I love those moments on Wikipedia where you go to look up something relatively innocuous and you end up stumbling across something else entirely. Such was the case for me tonight, where I went to look up what exactly a "malamute" looked like and ended up reading up on pets owned by U.S. presidents down through the years.

Ever since Franklin Roosevelt, it's been a fairly bland assortment of dogs, leavened by the occasional cat (and apparently the Clinton cat Socks finally kicked the bucket this year!) and assorted miscellanea (Kennedy's kids had a couple hamsters and a parakeet).

Ah, but go back a bit further and we start to see some really...interesting choices.

For one thing, you get a real reminder of the the rural nature of 19th century America as nearly every president from that time owned some kind of barnyard animal. Lincoln owned a turkey named Jack and two goats, Nanny and Nanko.

That's another thing--the names! I think George Washington takes the prize for best overall names; he had a staghound named Sweetlips, a pack of coonhounds named Drunkard, Taster, Tipler, and Tipsy, and a donkey named Royal Gift. Take that George III!

Teddy Roosevelt takes the prize for best individual name, or in this case names, for a set of guinea pigs (probably belonging to one of his kids): Dr. Johnson, Bishop Doane, Fighting Bob Evans, and Father O'Grady. Oh my god, Fighting Bob Evans is the best name for a guinea pig pretty much EVER.

Some other bizarre presidential pets:

John Adams had a dog named Satan ("Satan! C'mere boy!")

Thomas Jefferson owned two bear cubs at one point

John Quincy Adams owned an alligator(!) and raised silkworms

Andrew Jackson, aka "The First Redneck President," owned a parrot he taught to swear and fighting cocks

Martin Van Buren "briefly owned two tiger cubs"

U. S. Grant had a way with naming horses: he owned one named Butcher Boy, another named Cincinnatus, and his mount during the Civil War was named Jeff Davis

Chester A. Arthur is the only President on the list with no record of having owned pets

Benjamin Harrison owned a pair of 'possums named Mr. Reciprocity and Mr. Protection

In addition to his illustriously-named guinea pigs, Theodore Roosevelt hosted a veritable menagerie at the White House: four terriers, a Pekingese, a Saint Bernard, a Chesapeake Bay Retriever, two cats, a garter snake named Emily Spinach, two ponies, a pig, a badger named Josiah, a rat, a hen named Baron Spreckle, a macaw, a couple more dogs (breed not stated), and...a one-legged rooster.

Not to be outdone was Calvin Coolidge, perhaps the last of the great "menagerie Presidents" as we must now call them. Observe: two white collies named Rob Roy and Prudence Prim, nine other dogs of various breeds, two raccoons named Rebecca and Horace, a donkey named Ebeneezer, a goose named Enoch, a cat, a bobcat, two lion cubs named Tax Reduction and Budget Bureau, a pygmy hippo named Billy, a wallaby, a duiker, and, to round it all out, a black bear. And why not?

From Wikipedia:

Dave Allen Mather (August 10, 1851, date of death unknown, most probably May 1886, but nothing confirmed), known as Mysterious Dave, or sometimes as New York Dave, was an American lawman and gunfighter in the American Old West.

I wouldn't have been able to choose between "Mysterious Dave" and "New York Dave" either.

Pirates have, of course, become fashionably kitschy over the last few years, but there's a really interesting article over on the Huffington Post that delves into the true motives of piracy, both of the "classic" variety and the most recent. Turns out, people don't tend to get into piracy because they're "evil" but because they're forced into it by economic circumstances often brought about by the very governments that would condemn piracy in the first place. In other news, the Sun rises in the East and sets in the West.

Some choice quotes:

In 1991, the government of Somalia - in the Horn of Africa - collapsed. Its nine million people have been teetering on starvation ever since - and many of the ugliest forces in the Western world have seen this as a great opportunity to steal the country's food supply and dump our nuclear waste in their seas.

***

When I asked Ould-Abdallah what European governments were doing about it, he said with a sigh: "Nothing. There has been no clean-up, no compensation, and no prevention."

***

This is the context in which the men we are calling "pirates" have emerged. Everyone agrees they were ordinary Somalian fishermen who at first took speedboats to try to dissuade the dumpers and trawlers, or at least wage a 'tax' on them. They call themselves the Volunteer Coastguard of Somalia - and it's not hard to see why.

