I dreamed I was over in 11th Century Palestine, chillin' with my homies on the First Crusade. At some point, however, the scenery shifted and instead of hanging out with Bohemond and Tancred, I was with Xenophon and Clearchus and we were negotiating with some Achaemenid prince. I guess it may have been Cyrus himself.
Anyway, the Persian dude was wearing this kind of bullet-shaped gold helmet, maybe a foot tall, and in mid-harangue, he pulled it off to wipe sweat off his forehead, and the dude's head was shaped like that. It creeped me out enough that I was just staring at his freakishly deformed noggin and couldn't concentrate on what he was saying. Then I woke up.
(PS: Firefox's spell checker is historically illiterate. I'll cut it slack on Bohemond and Clearchus, but it darned well oughtta know Achaemenid. At least it knows Xenophon.)
Firefox's spell checker is historically illiterate.
ReplyDeleteThat's because it was programmed by engineers. It would be interesting to see the rate of spell check missed between technical and non-technical subjects.
Well,OF COURSE, his head was bullet-shaped. See, all Mohammedans are descendents of the space aliens who actually built the pyramids and Stonehenge. The aliens mated with the human women and...
ReplyDelete"Well,OF COURSE, his head was bullet-shaped. See, all Mohammedans..."
ReplyDeleteIf Cyrus was a Mohammedan, he was pretty ahead of his time.
I was gonna say. Zoroastrianism was more or less the state religion in those days.
ReplyDeletewv: vershpne. Sounds Yiddish somehow. "You kids get your vershpne butts out of that tree!"
Spell checker you say? Heresy!
ReplyDeleteUnless you just use it to correct it...The TK Checkerchecker.
AT
I leave it turned on as more of a typochecker than anything else.
ReplyDeleteExcuse me, ma'am, was this the super villain you saw:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.internationalhero.co.uk/h/humbull.htm
Was he like a SNL conehead?
ReplyDeleteDid you warn him to steer clear of the Greeks?
What type of light before-bed reading have you been nosing into?
ReplyDeleteI've been doing some reading about the Crusades off and on for the last couple days, so that makes sense, but I haven't read anything on the Ten Thousand in the last year that I can remember.
ReplyDeleteI vaguely recall that the Sarmatians, a good thousand miles or so north and a good number of centuries later from the Achaemenids practiced ritual skull deformation by wrapping infants' heads in bindings.
ReplyDeleteI'm having trouble coming up with a citation for that that doesn't involve a chain of logic connecting this factoid to Atlantis, The Master Race, or magical crystals though, so this could just be Mnemosyne playing her usual naughty tricks on me.
'Thus spake Zarathustra!'
ReplyDelete(talk about an earworm!)
I immediately conjured a visual of Johnny Carson as Abe Lincoln, removing the stovepipe hat off similarly dimensioned hair. And, I wasn't even asleep.
I'd be impressed with myself if I pulled Clearchus or Achaemenid randomly out of my subconscious.
ReplyDeleteTam,
ReplyDeleteStaying with the notion that you are all the people in your dream, I imagine that the gold helmet thing was just a drifted tangle of thought, and the hat-head thing merely relief, or fear, that wearing stupid looking stuff leaves marks and changes things.
Shampoo, rinse, repeat. And be careful of heavy head gear for a day or three - you have been wearing the two-wheeler helmet, haven't you?
wv: haggicut. Haggis cutter. Or maybe a haggis-type haircut?
That's a bad case of helmet-hair - eventually he'll go bald and need a do-rag to cover the dimples.
ReplyDeleteHad a dream some crazy street-person forced his way into "my house" (didn't look a thing like my pad). I ended up drawing down on him, and when that didn't seem to persuade him much, I Mozambiqued him.
ReplyDeleteThe 230gr +Ps didn't do a whole lot, but for reasons unknown my gun stopped working.
The guy had a .45 hole in his left temple, and was still looking bright-eyed and bushy tailed. Still the JHPs did make him sit politely in a Lay-z-boy recliner (that I don't own) until the police arrived.
Just had a steak and salad for dinner...did wash it all down with a Peppertini...hmmm maybe the home-made pepper vodka is to blame...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cranial_deformation
ReplyDeleteSeveral cultures practiced "skull wrapping." The idea of deforming the skull for aesthetic or religious reasons isn't new or limited only to Indians. Those so altered as infants had skulls resembling our modern notion of what space aliens look like.
gvi
Tam,
ReplyDeleteAre you related to Victor Davis Hanson, by any chance?
Been reading Carnage and Culture of late, and I'm getting a strange vibe from your post.
"Bullet shaped"
ReplyDeleteSrsly?
Sounds like "gun shaped" or "Car shaped" or "Motorcycle shaped" to me.
Come on, out with it. Spitzer? Spire? Lead round nose? Conical? Flat point? Hollow point? what KIND of bullet, futhuchrissakes? ;)
"Beldar: An owner's manual to a Ford Lincoln Mercury Sable.
ReplyDeleteHighmaster: Ford Lincoln Mercury Sable?
Beldar: A personal conveyance named after its inventor, an assassinated ruler, a character from Greco-Roman myth and a small furry mammal.
Highmaster: Ah."
I know I'm not the only person that thought of this movie when reading Tam's post.
@ Weer'd Beard
ReplyDelete"The guy had a .45 hole in his left temple, and was still looking bright-eyed and bushy tailed".
By any chance, did you recently watch Gina Davis in "Long Kiss Goodnight"?