Rowr.

Random Wiki Today: The Lion of Belfort




Every once in a while, I get an offer from someone I don’t like very much that I find very hard to refuse. So I don’t. Every time, this has turned out to be the right decision. That being said, if someone would offer to take me on a tour of really really big things in the world, it wouldn’t matter what they looked like, or talked about. I would even excuse the inevitable double entendre. I like to think that if I keep my standards low enough, some day this will happen. You’re thinking “but Bridget, what about all the really hot 20 yr olds out there with even lower standards?” I like to think that I would be less intimidating, with more lasting entertainment value. Sarcasm never gets old, right?

The Lion of Belfort is one of those amazing things that you have no idea exists unless you live in Eastern France, or you happened to major in something weird in college, like Historical Architectural Design. It’s iffy even then. If I were randomly in Belfort one day, and I saw this by accident, I would seriously then consider moving there so I could stand under its shadow every day.

I feel this way about a surprisingly large number of monuments.

The Lion of Belfort was designed by the same guy who did the Statue of Liberty, Frederic Bartholdi. Did you know the actual name of the statue is “Liberty Enlightening the World”? Also that Bartholdi was originally going to do a statue for the Suez canal called “Egypt Bringing Light to Asia”, which was a woman holding a torch, modeled after the goddess Libertas? Yeah. I get it. He was an artist, and he needed an excuse to get some government to fund his giant bronze woman. I don’t fault him for repackaging the concept.

The Lion was probably a little nearer to his heart though. Bartholdi was an officer during the Franco-Prussian war, and this cat is dedicated to the siege of Belfort during the last gasping heaving campaigns against the Prussians. Bartholdi was an officer under Garibaldi, an Italian who originally fought with the Prussians, then switched his support to the French. Now there’s an interesting guy, Garibaldi. Anyway, so Bartholdi originally is fighting for the Prussians, then the French. He makes this giant lion as a testament to the small contingent of brave French who hold off the Prussians at Belfort for 103 days, only to have to surrender in the end because the Armistice is signed. Can you imagine having to surrender because your government tells you to, after 103 nightmarish days of beating unbelieveable odds? It's unthinkable, walking out to lay down your arms to the enemy after something like that. He then faces the lion east, as a warning to any stray Prussians who might be thinking conquistador thoughts. Only at some point, there were enough German protests about it, they MOVED it to face the east.



This thing is big. 22 meters long and 11 meters tall. That’s 72 feet long, 36 feet tall. I remember reading a ZooBook when I was a little girl, and it said that Bengal tigers were 8-9ft long. And someone told me that was roughly the same size as our couch. Since then, whenever I’m trying to imagine a tiger, I think of a couch. I googled “72ft” to see what I could compare this to, and what I came up with was some giant inflatable billboard at the 08 PGA Open, that beat all previous giant inflatable billboard records. Maddeningly, I can’t find a picture of it.

Don’t you wish you were the kind of person who saw giant lions on the side of mountains, and colossal women standing in the water at the edge of ports? And then convinced international governments to give you money to build them, with hundreds, thousands of workers and years of time, all so that this huge lion can guard this town for the rest of known time? That's immortality.

I liked "Aim High" better

Random Wiki of the Day: The 64th Air Division (United States)

I know next to nothing about the Air Force.
Here is what I know about the Air Force.

1.Planes are cool, always. Shows about planes are cool. Being in a plane is cool. People who fly planes are cool.

2.Obviously I am not alone in thinking that all the coolest dogfight stories come from WW2, since there is an entire cable channel devoted to this.

3.Pilots are deceptively hot, which you don’t expect, ‘cause they’re short.

4.Pilots become astronauts, which is even cooler. Sorry, but all this crap of which military arm is the best is just that, crap. Because none of you GO INTO SPACE. NASA wins, hands down.

Yes, I know that’s not fair. And don’t get me wrong, I love planes. It’s almost like being outside the earth’s atmosphere. Almost. I understand the arguments that can be made for pilots having the more dangerous job. I mean, no one is shooting at astronauts. Yet.

When I think of the Air Force in WW2, I’m actually thinking of the Royal Air Force of Great Britain. I’m prejudiced to them. They have a better logo, number one. It looks like a commuter train ad.



The first image that comes to mind when I think of World War 2 planes are a bunch of little Tiger Moths being blown to pieces against the hot white sky and hot blue water of the Greek Mediterranean. It is Roald Dahl’s fault. He wrote an autobiography about his time in Africa with the Shell Company and then being a RAF pilot against the Italians, and its one of those autobiographies that defines an entire era for you. I’m in love with Roald Dahl. I used to be in literary love with Tom Robbins, which is so gross, it’s like admitting you used to be in love with Joey from New Kids On The Block. I remember my dad used to give me nasty looks when I talked about him as my "favorite writer". But then I grew up and realized that Roald Dahl is an epitome of a human being. Just AN epitome you know, since there’s lots of different ways to be a human being, but he’s my favorite epitome. So Dahl and fighter planes are inextricably linked in my head, along with queer little stories about snakes and olives.

