, Sayers challenged a 300-year-old law that banned the portrayal of God in staged drama. Other shocks included actors speaking contemporary English, instead of King James Version-era Biblical speech, and characters whose daily concerns mirrored those of the vast audience the plays reached. Sayers was unmoved by the uproar she had created, saying, “Let us, in heaven’s name, drag out the divine drama from under the dreadful accumulation of slipshod thinking and trashy sentiment heaped upon it, and set it on an open stage to startle the world into some sort of vigorous reaction. If the pious are the first to be shocked, so much worse for the pious—others will pass into the kingdom of heaven before them. If all men are offended because of Christ, let them be offended; but where is the sense of their being offended at something that is not Christ and is nothing like him? We do him singularly little honour by watering down his personality till it could not offend a fly. Surely it is not the business of the Church to adapt Christ to men, but to adapt men to Christ.” The plays were enormously successful, often translated into other languages and frequently restaged.
Sayers continued her attack on religious complacency in books such as The Mind of the Maker and Creed or Chaos?, a book often compared to C.S. Lewis’s classic Mere Christianity. She continued to insist that real faith must be grounded in more than emotion and sentiment; it must rest on a knowledge of, and acceptance of, the fundamental truths defined by the early church. She stated “It is fatal to let people suppose that Christianity is only a mode of feeling; it is vitally necessary to insist that it is first and foremost a rational explanation of the universe. It is hopeless to offer Christianity as a vaguely idealistic aspiration of a simple and consoling kind; it is, on the contrary, a hard, tough, exacting, and complex doctrine, steeped in a drastic and incompromising realism. “
Dorothy Sayers died on December 17, 1957. Every year on that date she is commemorated by the Episcopal Church with this prayer: Almighty God, who strengthened your servant Dorothy Sayers with eloquence to defend Christian teaching: Keep us, we pray, steadfast in your true religion, that in constancy and peace we may always teach right doctrine, and teach doctrine rightly; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
The great advantage about telling the truth is that nobody ever believes it.
As I grow older and older,/ And totter toward the tomb,/ I find that I care less and less,/ Who goes to bed with whom.
None of us feels the true love of God till we realize how wicked we are. But you can’t teach people that – they have to learn by experience.
The worst sin – perhaps the only sin – passion can commit, is to be joyless.
National identity and religion are often closely tied. This was certainly the case in eastern Europe at the close of the sixteenth century. Many Slavic inhabitants of the Lithuanian-Polish Commonwealth (a territory encompassing what is now Poland, Belarus, Ukraine, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia) were adherents of the Orthodox Church but they resented having to acknowledge the headship of the new Patriarchate of Moscow. In order to assert their independence from Russian hegemony many clerics sought to arrive at a bargain with the papacy and in return for certain important concessions they were willing to reunite with the Catholic Church and the Bishop of Rome.
On this day in 1595 Ukrainian bishops read out a letter agreed to by Orthodoxy clergy at the synod of Brest. Their churches would acknowledge the headship of the pope, Clement VIII, but would not have to give up many of their cherished beliefs. They could retain married clergy, say the creed without the “Filoque Clause”, avoid Corpus Christi processions, and follow the Julian calendar rather than the newly-reformed Gregorian usage. Worship styles would remain unchanged and theological disputes would be shunned, as in the case of Purgatory where the synod had decreed “we shall not debate about purgatory, but we entrust ourselves to the teaching of the Holy Church.”
The split from Orthodoxy was not an easy one. Violence broke out over church property and forced allegiances; animosity still lingers in parts of Ukraine and Russia to this day.
June 11 is St Barnabas’ Day and thus it was natural for Robert and Margaret Googe of Chilwell, Nottinghamshire to name their new-born son Barnabe. Young Barnabe grew to be a well-connected lawyer and politician during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I but his chief fame is as a poet, not necessarily a very good poet but an influential one. In literary circles he was renowned as one of the first English pastoral poets and to historians of Tudor Protestantism he is famed for his religious commentary, particularly that found in his translation of Thomas Kirchmeyer’s Regnum papisticum of 1555, a compendium of attacks on Roman Catholicism — in 1570 Googe rendered this as The Popish Kingdome, or reign of Antichrist.
