Christmas: Yet Another Pagan Holiday Hijacked by Christianity

On this fourth day of Advent, let me first wish you all a Merry Christmas (get over it Jews, Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists, and Disciples of the Cool and Mildly Miraculous Stevie Shumway), and second, completely destroy your pine-scented, holly-decked, carol sound-tracked world by informing you of this inconvenient truth: Jesus Christ wasn't born on December 25th --he was born sometime in the early spring (say, late February/early March).  And, if Constantine the Great's mother got this one right, the manger wasn't in a nice, well-kept barn, but a dirty, nasty little cave-like animal shelter.

I don't recall the particulars, because I had
JUST BEEN BORN, dumbasses!

For proof of this monstrous assertion, let's go right to the New Testament (King James edition-get over it Megga-Churches, 7th Day Adventists, UCCers, Mormons and  Disciples of the Cool and Mildly Miraculous Stevie Shumway):

And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night.  Luke, 2:8

Remember that the shepherds were the first bunch of people that the Angels told about Jesus' birth, and that they actually showed up before the Magi (who got there TWO YEARS LATER, weren't kings at all but rather astronomers/astrologers from somewhere in the vicinity of Babylon, and tipped-off Herod to the existence of a RIVAL KING born in Bethlehem! Wise-men, my left-one... oh yeah, Matthew, 2:1-2:12).

I'm so ashamed of myself...

So, why were the shepherds in the fields with their flocks AT NIGHT in the first place? It's because their flocks needed extra protection since it was lambing-season. Unfortunately, lots of ewes in labor attract just about every predator within 10 square miles for a tasty bite of newborn lamb.  Also, sheepdogs are useless during this time because something about the scent of a newborn lamb pushes the "wolf" button in their genetic make-up which completely overrides centuries of breeding and a lifetime of training and turns them into lamb-munchers for the night.  So if the shepherds wanted to save their new lambs, they spent the whole lambing season protecting their flocks.  Good thing, too, because if they hadn't been watching their flocks that night, the Angels' message would have been delivered to a bunch of sheep! (no, that was not a derogatory swipe at followers of organized religions :-P)  And what time of year is lambing-season, I heard you ask? Early spring, which arrives in Bethlehem around late February/early March.

OK Ex-Prof, then why don't Christians celebrate Christmas sometime around then, huh?  That's because of the socio-political realities of the first century CE.  Back then, the king's birthday (or the Emperor's birthday, if you were lucky enough to live within the Roman Empire) was a totally big deal. There were processions, games, races, burnt offerings at the temples --a real righteous bender for everyone. The leaders of the early Christian church DID NOT want ANY of this nonsense associated with Jesus' birth for two very good reasons: his birth wasn't nearly as important as his death and resurrection; and Jesus was not a mere earthly king, but a Heavenly King. To celebrate his birth with a big party would bring him down to the level of schmucks like Herod and Caesar Augustus and that crowd.

We'll have none of that tom-foolery, thank you.
And no, I'm not St. Cyprian.

 And so matters stood for a couple hundred of years, until St. Cyprian remarked in his De pasch Comp. xix, "O, how wonderfully acted Providence that on that day on which that Sun was born...Christ should be born."  What he meant by this is that by about 225 CE, those nutty Roman Christians were celebrating Christ's birth on the Winter Solstice, December 21st.  Why would they do that?  Firstly, Jesus had been identified with the sun for a long time: "the light of the World," "the Sun of Righteousness," etc., and the Winter Solstice was viewed by ancient peoples in the Northern Hemisphere as the birthday of the sun, because after the 21st, the daylight hours gradually increase. Secondly, there was already a party going on in Rome, so why not join the fun?

Excuse me, did you say party?  Yes indeed, the famous and fun-filled Saturnalia, a week of festivities that was capped on December 25th by the celebration of Sol Invictus, or "unconquered sun."  During this week, torch-lit processions filled the streets of Rome, candles were lit in all the windows after dark, domestic slaves and their master switched places for a day (I guess the commercial and industrial slaves had a day off), friends and family would visit each other and exchange little fruit-filled cookies called strenae, in homage to the Roman goddess Strenia, goddess of the new year, purification and well-being. Does any of this sound familiar?

Sol Invictus on December 25th was the climax of the week, with a huge public ritual officiated by the Emperor in his role as Pontifex Maximus, or chief priest.  After all that, Rome needed another week to clean up, sober-up and get back to work, which was concluded on January 1st when the newly elected Consuls took up their posts.

Actual rare photograph of a Roman party --not really sure
how the Asian chicks got to Rome, but oh well...

So, just like that, Jesus got his "official" birth-date: December 25th.  If you think about it, the early Church Fathers like ol' St. Cyprian and St. Maximus of Turin (the dude totally rockin' the Duck Dynasty beard above) were not only A-1 theologians, but were also a fair hand at public relations.  How better to gain acceptance by the culture at large for your little Messianic offshoot of Judaism than to adopt the Pagan's big holidays as your own --just put a mild Christian spin on it so's to not annoy the Faithful, and watch the converts roll in.  Oh sure, things did end up going south a bit after the death of Marcus Aurelius in 180, what with the ensuing persecutions, martyrs and all, but Emperor Constantine put a stop to all of that with his Edict of Milan in 313.  Which brings us to the matter of the manger in Bethlehem.

Everybody who calls themselves a Christian (ok ok, only those who are western, i.e. Catholic & Protestant Christians --get over it Greek Orthodox, Russian Orthodox, Armenian, Coptics and Disciples of the Cool and Mildly Miraculous Stevie Shumway) have a variation of this image in mind of the birth scene in Bethlehem:

Yup, that's it.

It's all there: the stable, manger, Mary, Joseph, Jesus, some shepherds, their sheep, an ox, a donkey, a wise-man, a couple of angels and the star.  As discussed supra, cancel the wise-man because that lot showed up two years later.  Cancel the angels, because according to Luke 2:15, after the Angels appeared to the shepherds, they flew back up to heaven.  But most importantly, cancel the stable, because of this little lady right here:

Hmmm, now if I were the True Cross,
where would I be?

History knows her as St. Helena, but to me, she'll always be Constantine the Great's mom.  Forget the famous son; forget the fact that she lived into her eighties in an age where the average woman's lifespan was the ripe ancient age of 28; forget even that she somehow not only managed to find the exact same cross that Jesus was crucified on a mere three hundred twenty years later (and bring it home from Jerusalem to Constantinople in her carry-on luggage).  Her biggest claim to our attention today are the two churches she founded in Palestine: the Church of the Ascension and the Church of the Nativity.