I think one of the reasons we’re so obsessed with fighter planes during that War is that they looked like toys, they were just so damn cute*, whereas now they look like much less fun much less cute toys that are way more expensive and easy to break. It’s the same thing with cars. They stopped being fun for all but the most savvy of you when they had computers installed in them. Computers make everything just a little bit scarier, more breakable. We don’t feel any sense of control over computers, which is silly, cause they are still just plastic, but we don’t feel capable of fixing them ourselves and therefore if we were stuck on a desert island with a broken plane or a boat to get us off, we’d rather it be old. We might be able to fuddle through it then.
That’s how I feel about it anyways.

This particular division did most of their time in WW2, so my thoughts here aren’t completely random. And like I said, I know nothing about the Air Force. But it still makes me feel sad when I read the words “deactivated”. It’s like reading about a good old farm horse that was put down, even though you understand it was its time to go, and it’s not like you knew the horse personally. There's probably this huge hidden reserve of sentimental patriotism buried deep in my commie soul that I haven't even begun to tap. Scary thought.

Also, I think the dish in their crest is supposed to represent the short period when they were defending bases in Greenland and Labrador as part of the Northeast Air Command.
It's odd to think of Labrador as an actual place, isn't it?



*Maybe for her next stunt, Palin can dress as Rosie the Riveter and assemble a fighter jet!

A lone king stands on his once great port and watches the harbor fill up with silt, just before they stab him in the back and call it history

Random wikiness of the day: Timarchus of Miletus
I love history on a very immediate, visceral level. Luckily, I have the worst memory ever, I’m completely unable to remember dates and names. So I get a lot of enjoyment from visiting historical sites, watching documentaries, reading books about things I’ve already read a lot about, because it’s all refresher to me. I can watch the Ken Burns Civil War over and over and over, even the Gettysburg episode. WW2 exists as a piecemeal of pictures to me, I marvel at the connection of campaigns. I’m always amazed at the Hapsburgs. History never gets old. Some might consider it a form of retardation, I look at it as a gift. A weird childlike gift. It’s not that bad really. I always did really well on history tests. I just don’t “retain”.

Timarchus of Miletus seems to be one of those D-List monarchs who somehow end up being remembered though their reign was brief, violent, and pretty inconsequential to modern man. He’s not to be confused with Timarchus of Media, another nasty fellow who had his coins inscribed with “Great King”, with a picture of Nike on the flip side (I’m still kinda sore at the whole victory/shoes connection). The ancient Iranians were not known for humility, guess. Anyway, our Timarchus is described by one word, “tyrant”. The author doesn’t tell us why he’s a tyrant, but there it is. The townspeople were so happy when he was deposed, i.e. murdered violently, they “awarded” the name GOD to the usurper. It also says he led a revolt against Ptolemy II of Egypt, but I think it was really more of an ongoing war, since Egypt was the major naval power at the time. And all this is right after years of rule by the weird Cyrus Persian guy, you know, the one in that bad cartoon movie. Miletus does not seem like it was a cool place to live at the time. Everyone was constantly trying to conquer it and tax it, and the kings, small fry as they were, were always being murdered. It was bounced around between the Egyptians and Greeks and Persians and Turks. And you know, it’s nothing special. It’s just like, a place. A place in Turkey with some ruins. People live there, well not THERE but close to there, and local would be kings still get murdered there, probably.

Most places in the world are like that. But we forget, because we’ve got such glorified terms as Paris and Rome and Medina. I think what’s missing in most people’s idea of history are the normal people, the sheer volume of normal people and normal small cities and normal villages and normal goats. Even the normal small time gangstas, like Timarchus here. The fact that we live in such luxury in the States makes us unable to relate to the idea of peasants, or mud huts, or slaves. I mean, we imagine it, sort of, like a Where’s Waldo picture. But we don’t smell it. We can’t see it. We don’t know what its like to be that dirty. We can’t even begin to relate to the mindset. Those people might as well be aliens, with empty dirty superstitious heads and sad little wives. Dirty short aliens who inhabited the Earth before us, and had no range of emotions, or care about their social state, or dignity. We’re all like, “oh, they used slaves to fight the Carpathians? Well that makes sense, they’re expendable”. History has been defined by the Master mindset. What makes us think for one moment we are Masters? Cause we know how to read?

I know that this is a problem we should correct for the sake of charity, not just to be more interested in history. But I feel like they're both screwed anyway, which is funny cause history is over and yet still screwed.

Someday someone will think of us the same exact way. And the mayor of Detroit will be a curt footnote in the super successor of Wiki, while kids in Introduction to the Western Union class watch the Cremaster Cycles and learn how to make Bubble Tea from scratch just like the pioneers did.