The History of Court Jesters in Britain

 

From Discover Britain:

While fools and jesters came into their own at Christmas and on special occasions, they also had more mundane duties to perform at other times of the year, whether as keeper of the hounds, huntsmen, or messengers. Jesters could also play important roles on the battlefield, boosting morale and making troops laugh with their bawdy songs, or taunting the opposing army – as the legendary Norman figure Taillefer is said to have done, provocatively juggling his sword and lance in front of the English at the Battle of Hastings.

Medieval and Tudor jesters broadly fell into two categories: natural or innocent fools, who were individuals with a learning disability; and artificial fools who, astute and educated, put on an act for professional comedic effect. The former had courtly keepers to look after them, and their royal patrons often seem to have been genuinely fond of them.

An innocent called Sexton, one of many Tudor court fools, was gifted to Henry VIII by Cardinal Wolsey when the cleric was trying to get back into the king’s favour. Sexton had keepers to take care of his every need from food and ‘posset ale’ (spiced milk curdled with ale) to new clothes in time for Christmas 1529, including worsted doublet and hose lined with sarcenet (soft silk) as well as a wig, all amounting to well over £5. Most court fools wore the attire of favoured retainers rather than multicoloured motley with hood and bells, which was a costume more associated with traditions of amateur ‘fool societies’ (particularly popular in France) and literature.

[...]

While actors like William Kempe and Robert Armin made their names in fool parts created for the stage by William Shakespeare, a few individuals still made a mark in the tradition of court fools. One such was Jeffery Hudson, a handsome, perfectly proportioned “rarity of nature” who stopped growing at around three feet tall and literally burst onto the royal scene when he jumped out of a pie presented by the Duke of Buckingham to King Charles I and Queen Henrietta Maria at a banquet. (Read more.)

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"An Inspiring Read"

A lovely review from lovely Suzanne at Lear, Kent, Fool:

Whoever you are, wherever your people came from, and whatever you enjoy doing with your free time, I don’t hesitate for a moment to recommend purchasing Elena Maria Vidal’s latest historical fiction novel The Paradise Tree.

The book begins in mid-19th century Ireland around the time of the Great Famine, a time in Ireland when Irish Catholics were discriminated against and persecuted by British landowners and occupiers. Main character Daniel O’Connor (who is based upon the stories and descriptions of Vidal’s own great-great-great-grandfather) strikes off for a new and better life in the New World.

And, it is better — well, at least, Daniel O’Connor and his bride, Brigit, don’t ever again know in Ontario, Canada, the pains of starvation they knew too well in Ireland. But, no new home one may find for one’s self and one’s family is ever exactly Eden, of course. And, no one’s family life is perfect and without strain, loss, or seasons of deep sadness. No man’s work is free of difficulty in this hard, fallen world. And, it seems, no culture or society is without its own forms of bigotry.

Despite their tribulations throughout the years, the O’Connors’ family (a vibrant, large family of 11 children) is one which is primarily shaped and formed by deep and abiding religious faith, married love, family tenderness and fidelity. As well as a good deal of enjoyable Irish wit and wisdom, with a touch of fascinating “mystical” Irish folklore. Vidal’s description of Irish immigrant life brings deeper understanding of the background and experiences of my countless delightful and much-loved friends of Irish heritage.

For me the quality of a book depends a great deal upon having likable, relatable characters. The Paradise Tree is filled with deeply likable characters about whom the reader comes to care very much, and desires to know better…and personally. It also has a few richly described dastardly characters.

I can say from a personal perspective that this book is an inspiring read for those beginning their own families who desire to know just how Catholic families in generations past kept and handed down the Faith to their children and their children’s children.

Above all, the O’Connor story is of re-birth, carrying on and going forward in hope for the future with a faith that sustains. (Read more.)

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The Origin of the Word “Dude”

 From The Art of Manliness:

Thanks to tireless research by two etymologists, we know the exact date the word dude was coined. Robert Sale Hill published a poem in The New York World on January 14, 1883, describing a type of foppish young man living in cities. These young men were overly fastidious about their clothing, professed an interest in avant-garde art, and smoked tiny cigarettes. They were the 19th-century version of the 21st-century hipster. And like the hipsters of the 2010s, the dandies of the 1880s were a trope that the public loved to lampoon.

