Then vs Now: the decline and fall, from an equine perspective

Then:

George Stubbs Lion Attacking Horse

George Stubbs A Lion Attacking A Horse was painted sometime around 1765… The horse is majestic but doomed, the lion, a ravaging monster. It’s Claude Lorraine meets Lord of The Rings.

Now:

Lion on Horseback

The shocking pictures come from the animal park at Xiamen in Fujian, south-east China, where the public seem to delight in humiliating circus-style stunts and have no regard for animal cruelty. Conditions are poor, with big cats including lions, tigers and leopards and other large animals including bears kept in solitary confinement in tiny cages.

So I see the fin was a little late this siècle.

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Genetic Manipulation News: The Longhorse Lives!

The longhorse on parade

Oft have we and many other notables of the blogosphere lamented the passing of the iconic Longhorse, most noble of beasts, most loyal of friends, most helpful of livestock, and, until now, most extinct of creatures.

We mourn no longer.

Inspired, perhaps, by the leg-lengthening operations so popular amongst Asians with high net worth and higher pain thresholds, or then again, perhaps by the spine-extension procedures perfected by Dr. Francois Charriere in his rotting and ghoul-haunted Providence house, modern science has dipped into the Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and re-created the noble Longhorse, offering it on a for-profit basis in what can only be described as a Frankensteinian nightmare of simultaneous triumph and horror.

Dr. Boli has the proof:

Longhorse Ad

Cautiously optimistic as I may be about advances in science, I think even the most coldly rational among us must pause and consider the implications of turning banal Dobbins into a tawdry modern similacrum of what was once one of nature’s most beautiful creations. Are we not all too familiar with what can occur when Man seeks to usurp the role of Creator?

Jocelyn Wildenstein, the Bride of Wildenstein!

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quiz: what kind of a redhead should you be?

Yet another nail on the head, although this time more literally. Thanks be to the seventy-fourth avatar of the goddess Feria I have now aligned my inner redhead with my outer and become as fiery on the exterior as my friends know me to be on the interior. Bring on the mens!


You Should Be a Fiery Redhead


Bold, head turning, and sure to show off your skin and eyes.

exactly why I am doomed to burn in Hell for eternity

The Last Battle

First of all, when people tag me to do memes, even cool ones, I ignore them. Sometimes I apologize, but mostly I just say “you think I’m doing a meme?” This is a continuation of my elementary school habit of refusing to write stories on any of the four subjects suggested and coming up with my own idea.

  1. what I did on my summer vacation
  2. my pet
  3. what I want to be when I grow up
  4. when my family came to Canada

I think it’s fairly safe to say that “How to Capture a Unicorn” is a more compelling essay topic, particularly for a teacher who’s spent several hours wading through identical papers.

In any case, I don’t do memes when tagged. I do, on occasion, steal memes, though, and it is the result of one such theft which has made inevitable my eventual, and eternal, damnation.

It was a simple book meme; Grab the nearest book, turn to page 123, look up the fifth sentence, and type out the next three sentences. Innocuous enough, right? Like the pebble which starts the avalanche, it displayed no hint of the terrible chain of events it was about to set in motion. First, max posted it. Then I read it. And then, I’m ashamed to say, the urge to pocket it became irresistible and I gave in and grabbed that fucker like it was a chocolate-coated, bacon-wrapped, Viggo-topped ingot of solid gold.

Polyeuct and NearchusAnd I ran with it.

Oh, man. This is so sad. The nearest book is The Last Battle, by CS Lewis. Great, I get the book that has the end of the world in it. Swell.

Tirian had no need to ask which was the High King, for he remembered his face (though here it was far nobler) from his dream. He stepped forward, sank on one knee and kissed Peter’s hand.

“High King,” he said. “You are welcome to me.”

Oh, great. And now I’ve put gay innuendo into a meeting of the High King and the Last King of Narnia.

I’m going to hell.

Well, I am!

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Lucy Liu attacked!

Lucy Liu attacked by a school of horny cuttlefish!

Lucy Liu and the Horny Cuttlefish of Doom

It gets worse.

Lucy Liu and the Horny Cuttlefish of Doom, back attack

Yes, showbusiness is a sordid, gilded ghetto. Behind the flashbulbs and the awards, behind the makeup and the costumes, lies an ugly truth.

The Casting Aquarium.

Even Lucy Liu, the lovely and talented star of the Charlie’s Angels chick action flicks, cannot escape its greedy clutches. Smiling bravely for the paparazzi despite the slimy embrace of a school of hormone-crazed cuttlefish, she personifies what must be suffered in silence inthe unspoken struggle for stardom.

In what used to be known as a “Faustian Bargain” and is now called “a personal contract with Harvey,” comely starlets are subjecting themselves to the embrace of repellent, corpulent invertebrates from under the sea. As for what their agents can do about it…why don’t you ask this young woman:

Why is this file entitled Dating?

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