A botched history of hairdressing

Humans, it would seem, have always had a propensity to mess around with perfectly good and functional parts of their anatomy regardless of any apparent pointlessness or consequences of doing so.

Tattoos.  Piercings.  Victorian era women constricted their waistlines with corsets until their intestines were forced upwards to reside uncomfortably somewhere in the vicinity of their larynxes.

Today toxic injections of the Botulism organism are used to "fluff up" lips, and surplus buttock fat is sucked out to fill up natural laugh lines on faces.

Bald old men still persist in wearing expensive toupees which, even from fifty yards away, resemble dead gerbils draped across the top of their heads, while young hirsute athletes shave it all off and look like little Kojaks hellbent on a mission to acquire cranial skin cancer.

This brings us to our history tutorial for this week;

The History of Hairdressing
It is probably fortunate that luxuriant long hair only sprouts from the head, providing an unchallenged monopoly for hairdressers.
Had it been biologically otherwise, their dominance in the field might have been challenged by an assortment of other occupations such as African Underarm Hair Plaiters and Brazilian Shearers.

Be that as it may.

Ever since Eve discovered Garnier Hair Conditioner (new and improved, containing added aloe vera) on the shelf at her Garden of Eden supermarket, and Randy the caveman slicked back his locks with newly-slaughtered mammoth grease, women and men and been messing around with their hair to attract the opposite sex.
(Note;  Or same sex. This is a non-discriminatory Academy)
The first professional hairdressers were recorded in the 4th century AD, although there is much statuary evidence to suggest that hair decoration was widely practised by ancient Egyptians and Persians too.

When women of the Roman Empire had inadequate tresses they were enhanced with blonde hair shorn from captured warring tribesmen of Germanic origin.

The pinnacle of hairdressing stupidity was reached in England and Europe in the 18th century during the reign of Louis XVI (1774-92).  (refer illustration above)

French coiffeur-to-the-stars Marquis Marcel de Bonkers overindulged in champagne during a lunch at La Cafe Escargot one day after which which he went back to his salon and invented the "coiffure a la frigate", where hair was piled up resembling a monstrous rat's nest with a model warship anchored to the top with pins and combs.

The design went out of fashion following a legal class action from all the male French lovers who had suffered prow wounds to their noses and foreheads sustained during amorous adventures with women adorned with this type of hairstyle.

I am jealous of people who have hair.
In 1964 I adopted a Beatles style 'mop-top', but 47 years later there are only 17 short strands of gray hair left to remind me of that youthful magnificence. (Sorry, 16....one just dropped out while I was typing this paragraph.)

Does anyone have a recently deceased gerbil they would like to donate to a worthy cause?

The history of ice skating

Please settle back and share my vast expertise in ice skating.

As an Australian living in the tropics this astounding stash of knowledge has been accrued from three main sources;

1. Observations made whilst cleaning out the freezer compartment of my refrigerator.

2. Studying Australia's enviable gold-medal skating performances at Winter Olympics.   A grand total of ONE.
In the men's 1000 metre speed skating event at the 2002 Winter Olympics in South Korea, Steven Bradbury, after trailing for the entire race went on to win gold after every other competitor ended up in a spectacular pile-up on the final corner.

3. Viewing countless hours of figure skating on television. (Primarily involving shapely young women dressed in short diaphanous yellow skirts.)

I also once fell in sympathy-love with Nancy Kerrigan (pictured above) back in 1994 after the charming Tonya Harding arranged for harm to be done to Nancy's gorgeous long, shapely, sensuous, sylphen, sexy........my apologies.....I almost drifted off into old-man's fantasies there.

Right!  Back to business.  You are here for the formal history of ice skating, so here it is;

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Ice skating enables a minority of people in the world to make the most of the appalling decision their ancestors made in migrating from hospitable African climes to the frozen extremities of the planet.