In the poem that Robert Sale Hill published, he called these fops “dudes.” Etymologists Barry Popik and Gerald Cohen theorize that Hill derived the word “dude” from “doodle,” as in “Yankee Doodle Dandy.” The original New England Yankee Doodle, Cohen notes, “was the country bumpkin who stuck a feather in his cap and called it macaroni; i.e., by sticking a feather in his cap, he imagined himself to be fashionable like the young men of his day known as ‘macaronis.'” (Read more.)

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The Cultural History of ‘The Addams Family’

 From 2019 in Smithsonian:

In the summer of 1938, a determined salesman dropped in on a haunted mansion to peddle his “vibrationless, noiseless” vacuum doubling as both a “great time and a back saver” that “no well-appointed home should without.” It was a single-panel cartoon on page nine of The New Yorker fetching the author a tidy $85 sum. It introduced the world to an unnamed brood that will, once again, be returning to the big screen on Friday.

Mysterious and spooky and all together ooky, the Addams Family is back, this time as an animated big screen version to deliver Halloween frights for young fans meeting them anew and for old-timers who remember the original cartoons hatched in the twisted mind of artist Charles Addams. Throughout their various iterations, the family has cemented itself in the mausoleum of pop horror culture history, which to some degree is strange within itself. Unlike Dracula, Frankenstein, the Wolfman, or any of the machete-wielding madmen at the multiplex, the Addamses have been both surprisingly difficult to forget but equally challenging to bring back to life. How exactly did they find themselves in this kooky situation? Let’s fire up the Packard V-12 hearse and take a spin down Memory (0001 Cemetery) Lane...(Read more.)

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P.J. O’Rourke: Greatest Satirist and Coolest Conservative

 From John Podhoretz at the New York Post:

P.J. O’Rourke, who has died at the age of 74, once hosted a small New Year’s party at his apartment in Washington. The year was 1990. He’d just returned from Germany, where he had covered the fall of the Berlin Wall. I expressed my sorrow that I hadn’t been there to see it. He went into his bedroom and returned with a small tin of mints. He’d emptied it — and he’d put a shard of the wall he’d pickaxed himself with his own hands inside it.

“Happy New Year,” he said.

That was P.J. Though he and I liked each other, we weren’t intimates. And yet he gave me something of inestimable value just because he could. P.J. O’Rourke was maybe the nicest person I’ve ever known, which is an interesting thing to say about a man who made his name and his reputation as a take-no-prisoners cynical wit and observer of political foibles. His passing after a short illness is devastating, not only because it robs us of his gimlet eye but because it reduces the store of kindness in the world, which is more precious than rubies. (Read more.)

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Christmas Pudding

All you need to know. (Via Stephanie Mann,)

 Few foods can trace their history back through multiple centuries. Plum pudding stands out as one of those few. It began in Roman times as a pottage, a meat and vegetable concoction prepared in a large cauldron. Dried fruits, sugar and spices might be added to the mix as well.

Another ancestor to the plum pudding, porridge or frumenty appeared in the fourteenth century. A soup-like fasting dish containing meats, raisins, currants, prunes, wine and spices, it was eaten before the Christmas celebrations began. By the fifteenth century, plum pottage a soupy mix of meat, vegetables and fruit was served to start a meal.

As the seventeenth century opened, frumenty evolved into a plum pudding. Thickened with eggs, breadcrumbs, and dried fruit, the addition of beer and spirits gave it more flavor and increased its shelf life. Variants were made with white meat, though gradually the meat was omitted and replaced by suet. The root vegetables also disappeared. By 1650, the plum pudding had transformed from a main dish to a dessert, the customary one served at Christmas. Not long afterward though, plum pudding was banned by Oliver Cromwell because he believed the ritual of flaming the pudding harked back to pagan celebrations of the winter solstice.

George I, sometime called the Pudding King revived the dish in 1714 when he requested that plum pudding be served as part of his royal feast to celebrate his first Christmas in England. Subsequently it became entrenched as part of traditional holiday celebrations, taking its final form of cannon-ball of flour, fruits, suet, sugar and spices, all topped with holly in the 1830’s. In 1858 it was first dubbed the Christmas Pudding, recorded as such in Anthony Trollope's Doctore Thorne.  (Read entire post.)

