Have you no sense of decency, ma’am, at long last?

A German COVID-denier (hard to believe such things exist anymore) decided to present herself as bravely defying the government by standing on a stage and claiming to be just like Sophie Scholl, which kind of takes one’s breath away as an appalling act of hubris. A security guard at the event is so disgusted at the way she’s trivializing the Holocaust that he publicly quits on the spot.

Watch to the end. The best part is when the young woman is so embarrassed that she throws her microphone down and storms off the stage.

Be like that security guard. Don’t be like Jana from Kasse.

Huh. I guess I am a big ol’ prude

You probably are, too. People apparently had a different attitude towards nudity and public sexual displays in the medieval era, at least as revealed by divorce records, where one of the few ways a woman could get an annulment of a marriage was to prove her husband was impotent. With witnesses. Which seem to have been surprisingly easy to get.

In the year 1370, Tedia Lambhird filed for divorce from John Saundirson, claiming that her husband was impotent. Next, she had to prove it. Fortunately for Tedia, she had eyewitnesses.

One key witness, Thomas son of Stephen, testified in church court that he had seen the couple unsuccessfully attempting to have sex in John’s father’s barn before 9 o’clock one springtime morning. In spite of the fact that John and Tedia were “applying themselves with zeal to the work of carnal intercourse,” Thomas reported that he saw “John’s rod was lowered and in no way rising or becoming erect.” Furthermore, Thomas claimed that John’s brother also witnessed the failed sexual encounter, adding that the brother stroked John’s penis with his hand in order to see if he could help.

So to summarize: John Saundirson not only tried (and failed) to have early-morning barn-sex with his wife before an audience of two men but also received ineffective manual penis stimulation from his own brother. Thanks to Thomas’s devastating testimony, Tedia won her case.

Uh, kinky? I have no idea how common this kind of behavior was — maybe John and Tedia were swingers, atypical for the time. Or maybe we modern people are the weirdos, with our fetish for privacy and the wealth to have houses with multiple rooms and doors, and no need to resort to our nearby hay pile in the barn. Go to a zoo and you’ll see that primates are generally not particularly shy.

I have to say, though, that some of the approaches taken would make me flee — there’s a degree of casual intimacy that makes me cringe deep down inside.

Often the witnesses in impotency cases were women, either married female acquaintances, widows, or local sex workers. They might be tasked by the court with inspecting the man’s genital equipment, or they might expose their breasts and genitals to the allegedly impotent man, give him ale and tasty snacks, kiss him, and rub his penis in a warm room to see whether he became aroused. But other times, these witnesses were men who looked on as the husband in question tried to have sex, or even lent a hand and stroked his penis themselves, reporting their findings to the court.

Impotence was a pressing concern for men and women in late medieval England. Multiple poems from the time feature women gathering in groups over copious amounts of alcohol and complaining about their impotent husbands, comparing their flaccid penises to maggots, snails and bumblebees. Other poems are voiced by the men themselves, who mourn their impotence and offer advice to others about preserving their virility. “All ye lovers take heed of me, for I was once as lusty as ye,” laments one poet.

I am repelled by all of that…except for the bit about bringing “ale and tasty snacks”. Ladies, I won’t object to that at all. Bring it on!

Wait, “bumblebees”? I don’t get that one.

Stay home. Please.

Have you read the news from Minnesota?

The daily scene at Regions is playing out in ICUs across Minnesota as the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 sweeps across the state. Open ICU beds were down to single digits in some parts of Minnesota last week, when Gov. Tim Walz ordered a four-week shutdown of bars, restaurants and entertainment and fitness establishments in hopes of slowing the virus’ spread to alleviate pressure on hospitals.

From Mercy Hospital in Coon Rapids to Rice Memorial Hospital in Willmar to Regions, ICU beds are filling as quickly as they are opening up. Statewide, 79% of available ICU beds are filled, and 26% filled with COVID-19 patients.

The state’s capacity of open ICU beds has declined about one percentage point per day the past two weeks — raising the probability that some of the 408 ICU surge beds might need to be activated in unused hospital and nursing home wings.

“There’s no beds anywhere,” said Dr. Matthew Klee, whose ICU at Mercy is full and under pressure to take patients throughout Minnesota and western Wisconsin. “It’s become like a game of chess over the entire state.”

More worrisome are the growing infections among health care workers who then can’t care for patients.

HealthPartners on Friday reported 308 workers absent due to COVID-19 infections and 414 who were quarantined due to viral exposures. Collectively, the Allina Health, CentraCare and Mayo Clinic systems reported more than 3,000 such absences last week.

Stay home. Stay home. Stay home. Stay home. Stay home. Stay home. Stay home. Stay home. Stay home.

