Victorian Post Update

This is just to inform my readers that I have updated the Victorians at the Seashore post with an illustrative diagram. It was drawn hastily, yet with great concern for accuracy.  You may ask yourselves: Why is the chandelier lit under water? What, pray tell, is a great blue whale? Why is the dead kid still clutching a lollipop? Ummm. I think we can only blame the Victorians for such ludicrous errors.

It was nerve wracking, making drawings again. Many of you don’t know that I flunked out of art school. Got in under false pretenses and was asked to leave. I guess instructors found my endless representations of railroad tracks vanishing into the horizon “bizarre” and “uninspired.” They didn’t understand my artistic “choices.”

“It’s called a vanishing point!” I would insist.

Meanwhile, what else is new? Cotton candy magic is imminent. My 1.5 year old daughter is panting and tap dancing and sucking vigorously on her cup of milk. Brian gave me a gift that will insure I never lose my cell phone again. Pirates committed unspeakable atrocities on the high seas which should not be romanticized. And fall is glorious. May each of you partake, behold, and cherish it, etc. For it is vanishing. Poignantly.  As shown by this picture (which someone should really draw):

Spoiler Alert: Forthcoming Cotton Candy Blog!

Okay, I’m going to be the first to admit that my blog is already boring. I just blogged about water density. Why did I do that? I don’t know. Too late now.

But, dear readers, you should know that my next blog will be written on the subject of that most decadent and evanescent of earthly delights–cotton candy!

My friend, here known as Heggsie, just bought herself a home cotton candy machine. Why? I don’t know. I guess she has a lot of expendable income. Psyche, she doesn’t! That’s what’s so great and magical about it.

Sometime next week we are going to make cotton candy magic and blog about it.

I first made cotton candy magic with my old friend Danielle. Her mom owned a cotton candy machine as part of a business venture. I am no stranger to cotton candy magic. Do you wish I would stop saying cotton candy magic? Okay, I will, but only till next week!

Victorians at the Seashore

Is it wrong to make fun of an entire era? Say the Victorian era?

If it’s wrong, I don’t want to be right.

There is going to be a lot of Victorian bashing here on spartanholiday. The subtitle of this site could be: “In Which the Author Ignorantly, Repeatedly, and Unjustly Ridicules Several Generations of The Queen’s Subjects.”

But look at them. They went swimming in frocks, and pantaloons, and hats. They had a funny way of talking, walking (as evidenced by the above picture), and fainting (from hysterics). They were stiff, starched, yet perishingly dainty–not all of them of course, but the funniest ones. I don’t think there is any one era I would rather mock out than the Victorians. Maybe the ancient Egyptians…

So, Victorians. I could start with their drafty parlors.  I could start with cultural artifacts like Waterloo teeth (early dentures made from the teeth of convicts, war dead, raided corpses, etc). We have the Victorians sugar cane empire to thank for our everlasting mania for sweets. Jam on their toast, sugar in their tea, cookies at every clock chime. Surprise–their teeth rotted out. Let’s go borrow some teeth from our criminal friends… But I think, instead, I’ll start with a particular oceanic belief of the Victorians, as told to me by Simon Winchester, author of Atlantic.

Like its subject, Atlantic is vast, and billowing, and epic, and kind of smoky blue in color. There are pictures—all manner of boats, and lighthouses, and seaside precipices. Printed across the inside cover is a photo of great steam ships coming into port—thick hawser ropes in the foreground, tinny water, onlookers in their rain slickers and porkpie hats—that sort of thing, which is the sort of thing I like.

Simon Winchester finds Victorians hilarious too, citing their belief that at great depth, water compresses…so that as you descend through the ocean, the water becomes more viscous, moving from light and splashy water, to syrup, to marmalade, to sludge, to plaster until the ocean’s bottom where the water is impenetrable, thick as concrete. The heavier the object, the deeper it can sink. This meant that there were different strata of sunken objects of different weights–a sunken object parfait, if you will. Like this:

 

So there you have it, the first in a repeating series about fanciful Victorian notions. It’s okay to laugh, we here in the information age know pretty much everything about everything. That is the truth to which we modestly cling. Okay, we don’t know what happens to the energy and mass sucked into a black hole, but we have some pretty good hunches. Or at least I do. And we know to swing our arms normally, casually, when we stroll on the beach.

Hence our magnificent confidence.

Note: The HMS Victoria was accidentally rammed by another British battleship and sunk off the coast of Tripoli. This happened for no good reason at all. Just Victorians being funny.