As reported by the United Kingdom's The Daily Telegraph, during home renovations in a building in Urborough, England, the homeowner discovered the mummified remains of a cat in the walls. (See? Newspapers still have uses.) It is believed by the locals that the cat was placed in the walls sometime in the 17th Century as a ward against witches. Says the homeowner (a funeral director, by the way), "It clearly works as, since we have lived in the village, we have not seen sight or sound of any witches." I'm pretty sure that I could use the same logic to prove that the cat is an effective ward against bigfoot, honest politicians, and God.

I can understand why the ignorant peasants of the Middle Ages would believe in witches ("life sucks, but it's that witch's fault, not mine!"), but I'm not exactly clear on why dead cats would make an effective witch deterrent. Medieval witches had the power to transform themselves into animal form, fly on broomsticks, and prevent milk from being churned into butter. (What, no butter? Diabolical!) So why should a dead cat be a problem?

Other witch preventatives included iron, salt, candles, urine, and lockable broom-closets, all of which make some sense. In fact, I think urine makes a pretty fine deterrent for just about anything other than the rare and dreaded Piss Vampire. But why should a dead cat be any more effective than a dead dog. Or even a live cat, other than the fact that it's really hard to get that live cat to stay in the wall for 400 years.

Maybe we'll never know. So long as that dead cat stays in the wall in Urborough, I guess no witches will be showing up to tell anyone.

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If I were the sort of person to get offended by things, "Presidents' Day" would offend me. No, wait, listen. Sure, I get bent out of shape about everything, but I don't get "offended." You'll note that to be offended, one must have feelings. I don't have feelings, per se, I just hate everything. Now where was I? Right, Presidents' Day.

Calling this mid-February federal holiday "Presidents' Day" is a convenient way to lump together two of the by-almost-all-measures greatest Presidents in American history. (Taft was the greatest tub of lard, but see, we don't really celebrate that in America, we just live it.) Officially, the holiday is federally recognized as "Washington's Birthday," but it's kind of hard for the celeb-obsessed press to call it that when it falls on such a sexy date as Lincoln's 200th birthday. While both Washington ("Father of Our Country" and definer of the role of the President in the American Experiment) and Lincoln ("Great Emancipator" and the Commander-in-Chief who preserved the Union) are deserving of their own holidays, in most years in most of the country they usually get stuck together in honorary observation as this "Presidents' Day" mess. Unfortunately, that opens the door for losers such as James Buchanan and Warren Harding to join the party. If I were Washington or Lincoln, that'd piss me off. (Of course, that probably wouldn't piss either of them off, which is one of the many, many differences between those two Great Men and a lowly blogger who grits his teeth a lot.)

If it's got to be a Multiple Presidents' Day, couldn't we at least be a little more specific about who exactly we're celebrating? I propose we call it the "Official WaLi-Day of America." This will ensure that Gerald Ford and Calvin Coolidge can't flash their weak credentials to push their way into the spotlight while simultaneously giving the holiday one of those great modern slogans that will endear it to a public accustomed to such ridiculous drivel as "Clean Coal" or "Yes We Can." While I personally like the sound of "Washington and Lincoln Day," it's a little too old-school wordy to sell mylar balloons, greeting cards, and specially colored M&Ms, and that's really the whole point of modern holidays, isn't it?

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The same day I discovered how much spam I was receiving (see previous post for details), I watched the 1973 Michael Crichton-written film Westworld in which the attractions in a lavish theme park inexplicably become murderous. (Really, it's exactly the same movie as the 1993 Michael Crichton-written film Jurassic Park but with less explanation for why the attractions are killing people.) Perhaps it's because I had already been looking at numbers that afternoon, but I became captivated by the economics of Westworld.

The park guests attending the theme park Delos (of which Westworld is just one part, like Frontierland or Adventureland at Walt Disney World Resort) each pay $1,000 per day for a week-long visit to the theme park of their imagination. So for a mere $7,000, these guests spend a week surrounded mostly by robots who simulate the lifestyles, behaviors, and mores of inhabitants of the mythical American West. While that may seem expensive for simple park admission, think about it this way: for $7,000 they get to abuse, kill, or sexually molest machines, who for all practical purposes, are human beings. Says one fellow in a promotional video at the beginning of the movie, "I shot six people!" When you look at it that way, the price of admission becomes a bargain when you consider that the costs of the same actions outside of theme parks is likely life in prison or worse.

It's worth noting here that the Grecian island of Delos was once sacred to the ancient Athenian civilization. Besides being the birthplace of Apollo and Artemis -- god and goddess of arts and the hunt, respectively -- Delos was also famed as a location upon which people were forbidden to be born or die. Quite fitting for a theme park populated by robots. And a way better name than Six Flags.

But more to the point, there are approximately 20 guests seen delivered to Delos by hovercraft for their weekly stay. (Apparently, even in 1973, monorails were artifacts. And to be fair, an actual count appears to be 18 people, but I'm rounding up, figuring in Delos' favor that this was an off-week as they appear to have a slightly greater capacity than they are using.) That means that the gross weekly income at Delos was $140,000, or over $7 million per year generated by 1040 guests, assuming there is no "off" season.

Delos is a very large enterprise, consisting of three "worlds," each populated by dozens of unique and technologically-advanced robots, period-accurate buildings and an underground central command and control complex coordinating the entire site's operations. Weekly expenditures for power and maintenance of such amazing facilities and mechanical marvels would have to be staggering, well exceeding $140,000! (Walt Disney World doesn't release operating costs, but they recently bragged that an energy overhaul saved them 100 million kilowatt hours of electricity per year. At the average Florida commercial price of 10 cents per kwh, that's a monthly savings of well over $800,000!)

To compare, Walt Disney World, opened in 1971, is a huge operation maintained not by expensive robots but by teenagers dressed as "cast members." Well more than 10 millions visitors pass through the Walt Disney World gates every year, 10,000 times greater attendance than Delos achieves! A well-to-do modern day visitor to Walt Disney World could pay well over $5,000 for park admission, room, and food for a week, all of which are included in the admission price to Delos. Transform that $5,000 in modern cash to 1973 dollars, and you find that it's roughly equivalent to... $1,000. Just think about how much red ink there must be on Delos' books!

While having your rides assassinate all of your guests and staff is certainly bad for business, it's probably a better option than actually letting your guests shoot holes in your rides. I'm certainly no business major, but I'm pretty sure that Business 101 includes the maxim that if you construct one-of-a-kind replicas of famed Western actor Yul Brenner, don't let your customers destroy them for a mere $1,000 a day. After all, also in 1973, the United States Government spent six million dollars upgrading just one man! And that was only 2 legs and an arm!

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Info-tainment: the following is a lesson in how I learn things.

As I am prone to doing when I get depressed or bored (which I equate to pretty much the same thing), I was looking at pictures of the dilapidated and mostly abandoned urban settings. In this particular case, I was investigating the United States Pavillion at Canada's Expo 67. (World's Fairs are great examples of amazing structures designed for temporary use and then abandoned.) The US pavilion -- a giant geodesic dome designed by Buckminster Fuller and containing the "world's longest escalator" simultaneously promoted American progress in the two most important endeavors in world history, the space race and the movie industry -- was gutted by a fire in 1976. It turns out that by the end of the 70s, the entire remainder of the Expo was in such terrible condition, that it was used as the backdrop for an episode of a Battlestar Galactica set on a post-apocalyptic world ("Greetings from Earth").

Searching the internet for scenes of the Galactica episode in question, I found a flickr page that had jumbled a bunch of vintage Expo 64 and Expo 67 pictures. There I saw a Tyrannosaurus Rex statue that had been displayed at the Sinclair Dinoland exhibit. (Amusing, I think, that an oil company would have an exhibit consisting of life-sized audio-animatronic dinosaurs. That's like a glue factory showcasing an exhibit of horses, isn't it?) Following the history of that T-Rex, I discovered, and here I quote the website of Dinosaur World, a dinosaur attraction with parks in Florida, Kentucky, and Texas:

Of the many movies in which T. rex (the all-time movie star among dinosaurs) has appeared, old T has been brought down only by Superman in The Arctic Giant (1942) and by a Spinosaurus in Jurassic Park III (2001).

So in the end, what have we learned? That's right: the only person to beat a Tyrannosaurus Rex on film was Superman! (Funny, I thought, that I should start with the movie-centric contents of the US Pavillion from Expo 67 and end with movie trivia. But that's how life works, isn't it? I mean, when it's not giving you bone cancer and killing you in house fires, that is. And, let's face it, America is pretty obsessed with Hollywood culture.)

Moving fluidly from point to point through the sea of information that is the internet. That's why we call it "web surfing," James. And that's how you win on Jeopardy!.

P.S. That T. Rex statue in question now resides at Dinosaur Valley State Park in Glen Rose, TX, alongside the Sinclair Dinoland Brontosaurus. And yes, they do know that there was no such thing as a Brontosaurus, but they don't care. That's just how how Dinosaur Valley rolls.

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I think there's something to the Art Deco style that goes a little deeper than is generally credited. Years after the movement unofficially ended, it is still the subject of much emotional appeal, if it's continuing appearances in all forms of popular media are any indication. Perhaps it's because the movement is so strongly linked to the period between the World Wars of the 20th century, that period of simultaneous excess and poverty coupled with industry and futurism evocotive of the emergence of the United States as THE world power. Maybe it's because Deco was more decorative (for art's sake!) than the rival, utilitarian International Style without being as pretentious as the preceeding Nouveau. Or then again, maybe it's the fact that Deco was the springboard for the endearing Googie, providing it a position as a favored ancestor. I like to think that it's just because it looks so good.

Where did this train of thought come from, you ask? I've spent a lot of time this week looking at architecture from the American World's Fairs of the 20th century. There have been some spectacular buildings constructed for the purpose of temporary entertainment. New York has no doubt had the best of it, as the style and enduring memory of 1939's Trylon and Perisphere or 1964's Unisphere tower over other Fair relics such as Knoxville's Sunsphere, San Antonio's Tower of the Americas, and Seattle's Space Needle. (Towers and spheres were clearly pretty common themes for 20th-century modernist architects.)

I have long cherished the 1939 Fair as the cradle of superheroes. (1940 World's Fair Comics was the first to feature both Batman and Superman together -- on the cover. They were in separate stories inside.) But the 1964 Fair has a lot going for it, too. The aforementioned Unisphere is a masterpiece of sculpture. And the Uniroyal Tire Ferris Wheel was so spectacular that Detroit can't bear to let it go. (The giant vulcanized tire puts me in mind of Birmingham's cherished giant Vulcan, similarly made for a World's Fair -- St. Louis 1904 -- but now residing in a comfortable, customized park.) This all, of course, leads to one of my enduring interests: decaying urbanscapes. Have you seen the remains of 1964's New York State Pavilion? Fantastic!

To quote the NY Pavilion architect, Philip Johnson, "There ought to be a university course in the pleasure of ruins."

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UNPAID ENDORSEMENT: I'm currently reading Assassination Vacation by Sarah Vowell. (I bought it for my mother for Christmas because I wanted to read it, and she just finished it and gave it to me to read. Mission accomplished!) It's chock full of interesting information about the assassinations of Presidents Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley. Hooray, book!

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Yesterday the state of Virginia publicly apologized for its role in slavery. As is the trend these days, it blamed its mistake on the horrible disease of alcoholism and promised to seek help immediately.

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So this is Christmas? I must say that this Christmas was probably more enjoyable than recent years past. No one argued. No one threw punches or food. No one stormed out and drove home. (Though my father is sleeping in his car tonight. But it's just out of appreciation for tradition.)

The lack of friction around the table this year made me realize that I often hear people talk about their dysfunctional families' holidays, but I never hear anyone talk about their functional families' holidays. I think it's about time that the June Cleavers and Donna Reeds of the world speak up. Is Nixon's "silent majority" too busy enjoying the holiday season with their sweater vests and sober relatives to tell the rest of us that we're screwed up? Or are they just smart enough to lay low, lest they find themselves co-starring on a very special holiday edition of Cops with my father?

I even enjoyed a better than average gifting this year. The only thing I asked for was socks, but in addition to the socks, I also received 12 pairs of underwear and a fog machine. Wowee! I'd say it was "like Christmas," except for the fact that it actually was Christmas. In this case, my extensive mental inventory of useful sarcastic cliches has let me down, leaving me grasping for words with which to describe the event. (Sarcasm just can't be used to describe satisfaction.)

The 12 pairs of underwear made me wonder about why we call them "pairs" of underwear. A quick internet search reveals that back in the day, only nobility wore anything over the coverings of their genitals, so there was technically no such thing as "underwear" until the last few centuries. (Unless, of course, you were hanging out in a royal court wearing a codpiece or tunic.) Modern legged outerwear evolved from two, unattached leggings (a pair of hose, to be precise) to become the single garment that we now call "a pair of pants." As I understand it, the word "pants" evolved from the word "pantaloons," a type of legged, female underskirt garment designed to cover their highly coveted naughty bits. This would make "pairs of underwear" a vestigial etymological remnant of a bygone wardrobe in our lexicon.

Note that since "pants" originated as a type of underwear, modern outerwear "pants" should properly be referred to as "trousers" since "pants" is specifically derivative of a type of undergarment and "trousers" are outerwear for the legs. This appears to be yet another difference in American and British English languages. They get it right, whereas we American's don't care what you call it so long as you can't see our legs.

It turns out that "men's cotton briefs," such as I received for Christmas, weren't even invented until the 1930s in Chicago, Illinois. Named for the 20th century male undergarment called a "jockstrap," they were designed and sold by a company which would later adopt their brand name as the company name: Jockey.

Now, all this thinking of underwear has reminded me of an editorial that I once wrote to the University of Georgia's student newspaper, The Red and Black. I took the opportunity to satirize the University community's overreaction to one editorial cartoon by criticizing another by my classmate Mack Williams (now an accomplished animator for Cartoon Network's Adult Swim program Frisky Dingo). What does this have to do with underwear, you ask? Simple: "culottes," a French underwear that appears to be a cross between a skirt and shorts. I quote from one of the many, many responses to my letter:

First we had someone decrying Williams' Feb. 26 cartoon as an insult to the soldiers who fought at Iwo Jima, when it should have been plainly obvious such an insult was not the cartoonist's intent. Now we've got someone with his culottes in a bunch over Williams' portrayal of poodles in a subsequent cartoon ("Poodles not often angry or mean dogs," Feb. 28). Poodles! Come down off the ledge, Stephens, and understand that the poodle in that cartoon was a symbol for something else -- the cartoon was not about poodles any more than it was about bulldogs or people with facial hair.

The full text can be read from the archives of The Red and Black online. The event played out in the editorial pages' "Mailbox" from February 28 through March 3, 2003. The highlight of the affair for me was this dialogue exchanged in the online feedback section:

I am stunned at how many people have been writing in about the initial poodle letter. I know Americans are supposed to be irony-free, but this is ridiculous. The letter was satirizing the Iwo Jima complaints. Come on, people, show that you deserve to be at college.

Which received the following response:

He wasn't satirizing anything, it was written by a mixed up old secretary who has his priorities all mixed up. Not everyone is as clever as you think they are.

Now THAT is satisfying journalism.

Hmm. I seem to be rambling. It must be the effects of too much cranberry sauce, Hershey's Christmas Kisses, sweet tea, pound cake, Coca-Cola, and Klondike Bars. I suppose the point of all of this rambling is that I associate 17th century women's underwear with poodles. (But I don't endorse putting poodles into women's underwear. That's just weird.)

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Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis first performed as a comedy duo on this date in 1946. On the same day the year previous, in 1945, President Truman gave the order to use the atom bomb against Japan. I'm not saying that they are related, I just think that they make an interesting juxtaposition.

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There's a brief bit of dialogue in the movie Clerks that goes something like this:

Dante: You hate people!
Randal: But I love gatherings. Isn't it ironic?

I feel that way about the Independence Day holiday. It's my favorite holiday of the year but I hate parades and fireworks. What I love is watching people gather to watch parades and fireworks. (Of course, I hate to actually be in the gathering crowds. I prefer strictly hands-off voyeurism, exactly the sort of thing for which cars, tall buildings, and television sets were made.) I'm reminded of the stories of the crowds of sightseers that gathered to watch the first battle of Manassas. Apparently, people will gather anywhere at the prospect of witnessing goose stepping and explosions.

On a related note, I've always wondered why we celebrate Independence Day on July 4. The Continental Congress approved independence from Britain on July 2 (it was this date that John Adams expected to be the one eternally celebrated), and the document itself wasn't actually signed until a month later. What we celebrate on July 4 is merely the voted approval of the document itself. Wouldn't that be a bit like deciding to remember Pearl Harbor Day on December 8, the day that the U.S. declared war with Japan, instead of on December 7, the day of the actual attack?

But never mind me. I got my panties in a bind when we celebrated the "new millennium" on New Year's Eve in 1999. (I "celebrated" with dinner in a now-defunct Shoney's Restaurant. Alas, poor Big Boy.)

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