You don’t need to go gallivanting off to visit family this weekend. Really, you don’t.

Funny-looking rocks are not fossils

Anyone remember Ed Conrad? I had a few encounters with him years and years ago. Now I found someone worse, a guy named Roger Spurr who runs a YouTube channel called “Mudfossil University”. It’s about as much a university as PragerU; it’s a dorkwad with stupid ideas promoting them without any critical evaluation, and what he believes is that natural rock formations and caves are actually the fossilized remains of giants. So I had to make a video about him.

Scriptish sort of thing below the fold.

[Read more…]

I get mail…from Autism Speaks

Yesterday, I got a letter from a charity in the mail — it was from Autism Speaks. It had me mystified me — why are they asking me for money, and most of all how did they think I’d be interested in their organization? I didn’t bother to open up, but just threw it in the trash.

So today I ran across this useful guide to autism organizations, and thought I’d share it, just in case they’re doing a large scale fundraising drive.

It’s almost as if we could learn from history!

I had no idea that there was any relevance in ancient and medieval history to current events, but the history of the antipopes is shockingly on point and surprisingly much more complicated than I imagined. I’ll cut to the chase here, but the whole post is fascinating.

So what can we learn from this? History is full of venal, self-interested rich guys who do not take no for an answer, and the thing is a lot of the time they actually get their way. People with weaker claims to the papal throne have in fact won when they managed to get other powerful people on their side. Moreover, “official” titles and lineages are not necessarily proof of moral worth. We should approach pontiffs on a case by case basis when we start making generalisations about Antipopes. The more you know about Urban VI and his election the more you can sympathise with trying for a do-over and fucking back off to Avignon.

In the grand scheme of things, however, whether or not we think of any particular Antipope as, well, an Antipope doesn’t really matter to them. What care do they have for us hundreds of years later and how we feel, when they were able to live out their days in luxury, writing screeds about how they were wronged.

There is a lesson here, as well as a warning. Rich dudes are not good at being told no. That can mean a number of things. It can been an amusing story in a blog six hundred years later, or it can mean a destabalisation process which feeds into military conflict. The difference is largely based on clout, but one should never assume that the powerful and rich who bestow such things do so because of procedure or some sort of nebulous concept of morality. They do so based on what it gives them. It is our job to make our feelings about that clear so that poor decisions are not made and retroactively forgiven. (*cough* Bush v. Gore)

I think I already knew that answer.

Are you into button porn?

Boy, do I have a page for you. Return to the late 20th century when the cutting edge of human interface design was buttons, lots of buttons, more buttons on everything, and modernity was all about slapping buttons on something.

I’m sorry, but I’m not into buttons at all. I once possessed a still — not that kind, the ones you used to make pure distilled water — and it may have been a thing of archaic beauty, with a gorgeous glass coil and a reservoir tank and multiple outlet valves, but it was entirely controlled by a bank of buttons. You had to initiate the process by firing up a boiler, and then you had to open up a set of valves in a specific order by pressing buttons in the correct sequence. In particular, there was a glowing red button that had to be pushed at the right time to start the process with a lot of hissing and bubbling, and you had to check regularly because if the boiler ran dry, it was bad. And if you pressed the buttons in the wrong order, you could, for instance, let the tubes get red hot before you flushed them with cooling water, and that would be very bad, because things could shatter and then you were out a few thousand dollars and your bench was going to get flooded with broken glass and boiling hot water and steam was going to spray out everywhere.

It looked very high tech, though, with a big gray sheet metal control panel studded with buttons and indicator lights. I kind of ruined it by taping sheets of paper with handwritten arrows and warnings in different sharpie colors all over it.

Buttons are kind of stupid, I decided. Give me smart control circuitry any day, especially with something as mechanically trivial as a still.

Anyway, the worst example of button porn at that link, I think, is this one.

Even in 1981, Byte was a dinosaur of a magazine, catering to that weird world of computer hobbyists who thought a good soldering iron was a practical tool for optimizing your gear (I know, I was one of them…but I got better). Did anyone stop to wonder where our future computer watch user was going to stow the microscope and tiny needle-like stylus they’d need to use that toy? Did they still think we’d do everything from the command line with little tiny spinning magnetized disks for storage?

I greatly appreciate that my phone has one button and gigabytes of solid state storage, and that I have access to more via a little USB port and wifi. I guess, though, that a thin black slab wouldn’t have been considered very magazine-cover sexy 40 years ago.

Creepy bobblehead farms gullible flock

How can normal human beings fall for Kenneth Copeland’s schtick? But they do,and this ranting twit makes millions of dollars, and sheesh, watch his audience clutch their baldspots.

Somebody make a video of Copeland “curing” impotence, or hemorrhoids.