St. H got all this started after her trip to the Holy Land in 324, where she was able, with the help of the locals, to find all kinds of stuff, such as:
a. where Jesus was born
b. where Jesus was crucified
c. which bakery had the best humus

Now, some cynics out there are probably thinking, "Yeah, right: the locals saw this rich, pious old lady looking for early Christian stuff and sold her anything they could pass off as the original article."  While that may be true, let me remind you that some amazing stuff has been discovered by complete amateurs (Hiram Binghan and Machu Pichu, Heinrich Schliemann and Troy), so why not St. H?  Besides, what's really important is that through her diligent research, we are more than pretty sure that the real Nativity Scene looked more like this:

Kind of nice and sung --and really, really smelly!

That's because we know from the Gospel of Luke that Joseph and Mary were in Bethlehem for Caesar Augustus' tax-enrollment-thing (and you thought the roll-out of the Affordable Health Care website was a mess --just imagine the whole friggin' Roman Empire on the move just so that the locals could be registered for tax purposes!) and all the inns were full-up, so they had to take what was really just a cave at the edge of town that the locals were using as kind of an improvised animal shelter.  And give birth to the savior of the world. With no family or midwife attending.  Her first child.  And these weren't even the BIGGEST miracles this kid is connected to!

St. Francis and 3 parishioners

Oh, and the whole barn-thing? Thank St. Francis of Assisi for that.  Yup, the same saint that brought us the Franciscan Order; the same saint who preached his sermons to the birds and cute, furry little animals.  You see, Francis was having a hard time getting the whole idea of the incarnation across to his parish, mostly because they were ignorant farmers, so he did the one thing guaranteed to work: he put on a play!  He grabbed some animals, dressed a bunch of his monks up as shepherds, Magi, angels, Joseph, convinced a lady of the parish and her baby to play the part of Mary and Jesus, THEN shoved the whole cast into a barn, and voila!  

Not only did his congregation "get it," but his little Christmas tableau was copied all over the Catholic world until it became the unofficial official version of what happened.  Nobody, but NO-body could hold a candle to St. Francis in the persuasion department!

So, Merry Christmas!  And if you liked what you read about December 25th and the Nativity scene, then stick around for the next blog entry where I take on Christmas trees and Santa Claus!

Ya Say Ya Want a Revolution?

Today's post (the first one as Ex-Prof!) is all about revolutions and how they're usually democratic, except when they aren't.  But first, let's define our terms: a revolution in this sense is an overthrow of the existing political power structure in favor of a different power structure.  This means that I don't mean "revolution" in the same sense as "Industrial Revolution" or that giant of professional sports, the New England Revolution soccer team (sorry if I offend both of their fans). The reason I'm interested in revolutions today is because I was listening to a couple of talking-heads on NPR Radio (NPR: No People-listening-to-this Radio-show), complaining about the ongoing revolution in Egypt.  Specifically, there was much hand-wringing over the fact that the Egyptian military and 97.33% of the Egyptian people were sick of the Muslim Brotherhood D-baggers they had elected (just after they had thrown out their last dictator), so sick of them that the Egyptian people had told the army to arrest the president, the spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, and some guy named Hakim who was just hanging around Tahrir Square trying to sell t-shirts that said, "Come See the New Egypt: No More Pharaohs Around Here!"

"Don't worry, Hakim -Egypt has democracy now!"

You see, Talking Head #1 was sad that a democratically elected government had been overthrown by the army; and Talking Head #2 was angry that anybody was feeling sorry for the Muslim Brotherhood, who were a bunch Taliband-wannabees that wanted to impose strict Islamic Sharia law on an otherwise secular society, so good riddance to bad rubbish.  That got me to thinking: just what is a revolution in the first place? --are revolutions compatible with democracy? --are all revolutions, to some degree or other, democratic?  But most importantly: what designer-wear looks are today's hottest revolutionaries sporting this year?

I am so totally for whichever rebels she's with

In the beginning (shortly after Pangea broke apart), rebels and rebellions didn't usually fare too well.  They were generally ordinary farmers who were sick and tired of putting up with whatever brand of authoritarian rule was being dished-out, armed with a few tricked-out farm tools, and going up against some ancient king's armed and trained soldiers.  And the results were predictable: defeated, enslaved peoples, flayed human skins, piles of skulls --the whole horrible scene.

The first successful revolt recorded by history was in about 2380 BCE (Before Calcium Emulsified) when the Sumerians of Lagash got rid of King Lugalanda and installed King Urukagina in his place.  Turns out that the big U was quite the reformer.  However, the Lagashians were still stuck with a king at the end of the day (democracy, communism and buggerocracy hadn't been invented yet), so how much of a revolution was it?

However, it's important that the people of Lagash --and not a rival city-state --were at the heart of the regime change, thus making the first successful revolution a popular one, if not a democratic one.  Between 2380 and 508 BCE (Because Cats are Excellent!), there were a few coups and military takeovers, but not a whole lot of popular involvement until the people of Athens, Greece took up arms against tyranny --and won!

I am so effing-smart --and aristocratic.

It seems that a real tyrant, Peisistratus, started out ruling Athens in the name of the people, but let the power go his head and turned into a colossal dick-weed.  There was nothing left for it but take it to the streets and hunt down Peisistratus and his supporters.  After the bloodletting and pottery-smashing stopped, the Athenians all took a collective deep breath, had a slug of wine and a few olives, and turned the whole problem of what to do after a successful revolution over to the smartest man they could find, an aristocrat named Cleisthenes.

What Mr. C. managed was a complete restructuring of Athenian society.  You see, before Cleisthenes there was another reformer named Solon (reputably smarter than Cleisthenes) who prevented a revolution by organizing society around the lines of a military unit.  At the top were the chiefs.  Anybody could be a chief, as long as their annual income was worth 500 bushels of wheat or more (Athenians liked wheat so much that they often used it as a currency.  Poly want a cracker?)  Next came the equestrian class, anyone whose annual income was 250-499 bushels of wheat.  This was supposedly enough bread --err, cash to keep a cavalry horse and rider in the field.  Next came the thetes, which is Greek for everybody else.  When not at war, this society actually got together and voted on civil questions, such as how much should we pay the Athenian dung-haulers (this was way before septic systems) or what to do with the colonies of feral cats infesting the local temples (the Ancient Greeks were not acquainted with Chinese cuisine).  Great system, right?

What's wrong with rule by Mafia?
It works for me...