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There’s Something About Brandon

 From John Zmirak at American Greatness:

In the spirit of Dave Chapelle cutting through the cant, defying his LGBTQMYNAMEISLEGION critics, Brandon zeroes in on the truth. The phony media spin on that NASCAR chant is exactly, exquisitely our current moment. It nails the vast, yawning gap that separates the Bidenist fantasy world from the real one we’re living in.

As prices shoot up and store shelves empty, half of Haiti somehow appears on the Rio Grande, and China prepares its next war of conquest, our elite fritters and squanders America’s legacy. People who’ve been triple-vaccinated cower in fear of those of us who won’t take it—wait, shouldn’t they be the ones feeling safe? But cower they will, and I say we should pretend to sneeze on such people. Maybe those groundhogs will go back into their homes for another six months.

We’re sick to death of an insanely overhyped pandemic, which blue-state governors turned really deadly by using COVID as euthanasia in nursing homes. We don’t trust big pharma companies that lied to us about using aborted baby parts. Or weird little creepy dictators like Fauci who try telling us in their Bugs Bunny voices whether or not to celebrate Christmas. And about whom Disney makes a fawning biopic, casting Fauci as an epic hero, which 91 percent of “professional” movie critics praise compared to . . . 4 percent of actual audience members. (By the way, that page with viewer comments is now mysteriously down.) (Read more.)

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Homegrown Tradism

 From The American Mind:

The Great Reset began in earnest this month with the Great Reveal, as the emboldened elites unfurled their blueprints for our coming re-education centers. George W. Bush got so excited about his new position as Assistant (to the) Gulag Commissar that he mixed up his job acceptance speech with his 9/11 memorial speech. I should tell him about the time my dad got his car keyed because he had a “W” sticker on the bumper.

“Domestic extremists” are the main threat to the homeland, they tell us. “White supremacists” are the real terrorists. Meanwhile the non-extreme experts in charge of the planet just obliterated seven toddlers at their home in Kabul, but that was fine, since state-sanctioned child murder is, well, state-sanctioned.

The Regime’s definition of “domestic extremist” is expanding rapidly. Their list of threats now includes anyone who chooses to wait on a Covid vaccine or doesn’t want their healthy teenage son to risk myocarditis. It includes dangers to the homeland like asthmatic toddlers on airplanes and anyone who doesn’t wish to construct a 10-unit apartment building in their backyard to house needy Afghans and their pregnant 11-year-old brides.

(Don’t worry, these guys spit cook their goats so they won’t touch your Traeger, you bigot.)

As I typed this the Regime was ringing the Capitol with fencing and stocky stormtroopers—again—to prevent “attacks” from “violent right-wing extremists.” The only people who showed up were reporters, Antifa losers, and CIA spies laughably costumed as white supremacists.

You thought a “homegrown terror” was the preschooler who smashed your new TV when he tried to get his Buzz Lightyear toy to fly?

You thought a “sleeper cell” was the darkened bedroom your teenager creates to doze through her alarm?

Time for her to wake up.

They could drone strike a thousand orphanages in Asia and a million preschools in Afghanistan and the calculus would not change: you, friend, are the bad guy. (Read more.)

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Carole Lombard’s Divine Lunacy

One of the last photos of Carole Lombard before her sudden death

From The Criterion Collection:

Carole Lombard wasn’t a suits type. A clothes horse but not a mannequin, she was a study in paradox. She looked best in (first Travis Banton’s then) Irene’s slithery boudoirish satin gowns and negligees . . . and shorts, the swan undermined and complemented by the jock, the cutup making mincemeat of the dreamgirl, the siren embracing clunky character names like Hazel Flagg and Ann Krausheimer. You feel she never tries to protect herself, insist on showing her best profile. In evening clothes and with key lighting, she’s a knockout, but she’s just as mesmerizing in shorts and boots, flycasting in a fishless pond.

Though she could hold her own in tearjerker territory, Lombard practically invented screwball comedy, or at least shaped its contours. She arrived at the majors from the try-anything Mack Sennett studio, what she called “the most delightful madhouse imaginable.” A natural athlete, she’d been spotted playing baseball by Allan Dwan. She’d actually had her first part at age twelve, but didn’t really sign on until 1925 with Fox Films. She was fielded in the usual smorgasbord of comedies and westerns, but in one of those setbacks with a silver lining, a car accident left a scar on her face, thus thwarting (actually only delaying) her career as a Hollywood dazzler. Mack Sennett didn’t give a damn about facial scars, but he did care about curvaceous bathing beauties who could also indulge in the wildest tomfoolery. By Lombard’s own account, Sennett’s boot camp was the greatest preparation she could have had, a liberating free-for-all that prepared her for the divine silliness of her screwball heroines.

