Two faces.

It's said that Henry VIII, king of England and all that, fell in love with his fourth wife, Anne of Cleves, before he'd even met her. He had gazed upon her portrait by Hans Holbein the Younger and got all worked up. I recall hearing that Hank the Ocho was so thrilled when Anne's ship arrived that he rode his horse right up the gangway in excitement. 

She looks nice.

It fell apart quickly. Will Cuppy, in The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody, puts it this way: 

"Anne of Cleves had been much admired in the Low Countries, but in England she just wouldn't do. The way she got herself up, they thought she was playing charades. Anne of Cleves couldn't play or sing like Anne Boleyn. She could only spin, and nobody asked her to spin. Henry had seen her portrait by Holbein. She was a picture bride. Cromwell, who had helped arrange the wedding, was beheaded nineteen days after the divorce."

Cuppy says in the footnote, "Henry should have beheaded Holbein instead." 

I don't want to be picking on Anne of Cleves, whose looks may not have been all that Holbein made her out to be, but whose brother was a leader of Protestants in Western Germany. Henry was eager to make an alliance with them. However, with her lack of English skills and yes, her looks not being what that fat bastard was hoping for, Henry said screw the alliance and it was soon off to wife #5, and Cromwell's head in a basket for good measure. 

But that's not why I bring up any of this. Paul Begala is credited with the notion that politics is show business for ugly people, and that's why I thought of poor Anne of Cleves. In show business, most people who aren't character actors are expected to be good-looking, but in politics, you can be ugly. In fact, some of them abuse the privilege. However, I've noticed that more politicians are trying to gussy themselves up for the campaign season than in years past. 

The literature that stuffs the mailbox and the online ads show much more appealing people than the ones we see out pressing the flesh. The problem is, because these are local guys and gals working retail politics, we know what they look like. A touched-up photo from 1999 isn't fooling anyone.

Of course, their opponents will gladly use more realistic visuals of these politicians, rendered in horror-movie black-and-white, with narration by murder-show enthusiasts. Sometimes you can't even tell it's the same person.

This goes for everyone in the stupid game of politics, so I'm not singling any party out. And because politics is stupid, maybe these gimmicks work, although it would have to be on the most easily swayed independent ninnies. I loathe our state's senators, and it has nothing to do with their looks; one is passable and the other looks like a gnarled catcher's mitt with glasses perched atop an enormous baked ham. They're both liars, socialism-for-thee-but-not-for-me creeps who would run over the bodies to get on camera even if the blood from the train wreck was still flowing. I wouldn't trust either of them to manage nap time at a preschool. Half the children would die and the rest found wandering across town five days later.

My point today, though, is that if you went by campaign literature, our political class would be a collection of fine-looking youth, happy warriors, and genial sages; to go by their opponents' literature, you would move away from them on the subway platform. We have to stop paying so much attention to looks, or the political class will keep treating us like morons. 

♔📖♔📖♔📖

COMPLETELY UNRELATED NOTE: We all know the mnemonic to recite the ends of Henry VIII's wives: 

Divorced, Beheaded, Died

Divorced, Beheaded, Survived

Well, one of my all-time favorite book titles came from that, a youth novel by Barbara Williams published in 1987. If anyone out there has read it, I'd like your review; I never got a copy. The plot:

During a summer tour of England, two troubled teenagers--Lowell, upset by the remarriage of his mother, and Jane, a diabetic struggling to cope with her illness--come to terms with themselves and each other.

The title: Beheaded, Survived. 

I've had days like that. 

Get them swans!

The swans are back at the lake! Can swan-upping season be far behind? 

Swan-upping is not a sport -- perhaps it's better described as an activity or a job -- that one finds here in the States, but it has been going on for centuries on the Thames. I shall let Dr. Wiki explain:

Swan upping is an annual ceremony in England in which mute swans on the River Thames are rounded up, caught, ringed, and then released.

     By prerogative right, the British Crown enjoys ownership of all unmarked mute swans in open water. Rights over swans may, however, be granted to a subject by the Crown (accordingly they may also be claimed by prescription). The ownership of swans in a given body of water was commonly granted to landowners up to the 16th century. The only bodies still to exercise such rights are two livery companies of the City of London. Thus the ownership of swans in the Thames is shared equally among the Crown, the Vintners' Company and the Dyers' Company.

