The Nine Days’ Queen

A few days ago, I stumbled across Suicide Blonde. It’s a blog that mostly features photographs, generally of pretty women, but also arty and\or kitschy pictures, too. I subscribed to their RSS feed, and got this in my inbox yesterday:

execution_lady_jane_grey

It’s a painting called The Execution of Lady Jane Grey by Paul Delaroche, and it made me think of the gigantic mess that Henry VIII left in his wake.

Henry VIII came to the throne with plans. Plans to reinvent the Royal Navy. Plans to take power away from the nobles and give it to the King and Parliament. Plans to introduce progressive and efficient taxation. Plans to unify England and Wales. Plans to be a patron of the arts and architecture. It’s somewhat ironic that Henry’s main plan, the thing he thought about almost constantly – securing the future of the Tudor dynasty – nearly failed so horribly.

Henry died on January 28, 1547, leaving firm plans that his son Edward, from his third marriage to Jane Seymour, should be king. There was just one problem: Edward was only nine years old when his father died, so a Regency Council was created to rule in his stead until he reached adulthood. Thus, Edward was crowned King Edward VI of England on February 20 1547, and his Regency Council was led by by his uncle, Edward Seymour.

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Ft. Worth “Wins”

One of the neat things about being an Anglican in the United States is that you get a free legal education with your faith!

Take the case of the Diocese of Ft. Worth, Texas. It was created in 1983 after it was decided that the Diocese of Dallas had become too large. Because the Diocese of Ft. Worth is a legal instrument, papers of incorporation were drawn up and signed, a bishop appointed and a board of trustees selected to run “the Diocese of Ft. Worth, a legal corporation”.

However, the conservative diocese, led by Bishop Jack Iker, voted on November 15, 2008 to leave The Episcopal Church and come under the jurisdiction of the province of Anglican Church of the Southern Cone (which covers Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Paraguay, Peru and Uruguay).

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Is that you, Sweeney Todd?

From our Russian friends:

MOSCOW (Reuters) – Russian police have arrested three homeless people suspected of eating a 25-year-old man they had butchered and selling other bits of the corpse to a local kebab house.

Suspicions were raised when dismembered parts of a human body were found near a bus stop in the outskirts of the Russian city of Perm, 1,150 km (720 miles) east of Moscow.

Three homeless men with previous criminal records have been arrested on suspicion of setting upon a foe with knives and a hammer before chopping up his corpse to eat, local investigators said in a statement on their www.susk.perm.ru Web site.

“After carrying out the crime, the corpse was divided up: part was eaten and part was also sold to a kiosk selling kebabs and pies,” the Prosecutor-General’s main investigative unit for the Perm region said in a statement issued Friday.

It was not immediately clear from the statement if any of the corpse had been sold to customers.

Nice.

At least they didn’t make bears play ice hockey.

Russians are weird.

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2009-11-15

  • AP Top 25: "7) Georgia Tech" Woot! #
  • After searching for this one Blondie song for 5 years… I found out that it's actually a Kim Wilde song. Ooops! #
  • Woo-hoo!! Bring on the Bungles, baby! #
  • Let's go, Virginia! Time to execute John Allen Muhammad!! #
  • "The prettiest girl in a John Hughes film was Gina Gershon". Discuss. #
  • "Did you f**k my mom? Did you f**k my mom, Santa?" Ahhh – Charlie Kelly, you comedic genius! #
  • @MicrosoftHelps Is there any way someone could look at http://tinyurl.com/ybk49qd This issue is driving me crazy! Thanks! #
  • "The courage of your weenie" – an actual subject line from an email in a client's spam folder. #
  • Actual headline from the UK: "Slaughterman executed mother with bolt gun in front of her daughters after she snubbed him on Facebook " #
  • GO JACKETS! 10-1 and ACC Coastal champs! #

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Quote of the Day

“Technology is a glittering lure, but there’s the rare occasion where the public can be engaged in a level beyond flash… if they have a sentimental bond with the product. My first job, I was in-house at a fur company with this old pro copywriter, a Greek named Teddy. And Teddy told me the most important idea in advertising is ‘new’. It creates an itch. You simply put your product in there as a kind of calamine lotion. He also talked about a deeper bond with the product: nostalgia. It’s delicate, but potent. Teddy told me that in Greek, ‘nostalgia’ literally means ‘the pain from an old wound’. It’s a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone. This device isn’t a spaceship, it’s a time machine. It goes backwards, and forwards… it takes us to a place where we ache to go again. It’s not called ‘The Wheel’, it’s called ‘The Carousel’. It lets us travel the way a child travels – around and around, and back home again, to a place where we know we are loved.”

– Jon Hamm as Don Draper
Mad Men, “The Wheel”

The Lost Persian Army

Legend has it that Cambyses II – son of Cyrus the Great, the founder of the Persian Empire – sent a massive army to Egypt in 525BC. Also according to legend, the army was swallowed up by a sandstorm and never seen again.

The legend was first documented by Greek historian Herodotus, and most archaeologists dismissed it as fantasy. Others, convinced that the story was based in fact, searched for the army’s remains over the centuries (past searchers included Count László Almásy, the historical figure upon which the novel The English Patient was based).

But it seems that Angelo and Alfredo Castiglioni, a pair of Italian twins, just might have found it. The two have found hundreds of skeletons, dozens of water pitcher fragments, several bronze daggers, and several arrow tips near the legendary Oasis of Siwa. The men found the items near a rock formation 114 feet long a 6 feet high – the perfect shelter from a sandstorm and the only such rock over a wide area.

Lost Persian Army

You can read more about it at the Daily Mail’s site here. I recommend it – it’s a worthy read!