Already something of a contradiction—a well-bred young lady whose background was belied by notoriously blunt talk and salty language—she was a perfect fit for the Sennett MO, which “exposed the sham of pretension, it exploded the petty hypocrisies of people in high places, it flung pies at false dignity,” as she later put it. Her shameless pursuit of William Powell in My Man Godfrey has its roots in Sennett comedies, where she often played a boy-crazy girl.

She was also a perfect fit for the thirties, when verbal acrobatics and fast-talking heroines had displaced the sultry divas of the twenties, that decade of postwar libertinism, contraband booze, flappers, and suffragettes, when movies were as racy as they would ever be, or at least until the sixties when censorship faded. The Depression and the Hays Office ushered in a new conservatism—marriage was sacrosanct, women’s true vocation was wife and mother. The advent of sound had lured some of the wittiest of East Coast writers to Hollywood. Men like Ben Hecht, Robert Riskin, Morrie Ryskind, with wise-guy newspaper or Broadway experience, would circumvent the new prohibitions with delicious innuendo and some of the wittiest dialogue ever to grace the screen. The sexually explicit became sensually implicit, and as avatar mouthpieces for this often rapid-fire dialogue, actors with Voices and razor-sharp timing were in the ascendance.

Lombard was getting her footing in pre-Code movies and is quite believable as a prostitute (no euphemisms used) in Virtue, a proletarian never-trust-a-dame melodrama with Pat O’Brien as her taxi-driver husband. Misunderstandings and a false imprisonment ensue until the movie concludes not with the usual kiss and fadeout of romantic comedy but with a perfect Lombard ending: the exonerated fallen woman pumping gas at a filling station recently acquired by the couple. 

The comedy that propelled not only Lombard but Hollywood itself out of the Sturm und Drang of melodrama and into the inspired silliness of the screwball comedy was Howard Hawks’s Twentieth Century. That grand showcase in which two hams—Lombard’s lingerie model turned actress and John Barrymore’s Svengali director—go at each other with relentless comic savagery was remarkable for, among other things, the sheer nonstop physicality of Lombard herself. The scissor kicks she levels at the egomaniacal Barrymore in a train compartment were the opening volley of no-holds-barred intramural warfare. Lombard serves notice: from here on in, the screwball heroine would give as good as she got. (Read more.)

This heart-wrenching book about Carole Lombard's tragic demise is worth reading. I listened to it on Audible.

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Deep Thoughts About the Coronavirus Pandemic

From P.J. O'Rourke at American Consequences:

Another pernicious result of sheltering in place is that we’re all spending far too much “screen time.” This can have a bad effect on in-person communication. For example, my 16-year-old son told me about a classmate of his who, at the dinner table with his parents, blurted out, “Have you noticed how much the basement where Joe Biden is doing his campaign videos looks like the set for an amateur porn movie?” 

Mom: [Tuna casserole spit take] 

And the kid’s dad did not improve the dinner table atmosphere by saying, “Nonsense, son. Amateur porn sets hardly ever have an American flag in the background.” 

On the upside… Many of us may discover that we look better in a face mask. I do. Maybe strict Muslims are onto something here. Perhaps this is the secret to the burka. Although they really ought to use it on the guys. 

And I’m thinking that for many guys this could be beneficial to their online dating experience. There are beautiful women out there seeking an attractive match, and maybe they’ll start going, “Oooo… look… He’s got a N95 mask! Swipe right!” 

With the use of Zoom, we could go beyond online dating. We could achieve online marriage, which would have certain advantages, such as “Internet in-laws.” Spam-block that brother-in-law! (Read more.)

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Classic Cartoons and Cultural Literacy

Rabbit of Saville is my favorite. From Intellectual Takeout:

I recently picked up Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court for the first time. Finding the plot rather amusing, I began relaying it to my father over the weekend. Because he had never read the book, I was rather surprised when he began asking informed questions about the story. In no time at all, he was the one schooling me on plot elements I had not yet reached.

“Wait a minute,” I asked. “Are you sure you’ve never read this book?”

