ancient roman 1: my dude what would you like to paint on the walls of our awesome house ancient roman 2: i dunno bro i was thinking that maybe we could get a fresco of that boner god weighing his erect dick against a bag of money ancient roman 1: that is exactly what i had in mind too bro let’s do it scholar: clearly this is the greatest civilization to walk the face of this earth
Fun Fact: Priapus is a protective god. His phallus represents the wealth and power of the household, and if you rob them he’ll shove it up your ass.
“villain attempts to go back in time to kill superman as a small child, gets shot in the face by ma kent, who buries him behind the barn with the others” would probably have niche appeal as a comic but i don’t care, i want it
The first time a man from the future showed up at Martha Kent’s house, Clark Kent was two years old.
According to his birth certificate, anyway. She just kind of accepted that the details were a little fudged. Relativity, and all.
Maybe the stranger would have succeeded in whatever it was he wanted to do, except that he really did just show up. Appeared, like a ghost made flesh, right in the backyard. Clark, thank goodness, was out in the fields with Jonathan. He couldn’t bear to be alone, that boy, and they could never bear to leave him.
Which left Martha free to shoot the ghostly intruder in the face.
Martha had not always considered herself a shoot first, ask questions later sort of a person. But that was before she found a baby in a spaceship where her corn was supposed to be.
They’d switch off, Jonathan and her, who got Clark and who got the shotgun. Martha got the shotgun more often than not. Guns made her husband uncomfortable. She was hardly a fan, but she’d always been a terrible pacifist. Too determined to defend herself.
The sight of all that blood and brain and bone was still nauseating. She compartmentalized, told herself it was no different from slaughtering a cow; didn’t think about riot gear or tear gas or the friends she’d lost or all the things she’d moved away from when her heart couldn’t take it any longer. This was different. This was her son.
She prodded the corpse with her foot. It remained a corpse. A real nasty looking corpse, all big and burly and holding a gun much too large. She didn’t like making assumptions based on appearances, but she didn’t imagine he’d been coming for anything nice. She bent down to search his pockets, found a metal wallet and flipped it open.
Born 2018.
Well, hell. Wasn’t that just a kick in the pants?
Probably she ought to have been a bit more unsettled than she was. But she’d been waiting two years for someone to show up on her doorstep, men in black or UFOs or something. Hell, she’d half expected her sweet little boy to hatch into something worse.
Just because she brought home space babies didn’t mean she was a damn fool.
Jonathan had rejoined her in long strides, was holding Clark in such a way that he couldn’t see the corpse on the ground. “Well, shit,” he said.
“Eyup,” Martha agreed.
“Don’t look government.”
“Nope.”
“We burying him?”
“I’ll bury him,” Martha said, standing up. “You get Clark inside and read him a book or something. I don’t want him seeing any of this, getting him messed up in the head.”
“You sure? Looks heavy.”
“That’s why we have a wheelbarrow. I’ll stick him out behind the barn, might as well keep all our secrets in one place.”
Martha had a long time to think as she dug a time traveler’s grave. There were a lot of reasons someone might travel back in time trying to kill her kid. The first was her instinct as a mother, which was: he was a fucking asshole. Who killed a kid? Fucking assholes, that was who.
Now, it was also possible that her sweet little boy grew up to be some kind of space Hitler. She didn’t think she’d raise that kind of a kid, but she didn’t suppose there was any parent who set out to raise a Hitler.
Still didn’t sit right with her. She didn’t much like the idea of killing baby Hitler, either.
Ok but have I never told you my FAVORITE rare book bible swearing in story???
This was told to me by the chief of rare books at LoC.
So, when Obama was sworn in he asked to be sworn in on Abraham Lincoln’s bible. This upset various Republicans bc they thought he was getting special treatment or something. So when John Boehner was going to be sworn in as Speaker of the House, he too wanted to be sworn in on a special bible.
So, an aide from Boehner’s office calls up special collections at LoC and says Boehner wants to be sworn in on the first bible printed in America. The librarian says, “Are you sure you want that bible?” and the aide gets kind of snippy and says, “We know what we want–we want the first bible printed in America,” and kind of goes off on a tear about preferential treatment, et c. et c. The librarian says fine and makes the arrangements.
So the day comes when the bible is to be taken out of special collections and the aide shows up to retrieve it. The librarian brings out the book and shows it to the aide, who throws up her hands and says “What the hell is this!!” The librarian says, “This is the first bible printed in America.” The aide says, “No it’s not. This can’t be the bible. I can’t read it.”
To the end of my days, I will think of this unknown Republican aide who is under the impression that all bibles are in a language that she can personally read.
Incidentally, the Eliot bible predates the first English-language bible printed in America by more than 100 years.
i was expecting this to be EXTREMELY expensive but actually it’s FREE? can’t wait for the android version, but it does work really well on my ipad (when i remember to turn the sound up). a thing that differentiates SMOOTH MEDICINE BOTTLE A from SMOOTH MEDICINE BOTTLE B, etc!!!
Kimchi and Justice 