It is generally accepted that ice skating began on the frozen canals of The Netherlands more than 1000 years ago, when animal rib or shin bones were strapped to the feet.

When Dutch people travelled to North America in the 19th century, they brought their schaatsen with them along with clogs, windmills, their Dutch courage, elm disease, auctions and ovens.

The first steel skate blade appeared in 1860 and speed skating was introduced as a winter Olympic sport for men at Chamonix, France, in 1924, and for women at the 1960 Olympiad in Squaw Valley, California after the girls demanded equal ankle-sprain rights.

Canada gave birth to the game of Ice Hockey after a mob of unemployed English soldiers were observed swinging sticks at a little flat rock on the icy surface of Kingston Lake, Ontario, in 1867 before the whole lot of them were hauled off by their superior officer to the nearest Sanitorium for psychological intervention followed by repatriation back to Britain.

Figure skating is an activity originally perfected and made popular by Norwegian world champion Sonja Henie.

God bless Sonja.

God bless figure skating, the most graceful and elegant sport in my world.

God bless Nancy Kerrigan.

I still have the latent hots for Nancy Kerrigan.

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P.S. My use of the words "God bless" should not be used as evidence of the History Academy having religious affiliations.
The Cosmic Perspective of life has so far failed to come up with an equivalent phrase to represent this sentiment.

The Dora Ratjen story

This little tale of intrigue involves three bastions of truth, honesty, fairness and incorruptibility.

1. Hitler and the Third Reich.
2. The International Olympic Committee.
3. Journalism and the film industry.

Agnes Zwanzger was a midwife in the little town of Erichshot in Germany during 1918. Like most midde-aged folk, her short-range eyesight was, in optomological terminology "substantially ratshit". Additionally, she'd spent the previous evening demolishing many steins of lager which had the effect of blurring her vision even more.  So, when the infant Ratjen eventually plopped out into her hands she announced "It's a girl. Halleleujah, now has anyone got some aspirin for my headache, I'm going home to sleep off this hangover."
The parents raised the child as a girl, apparently oblivious to the surplus-to-requirements sexual equipment that must have been dangling around in the breeze between her legs.

After puberty when Dora noticed that more bodily development seemed to be taking place inside her frilly pink knickers instead of where it should be happening filling up her sports bra to maximum capacity, she diverted all of her frustration into achieving athletic excellence.

The 1936 Olympic Games had been awarded to Germany before the charming part-mustachioed Mr Hitler came to power.
Mr Hitler subsequently developed a reputation for occasionally exhibiting unsportsmanlike behaviour.  He didn't like his team being beaten, especially by Jewish teams whom he liked the least of all.

So, when Gerhardt Vanker, the German athletics coach suggested
"Yo Adolph baby, Mein Fuhrer, there's this guy in the athletics training squad pretending to be a chick, how 'bout we enter him in the Olympic women's high jump"  Mr Hitler saw it as one way of preventing "any of those inferior obnoxious little Jewish girls from winning it."
Unfortunately Dora only managed 4th place in the event which displeased and disappointed both Mr Hitler and Dora herself.
She trussed up her troublesome genitalian trio even tighter, trained harder, and won the women's high jump gold medal at the 1938 European Athletics Championship with a world-record sproing of 1.67 metres.

Few people, even fellow competitors, ever suspected that Dora was not female, but no-one could pull the gender wool over the eyes of Manfred Schwass the train conductor on the Vienna to Cologne express on 21 September 1938 in which Dora was traveling.

Manfred had spent a lifetime on the trains ogling and mentally recording every set of long sexy legs, wiggling derrieres and jiggling bosoms that had ever passed by him.
He was what the legal fraternity might term an "expert witness."

When Manfred observed Dora, meticulously attired in a brocade dress and sparkling earrings, making her way towards the women's toilet, he noticed some slight discrepancies from normal feminine behaviour.
The early-morning farting, belching, groin scratching and five o'clock shadow which accompanied this girl convinced Manfred that Dora was perhaps more biologically suited to using the gentlemens toilet facilities.