“No, never have,” he replied, “but I saw a cartoon version of the story when I was younger and everything I know comes from that.” His revelation was intriguing, and to be honest, not the first of its kind. Like many in the Boomer generation, my father grew up watching classic cartoons, numbers of which were produced by the likes of Warner Bros. But those cartoons did more than mind-numbingly entertain a generation of children. They also introduced millions of young people to key facets of cultural literacy, particularly in the realm of literature and music.

Beyond the aforementioned case of Mark Twain’s novel, these cartoons introduced children to stories such as Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde through the medium of Bugs Bunny. Key quotations and scenes from William Shakespeare’s works were the main theme in a Goofy Gophers cartoon known as A Ham in a Role. And Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s epic poem The Song of Hiawatha was placed front and center in a Walt Disney short called Little Hiawatha.

Perhaps even more famous than the literature references are the many ways in which cartoons introduced children to the world of classical music, including both instrumental and operatic selections, one of which is the famous Rabbit of Saville. American film critic Leonard Maltin describes the situation well:

“An enormous amount of my musical education came at the hands of [Warner Bros. composer] Carl Stalling, only I didn’t realize it, I wasn’t aware, it just seeped into my brain all those years I was watching Warner’s cartoons day after day after day. I learned Liszt’s Second Hungarian Rhapsody because of the Warner Bros. cartoons, they used it so often, famously when Friz Freleng had a skyscraper built to it in Rhapsody and Rivets.”

But Maltin wasn’t the only one learning from these classical music forays. In fact, as the famous pianist Lang Lang testifies, it was Tom and Jerry’s rendition of Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody in The Cat Concerto which first inspired him to start piano at age two. (Read more.)

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Freedom’s Flaw in “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel”

I watched one episode of "Mrs. Maisel" and found it vulgar and crude with anti-Semitic overtones. From The Imaginative Conservative:

But: the comic, as comic, cannot be afraid to say or to joke about anything. Of particular delight and constantly in the comedian’s crosshairs is the Sacred. The family and its secrets, from the noises your mother makes in bed to the mundanity of your father’s prized career, as well as religion, marriage, and even one’s own children are where the true booty of comics is buried—waiting to be dug up and paraded for the world to see. “She’s a comedian: they humiliate their families on stage, that’s their job,” her father tries to explain to a mock tribunal in defense of his cushy and obviously trivial, but nonetheless covert government research position after Miriam reveals harmless but ludicrously classified information on stage. What begins as a cathartic opportunity for Miriam to aim a well-deserved snowball at the eye of the overbearing and often oppressive society around her at the outset has, by the end of the show’s second season, steadily built into an avalanche that threatens to devastate everyone and everything in Miriam’s path, not pausing even for her mother’s sanity, her father’s career, her children’s upbringing, or Joel’s newfound commitment to salvaging what is left of a teetering relationship. In the final moments of the finale of the second season Miriam is finally confronted with the possibility that the consequence of being The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel—with her insatiable desire for the spotlight, the liberating power of the microphone, and the wild adoration of the audience—threatens to send Miriam into unconstrained freefall and bring about freedom’s furthest extreme—the tyrant’s freedom of being totally and utterly alone. (Read more.)

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Make America Smoke Again

From Spectator USA:

The number of American adults who smoke has fallen to the lowest level ever recorded, a mere third of what it was 70 years ago. Decades of aggressive public health campaigns and advertising bans are responsible for this remarkable decline. As norms and mores changed, smoking became situated somewhere between bear baiting and regularly dining at Cracker Barrel as a form of utterly deviant behavior. 

Those who continue to smoke belong to the struggle towns and junklands of Middle America. They are usually adult men without much of an education, living below the poverty line; they are the very backbone of Trumpism. Of course during the golden age of American smoking in the years after World War II, Marlboro men were just as easily found in Madison Avenue and Wall Street as they were in Texas Hill Country or Youngstown. Smoking – before its deleterious effects on health were properly known – was a truly egalitarian practice that bound the country together as much as compulsory civics education ever did. Big Tobacco even played a surprising and largely forgotten role in the emancipation of women in the 20th century. (Read more.)

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Women of the Right

From The Federalist:

The women of the Right are allowed to believe things that the women of the Left are not. They are allowed to believe there is a difference between women and men, female and male, and that those differences are real, not a false cultural construct imposed by a self-interested, manipulative patriarchy. Unlike Gloria Steinem, they can express their femininity in any way they choose to, without fear of being accused of a calumnization of the sisterhood.