The problem was that the people voted in tribes --that is, they all voted in political units dominated by a powerful extended family and its allies.  This meant that the most powerful families --there were 6 of them --could control the government of Athens and ride roughshod over everyone else.  Think of living in a state controlled by 6 Mafia families and you'll get the picture.

Enter Cleisthenes.  The thetes of Athens were on a total rampage, destroying shops, homes and killing aristocrats.  If he couldn't stop the civil unrest, Athens would become a wrecked slaughterhouse.  What he did was simple on the one hand, yet brilliant on the other: he changed the system of voting from tribes to locations (Acropolis, Agora, Harbor, Plains, Outskirts, etc.)  This broke the power of the ruling families and allowed Solon's reforms to function as a true direct democracy.  Add to it a popular assembly of all citizens (adult, male, non-slave, bisexual) and a jury of 501 citizens, and you've got the world's very first democracy.  Hooray for Athens!

Vive l'Revolution! uhmm, coup d'etat!
Whatever, vive me!

But now we must deal with with the fine distinction of just what makes a democratic, or at least popular revolution and what is just a mere coup d'etat, which is French for "Affair of State" (leave it to the French to be having affairs during political uprisings, those horny little frogs!)  With a coup d'etat, you're really just changing one ruling faction for another.  For example, when Napoleon Bonaparte got rid of France's government of the Directory and installed himself as First Consul for Life, he was merely showing the Directors the door and snagging himself some nice new office space --as well as assuming the rule of the entire country of France.  A revolution must be more: more people, more change, more time spent doing it, and more suffering for everybody involved.  This is what makes revolutions popular, and that is why so many of at least the modern ones have been democratic.

With me so far? Good; now let's turn our attention to a revolution we all know and love, the American Revolution.  My favorite Bay Stater from history, John Adams, was quoted as saying that "[the] American Revolution was accomplished long before the first drop of blood was spilled at Lexington and Concord --and that was the revolution in the hearts and minds of the American people."  By this, Adams meant that before any shooting started, the King's subjects in the part of British North America that wouldn't later go on to dominate the sport of ice hockey had gotten it into their heads that they were somehow different from your average run-of-the-mill Englishman from England.  They were, in fact, thinking of themselves as American Englishmen (to distinguish themselves from native Americans [called Indians then], African Americans [called slaves or Negros then], or Franco Americans [called miserable dirty rotten French bastards then]).

There's no friggin' way we can lose this one!
-oops, we did.  My bad.

However, Adams wrote this a few years after the successful conclusion of the American Revolution when he and everybody else in short pants, knee socks and a whig was feeling overly optimistic.  During the revolution, he wrote that the people of America could be roughly divided into thirds: one-third that was for independence, one-third that was loyal to the British Empire, and one-third that was working so friggin' hard to put a beer and a burger on the dinner table every day that they couldn't care less who ran the country --just as long as it wasn't anybody who was Catholic.  And this is where most people totally miss the whole point of the American Revolution: it was not ever, in any sense of the term, a sure-thing.  In fact, it's the best proof I can think of that God does exist and does care about what goes on around here, because by all rights, we should have lost our war for independence on at least 5 occasions: Bunker Hill, the Evacuation of New York City, the Occupation of Philadelphia, Valley Forge and the Treason of Benedict Arnold.  Each of these five pivotal points will be the subject of a subsequent blog post (good news for you Revolutionary War junkies out there!)  But it's a curious event at the end of the war, when the Continental Army was in winter quarters around Newburgh, New York, that I want to examine, because if things had gone the other way, we might have found ourselves facing the same situation the Egyptians are facing today.

"And we're all just going to stand at attention in the snow until whomever
threw that flaming bag of poop at Congress steps forward!"

The scene: Newburgh, New York (for the second time).  Previously, the Continental Army and their tre's fort French allies had beaten the snot out of Lord Cornwallis, basically ending the war, but for the fact that there were still tons of British soldiers in America and there was as of yet no formal peace treaty.  George Washington's officers had had it up to here with Congress because they had never fully provided for the army during the course of the war, making it necessary for soldiers to march without shoes, make camp without tents, and, yes, even go into battle without a musket.  In their frustration, the officers offered to make George Washington king of America.  After considering their offer for a whole three seconds, Washington politely declined, reminding everybody that they just fought a war against a king, so if it was ok with them, he'd just become the first President.

Just for a moment, let's imagine what might have happened if ol' George took his officers' offer up and became king of America.  No doubt Congress would have had something to say about that, not to mention all the pissed-off current and former soldiers who fought to rid America of kings.  So, what probably would have happened next is the American Civil War, four score and seven years earlier than it really happened.  This would have put America at a severe disadvantage vis a vis the rest of the world, prompting Britain to grab Maine, France to grab everything east of the Mississippi and west of the Appalachians, and Spain to grab Georgia.  As bad as that might be, it could have happened; only the strong character of George Washington prevented it.

Revolutions are not tidy things --those are coup d'etats --so don't give up on Egypt's revolution just yet.  They just might end up with a better, more democratic government than they used to have.  Heck, we managed it somehow.   After all, the pyramids weren't built over the weekend; nor will democracy appear over night.  And out of protests and arrests and general unrest could result in a genuine democracy for Egypt.  But whatever we in the United States must do, we must NOT interfere.  After all, the Egyptians left us to work out our differences in 1776.  They deserve the same respect.

1,000 Views of "View From the Podium" and Counting!

We passed the 1,000-viewer mark last weekend!  Yay!  I don't even care if some of those "views" were internet search engine spiders; it's up to 1,046 at this posting.  Here's a gift to you, my faithful reader: the world's largest fireworks shell (43" - the main guns on U.S. Navy battleships during WWII was only 16"!)

*BANG!*

Thanks again!

We're All Squeaky-Clean!

Friend and regular (as opposed to XXL) reader Susan suggests that in order to get lots of people to read these pearls of wisdom of mine, I should stick labels like "Justin Bieber" and "Kim Kardashian" in my blog.  Fine.  Here ya go.  And no, that noise you just heard wasn't Socrates spinning in his grave; that was Adjunct Proff smacking his noggin with a 2-by-4 over the death of intellectualism in America.  To be fair, my Mom's a big fan of "Keeping Up with the Kardashians," and I'm sure that the Bieb hasn't written only songs that suck.

Kim, on names: "Reading names is so.  Hard."
Justin, on the word German: "We don't say that in America."

