Spring into Spanking!

As the weather gets warmer, I'm reminded of a verse from Algernon Charles Swinburne's Atalanta in Calydon, "When the hounds of spring;"

WHEN the hounds of spring are on winter’s traces,
The mother of months in meadow or plain
Fills the shadows and windy places
With lisp of leaves and ripple of rain;
And the brown bright nightingale amorous
Is half assuaged for Itylus,
For the Thracian ships and the foreign faces,
The tongueless vigil, and all the pain.

In addition to turning out amazing poetry, Swinburne was also a spankophile, one of a generation of Englishmen who enjoyed a birch rod across their backsides so much that the French euphemism for the kink became "la vice anglais." Yet the first flagellation fetishist to come out of the closet was himself a Frenchman, Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

With this in mind, certain things leap out at me in Swinburne's poems.

Get a Grip

At some point in history, someone--and I'd love to know who--started the myth that masturbation leads to blindness, replacing the earlier rumor that masturbation can make you gay. Other theories propose that rockin' the redhead kills felines, or even worse, that pocket pool will cause one to hate America. Somehow, a decade into the widespread popularity of the Internet, we have avoided becoming a planet of hirsute-palmed, cat-murdering insane America-bashers walking into walls.

The cold, hard truth, though, has emerged in indisputable scientific tests and been published in journals of the highest integrity: Blindness causes masturbation.

Gimme that old time religion

As a true religious conservative, I'd love to see my milquetoast reactionary brethren and sisteren get serious about bringing back religious prostitution, that time-honored and sacred activity that, were it around today, would certainly make nine o'clock mass more interesting (and better attended). The truth is, though, we don't seem to know who these good-time nuns of pagan antiquity were; Many folks based their claims on the testimonies of Herodotus (writing about Babylon) and Strabo (writing about a temple with 1000 temple prostitutes in Corinth), but scholars and theologians now doubt these reports.

I'd love to know how the whole institution worked and why it went away--if it in fact existed. Was it part of the Canaanite worship of Yahweh's chief rival, the embarrassingly named Baal? Were Dagon's ladies hotter? Questions abound on this one, and I could use some answers, if I'm going to pass my agenda around to my local churches.

"All camels have syphilis"

Everyone loves an intriguing bit of trivia to be mentioned at cocktail parties as proof of the speaker's cleverness and depth of knowledge, but this is my all time favorite fun fact. How true is it? The Internet, infallible source of truth that it is, has little to say on the subject, though apparently you don't need to start scarfing the penicillin if a camel spits at you.

Also, it raises the related question: can you get syphilis from smoking Camels?