Even more, women of the Right are allowed to accept obvious things rather than engage in exhausting psychic gymnastics to get to a place that is politically correct, while preposterous. If a thug murders a pregnant woman, he should be charged with two murders, not just one, and women of the Right feel no compulsion to weary themselves by filing amicus briefs on behalf of the murderer to nullify the second killing because the unborn baby does not qualify as human life.

Even further, they have no difficulty with the notion that the woman in question had every right to effectuate her own protection, if she chose, with whatever weapon she preferred to use, for the easily understood and non-controversial purpose of blowing the thug away before he could murder her and her baby. It’s not tiring to get to that conclusion; it’s tiring to get to the opposite one.

They are allowed to love their gay friends and want all good things for them, but still believe it’s a bad idea to start redefining marriage without being labeled a bigot by those same friends, and that, too, removes a burden. They are allowed to go through life treating people—all people—with dignity, respect, and friendship, and not be concerned about being called racist, even if they are called racist, because they know they are not. (Read more.)

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Pumpkin Spice Pull-apart Bread

From Hummingbird High:

When I worked in corporate, I've never been the kind of person who glorified being busy. I always tried to work smarter, trying (but not always succeeding) to contain all my work within the 8-hour-day/40-hour-work-week. Because let me be honest with you: the work I did, which was hard and boring and consisted of me and my team moving data from one database to another in faster and more efficient ways, was NOT saving anybody's life. To me, it was always more important that me and my team members went home to get well-rested and motivated for the next day.

So I was especially excited to find myself home after all my work travels with a calendar completely clear and free of any commitments for the week. Blank calendars excite me; it's almost as if I've been given permission to tackle a time-consuming baking project like this incredibly delicious pumpkin pull-apart bread. (Read more.)

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Chemists and Apothecaries

From All Things Georgian:

We have looked at trade cards on a couple of previous occasions and it appears that many of our readers like them as much as we do. So, today we’re going to look at a specific trade – that of a druggist or chymist....This one tells us little about who Beavan was, but we do know that his company took over the business from Paytherus, Savory and company who also owned a warehouse on Bond Street, London and who were involved from 1793, in the production of Cheltenham Salts. Beavan’s was certainly trading under its new name from 1818 onwards according to the newspapers and we see this advert below for one of their products in 1832. (Read more.)

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Why Kids R Commies

From P.J O'Rourke at American Consequences:

The opinion polls agree…

In a Pew Research Center study of Americans age 22-37, 57% called themselves “mostly” or “consistently” liberal. In a Gallup poll of Americans age 18-29, 51% had a positive view of socialism. And in a University of Chicago survey of Americans age 18-34, 44% said they would prefer to live in a socialist country. “Mostly” or “consistently” liberal may not be enough for young voters. Ten-term incumbent congressmen Michael Capuano (D-MA) and Joe Crowley (D-NY) are as mostly consistently liberal as they come. And they were kicked to the curb in Democratic primaries by leftist “progressives” Ayanna Pressley and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, respectively.

What’s the matter with kids today?

Nothing new. The brats, the squirts, the fuzz-faced mooncalves, the sap-green sweet young things, and the wet-behind-the-ears in general have always been “Punks for Progressives.” As soon as kids discover that the world isn’t nice, they want to make it nicer. And wouldn’t a world where everybody shares everything be nice? Aw… Kids are so tender-hearted.

Kids are broke – so they want to make the world nicer with your money.

But kids are broke – so they want to make the world nicer with your money. Kids don’t have much control over things – so they want to make the world nicer through your efforts. And kids are busy being young – so it’s your time that has to be spent making the world nicer…

For them. (Read more.)

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Life Lesson

From P.J. O'Rourke at American Consequences:

What I had was a skin cancer, squamous cell carcinoma. Practically every melanin-deficient (let alone Irish) person who spends time in the sun gets this if he or she lives long enough. The oncologist said, “I call it ‘adult acne’ when it turns up on the face or arms.” But it occasionally turns up where it turned up on me. And why is something of a medical mystery. I mean, I was naked a lot in the 1960s, but not that naked.