Now that I have pandered to the puerile and prurient peccadilloes permeating the public's psyche (are you diggin' any of this, cute English Adjunct Proff???), on with the erudition!  During my moon-lit shower this morning at 4 a.m. (a.m.: after mooning), I took a moment to sadly reflect that not too many of us take the time for a good, long, hot... soak in the tub (shame on you dirty-minded eegits!)  Then I remembered the great Mike Stanton who once said, "Who wants to marinate in their own sweat, oil and dead skin?" --Mike was a bit on the fastidious side.  That got me to wondering about this whole bathing and personal hygiene thing in the first place, so grab your loofa and rubber-duckie, because we're going to dive head-first into the wonderful history of bathing.

"Hey, where's the babe in the other tub?  Hey, where's my friggin' Cialis?"

Nobody knows who the first human to bathe was, but it may probably have been a female homo sapiens-sapiens somewhere in Africa.  Why a female?  Well, every month she would have received her Mother Nature's Little Monthly Gift, and she probably would have washed the blood off of herself in order to present less of a target to cheetahs, lions, jackals, warthogs, meerkats and the rest of the cast of Disney's "The Lion King."  Mind you, it could also have been a male who wanted to wash away the smeared-on leftovers of the last gazelle feast for the same reason as above.  But whomever it was, they started a fad that continues to this very day.

You cray-cray if you think I can look this hot
with no bath, be-atch-ez!

Digging around in Mesopotamia, archaeologists have found clay pots that contained all the compounds needed to make soap.  Since the Mesopotamians wrote about bathing (what's the first thing Enkidu in The Epic of Gilgamesh does in order to civilize himself? --I mean after having sex with Shamash the Hooker, for an entire week?  That's right, take a bath!) and there is no record of Mesopotamians eating or drinking soap on purpose, and the men wore these elaborately coiffed hair styles and beards and so did hookers and noblewomen (only a pro can spot the difference ;-)), then there must have been some serious rub-a-dub-dub going on in and around the Tigris-Euphrates Rivers.

Egyptians were an especially hygienic bunch --then again, living so close to such a terrific river that's right at the edge of a bunch of deserts would make anybody thankful for a nice long soak.  Poetry, tomb art and weekly big box store circulars all attest to the Egyptian penchant for bathing.  Another bunch who felt that cleanliness was next to godliness (perhaps a bit too literally) were the Ancient Hebrews.  Heck, they even managed to keep clean while wandering around in the wilderness for 40 years by scrubbing with sand, ashes, pumice and clay (what else could they do with no water?) Yhwh, a.k.a. God, also reminded them to wash their hands before meals and ritual sacrifices to Him, although the source of all this water is a bit sketchy.  Supposedly, Moses whacked a rock with his staff and a freshwater spring just gushed forth.  What a lucky prick!

The Greeks reportedly used soap to get clean, and olive oil for an all-over marinade --err, moisturizer.  After a bout of wrestling, a footrace, a discus throw, javelin catch or other Olympic event, athletes would be dusted with very fine dirt in order to soak up the sweat.  A slave would then scrape all the sweaty dirt off with a curved, toothed scraper-thingy called a strigil, after which our athlete would get a massage and rub-down with olive oil.  Wish my gym did that.

Competitors ready themselves for the
Let's-stare-at-each other's-Junk event

But leave it to the Romans to elevate bathing and cleanliness to its zenith, imbuing it with religious as well as civic significance, and making the Roman Baths some of the ancient world's more impressive architectural structures.  At the social heart of every neighborhood in the Eternal City lay the baths, lavishly built and outfitted by politically ambitious men as a way of gaining favor with the publica.

Upon entering these impressive piles of marble-faced brick walls held together with that high-tech adhesive the Romans invented (cement), patrons proceeded along collonaded walkways towards the changing room, where they could ditch the old toga and sandals in favor of the even older birthday suit.  The first stop was the frigidarium, the pool that had room-temperature or colder water.  After a little swim and some shrinkage, the bather would make their way to the tepidarium, a room that had a warm water pool and tables for massages.  This was the biggest of the three main rooms, and it probably resembled the scene at a contemporary hotel's indoor pool.  The third room, or caldarium, had a big pool that was heated by a charcoal fire underneath the pool (some rather ingeniously vented to the outside by brick ductwork.  I wonder what kind of duct tape you'd use for brick), 3-4  small cold-water pools, and chairs and benches for the bather to rest in between hot and cold.  Only very fancy bath houses had something like a sauna, which was where a patron could relax to the point of wet noodledom and get a really good sweat on.

No, this is not the holodeck on the U.S.S. Enterprise (Star Trek TNG), it's a Roman Bath.  Kickass.

But were they finished after one last dip in the tepidarium and a rub-down with scented oils?  Not quite yet.  Afterwards, our Roman bathers could stroll through the bath's gardens, hear a lecture by some interesting person on some interesting topic, play a pickup game of handball (bocci would come much later), watch a performance by acrobats, or read a scroll from the bath's little library.  On-site beauty and esthetician services were also offered by skilled slaves or freemen.  One could literally stay all day at the baths!  Or, as that old grouch, Cicero writes, one could literally live over the baths:

"I live over a public bath-house. Just imagine every kind of annoying noise! The sturdy gentleman does his exercise with lead weights; when he is working hard (or pretending to) I can hear him grunt; when he breathes out, I can hear him panting in high pitched tones. Or I might notice some lazy fellow, content with a cheap rub-down, and hear the blows of the hand slapping his shoulders. The sound varies, depending on whether the massager hits with a flat or hollow hand.

To all of this, you can add the arrest of the occasional pickpocket; there's also the racket made by the man who loves to hear his own voice in the bath or the chap who dives in with a lot of noise and splashing."

Just like the hookers to ruin it for everybody

Other professional services were on offer at the baths, including that of the oldest profession (and no, it wasn't offered by my grandmother, you smartass!  I'm not THAT old!)  In fact, it was the proliferation of street-walkers around the baths that gave them a bad name in the eyes of the growing-in-size-and-political-muscle Christian Church.

After the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 CE (CE: Crap Exists now), public bathing fell out of fashion, partially because of the Catholic Church and their moral objections to it (men and women getting naked, massaged, washed by other people and being completely bare-ass naked and nude all together at the same time without any clothes on?  And naked?  I ask you: who could object to that?), and partly because LARGE HAIRY BARBARIANS had pretty much taken over all over Europe at this point, and that crowd thought that bathing was for pussies.  Just like a bully to be afraid of something like a bath!  And so, as late as 1492 we get people like Queen Isabella of Spain (yep, Columbus' queen) whose virtue was so great that she had only taken two baths in her entire life!  No word of what King Ferdinand, her husband, may have thought about this, but Columbus sailed all the way to America --four times! --to get away from her royal stench.

