Blackmoor Vituperative

Two weekends ago, at RavenCon, one of my artist friends had a piece of artwork on his table in the dealer’s room, in which a skull was overlaid with a Confederate flag graphic. Beneath, it said, “Treason in the defense of slavery should not be celebrated.”

Not too long ago, Governor McDonnell declared April “Confederate History Month” in Virginia (it is already Confederate History Month in several nearby states). Personally, I do not see a problem with this, for reasons I have explained elsewhere.

You might think that I would object to this artwork. You might be surprised.

Art, at its best, should provoke a reaction. Whether it’s lust, or nostalgia, or awe, or some other emotion, the best art affects us. This particular piece of art affects me in two different ways. On the one hand, yes, I absolutely agree with the sentiment behind it. Treason in the defense of slavery should not be celebrated. On the other hand, I strongly disagree that secession was treason, that the Confederates who actually fought in the Civil War were fighting to defend slavery, or that most of the people who would commemorate that conflict are celebrating “treason in the defense of slavery”.

I do not pretend to be an art critic. I can’t even remember the name of my favorite painting, or the artist who painted it (it’s a girl standing on a rock under an open sky, with her dress billowing in the wind — if that rings a bell to you, please drop me a line). But I think this is an effective piece of artwork, on par with (and in my opinion superior to) Shepard Fairey’s “Hope” poster. This challenges us, and does so with a clean and immediately understandable design.

Well done, Andy.

Governor McDonnell recently declared April “Confederate History Month“. To some people, this sounds a lot like “Let’s all wear white hoods and burn some crosses”. These people are, shall we say, misinformed.

News flash: the Confederates were not the “bad guys”. They weren’t out to conquer anyone, or exterminate anyone. The Confederacy did not fight the Union to preserve the practice of slavery, nor did the Union attack the Confederacy to prohibit it. The vast majority of Confederate soldiers did not own slaves, nor did they fight in the war to defend the practice of slavery. They were fighting for the same things the Colonials had fought for a century earlier.

Was slavery evil? Of course it was. It was also on the way out well before the Union and the Confederacy went to war (and it continued in the “North” until well after the Civil War had ended). The Civil War was not fought over slavery: that was an excuse fed to people who did not know any better (and apparently still don’t). “Slavery” was the “weapons of mass destruction” of its era (the deception, in that case, not being that slavery did not exist — it did, in both the North and the South — but that it was the reason for the war).

People who equate the Confederacy with slavery are ignorant of an important part of the history of Virginia and the USA. Let’s hope that the observance of “Confederate History Month” can help to educate those people.

On the other hand, history is written by the winners. If the North spent 150 years telling people that Confederates had cloven feet and gave birth by laying eggs, the people attacking McDonnell would be repeating that story, too, saying he was defending the unholy cloven-hoofed egg-laying slave-mongers.

“The Civil War was fought over slavery” belongs in the Great Lies Of History right next to “George Washington chopped down a cherry tree” and “Christopher Columbus proved the world was round”.

At a press conference yesterday, researchers announced the completely unexpected: a Siberian cave has yielded evidence of an entirely unknown human relative that appears to have shared Asia with both modern humans and Neanderthals less than 50,000 years ago. The find comes courtesy of a single bone from individual’s hand. Lest you think that paleontologists are overinterpreting a tiny fragment, it wasn’t the shape of the bone that indicates the presence of a new species—it was the DNA that it contained.

(from Neither Neanderthal nor sapiens: new human relative IDed, Ars Technica)

Religious conservatives argue the Founding Fathers intended the United States to be a Judeo-Christian country. But President Obama is right when he says it isn’t.

(From America is not a Christian nation, Salon)

I am no great fan of President Obama (nor was I of President Bush). But when someone is right, they are right.

(I heard about this from The Breda Revolution.)

I was reading this article about the Hungarian Prime Minister who was ultimately instrumental in the fall of the Berlin Wall, and I was struck by the contrast between the fall of the Iron Curtain, and what has been happening to the USA for the past ten years (and a new President has made absolutely no difference in this trend).

It makes me sad.

I spent some time today piecing together the cinematic history of Godzilla. I have about a dozen Godzilla movies on DVD. Most are available in English. A few are not. Some were brutally mangled for US release, but I think many of those have since been re-released by distributors that actually care about the film (most notably Gojira and Godzilla Raids Again).