By "ringed," they mean an identifying ring is placed on each swan's leg. In the old days a mark would be carved on each swan's beak, some of them annoying complex -- annoying to the swanherds and, presumably, the swans. The Queen made headlines in July 2009 when she attended the ceremony, the first English monarch to do so in hundreds of years. Of course, it was cancelled last year due to Chinese Death Virus. 

Now, you may be wondering, what do they want with all those swans? Lunch? But no -- while in medieval times one might find a roast swan at a feast, today it's mainly done to check the health of the birds. Like all cool things in England, it has gone squishy. And yet it's still no easy task. Swans are large, larger up close that people might think, and usually ill-tempered and not inclined to be upped. 

The term "upping" seems curious; here is what the Royal Family itself has to say: 

A flotilla of traditional Thames rowing skiffs, manned by Swan Uppers in scarlet rowing shirts and headed by The Queen’s Swan Marker, wearing a hat with a white swan’s feather, row their way steadily up the Thames. ‘All up!’ they cry as a family of swans and cygnets is spotted, and the Swan Uppers carefully position their boats around the swans, lift them from the water and check their health.  The Swan Marker’s iconic five-day journey upriver has been an annual ceremony for hundreds of years, and today it has two clear goals; conservation and education.

Meh -- sounds like a waste of time to me, if you're not going to bother to eat some of them.

If upping you will go, you'll need a good swan hook. These traditionally looked like shepherd's crooks, because you want to get a good grab on the swan but not actually be that close to the damn thing when you do it. You can buy a modern swan hook for a mere $170 at Rescue Technology, and hook all the swans you can reach.

I first got wind of swan-upping via the inimitable Will Cuppy, whose article on the topic -- "Swan Upping, Indeed!" -- had run in The New Yorker in 1935, and was included in his book How to Attract the Wombat. Here's the start of his essay:

I was a fool to give Swan-upping a second thought. I won't say I should have ignored it. You can't ignore a thing that is called Swan-upping. The moment I heard it, I should simply have said, "Swan-upping, eh?" or "Fancy that!" and gone about my business, instead of spending an afternoon in the Public Library reading about Swans.

     Swan-upping sounds like a custom that should have been quietly dropped around the time of, say, Ethelred the Unready. But it has not been dropped -- that's the whole point. Indeed, it flourishes, quite as it did on July 16th, 1308, when Edward II issued a commission of oyer and terminer about some Swans belonging to John de Fitzgerald, who kept his birds on the Waveny, at Mendham, Suffolk.

Maybe I too was a fool to give swan-upping any notice, but he's right; once you've seen it, it makes you think. Sorry about that.

Fred's Book Club: Hermit.

I thought we might try a new feature here on the ol' blogeroo, the Wednesday Fred's Book Club. Just a brief run-down of books I have read, whether I liked them or not. It does not require audience participation; there is no obligation to read a book, even if I go gaga over it like an idiot tween over an Auto-Tuned pop star. However, if you'd like more information, or want to weigh in on my selection, please pile on in comments.

Since I want to do this on Wednesdays, I'm calling this the Humpback Writers feature -- this does not indicate that any of our writers in fact have or had humps on their backs, nor are or were they ungulates in the Camelus family. Just that it's Hump Day, and here's a book, and a writer wrote it.

Our first selection is one that I have found very useful over the years:

Will Cuppy, book reviewer and humorist best remembered now for The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody, published the helpful guide How to Be a Hermit in 1929. It was inspired by his time of living alone in a shack out on Jones's Island, which is what Jones Beach was before it became Jones Beach State Park under Robert Moses. He survived in solitude with his typewriter and his rowboat, with the help of his razor-sharp mind, his manly fortitude, and the Zach's Inlet Coast Guard Station, without whom he could not change the ribbon on his typewriter.

I love this book, and not just because of the strong urge I have sometimes to find a hole somewhere and pull it in after me. Cuppy's wit suffuses the whole thing, of course, and he has very helpful tips for the hermits among us (or should I say not among us). For example, here is Cuppy on...