"In America, I found gold, and spices, and sandalwood --that makes a dandy
soap --and perfume, and douche, and body wash, and shampoo..."

But hey, Adjunct Proff-o-rama, what about the other Romans --the Byzantines?  Didn't they make it all the way to 1453?  Dude, you've been paying attention!  Gold star on the forehead for you!  Yes indeed, the Byzantines did make it to 1453, thus keeping the Roman bathing tradition alive all throughout the Middle Ages.  And when the Turks conquered Constantinople, they took a look around at the beautiful baths of that city and said, "Nice idea --but we can do it better," and voila, the Turkish bath was created.  Keeping the Roman basic design of three rooms of ever increasing temperature, the Turkish bath starts one out in the warm room, moves into the hot room which is heated by steam, and finishes out in the cold room.  Along the way, bathers get a full-body wash and a massage that is so rough that the masseur practically beats you up and shoves you in your own hip pocket.  Other treats include Turkish towels (a Turkish invention) and bathrobes that are ever so comfy, and a nice cup of Turkish tea to put the perfect finishing touch on one of the world's most pleasurable experiences.

Did I mention the pile of erotic soapsuds? 

But for the rest of the Western world not lucky enough to be conquered by the Ottoman Turks, bathing was still frowned upon.  Oh sure, there was the odd clean-freak like Queen Elizabeth I who took one bath every month "whether she needed it or not," but for the most part, Europe smelled like the Bruins locker room after one of those triple-overtime Stanley Cup games.  Europeans were SO stinky, that when the Portuguese and Dutch made it to Japan -a place that has an even more intense bathing experience than Turkey  -the Japanese were so horrified by their smell that they had to deal with those putrid people by wadding up a perfumed scrap of silk and breathing through it like a gas mask.  No wonder the Shogun kicked them all out in the 1700's!

"F*CK! The toilet paper is frozen again!"

But have no fear: all this would change in the 19th century with the discovery of germs and their role in disease.  Guess what? washing with soap kills germs by the gazillions and makes you smell good as a happy byproduct.  Soon Europeans were doing the unthinkable: scrubbing, scouring, rinsing, lathering and having a blast doing it.  And they were doing the even more unthinkable: building bathrooms inside their houses that combined the ultra clean (bath and shower) with the ultra dirty (toilet).  Prior to this, the toilet was confined to the outside in its own little house with crescent moons cut into the door.  This made it tough on folks who lived in northern climates to "do the necessary," especially in the middle of a snow storm.

Bathrooms were cropping up everywhere, even in hotels.  In the beginning (not as far back as the Big Bang Singularity), hotels would have one or two bathrooms per floor that every guest would share.  Doily Carte would have none of that.  Besides being Gilbert and Sullivan's producer, he was the major owner of London's Savoy Hotel, accommodations that boasted private bathrooms for some of the more expensive rooms.  A London newspaper of the day wondered out loud whether the guests were all amphibians.

Today, bathrooms have become a major selling point of a house --the more expensive the house, the fancier the bathrooms.  High-pressure, multi-spray shower stalls, jacuzzi tubs, bidets, urinals, heated floors and heated towel-bars are just some of the fixtures homebuyers can expect in the bathroom.  What people in the west can't expect is a public bath in the neighborhood.  While there are exceptions in New York and San Francisco, the public bath has gone the way of the dodo-bird. These days, there are day-spas, regular spas and municipal swimming pools filling in the gaps made by the lack of public baths.  So the next time you head off to Napa for a weekend of wine tasting, mud-wraps and cucumber slices on your eyes, take a moment to reflect on the long and squeaky-clean history of bathing.  But take care you don't slip on the soap!  Statistically, more household accidents occur in the bathroom than in any other room.

Who could take a dump in this beautiful bathroom?

69 Page Views short of 1,000!!!!!

Hooray!

I had no idea that almost 1,000 people in the world would read my writing, so here's to you wonderful readers out there: thank you!  I really hope you've enjoyed it, and either learned something new or were surprised by something in "View From the Podium."  I will continue to publish it until the NSA discovers my connection to the Anonymous Computer Hacker-Avengers, Julian Assange and Edward Snowdon (not to mention Mao Tze-Tung and Doctor Who!) and sends me scurrying towards Ecuador as well (Ecuador: when Venezuela or Cuba just won't do).

Thanks again, and keep your eyes peeled for a treat when I hit 1,000 :-)

xoxo, Adjunct Proff

Q: What's Adjunct P's favorite number?

To No-Fly-Zone, or Not to No-Fly-Zone?

Today in the news, I was pleased to hear that President "I-Heard-Your-Last-Call-on-Verizon-and-You-Should-Be-Ashamed-of-Yourself" Obama had finally agreed that it was about time to help arm the Syrian rebels in their civil war, just so that the Russians, Hezbollah, Bashar al-Assad and some guy named Steve will think twice before totally killing and gassing (or was that gassing and raping? It's hard to keep up with the atrocities committed by that walking pile of camel diarrhea) completely innocent Syrian people.  The current debate is what kind of weaponry to give these rebels.  Do we give them rifles?  -machine guns?  -grenade launchers?  -mortars? -Patriot Missile Batteries?  -AAA batteries?  What happens if we give them something cool like Stinger shoulder-launched anti-aircraft missiles, they win their civil war, they stop shaving, they start screaming about "Allah!" and my personal favorite, "Death to the Great Satan America!"  and then start using those Stingers to shoot down our drones that we send in to righteously kill them with?

I say we send them a bunch of these deadly firearms.
We used them in our Revolution and Civil War!

Another thing being batted around the foreign policy think-tanks (Think-Tanks: the best offensive weapon against Think-Trenches) is whether or not to establish a "No-Fly Zone" like the international community did in Iraq (the first time), Bosnia and Libya.  Since such questions are best left to people like Secretary of State John Kerry and his esteemed colleagues in the foreign ministries of our allies (yeah, BOTH of them!), Adjunct Prof will weigh-in his considerably massive intellect (and similarly large behind) on another kind of no-fly zone with a different weapon: pesticides!

Noooooooooo!!!!