He reported the matter to the police at Magdeburg, the next train station.

Dora's secrets were finally exposed.

She changed her name to Heinrich, handed back the gold medal, and thereafter lived a life of partial seclusion refusing interviews to speak about her life.  The uncorroborated story about Hitler and the Third Reich being involved in Heinrich's career first appeared in a popular magazine in 1966 and was the basis for the 2009 film "Berlin 36".

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It is most probable that the sporting conspiracy allegations are in fact not true, and that Heinrich was simply the unfortunate victim of inept parenting.
He died in 2008.

Henry VIII and all his wives

If you'd lived next door to Henry VIII in the sixteenth century there would have been an irresistible urge to make a tree-change to the distant countryside, especially if you had an eligible and attractive daughter.

It all started when Henry VII, King of England, and his missus Elizabeth of York spawned a boy-child in 1491 who went on to become one of the most inhumane monarchs in history.

Henry Senior eventually kicked the bucket in 1509 leaving space for the next young Henry, then aged 18, to plonk his expansive despotic royal arse onto the vacant Tudor Throne and call himself Henry VIII.

(There were many significant facets of the Henry VIII reign including wars against Scotland, France and the Roman Catholic Church, but today we will examine that which history has judged to be of greatest interest; his personal life.)

Henry VIII conducted himself with the sort of compassion that you might expect from Hulk Hogan after you had stomped on his leg, then rammed his head into the turnbuckle seven times before throwing him out of the ring headfirst onto the concrete floor during a wrestling match.

One Venetian diplomat at the time assessed him differently.
He wrote;  "His Majesty is the handsomest potentiate I ever set eyes on....he has an extremely fine calf to his leg..........and a long and thick neck"  etc etc.
Maybe Henry should have taken up with the diplomat, because he had an awful lot of unfortunate misunderstandings with the six women he married during his lifetime.

1. Catherine of Aragon had been married to Henry's older brother Arthur who inconveniently died in 1502,  just five months after the wedding, leaving Catherine a widow at age 17.
At this time Henry was twelve years old with just a trace of bum-fluff beginning to show on his chin and upper lip, so his Dad (Henry VII) came up with the sweetest words any twelve year old boy could ever hear.
"Son, would you like to play around with perky young Catherine and keep her occupied until I can organise a dispensation from the Pope for you to marry a widow. "

The marital union eventually took place in 1509, but the relationship subsequently went to the dogs because Catherine failed to produce a boy child.
She attempted to divert a percentage of blame for this deficiency with;  "Henry, you have been firing fusillades containing reticent and reluctant Y chromosomes so it's not my fault."
Henry was not amused, or indeed even remotely interested in genetic technicalities. His interests had been diverted in the direction of a nubile chick called Anne who he had surreptitiously appointed to the newly-created position of Auxiliary Royal Loin Comforter.

Catherine's services were terminated and Anne was promoted to the position of wife.

2. Anne Boleyn. She also fell victim to another Henry Y-deficient chromosomal offering and produced baby Elisabeth (eventually Queen Elisabeth I)
Some time after the lust had worn off, Henry found Anne to be an irritating and noisy wife who sometimes overcooked the quail eggs so he trumped up a few treason charges so that he could have her beheaded along with her brother and three other Anne-sympathisers who also irritated him occasionally.  He mumbled with great relief to his dog after it was all over; "Rover, there's nothing like a few executions to freshen up the domestic air."

3. Jane Seymour was next in line to keep Henry warm at night.
He was now desperate to produce a son and heir to the throne.

One rainy afternoon as they were enjoying a royal cuddle Jane related to him the contents of an article she'd read in the January 1536 issue of Renaissance Cleopatra Magazine that provided step by step instructions for an acrobatic sexual maneuvre that was guaranteed to result in male babies.
Precisely 40 weeks later Henry managed to celebrate the birth of Edward (later Edward VI) despite having been in pain and traction for 9 months recovering from that single night of strenuous entanglement.
Jane sadly died of complications from the childbirth which may or may not have had anything to do with all the inverted swinging from chandeliers.

4. Anne of Cleves was a sight unseen 19 year old political appointee to 46 year-old Henry's conjugal bed in an attempt to forge diplomatic and protestant links with Germany.  It turned out that she wasn't interested in forging anything on either a political, religious or personal level so he divorced her after just a few months of marriage.
At the media conference which followed he issued a short prepared statement;  "I like her not."

Out of range of microphones he later ranted to Thomas Cromwell his Chief Advisor; "Holy shit Tom, why did you recommend that I marry that ugly little scrubber? For God's sake see if you can find me some 19 year old with some bedroom experience who looks presentable enough to take out in public."
Anne was sent back from whence she came and Cromwell was beheaded later in 1540 for his errors of judgement.

5. By some uncanny coincidence just one day after The Clevester Annie had departed, Henry stumbled across the following advertisement in the personal columns of the Tudor Times.

"Catherine Howard, nineteen years of age, vastly experienced since the age of 15 with Mannox the music teacher, Dercham the Gentleman Usher to the Dowager Duchess of Norfolk, and a few other dudes, seeks good times and marriage to any fat hairy unsanitary and tyrannical old King."

Henry was up for the challenge but two years later Catherine died from a  decapitation incident soon after Henry discovered a cache of her love letters to and from one randy little relative named Thomas Culpepper.

6. Catherine Parr must have approached her marital union to Henry with at least a small amount of trepidation knowing that 60% of his previous partners had died in conjugal office.
She stroked his ego, but not much more, for 4 years just passing the time until finally the old tyrant did something useful for the world by dropping dead.

Henry's Rolling Heads count;

1. Sir Thomas More
2. Cardinal John Fisher
3. Anne Boleyn, her brother, plus three gentlemen of the privy chamber.
4.Catherine Howard.
5. Thomas Cromwell.
6. Assorted opponents of his supreme edicts and the teachings of the Church of England.

Estimated number of executions during his 38-year reign;
120 per month = 50,000+

Henry died in 1547 leaving the throne to 9 year-old Edward VI who reputedly put down his toys for a moment and said; "What the hell am I supposed to do with this bloody throne?  I'm just a little orphan who wants to keep playing in my sandpile."

As usual, some opportunistic royal relative (in this case his paternal uncle Edward Seymour) moved in temporarily and continued the trend of warfare, corruption, cruelty, power and greed which was a trademark of the English Monarchy during the Renaissance Period.

The Inquisitions

Aloysius the Border Leicester ram looked around the field at all fifty of his cute and fluffy satisfied conc-ewe-bines who were knee-deep in abundant but dry summer grass, and he baa-ed out loud at how wonderful his world was.
 
Then he decided to celebrate with a drink.
It was 96 degrees in the shade.
Firstly he snouted-down the float valve to send a burst of water bubbling through the trough so it would have extra froth on top.
He preferred it that way.

Their world was a single paddock which contained everything that the sheep thought they needed, and none of them ever felt an urge to look through the fence, or, Ovine God forbid, break through it and discover that Old McDonald had five acres of lush irrigated rye and clover growing on his farm just beyond the next ridge.

It is therefore no coincidence that the word 'flock' was adopted by religious organisations to describe their congregations of faithful adherents.

The 'pastoral staff ', an object which is part of the Episcopal Vestments of Bishops in the Catholic Church is a replica of a shepherd's crook, and is used as a symbol of power over the "flock".

The Roman Catholic Church has historically needed to use much greater force than a pastoral staff to prevent it's parishioners from venturing into the intellectual topography beyond it's constrictive boundaries.

"Inquisitions" were committees of Little Theological Hitlers charged with the responsibility of rounding up the strays, and having them clonked on the head with a four by two plank of wood when other methods of convincing them to remain within the confines of the Catholic paddock failed.

1. The Papal Inquisition

Established in 1233 by Pope Gregory 9.

Erasmus the Tinker trotted around Italy on his horse in the year 1235 providing a unique service repairing leaking pots and pans with his patented sealant concocted from Vesuvian Spotted Toad spleens.
 
He was put to death by the Church after inadvisedly whispering to
Mrs Ciccione, the owner of an extremely holey frying pan who also happened to be an undercover informant to the tribunal, that the story of Adam and Eve  "was a bloody great big load of unmitigated codswallop".
Two Popes later in 1252, Pope Innocent 4, a gentle caring humanitarian and devoted earthly representative of God, authorised the use of torture by his Tribunals.

Gaius Apuleius Gaggio, a shy and sensitive used chariot salesman, (who also enjoyed an occasional cup of coffee) was suspected of having heretical tendences in 1253.
Additionally, there was a rather well worn track of evidence in the grass starting at the back door of his house, to suggest that he might have been servicing, after hours, some of the aforementioned Mrs Ciccione's needs which were not always being attended to by Mr Ciccione, a merchant seaman.

He was tethered inside the apse of the church just behind the altar and rigorously interrogated for seven hours, but a full confession only came forth after his testicles had been connected to the terminals of a truck battery in the following sequence;
Right to +ve, left to -ve.

2. The Spanish Inquisition

In 1480 the Church endorsed King Ferdinand the 5th and Queen Isabella's dubious idea of launching an Inquisition which, over a period of three centuries, executed 30,000 people for heresy, polygamy, seduction, smuggling, wearing your underpants inside out, and not cleaning the blue lint out of your belly button.

3. The Holy Roman and Universal Inquisition

It was a particularly bad day for Pope Paul 3 in 1542 for two reasons.

Firstly he had received an unusual item in the mail.
It was a bundle of pamphlets hot off somebody's newly invented
'printing press'.
They were invitations for all the Priests and Bishops to join the Roma Club de Spogliarello for  'Steamy Friday nights of raunchy revelation.'

Shocked, appalled, and just a tiny bit aroused at the prospect of attending, he retired to the Sistine Chapel for meditation and guidance from God.
 
No sooner had he opened the door, than a trail of paint spatters led his eyes ever upwards to an intoxicated Father Pius, with his black cassock in disarray revealing all manner of atrocities, suspended beneath the ceiling on ropes, holding a paintbrush in one hand, having obviously spent a lot of time enlarging certain anatomical features on Michelangelo's male nudes.

Upon being discovered, Pius swung himself back onto an upper parapet whilst attempting to sing a slurred rendition of the chorus of  'Oh what a lovely bunch of coconuts', in Latin.

The Pope immediately rushed off to the Apothecary, swallowed four aspirin and six valium, washed them all down with a bottle of mead, then declared an Inquisition to counter the dissemination of 'subversive' information from all the new-fangled printing machinery which threatened the Church's domination and control.

The prospect of free expression and mass-produced literature for all people scared the Papal crap out of him.

This Inquisition remains in place today, although in 1965 at Vatican 2, it was renamed 'Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith', and it no longer interferes in the lives of the laity.

The Catholic Church Administration today has a full-time job just trying to prevent it's own clergy from widening the narrow 16th century tunnel of doctrine into something that might be vaguely appropriate and useful for the 21st century.

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In the broader perspective of the universe, whatever happens in this field of human endeavour will most likely prove to be little more than a conceited and impertinent irrelevance.

The history of willow pattern plates

(Parental guidance recommended;  contains erotica and sexual references suitable for 15 year old boys.)

China pioneered the process of manufacturing superior quality porcelainware from fine white clay mixed with silicates and fired in high-temperature kilns. 
This technology remained solely in the hands of Chinese artisans until the eighteenth century AD. 

A feature of this pottery was the intricate fine-lined artwork which often depicted scenes illustrating Chinese legends.

The blue and white Willow Pattern plates became popular in the West during the 19th and early 20th century, and original specimens have become highly prized and extremely valuable collectors items.

The plate pictured above however was mass-produced in China during the 1990's. What follows is the modern day story of events which led to it's design.
 


Hu Sung Dat was the Managing Director of Jonah (Asia) Pty. Ltd.,
a company based in Beijing that imported, then processed, raw
seafood from Japan before reselling it in cans bearing the
"Nippon Whalesong" logo.

Hu's Headquarters were in an architecturally pleasing three-storey replica of an ancient Chinese pavilion located beside a landscaped garden dominated by an attractive water feature. Decorating the reception lounge in the office were some genuine artifacts dating back to the Ming Dynasty, including one purportedly owned by Emperor Yung Lo himself.

Hu's daughter, Mee Sung Dat was a precocious nineteen year-old who had the unbridled hots for her Father's secretary, the ruggedly handsome Mr Chang.

Mee Sung was bountifully endowed by Mother Nature with waist length silky black hair, an hourglass figure that according to those with intimate knowledge possessed significantly greater capacity on the top half than the bottom, and legs that went all the way up to where her femur was connected to her pelvic girdle bone.

It was these long and shapely legs that carried her today discretely up the thirty two steps in the fire-escape stairwell to the third storey office of Mr Chang, where she perched herself seductively on the corner of his desk, waiting expectantly for him to perform his daily thorough debriefing.

Chang diligently and dexterously devoted himself to this mutually rewarding ritual.
Mee Sung was the most beautiful girl in all of Beijing, but her normally radiant face today made Chang go all wobbly at the knees.
Just that very morning she'd had studs inserted in her eyelids, nostrils and lower lip and each puncture wound was still dripping tiny coagulating rivulets of blood.

Chang accordingly decided to start operations at the opposite end.
He slowly and sensually worked his way up from her nine slender toes (one had been accidentally amputated in a panda trapping mishap seven years previously) to her athletically smooth calves and thighs.

Then beyond.

Quivering uncontrollably, his hands slowly loosened the belt of her faux-leather mini-skirt revealing to him for the very first time an exotic expanse of unexplored territory interrupted only by a single tattoo in the centre of her left buttock.
One five-letter word.
An indelible and permanent memento of Mee Sung's teenage infatuation with pop singer Sting.

This was not immediately apparent to Chang because the Mandarin-speaking tattooist had misspelt the name by using a "K" as the final letter.

In this moment of temporary befuddlement Chang accidentally and unknowingly pushed the intercom button on the front of his desk which allowed Mr Hu to overhear the muffled duet of synchronous lust-fuelled heavy breathing and groaning coming from his secretary's office.

The workers at Jonah (Asia) Pty. Ltd. had all signed an Employees Contract which detailed ten misdemeanors under the clause "Inappropriate Conduct", each item of which constituted grounds for immediate termination. Misdemeanor Number 7 was;
"An employee shall NOT, during the course of his normal duty be discovered with both hands full of tits which belong to the boss's daughter."

Avoiding the large swinging sword in Mr Hu's hand also constituted an immediate incentive for Chang to speedily leap out of the office window following Mee Sung onto the nearby limb of a weeping willow tree, before sliding down the trunk and running across the old arched bridge with Mr Hu in hot slashing pursuit.
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Mr Wang was an 83 year-old bachelor who lived in an apartment across the road. He had recently bought a 35 optical-zoom camera specifically to spy on his 75 year-old spinster neighbour who was, according to Wang "still a pretty hot chick".

Witnessing the confrontation unfolding across the road on the little bridge, he immediately took a photograph which became the inspiration for all modern Willow Pattern plates.


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A somewhat older and arguably more accurate legend pertaining to Willow Pattern plates can be found here.