Cleaning:

My windows are something else again. Whoever built my house was an ardent advocate of those windows with twelve little panes of glass in each, and how he managed to get six windows into one small shack beats me. That makes seventy-two panes, all rattling at once. "They must be awfully hard to keep clean," a lady once observed, and I often wonder if she wasn't kidding me. It was the first time that aspect of the subject had occurred to your humble hermit. They must be, indeed. I must leave my readers to decide for themselves how I solve this part of my housecleaning problem.

Organization:

It may prove helpful, and the moral harm practically nil, to spend a part of each Sunday in searching for household necessities that have been lost in the shuffle. That's the one little weakness of the Cuppy Plan, you never know where the can-opener is. Short of attaching it to one's person with a piece of stout cord and dragging the rest of the essentials about on a leash, there is no way of getting around that sort of thing—you just have to put up with it. Why not make capital of this small fault? You need never subscribe to a memory strengthening course if you try to remember that the nail that pries open the pantry door is probably under the newspapers in the corner behind the stove, that the salt water soap doubtless got mixed up in the winter woolens and extra bedding on the tool chest (where it's as good as in a safe-deposit vault), that the review of J. S. Fletcher's latest must have blown out the window and that the Coast Guards borrowed the camphorated oil summer before last that time Comanche had the lumbago. I couldn't swear to where much of anything is in my house, but it's not as if I had spectacles to lose. I haven't the faintest where my dustrag is, and I care less. I haven't seen it in the last six months, and good riddance.

Survival:

Clothes, of course, one can't get away from. The weather being what it is, and it is certainly all of that, we of Great South Bay require a lot of good durable clothes; though, truth to tell, the changing fashions do not disturb us at all. Why should we be slaves to some dim arbiter in Paris, who couldn't tell a stiff gale from a cyclone? What do they know in Paris of the needs of High Hill Beach, Goose Crick and Crow Island? The hermit will do well to leave to the very last his pink pajamas, silk socks and suchlike, including first in his budget the best obtainable grade of hip boots, oilskins, flannel shirts and woolen breeches—that's where the money goes. And if the Rue de la Paix objects, he can tell the rue to lump it.

He also gives some helpful recipes for the nascent bachelor slob, such as for Poor Man's Duff and a marvelously complex sardine sandwich.

The book is available for free on Australia's Project Guternberg site, but of course you'll want your own physical copy to treasure and mark up and take with you where WiFi has no sway. Fortunately it is still in print and can be purchased online.

Sadly, Will Cuppy was forced off his island in the end as the state park was being constructed, and became a hermit instead on Manhattan, but it just wasn't the same. Happiness eluded him, and he died in 1949.

O Cuppy! O Humanity!

Pancake Day!

It's Shrove Tuesday, Mardi Gras, Carnival, Pancake Day! Woo! Break out the pancakes, boys, let's get eatin'!

Of course we know Lent begins tomorrow in the Roman Catholic Church, and the day before is often celebrated with a feast to get rid of all those fabulous foods we're denying ourselves until Easter. Thus Mardi Gras (Fat Tuesday) and Carnival ("Italian carnevale, alteration of earlier carnelevare, literally, removal of meat, from carne flesh (from Latin carn-, caro) + levare to remove, from Latin, to raise" per Merriam-Webster's). But what about the shroves?

Webster's has an fascinating explanation of the word shrove, related to confession of sins and freeing from guilt:

We wouldn't want to give the history of shrive short shrift, so here's the whole story. It began when the Latin verb scribere (meaning "to write") found its way onto the tongues of certain Germanic peoples who brought it to Britain in the early Middle Ages. Because it was often used for laying down directions or rules in writing, 8th-century Old English speakers used their form of the term, scrīfan, to mean "to prescribe or impose." The Church adopted scrīfan to refer to the act of assigning penance to sinners and, later, to hearing confession and administering absolution. Today shrift, the noun form of shrive, makes up half of short shrift, a phrase meaning "little or no consideration." Originally, short shrift was the barely adequate time for confession before an execution.