I know you loyal readers are sick and tired of hearing this, but the Sumerians (geesh, isn't there anything those wacky Mesopotamians didn't do first?) used sulphur compounds as a way to keep insect populations down around their harvested grain (I guess those Sumerian Cats were great at mousing, but could do fuck-all about bugs).  Meanwhile, over in India, the Aryan Vedas (sacred writings of the Aryan peoples, not little dudes dressed up entirely in black, wielding light-sabers and breathing with the help of a respirator) mention that Indians used poisonous plants in order to stop bugs from getting into the basmati rice and shrimp vindaloo.  They didn't say which poisonous plants, nor did they mention anything about the effects of eating a papadam or samosa made with grain tainted by these unnamed poisonous plants, but since there are Indian people currently living in India and in Waltham, Massachusetts, I'm pretty sure it wasn't 100% fatal.

Ancient Greeks (as opposed to Greeks in their early 20's) were well known to use smoke to drive-off some pests such as caterpillars and aphids.  Another thing they did was to pray to the relevant god/goddess of agriculture to protect their crops.  They also used arsenic-laced powders.  I sincerely hope that ancient Greek (as opposed to Greek teenager) cooks washed their ingredients thoroughly before preparing a meal made with arsenic seasoning.

"That's one gyro with mint and diced olives, hold the arsenic."

In Rome, Pliny the Elder wrote that it was a good idea to use this junk called galbanum resin which you get from the fennel plant (whose seeds are inserted into sausages to give them a little kick) and add it to sulphur in order to discourage mosquitoes from snacking on you.  Leave it to those Romans --they even invented the first rat-proof granary!  This, of course, put thousands of cats and rat-chasing dog breeds out of work.  These disaffected animals gravitated towards radical politics and were  instrumental in the internal collapse of the Western Roman Empire.  Ok, maybe they weren't.  I forget.

But the best ever pesticidists (I know it isn't a real word, Microsoft Word --you don't have to underline it in red any more!) of the ancient world were the Chinese --first the Shang, who used chemicals to get rid of agriculture pests and bugs on people and animals, and later the Han who used the really hard-core stuff like mercury (not the Roman god Mercury --he was too busy delivering flowers) and arsenic to kill bugs dead.  No doubt these early chemical pesticides were discovered by philosopher-alchemists who were searching for the potion of eternal life, but hey, it killed cooties so good job.

After the ant on the left crushes the other ant with that cherry tomato,
it will be served-up in a tasty marinara sauce.

I would be remiss if I didn't mention our friends-behind-the-burka, the Arabs, in this decidedly minor treatise on pesticides.  The Arabs, observant little buggerers that they are, noticed that a certain species of mountain ant ate lots of other lesser species of ants for breakfast, lunch and supper.  They correctly figured out that a bunch of these mountain ants would munch-out on this other variety of ant that lived in oases and attacked date-palm trees, which produced dates, and since the Arabs went out on lots of dates, in order to protect their precious date-palm trees, they caught a bunch of mountain ants, transported them by camel-back to the oasis and let those hillbilly ants do their thing. Of course, once the mountain ants were out of oasis ants to eat, they starved to death, but so what, we're talking ants here.

When Western Civilization all but collapsed during the Middle (as opposed to the slightly-left-of-center) Ages, people couldn't have cared less about bugs in the granary, in the fields, or in the various cracks and crevices of their houses and skin (ewwwww!) Rumor has it that the Bishop of Orleans in France once tried to excommunicate the German Hessian Fly that had infested the wheat fields around Orleans in the 1270's.  The same rumor has it that he was entirely successful: no Hessian Flies were given communion at all during the entire decade of 1270.  Of course, the wheat fields went to crap anyway, but good for the ol' Bish for rolling-up his clerical sleeves and trying to do something.

And while I'm at it, all you fleas had
just better watch your asses 'cause you're next!

So, the Renaissance, Reformation and First Scientific Revolution all happened with nary a one bothering about bugs in the bed or bread-box.  It wasn't until the Age of Enlightenment (you know, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau and Monty Python?) that a Swedish taxonomist (no, not the guy who mounts your championship bass on a board;  that's a taxidermist!) named Carolus Linnaeus, a.k.a. Carl von Linne after he was knighted, took it upon himself to study, describe, classify and attempt to draw every single miserable pest that infested crops, livestock, pets and people.  What a breakthrough!  Now that we know what they look like, we can figure out a way to kill the little fuckers!

All through the 1700's and 1800's, farmers everywhere tried one thing and another on their crops to kill worms, weevils, leaf-cutters and such.  They wrote of their successes in publications like almanacs and popular magazines so that other farmers could benefit from their success.  In the 1840's, fungi were added to the list of pests that needed to be eradicated, when potato blight just about killed the entire rural population of Ireland and drove most of the survivors to anywhere else in the world that had food.

You bugs are SO screwed!

As the 20th century rolled around, some bright-bulb on the Christmas tree figured you could spray an entire field in short-order with that newfangled invention, the airplane.  Great, people now have air-support in their fight against bugs!  Then World War II happened, and the United States' agricultural industry ended up feeding the entire world for a couple of years, so all and every pest that ate food just had to go.  Enter DDT!!!  As pesticides go, this one was the bomb!  It killed every friggin' bug within miles of its application.  It looked like humanity was on the cusp of a pest-less utopian future.  Then along came Rachel Carson.

The time was 1962; the place was New York City; the publisher was Houghton Mifflin; the book they just published was Silent Spring.  This was one of the first and certainly one of the most influential books of the new environmentalist movement.  In it, Rachel Carson described how DDT was not only killing bugs, but it was also killing birds, snakes, fisher cats, cows, pigs, sheep, and even endangering humans.  You see, DDT apparently made birds' eggshells thinner than --well, eggshells, so when the mother bird sat on them to keep them warm, they cracked, thus killing her babies before they were even born (awwwww!)  Carson then asked her readers what would spring sound like if there was no birdsong because there were no birds because they had all been killed in the egg.

No tweets for you, bird-killers!

Since Silent Spring (nice alliteration there, eh cute English Adjunct Prof?), people have somewhat backed-off from chemicals in order to control pests.  A lot of pesticides are based on natural things, like chrysanthemum flowers and other flowers that bugs hate.  Some have even gotten wicked creative, especially in the fight against mosquitoes.  You see, mossies are attracted to warm-blooded animals because they give off heat and a lot of carbon dioxide.  Knowing this, some genius invented this gadget that looks like a big, fat, blood-filled animal to mosquitos.  It gives off a ton of heat and CO2, so much that mosquitos stampede over themselves to fly over and bite it.  When they get close to it, they are instantly vacuumed out of the sky and stuck in a bag where they eventually die of starvation.  The whole thing costs about $349.99, is powered by a barbecue propane tank and is available at the closest Walmart, Home Depot or Lowes.  Neat, eh? 