***

During the revolutionary war in America, George Washington and America's founding fathers paid pirates to protect America's territorial waters, because they had no navy or coastguard of their own. Most Americans supported them. Is this so different?

Head on over here to read the whole piece. Quite thought-provoking.

The Earth is degenerating these days. Bribery and corruption abound.
Children no longer mind their parents, every man wants to write a book,
and it is evident that the end of the world is fast approaching.
- Assyrian Stone Tablet, 2800BC

In this image provided by the Kronenberg Foundation in Warsaw on Thursday, Nov. 20, 2008, a computer-generated reconstruction of what astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus may have looked like on the basis of a skull discovered in the cathedral in Frombork, northern Poland, is seen.

Awww, he looks just like a typical college professor!

"This 200-year-old vampire killing kit was recently sold at an auction in Natchez, Missisippi. The winning bid? $14,850."

I'm reading Justinian's Flea right now, and it occurs to me that someone needs to make a Baz Luhrman/Romeo + Juliet/Knight's Tale movie that contrasts 6th-century Constantinople and the modern-day urban jungle.

To whit:

[On the subject of the public debates that were held in the city's Hippodrome:] "The most telling part of the entire dialogue, however, is that it was entirely conducted in a rigid metrical form with each call-and-response containing the same number of Greek syllables, and placing the stress on the penultimate or antepenultimate syllable for each line. That was apparently a commonplace occurrence in the Hippodrome demonstrates both the level of training and theological sophistication required for such poetic improvisation."

Sounds a bit like a rap battle, eh wot?



Then we've got the street gangs:

"By the time of Justin's accession, the Blues and Greens [the chariot-racing factions that were part sport franchise, part organized crime syndicates] each had shock troops, called Partisans, who resembled nothing so much as modern urban street gangs.... The Partisans wore color-coded uniforms consisting of short blue or green coats, in the style of the Huns, rather than the more modest Constantinopolitan tunics."

A bit like baggy trousers and do-rags, if you ask me.

The more things change...

Twenty years before Laika, those pesky Soviets were already busy coming up with ways to sacrifice canines in the name of the State.

The occasion was a bit more serious than the propagandistic Space Race, however. In 1942, the Soviet Union was on the verge of defeat and annihilation, having been invaded by Germany and its allies the year before. Resources were increasingly thin, and desperate times, well, you know what they call for...

( Not for the dog lover or faint of heart. )

Probably apocryphal, but a good 'un, and oh so true:

Richard Lionheart was in the Muslim army camp negotiating with Saladin. To impress Saladin, Richard ordered than an anvil be brought to the tent. With a mighty swing, Richard struck the anvil with his sword, cleaving it in twain.

"This is the power of Christianity." quoth Richard.

Saladin nodded with due regard to this feat and then rising drew his scimitar and a silk handkerchief from his sash. Tossing the handkerchief in the air, he gently let it pass over the blade of his scimitar as it fell, slicing it to ribbons.

"This is the subtlety of Islam." quoth Saladin.

Since I'm procrastinating on getting some work done, I figured I'd do something pseudo-productive and post a bit of an update on how things are going around here.

( Serious stuff and non-sequiter pictures--how postmodern of me )

1) I found my holiday icon for this year. Fits in nicely with my "retro" themed icons, I think.

2) We're leaving for LA tomorrow. Four-day trip. I'm feeling a lot better about it since I checked the weather forecast and discovered the outlook had changed from "raining the entire length of the trip" to "slight chance of rain the last hour or so". Still, we're going to stop by a tire place tomorrow and have them take a look at our worn treads. We might buy a new set before heading out. ::sigh::

Anyway, another positive is that, thanks to my parents no longer living in LA, we can limit our stay to a small locality. Our first SoCal visit that won't involve ridiculous amounts of driving! We'll still be plenty pressed for time, so apologies in advance to any of our friends and well-wishers we don't get to see. :(

3) Ah, and speaking of weather reports:



I can't stop laughing at this.

4)Also, thanks to tigerpillow for this awesome link of interest not just to baseball fans but also those interested in what life was really like back in the day of our great-grandparents.

5)I leave you, gentle reader, with this: