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bronze_ribbonsI could not focus on anything I was supposed to do last night -- work, fandom, upcoming crafts-fair, nada -- so instead I proofread some pages of Peter Charles Remondino's History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present for Project Gutenberg.
Oh, my saints and stylesheets. I have got to get back to my billable dockets today (not to mention reviewing tomorrow's anthems), but this may be the funniest thing I've read this year outside of fandom. The writer (a prominent nineteenth-century San Diego physician) is so vividly and passionately all over the place in his defense of circumcision and Judaism, and so well-intentioned yet wrong in so many of his postulates and generalizations -- oh, my sides. Oh, the glee!
For instance, from somewhere around page 167:
Take that, Louisa May Alcott!
And from page 193:
Oh, my saints and stylesheets. I have got to get back to my billable dockets today (not to mention reviewing tomorrow's anthems), but this may be the funniest thing I've read this year outside of fandom. The writer (a prominent nineteenth-century San Diego physician) is so vividly and passionately all over the place in his defense of circumcision and Judaism, and so well-intentioned yet wrong in so many of his postulates and generalizations -- oh, my sides. Oh, the glee!
For instance, from somewhere around page 167:
The writer has always felt that it took a mind that was incapable of appreciating simple truths, but that loved to hover on that mystical borderland on the confines of gloomy insanity that would allow its owner to seriously wander through and behold any theological beauties in Bunyan. To the Jew there is none of the gloomy, weird, mystical, mind-racking, ungodly theology that some of our creeds torture the poor brains of their professors with.
Take that, Louisa May Alcott!
And from page 193:
Horner, formerly of the navy, in his interesting little work on "Naval Practice," relates that it was customary, in the older navy of the United States, to allow public women to come on board at some of the ports and to go down to the men between decks, the Department of the Navy being probably actuated by the same humane principle that used to induce some of the West Indian cannibals to lend their wives to their prisoners of war who were intended, in the shape of roast or fricandeau, to grace the festive board, as it was deemed inhuman by these philanthropists to deprive a man of his necessary sexual intercourse, even if they were soon to roast him and pick his bones. They may, however, have been selfish in the matter, as by some authorities it is represented that this was done to improve the flavor of the prisoner, who was said to offer a more savory dish through this considerate treatment, the strong flavor that the semen gives to flesh being well eradicated by free fornication.