This li'l sucker will clear a
whole acre's worth of mosquitos

But if you don't want pesticides or machines killing your bugs, why not build a breeding-bat-box?  Bats eat way more bugs than birds do, are mammals just like us, and turn all those bugs into lovely guano, a.k.a. bat-poop, a.k.a the best fertilizer ever known.  Besides, wild bats are in trouble (at least the little brown bats in North America) because of this fungus that grows on their noses in the wintertime when they are hibernating.  They could use a leg-up from their fellow mammals on this one.

Aren't we lucky to live in a day and age where we can create a no-fly zone inside our kitchens with just a roll of Shell No-Pest Strip flypaper?  Some bugs can even spread nasty diseases --think Bubonic Plague and Eastern Equine Encephalitis --and almost all of them have untidy eating habits and distressing reproductive practices.  So the next time you swat a bug, just think of how far we have come in managing the pests that infest our little patch of ground.  But don't get rid of all of them --what would the birds and bats eat?

I vant to suck your blood!

GO TO SLEEP!!!

Can anyone spot the sleeping undergraduate in this pic?

As yet another rosy-cheeked dawn kisses the eastern sky outside ol' Adjunct Proff's window (without the aforementioned Adjunct Proff being successful at wresting [pun intended] a single hour of sleep from the previous raven-hued night), my thoughts turn towards that bug-eyed monster called Insomnia.  What is it?  --why do I have it?  --have any famous people from history suffered from it also?  --what can I do to stop it? --but most importantly: is there a delivery service in all of Massachusetts' Merrimack Valley that can score me some hot pastrami on a kaiser roll with spicy brown mustard, mayo, jarlsberg cheese, grilled onions, a side of fries, and a nice, hot cup of chamomile tea with milk and honey? --at 4 a.m.?  Failing that, is there a loyal reader out there who will hit ol' Adjunct P in the head with a crowbar so that he can have a couple hours' unconsciousness before facing whatever fresh new Hell today has in store?  Somebody?  Anybody?  Bueller?

You could also hit me with a sandwich this big-
it'd probably have the same effect as a crowbar.

The earliest written record of anybody not having insomnia (and thereby confirming that there was insomnia) comes down to us from the Epic of Gilgamesh, that kooky moldy-oldie that also treated mankind to the first recorded threat of the Zombie Apocalypse (see my post OH NO! Zombies Ate My History Homework!  for more on those zany Akkadians), and is none other than the title character, Gilgamesh himself.  In Tablet XI (the Gilgamesh poet wasn't really big on chapters --or paper, for that matter!), the Sumerian equivalent of Noah, a dude called Utnapishtim (the same dude who survived the flood, built an ark, re-populated the entire world and who, with his old-lady, were just chillin' at the End of the World and groovin' on the fact that they were immortal), challenges Gilgamesh to stay awake for an entire week.  If he can stay awake, he's a god; if not, he's just a human being like you and me.  You can guess the result: big-G falls right to sleep and sleeps for an entire week (to be fair, he had had a rough couple of days before that).

I am a Sumerian God!
I never sleep! -or fart!

Why did the Sumerians, Akkadians, Babylonians and such all want their gods and goddesses to have insomnia?  It's because they wanted to feel like the bunch of hooligans that created them, the Earth, the sky, that miserable little yippy-dog that lives next door to me --that their gods were always on the clock, around the clock, looking out for their creation and protecting them.  And since nobody mortal --not even the semi-divine King Gilgamesh of Uruk --could stay awake all the time, insomnia was seen as a super-power of the gods.  Wow.  I wonder: were chronic insomniacs like me seen as semi-divine beings back then?  That would be almost worth it...

And it wasn't just the Mesopotamians who liked their deities wide awake.  Argos was a Greek giant who had a hundred eyes.  He needed them because Greek heroes were constantly trying to sneak up on him while 30-40 of his eyes were asleep so they (the heroes, not his eyes) could kill him.  Apparently he had pissed-off the Greek Heroes' Union Local #733 by killing so many Greek Heroes, and not all of them in self defense.

The Hebrews and Christians had these things called Angels, a.k.a. Watchers who, well, watched stuff in Heaven and, well, elsewhere.  They were supposedly wide awake all the time.  And the most powerful bunch of Angels, the Seraphim, supposedly surround God 24/7 and praise Him 24/7 for all eternity --I presume that they are awake during all this praising, unless there is a condition among the angelic called "sleep-praising."

That is one seriously bad-ass bunch of angels, Mr. Botticini!
I assume the Virgin is there because it's her assumption.

As for people you've probably heard of who suffered from this god-like affliction of insomnia, there was Sir Isaac Newton (of course he did!  Newton was such a hypochondriac that this was probably his only legitimate disease!)  Sir Isaac, or Figgy to his chums from prep school days, reportedly went all of 1693 without sleeping.  Needless to say, this depressed Figgy --that, and nobody was believing that he had invented differential calculus, and everybody was believing that kraut Leibnitz had.  Sir Winston Churchill suffered from it --he was having troubles with a different kraut.  And speaking of great looking celebrities, Marilyn Monroe and Michael Jackson both had such a terrible time getting to sleep that they were literally killed by their prescription sleep medication.

I don't think they ever slept together.

Ok you wide-awake, semi-divine Adjunct Proff, so what causes insomnia?  The biggest (and most mind-bogglingly unspecific) cause is stress --the psychological kind, not the force on the airframe of a Boeing 777 at take-off.  Here is a link to the world famous and completely expensive Mayo Clinic if you want to read up on other things the doctors at the Mayo think cause insomnia:

Can't Sleep? Try Some Mayo!  

I suggest reading this late at night or early in the morning, especially if you can't sleep.  There's nothing better on nights like that than reading about why you can't go to sleep so that you can worry a lot about it.

So <YAWN!> there you have it: the complete and exhaustive <YAWN!> [pun not intended] history of insomnia, some <YAWN!> famous people who have had it, and some really... expensive... ideas as to what causes... Z-zzz-Z, ZZZ zzzzzzzzzzz... 

Are Those Puppies Real or What?

Watching re-runs of Beverly Hills 90210 (by the way: Beverly Hills High School isn't in the 90210 zip code  --it's in 90212.  And the show wasn't even shot at Beverly Hills High --it was shot at Torrance High.  Hell, the whole show wasn't even shot in Beverly Hills --Van Nuys, Los Angeles [on Pico Blvd.], Alta Dena, Eagle Rock [where some of them went to college], Hermosa Beach and Santa Clarita were all stand-in locations), I saw a lot of things that were fake: boobs, tans, abs, eyelashes, boobs, shoulders, boobs, hair color, boobs and boobs.  This reminded me of something that totally amazed me about California when I lived out there.  You know how local businesses can "adopt a highway?"  In California, there are stretches of the Long Beach Freeway that have been "adopted" by competing plastic surgery medical practices.  This all got me wondering: when did plastic surgery start and why do people do it?