Even though I had an undignified kind of cancer, there was still a loss of dignity involved in trading the awe-inspiring fear of death for the perspiration-inducing fear of treatment. There is hell on earth as well as hell in the afterlife. Until a generation ago, the remedy for anal cancer was a colostomy. Doctors have gotten over that. Most of the time. Now the remedy is radiation and chemotherapy. Would I have to go to some purgatorial place for this? To Sloan Kettering in New York, a city I detest? Or out to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, although I have a phobia about hospitals named after sandwich toppings? “No,” the oncologist said. “The treatment protocol is standardized and is successfully used everywhere.”

I named my local New Hampshire hospital (and large animal veterinary clinic). “Almost everywhere,” the oncologist said. I asked about the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, 90 miles from my home but still on the planet New Hampshire. Dr. Marc Pipas at Dartmouth-Hitchcock’s Norris Cotton Cancer Center came strongly recommended.

Dr. Pipas is an avid bird hunter and an advocate of reintroducing the prairie chicken to the eastern seaboard. So he and I had something to talk about in addition to my behind. I’d need radiation therapy every day for six weeks. (Every day, that is, Monday through Friday – the radiology department has to play golf, too.) And I would undergo two four-day stints of around-the-clock chemotherapy, carrying a fanny pack of poisonous chemicals to be pumped into my body through a surgically implanted mediport. (Dr. Pipas persuaded the infusions department to install this on the left side of my chest so that it wouldn’t interfere with mounting a shotgun.)

In theory I could get my radiation treatments elsewhere, within easy commuting distance. But it’s worthwhile to find out what a doctor himself would do if he had your medical problem. And he probably thinks he does. Several doctor friends have told me you can’t get through medical school without being convinced that you have every disease in the textbooks, including elephantiasis, beriberi, and Guinea worm infestation.

Dr. Pipas said, for anal cancer, he’d go to radiologist Dr. Bassem Zaki at Dartmouth-Hitchcock’s Norris Cotton Cancer Center. Dr. Zaki is a Coptic Christian who emigrated from Egypt in his late teens. He and I talked about Middle Eastern politics, which, as far as I’m concerned, is the second most interesting blood sport after upland-game shooting. (Read more.)

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Anti-Trumpers Need to Get Out More

Yep. From Townhall:

It’s an important lesson. With the election of Donald Trump many liberals have dumped parents, siblings, friends and colleagues for the sole reason that they supported Trump. It’s horrible and hurtful and unfair. It’s really deplorable. And the dumping didn’t happen after a sober, civil, considered conversation or debate. It’s a summary judgement. I recently met a lovely man in Northern California, whose grown children haven't spoken to him in over a year. He writes, sends messages of love and concern and his adult daughters won’t write back. They didn't even have a fight, they just stopped talking to him. He is heartbroken. 

It’s happened to me. I wasn’t even a full-on Trump supporter when an Italian friend who I had shared an apartment with 30 years ago sent me a message out of the blue telling me we were done, she couldn't be friends with me anymore because of Trump. Apparently I had posted something on Facebook that was not sufficiently anti-Trump and she didn’t want a discussion, she was done. She's not the only one. (Read more.)

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The Perfect Mom?

From Making Her Mama:

People do judge us, though not usually as harshly as we judge ourselves.  In today’s culture, we are obsessed with perfection and it holds us to a level that isn’t realistic; with our bodies, in our homes, for our children.  We want to be the perfect mom, but this goal can be really overwhelming and isolating. And then you add in all the mom bashing that happens online, behind closed doors, and even face to face. It’s easy to feel like everyone is just doing better;  that others have it all figured out….and maybe there are some moms that do.

But, I’m not one of them.  I am not a perfect mom.

In my teen years, many people called me a baby whisperer.  I could calm any crying child and put kids to sleep without even blinking an eye.  And then I had my own children. Without strings attached, anyone can walk in and do something effortlessly for several minutes or even hours.  It’s a lot harder to do it day in and day out; especially when you aren’t sleeping well (or at all)!

If I’ve ever looked at your circumstances and thought to myself that I could do it better, I’m sorry.

I have run a daycare in my home and cared for multiple children on a daily basis.  I LOVED this job, it was busy, fun, crazy and great for my kids.  It made me want to fill up my house with little feet all belonging to me.

But, until I had 2 children of my own close together in age, I didn’t understand the demands on a mother of having little ones all the time.

I love them dearly and I am so grateful that I get to stay home and raise my children.  However, I apologize to you because I really didn’t understand before just how demanding and physically tiring it can be.  It’s a job that leaves all hope of being a perfect mom in the dust. (Read more.)

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