To give you a flavour of his artistry, here is his description of the Catholic celebration of St John’s Day, December 27:
Nexte John, the sonne of Zebedee hath his appointed day,
Who once by cruell tyraunts will, constrayned was they say
Strong poison up to drinke, therefore the papistes doe beleeve
That whoso puts their trust in him, no poyson them can greeve.
The wine beside that halowed is in worship of his name,
The prestes doe give the people that bring money for the same.
And after with the self same wine are little manchets made
Agaynst the boysterous winter stormes and sundrie such like trade.
The men upon this solemne day do take this holy wine
To make them strong. So do the maydes to make them faire and fine.
Yesterday’s post was about Old Testament and Roman curses. None of the imprecatory psalms or the curse tablets, however, could come close in maleficent power to the Great Cursing and Monition of Gavin Dunbar, the Archbishop of Glasgow. He summoned the Almighty to thoroughly plague the English and Scottish border raiders known as reivers. Every parish priest in Scotland was obliged to read it from the pulpit. Here is a taste of it in the Scots dialect.
I curse their heid and all the haris of thair heid; I curse thair face, thair ene, thair mouth, thair neise, thair tongue, thair teeth, thair crag, thair shoulderis, thair breist, thair hert, thair stomok, thair bak, thair wame, thair armes, thais leggis, thair handis, thair feit, and everilk part of thair body, frae the top of their heid to the soill of thair feet, befoir and behind, within and without.
In contemporary English:
I curse their head and all the hairs of their head; I curse their face, their brain, their mouth, their nose, their tongue, their teeth, their forehead, their shoulders, their breast, their heart, their stomach, their back, their womb, their arms, their legs, their hands, their feet, and every part of their body, from the top of their head to the soles of their feet, before and behind, within and without.
I curse them going and I curse them riding; I curse them standing and I curse them sitting; I curse them eating and I curse them drinking; I curse them rising, and I curse them lying; I curse them at home, I curse them away from home; I curse them within the house, I curse them outside of the house; I curse their wives, their children, and their servants who participate in their deeds. I (bring ill wishes upon) their crops, their cattle, their wool, their sheep, their horses, their swine, their geese, their hens, and all their livestock. I (bring ill wishes upon) their halls, their chambers, their kitchens, their stanchions, their barns, their cowsheds, their barnyards, their cabbage patches, their plows, their harrows, and the goods and houses that are necessary for their sustenance and welfare.”
May all the malevolent wishes and curses ever known, since the beginning of the world, to this hour, light on them. May the malediction of God, that fell upon Lucifer and all his fellows, that cast them from the high Heaven to the deep hell, light upon them.
He goes on for some time, urging the repetition of the ills that befell Pharaoh and the Egyptians, Sodom and Gomorrah, Pontius Pilate, Herod, and Julian the Apostate. The Archbishop goes on to excommunicate them, forbid anyone from having any dealings with them, and concludes:
And, finally, I condemn them perpetually to the deep pit of hell, there to remain with Lucifer and all his fellows, and their bodies to the gallows of Burrow moor, first to be hanged, then ripped and torn by dogs, swine, and other wild beasts, abominable to all the world. And their candle (light of their life) goes from your sight, as may their souls go from the face of God, and their good reputation from the world, until they forebear their open sins, aforesaid, and rise from this terrible cursing and make satisfaction and penance.
In 1923, a group of women in Washington, DC decided to form the Anti-Flirt Club, an organisation “composed of young women and girls who have been embarrassed by men in automobiles and on street corners”, its aim being to protect such ladies from any further discomfort. Its rules were simple:
