i just saw an ad about how the founding fathers wouldn’t foster safe spaces or trigger warnings and all i can think about is when john adams made it illegal to make fun of him
Technically they didn’t make it illegal to mock John Adams specifically, but they outlawed criticism of the federal government and the president, which at the time was our boy Johnny Adams.
A few years prior there was a big hullabaloo in congress over the proper title for the chief executive. As veep, Adams thought that Washington should be referred to as “His Highness the President of the United States of America and Protector of the Rights of the Same,” because I guess otherwise all the fancy European kings wouldn’t take him seriously.
Many saner people thought this was stupid, with Thomas Jefferson calling it “the most superlatively ridiculous thing I ever heard of.” In response, many members of congress took to calling Adams “His Rotundity.”
One congressman from Virginia, John Page, also took the time to write a poem:
I think we should make Puritan naming customs cool again, but like, updated to reflect Millenial values. So we can have names like Resistance Jones, Self-Care Williams, and I-Am-Not-Throwing-Away-My-Shot Anderson.
I am 100% convinced that “exit, pursued by a bear” is a reference to some popular 1590s meme that we’ll never be able to understand because that one play is the only surviving example of it.
Seriously, we’ll never figure it out. I’ll wager trying to understand “exit, pursued by a bear” with the text of The Winter’s Tale as our primary source is like trying to understand loss.jpg when all you have access to is a single overcompressed JPEG of a third-generation memetic mutation that mashes it up with YMCA and “gun” – there’s this whole twitching Frankensteinian mass of cultural context we just don’t have any way of getting at.
no, but this is why people do the boring archival work! because we think we do know why “exit, pursued by a bear” exists, now, and we figured it out by looking at ships manifests of the era –
it’s also why there was a revival of the unattributed and at the time probably rather out of fashion mucedorus at the globe in 1610 (the same year as the winter’s tale), and why ben jonson wrote a chariot pulled by bears into his court masque oberon, performed on new year’s day of 1611.
we think the answer is polar bears.
no, seriously! in late 1609 the explorer jonas poole captured two polar bear cubs in greenland and brought them home to england, where they were purchased by the beargarden, the go-to place in elizabethan london for bear-baiting and other ‘animal sports.’ it was at the time run by edward alleyn (yes, the actor) and his father-in-law philip henslowe (him of the admiral’s men and that diary we are all so very grateful for), and would have been very close, if not next to, the globe theatre.
of course, polar bear cubs are too little and adorable for baiting, even to the bloodthirsty tudor audience, aren’t they? so, what to do with the little bundles of fur until they’re too big to be harmless? well, if there’s anything we know about the playwrights and theatre professionals of the time, it’s that they knew how to make money and draw in audiences. and the spectacle of a too-small-to-be-dangerous-yet-but-still-real-live-and-totally-WHITE-bear? what good entertainment businessman is going to turn down that opportunity?
and, voila, we have a death-by-bear for the unfortunate antigonus, thereby freeing up paulina to be coupled off with camillo in the final scene, just as the comedic conventions of the time would expect.
you’re telling me it was an ACTUAL BEAR
every time I think to myself “history can’t possibly get any more bananas” I realize or am made to realize that I am badly mistaken
True story – There are historical accounts (well, there’s at least one historical account) in which English people whine about how the Norse men bathe so often they’re able to seduce the local women away from their husbands.
Cracked is absolutely going off on high quality articles these days.
honey is the only food product that never spoils. there are pots of honey that are over five thousand years old and still completely edible
i also want to point out we know it tastes the same even after thousands of years b/c archaeologists who discovered two thousand year old honey tasted it. presumably right after they looked at each other and went “what the hell here goes nothing”
I’m pretty sure they also identify human remains by taste. Archaeologists are straight up freaks.
No, no no… you identify bone from rock or other substances by touching it to your tongue. If it sticks, it’s bone. The taste itself has nothing to do with it. And most archaeologists won’t lick human bones if they know they’re human.
…and I realize that doesn’t actually do much to prove archaeologists aren’t freaks.
mai nam is jane and wen i dig i fynde some roks both smol and big i put my tung upon the stone for science yes i lik the bone
Look my archaeology professor regularly had classes at the local bar and told us about his friend’s plan to create the Foundation for Unified Cultural Knowledge (when you see it…) archaeologists aren’t freaks, they’re damn entertaining freaks.
The average age in Boston in the early 1770s was 14. More than half the population of Boston was under 21 in the events leading up to the American Revolution.
It really puts everything into a completely different context, doesn’t it?
oh, and they complain about millennials shutting down a few colleges and highways
get some perspective!
EAT MY SHORTS I’m crying
Honestly this explains like… All of medieval Europe too. Everybody acted like a jerk with no impulse control because they were all TEENAGERS, and in fact DID NOT HAVE impulse control because what frontal lobes?
Kimchi and Justice 