So Shrove Tuesday meant a day of confessing of sins. Which is curious, because when a Catholic refers to doing his "Easter duty," they usually mean going to Confession and receiving Communion during Lent, not before Lent begins. However, "Easter duty" is not a term of law in the church, and it's all somewhat complicated. The Church advises three things for a good Lent -- alms-giving, prayer, and fasting -- and while going for Reconciliation is not among those three, it is highly encouraged, especially for those who have not been in the booth in a while, and absolutely for those who bear mortal sins (in fact, they should never wait for Lent if they can help it).

What about Pancake Day?

Pancake Day brings me back to Will Cuppy, the late humorist and book reviewer, author of The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody and other tomes with irresistible titles like How to Tell Your Friends from the Apes and How to Become Extinct. Cuppy died before Decline and Fall became a national best-seller, and his publisher, being the greedy sort that they are, threw together a book based on Cuppy's short pieces and notes called How to Get from January to December. It took me years to track down a copy of this in the pre-Amazon days. The editor arranged the pieces in calendar format, so the reader could get a dose of Cuppy humor each day. Here, on the entry for February 3, I first encountered a mention of the holiday Pancake Day, and the even more obscure Collop Monday, as follows:

This is as good a time as any to start thinking about Collop Monday, so called from the old English custom of eating collops, or pieces of salted meat and eggs, as a sort of preparation for Shrove Tuesday, or Pancake Day, when everybody would switch to pancakes. After eating all the collops they could get, the boys of the village would go around singing the following song:

Shrovetide is near at hand 

And I be come a shroving;

Pray, dame, something--

An apple or a dumpling.

Most of these boys grew up and became the ancestors of thousands of people alive today, and yet you wonder why things are the way they are. 

Which leaves me to ask: If on Collop Monday and Pancake Day they ate up all the meat and eggs and fats, what did they eat during Lent in those days? So many filling edibles are made with these things. Now we're only asked to abstain from meat on Lenten Fridays and to fast on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday. Sounds like our ancestors were starving but for odd bits of fish and whatever nuts they could get wangle.

Talk about penance. No wonder they sang such lousy songs.

Just one more.

Of course, this is a tribute to the great Jimmy Durante:

As I mentioned yesterday, though, when you write a punch line you like it's hard to let it go, especially if you don't have an editor or director making you let it go. This elephant thing turned into one of those contests where you have a drawing and have to come up with the gag, and I was all the contestants.

I think sometimes editors who run those contests know what gag they want, and they just wait until someone submits it. Like, you might see:

And he's just waiting for something like:

"Dan's on the juice."

Unless of course something funnier actually does come in.

Well, the four elephant jokes were the only ones I had that I liked, so it will be on to something else tomorrow. It will have nothing to do with elephants. But I will leave you with some of the best thoughts on the military application of elephants ever written. I refer of course to the Hannibal chapter from Will Cuppy's The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody:

Hamilcar also told Hannibal about elephants and how you must always have plenty of these animals to scare the enemy. He attributed much of his own success to elephants and believed they would have won the First Punic War for him if things hadn't gone slightly haywire; for the war had turned into a naval affair. But even when the fighting was on land, the Romans did not scare nearly so well as expected. The Romans had learned about elephants while fighting Pyrrhus, whose elephants defeated him in 275 B.C., and even before that, in Alexander's time, King Porus had been undone by his own elephants. Thus, if history had taught any one thing up to that time, it was never to use elephants in war.

Then Hamilcar … was drowned in 228 B.C. while crossing a stream with a herd of elephants.

Taking elephants across the Alps is not as much fun as it sounds. The Alps are difficult enough when alone, and elephants are peculiarly fitted for not crossing them.

Whenever a thousand or so of his men would fall off an Alp, he [Hannibal] would tell the rest to cheer up, the elephants were all right. If someone had given him a shove at the right moment, much painful history might have been avoided.

Most of the original group [of elephants] succumbed to the climate, and he [Hannibal] was always begging Carthage for more, but the people at home were stingy. They would ask if he thought they were made of elephants and what he had done with the elephants they sent before. Sometimes, when he hadn't an elephant to his name, he would manage to wangle a few from somewhere, a feat which strikes me as his greatest claim to our attention.

And he [Hannibal] probably believed, up to the very end, that everything might still come out right if he only had a few you-know-whats.