That is awfully confusing, you have to admit.
It is also odd and confusing that the first president of the United States, and the great African-American that discovered all those uses for the peanut, have such similar names.
Not to mention how many people in Austro-Hungarian history have "Johann Nepomuk" as their first two names.
2: Yeah, but who cares about Australia?
My favorite part of history is when Ben Franklin Roosevelt flew the kite over Pearl Harbor to prove that lightning was really magnets.
They have a theology department at Heebie U? I don't mean to offend, but I wouldn't have expected that, really.
5: Wait, why does that surprise you?
Next you'll be telling me that the Harry Truman who nuked Japan isn't the same guy buried by Mount St. Helens. My sense of karmic comeuppance tells me otherwise.
Also, it's spelled "kitschy".
Shocked by the licentiousness of the catholic church, Martin Luther Vandross nailed his 95 beautiful, beautiful ladies in a giant round waterbed.
Couldn't your colleague have just explained that the civil rights leader was Martin Luther King Junior, and it was his father who did the whole Protestantism thing?
Even worse than the example in the OP, I knew a Canadian transfer student who failed his Appreciation of Jazz final exam, because he inadvertently converted everything to Kilometers Davis.
Oh wow, this whole thing is orders of magnitude more funny now that I remember what heebie U is.
10: yes, yes. The second turtle was metric.
the Lutheran religion
Are you *trying* to start a holy war?
I can't blame the student, really. I believed the same thing until I was six or seven.
#5. I'm just a little surprised that there's anything besides Theology Departments at Heebie U. ("decent church-goin' women, with their mean, pinched, bitter, evil facesCon")
6: why does that surprise you?
Mostly because Heebie has written a number of posts about how ... unprepared ... the student body is. That a high percentage of students are athletes, that a fair amount of remedial learning has to go on, etc. Realize, I don't know what Heebie's U is; I'd just steadily gotten the impression that it wasn't as much scholarly in its pursuits as it was just practical.
16: this being Texas, they might be into the whole religion thing.
15 crossed in the mail. Right, I forgot about the religion.
Anyhow, the real travesty is the failure of US History books to address Ben Franklin's successful founding of a five-and-dime chain that lasts to this very day.
You guys don't even want to know how long it took me to finally know once and for all that Mary Wollstonecraft is not the same as Mary (Wollstonecraft) Shelley.
19: And let's not forget the Franklin Mint.
Who the hell is Mary Wollstonecraft?
22: Sorry, dear. It's a feminism thing. Would you like to take a course about that?
Day one: Mary Wollstonecraft is not the same person as
Mary (Wollstonecraft) Shelley, who wrote Frankenstein. Moving along ....
23: <insert Franklin's Golem joke I can't think of here>
Ingmar Bergman was great in Casablanca, and I liked it when Brett Harte wrestled comedy out of pioneer legends like Hacksaw Jim Duggan and Ricky The Steamboat Willie.
24: Babe, can you give me a link to Standpipe's (other) blog while you're at it?
Wollstonecraft
Founder of the ubiquitous British bookstore chain. Or was it pubs?
27: I couldn't stand it, honey. Really. It's like a virus. Nobody knows the link to Standpipe's other blog, in any case.
Martin Luther King wasn't a Lutheran, which is a little weird.
30.last: Nobody knows the troubles I've seen.
Nobody knows the link to Standpipe's other blog
These three guys did, right? Priest, rabbi, uh, whatsisface walk into Standpipe's blog. Guy's like, "what's with all the turtles?"
Nobody wears an ermine cape with tights anymore. I don't understand why that look went out of style.
35: You can certainly still wear it if you're female, so there's that.
36: True, but no dude has been able to pull it off since, I don't know, Joe Namath.
37: Prince could probably pull it off. Probably Johnny Depp, though I think he'd think it was silly and impractical. I bet various hip-hop artists could trend that way, though the ermine itself might be a bit much.
the ermine itself might be a bit much
I realize that. I still think they'd be down.
It was one of Martin Luther King's fellow protestant schismatics who came up with the well-known spiritual, "Zwing-low, sweet chariot."
Rebelling against the idea of eating fish on Fridays, Luther was a staunch advocate of a steady diet of worms.
After being persecuted by the Holy Roman Empire, Luther ate some spinach and famously declared, "That's all I can stands. I can't stands no more."
On another occasion Luther observed that a merry fart never comes from a sad ass.
Melancthon Smith was the only person to participate in both the Reformation and the American Revolution.
There was a guy in my class at school who, when the teacher started talking about Martin Luther, stuck his hand up and asked "Eh, sir, wis he no the king of somewhere?"
8 is great.
Also, Shakespeare's second wife is certainly looking good for her age.
Nobody wears an ermine cape with tights anymore. I don't understand why that look went out of style.
Hey, come on, if theology could just get past all of that medieval shit it would be lots more appealing to the new generations!
Also, Shakespeare's second wife is certainly looking good for her age.
Second wife? Am I missing something?
24: I thought the first day of feminism class was all about that Hustler meat grinder thing.
50: no idea why I wrote "second". Confusion with his second best bed maybe? Anne Hathaway, anyway.
I'm pretty sure the first day of feminism class involves an explanation of the difference between sex and gender. So said a one-time roommate of mine who was teaching such a course. I should have taken her course, or at least looked at the syllabus, but I think I was pretty busy at the time.
Huh. The Unfogged timestamp is off by 13 minutes. I'd been wondering about that.
51: I had managed to not think about that image in the last 15 or so years. Still creepy and gruesome? Check.
(Please, Jesus, let's not get into a discussion about whether pornography exploits women. I don't like the image of anyone being put through a meatgrinder or, for that matter, a woodchipper. I'm looking at you, Joel & Ethan Coen.)
Both Tim Powers' _The Stress of her Regard_ and Jude Morgan's _Passion_ have at least one of the Wollstonecrafts in them and are good. The latter is more about this Wollstonecraft, as I remember.
or, for that matter, a woodchipper
Well, it happens. One of my mom's colleagues is famed among forensic pathologists for making a positive identification of a murder victim who'd been put through a woodchipper (this was in the days before forensic DNA analysis).
56 - Does Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley show up in The Stress of Her Regard? I guess she does! I mostly remember the Keats stuff. There's also Walter John Williams' "Wall, Stone, Craft", an alternate history in which famed novelist Mary Shelley meets (the non-clubfooted) George Gordon, hero of Waterloo.
There's also the great film about the Russian Revolution that was shot at Relativistic speeds.
If you watch the Russian Revolution at relativistic speeds does it shatter?
Was Sergei Eisenstein Albert's time-dilated twin?
60: I think everyone is just shorter.
61: That would explain the movie lengths. . .
It would be interesting if the reason the student was unsurprised by the ermine was that all he knew about King was that he was some famous black guy. The whole movie he would have been like "Oh, that is what he is famous for."
It also doesn't surprise me that Texan kids come out of high school with scanty knowledge of the civil rights movement.
62.1: You might think so, but it's a bit more complicated.
There's also the great film about the Russian Revolution that was shot at Relativistic speeds.
i.e. "using light".
On the subject of the Romantics, you all know about 2dgoggles.com, right?
2dgoggles.com is the reason I pay for internet connection.
When I was TAing I had the opportunity to grade a bunch of freshman history essays.
You will all be delighted to know that the reason the US won WWII is because the US bombed Japan and took away their nuclear weapons before they could use them.
I truly revere anyone who has the bravery and optimism to teach. Every time I had to grade another set of their essays I thought about hurling myself off a bridge out of sorrow over the state of education.
