yo ho, yo ho.
01.23.03 @ 2:19 p.m.
I have spend an inordinate amount of time in the last two days reading about shipwrecked sailors.
They were not pirates, which is somewhat disappointing.
They resorted to cannabalism, but not homosexuality, though I guess when you're starving to death in Texas and the natives are enslaving you or killing your compatriots, sex isn't exactly in the forefront of your mind. In fact, Cabaza da Vaca (the author of Castaways) wrote with horror about a nice little society that had what I have just decided to call Early American Drag Queens.
So you're a Spanish sailor shipwrecked in 1528 and all but three of the 100 men you came ashore with are dead after a series of shipwrecks in boats large and small, exposure, starvation, and of course, attack by natives (who considering what Europeans did to them over the course of the next, oh, four hundred years were pretty damn smart). What do you do?
Become a messiah-like faith healer, of course! If this guy is to be believed, he healed more people that Jesus himself supposedly healed. I'm a massive skeptic, and I keep thinking "This guy is such a con man!" "I made the sign of the cross over three dozen cripples, oh, and raised a man from the dead. God was really with us." Hah. Like I believe that. And personally, I don't think he believed it, either. He paints himself as the voice of reason who boldly embarks on a foolhardy exploration that he opposed but joined so that people wouldn't think he was a coward (and if he had stayed with the ships, he could have had some illicit nookie as there were ten wives who watched their husbands trek off into the swamps of Florida never to return, then turned their attentions to the remaining sailors) and he's sympathetic to the natives that aren't actively trying to kill him and all of a sudden he's curing left and right. And he claims he didn't even want to, that because they couldn't hunt and wouldn't do women's work, they were forced into the role of medicine men.
I had history discussion group today and to my horror I'm in a class that also includes Thomas - a wad of dredlocks that stink of potsmoke and the most fucking pedantic person I've ever had the displeasure to know. And more often than not, he's just wrong. I could see it last term when he was in my 101 discussion group - he'd give some long, inane speech about Roman motives and the GTF would just look blankly at him and go, "Ye-e-es, but...." Teachers have a problem saying people are wrong, and I can understand that, but there are many who are very good at making "yes" sound an awful lot like "What the fuck are you talking about?" I don't know which I prefer, because I had a teacher who freely told people they were wrong, often before they could finish their thought and I hated her with a passion. And because she took roll in lecture (with something like 250 people... we had to sit with our discussion groups and pass around a sign up sheet) I couldn't just skip out. And so I wrote many many pages of fanfiction. And it's pretty bad of me, but I have anthropology in the same room and I find myself occasionally writing out the end of Riverwood Park during that lecture.
It's definately more exciting to write how Emma's brother George has evicted her from his house after a fight and now Beckford and Stuart are going to have to follow Emma and Julia Brandon up to Staffordshire to propose and ulitmately marry them.
Oh, I am so going to end up working for Zebra Regency Romance.
On a different note, I've decided that Led Zeppelin is okay but I don't really like them that much. The highlight of my day was that a fellow student brought in a DVD of The Who live at the Isle of Wight festival and we watched Young Man Blues. I think I love this boy. :)
However, in the course of watching an MTV Rockumentary from god knows how long ago (it was very eighties/early nineties) on Led Zeppelin, I have firmly decided that while sixties and seventies shaggy hair is dead sexy on a man of 18-25 or so, it is simply pathetic on a man of 40. You may still be a rock and roller but cut your fucking hair, you look ridiculous.
This definately applies to footage I once saw of Pete Townshend with a pony tail, but I'm not sure that Roger Daltrey looks too terribly bad with his Woodstock hair in the interview footage in Tommy: The Amazing Journey which is that documentary I've been going on about in previous entries.
I can't think of anything else I wanted to say, except for that after all that moaning about the Hendrix thing, I finished it and turned it in just fine... apart from forgeting to rate the articulation of the lyrics, a ha ha, whoops.
Previously
fuck it @ 08.01.05
fanciful imaginary sea voyages to come @ 07.20.05
*dies* @ 07.19.05
more ootp @ 07.17.05
harry potter: driving our children into devil worship @ 07.17.05