With that in mind, I have compiled a list of the Godzilla films and what I consider to be the important Godzilla-related films (I included Rodan, for example, but I did not include movies like War of the Gargantuas, which are ostensibly set in the same universe but which never cross over with Godzilla), and linked them to what I consider the best versions of those films on DVD (at the time I made this list, anyway — Classic Media is doing a great job resurrecting these). Unfortunately, some are not yet available on DVD in the USA.

I hope that other people find this list useful.

Showa era

• Godzilla (1954)
• Godzilla Raids Again (1955)
• Rodan (1956)
• Mothra (1961)
• King Kong vs. Godzilla (1962)
• Mothra vs. Godzilla (1964)
• Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster (1964)
• Invasion of Astro-Monster (1965)
• Godzilla vs. the Sea Monster (1966)
• King Kong Escapes (1967)
• Son of Godzilla (1967)
• Destroy All Monsters (1968)
• All Monsters Attack (1969) aka “Godzilla’s Revenge”.
• Godzilla vs. Hedorah (1971) I suggest that you watch this in Japanese with English subtitles.
• Godzilla vs. Gigan (1972)
• Godzilla vs. Megalon (1973) Unfortunately, there is no English version of this film on DVD. You may be able to find a region-free copy of the Japanese film on Ebay, though.
• Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla (1974)
• Terror of Mechagodzilla (1975)

Heisei era

• The Return of Godzilla (1984) Unfortunately, there is no English version of this film on DVD. That may be a blessing: the Americanized version of this film (“Godzilla 1985″) was an abomination. You may be able to find a region-free copy of the Japanese film on Ebay, though.
• Godzilla vs. Biollante (1989) Unfortunately, there is no English version of this film on DVD. You may be able to find a region-free copy of the Japanese film on Ebay, though.
• Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah (1991) Unfortunately, the only version of this film on DVD is so-called “fullscreen”, meaning that the image is chopped on the right and left. But I suppose it is better than nothing.
• Godzilla vs. Mothra (1992) Unfortunately, the only version of this film on DVD is so-called “fullscreen”, meaning that the image is chopped on the right and left. But I suppose it is better than nothing.
• Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla II (1993)
• Godzilla vs. SpaceGodzilla (1994)
• Godzilla vs. Destoroyah (1995)
• Rebirth of Mothra (1996)
• Rebirth of Mothra II (1997)
• Rebirth of Mothra III (1998) Unfortunately, there is no English version of this film on DVD. You may be able to find a region-free copy of the Japanese film on ebay, though.

The American knock-off

• Godzilla (1998) No, it isn’t really a Godzilla movie, but Zilla does show up in Final Wars.

Millennium era

• Godzilla 2000 (1999)
• Godzilla vs. Megaguirus (2000)
• Godzilla, Mothra and King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack (2001)
• Godzilla Against Mechagodzilla (2002)
• Godzilla: Tokyo S.O.S. (2003)
• Godzilla: Final Wars (2004)

As if we needed more reasons to be annoyed at Christianity.

A runway fashion show in Viking times would have spotlighted women cloaked in imported colored-silk gowns adorned with metallic breast coverings and long trains.

This surprising claim is the result of a new analysis of remnants from a woman’s wardrobe discovered in a grave dating back to the 10th century in Russia, painting a picture of Viking panache before Christianity was established that runs counter to previous ideas about buttoned-up, prudish looking Norsewomen.

“Now we can say the pre-Christian dress code was very rich,” textiles researcher Annika Larsson of Uppsala University in Sweden told LiveScience. “When Christianity came, the dress was more like that of nuns. There was a big difference.”

(from Viking Women Dressed Provocatively, Yahoo! News)

Sounds to me like the costumes from Viking Women And The Sea Serpent were not so far off, after all.

The National Library of France (BnF) has an amazing collection of prints from 1910 which depict life in the year 2000. They are credited to Villemard.

Did you know that the automatic dishwasher was invented by a woman named Josephine Garis Cochrane? She received an award for her invention at the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago. The company she founded to market the dishwasher to hotels, restaurants and other commercial groups was purchased in the 1920′s by the Hobart Corporation. They introduced the “KitchenAid” brand name that is known today. Dishwashers under this name were introduced in 1949.