These are so not fake.
And that's all my own collagen in my lips.

It seems that people have always been messing with their bodies.  In prehistoric times, Neanderthal people and some proto-Homo Sapiens practiced something called artificial cranial deformation, a.k.a. head-binding, in order to give people heads that were more egg-shaped than round.  The first written report of this practice comes from Herodotus, the Greek guy who invented history (really, he did!), who wrote about these people called the Maccrocephali, or People-with-wicked-long-heads as they were also known.  Head binding is where you take a baby's head and tie a rope around it while the kid's skull is still growing.  Some people, the Huns especially, added a board to this arrangement to give the head a slightly longer, flatter, whacked-with-a-frying-pan look that was considered hot amongst the Huns. The pressure of rope and board changed the baby's skull's shape as it grew into an adult.  I guess the societies that practiced this intentional deforming process on its defenseless babies thought long heads were beautiful.  I think they're kind of creepy looking.  But whatever, one can make the argument that this was the first plastic surgery, since it changed the looks of a person's body for purely aesthetic reasons.

Tell me that you DON't think this
Egyptian chick was an alien.

Another contender for the first plastic surgery-like practice is the ancient and honorable (not to mention colorful and borderline skeezy) practice of tattooing.   The only prehistoric guy we know for sure who had tattoos is Otzi, a.k.a. the Ice Man.  This poor bugger was murdered up in the Alps sometime during the early Bronze Age, died, was frozen into a glacier, was found by hikers in the 1990's, was then chopped-out of the glacier and moved to his own private combination refrigerator/museum in Bolzano, Italy.  His tattoos are on his back and legs, and consist of groups of three parallel lines (hey, those early Bronze Age tattoo artists weren't all that artsy, I guess).  Egyptians and Nubians both practiced tattooing, as did the Greeks, Germans, Gauls, Thracians and ancient (as opposed to middle-aged) Britons.  Once again, the human body is modified to make it look prettier, scarier, or more hip than the standard-issue body.  Piercings (ears, noses, lips, scroutms [scroti?], nipples and other parts) have all turned parts of our bodies into living bulletin-boards for people to display their bling.

Somebody give this guy a ring.
Oh wait, he already has about about 100.

But what we think of as plastic surgery (nip, tuck, lift and stuff) started in classical India about 800 B.C.E. (Before Crap Existed) when someone named Sushruta started doing skin grafts, mainly to help people who had been maimed by fire, but he occasionally helped out the random Hindu Raj suffering from terminal acne.  Later, ol' Sushruta's students branched out into nose-jobs.  In 1794, the British magazine Gentleman's Magazine which was presumably published by gentlemen for gentlemen ran a great article on the nose-jobbery of one Kumhar Vaidya, and suddenly, Englishmen and Englishwomen were getting those colossal English noses trimmed, shrunk and otherwise brought to heel.

Wish I had that nose full of sixpences.

As surgery in general got safer with the addition of anesthetics, antibiotics, cool looking scrubs and sterilized tools, reconstructive surgery got better and more ambitious. In America, the first plastic surgeon, John Peter Mettauer, was the first doctor ever to repair a cleft palate.  He did this in 1827.  Since he was the first person to do this, he had to invent all the tools he used in that operation.  But throughout the rest of the 19th century, all the big advances seemed to be in nose-jobs.

Why the fixation on noses?  It's as plain as the nose on your face.  The nose is the first thing you see when you look at your face.  If you're dissatisfied with your looks, the easiest and most obvious thing to fix is your nose. Another reason is that since it's completely made out of cartilage, your nose can get really damaged by infections, right-hooks, left jabs and such. It can get chewed off, sliced off, burned off, punched in --the poor nose!  No wonder an entire branch of surgery was invented to protect it.

For plastic surgery to take its next giant leap forward, a major war was needed.  Because they often survived their planes getting shot down but usually got horribly burned on the way down, British RAF pilots formed the so-called "Guinea Pig Club" after WWII with the aim of 1) fixing their burned and scarred faces and bodies; and 2) giving Britain's budding plastic surgeons a willing bunch to practice their arts on.  But the most amazing plastic surgery to take place right after WWII was performed by New Zealand's Harold Gillies when he did the first Sheila-to-Bruce sex-reassignment procedure by adding a... YOU know what he added! --to a former woman who ever after was allowed to stand when peeing.

Contrary to popular belief,
it wasn't David Bowie.

But I'll bet I know what all of you degenerates want to know: who had the first boob-job and when?  Well, keep wondering.  Besides, most boob surgery is done to remove breasts that have cancerous tumors, fix the scars from that surgery, and  --I am SO not making this up! --reduce a woman's breast size.  I know I know, why would a woman do such a thing?  Well, probably because they're way too heavy for some women to lug around.  Really big boobs can totally wreck a woman's posture and give her severe back and spinal issues.  That, plus the fact that she might consider them ugly or make her feel like a freak.  Shakespeare reminds us (in iambic pentameter, nonetheless!) "Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown;" he might also have written "Strained is the back that lifts the sweater-puppies."

Today, one can get a face-lift, boob-lift, butt-lift, botox injection (for that permanently serene face that is physically incapable of scowling or showing much emotion at all); lines, varicose veins and crow's feet can be banished; dimples and cleft chins (hell, ANY kind of chin) can be added.  Nip, tuck, stuff --if you have the money for it.

Ok people: Joan Rivers or Master Yoda?
Discuss, discuss...

The biggest thing to remember about plastic surgery is that although it may use people's vanity as a marketing tool, a successful series of surgeries can literally transform a person's life.  A woman trapped inside a man's body can be freed; a horribly disfigured person can  feel like they belong to the human community; a woman with breast cancer can have her life saved (and have implants afterwards if she wishes); bodies can be made to appear whole and sound even after traumatic injuries.

As with most improvements and innovation, plastic surgery can be a bit of a double-edged scalpel.  Just watch TLC (TLC: we used to be educational, but we're now America's televised freak show) to see people who are plastic surgery junkies or who have had surgeries that have gone horribly wrong.  But on balance, it's a better world (not to mention a prettier world!) with plastic surgery in it.