A while ago, for fun, I started doing some reading on some of the stranger naming choices made by the Puritans between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. (Yes, for fun. I am a dork.) Here are a few of my favourites:
A Sussex jury roll from the 1600s includes the names Accepted Trevor, Redeemed Compton, Kill-Sin Pimple, Fly-Fornication Richardson, Search-The-Scriptures Moreton, The-Peace-Of-God Knight, Stand-Fast-On-High Stringer, The-Gift-of-God Stringer, and Fight-The-Good-Fight-Of-Faith White, Obediencia Cruttenden, Called Lower, Hope-For Bending, More-Fruit Flower and Meek Brewer. Some other wonderful Sussex names around this time include Safely-on-High Snat, Mortifie Hicks and the marvellously-named Humiliation Scratcher. And let’s not forget Be-Stedfast Elyarde, Faint-not Dighurst, Hew-Agag-in-pieces Robinson, Swear-not-at-all Ireton and Obadiah-bind-their-kings-in-chains-and-their-nobles-in-irons Needham.
Here’s another good naming method: There was a tradition among some Puritan villagers of opening the Bible and selecting the first name their eyes landed upon, which led to some interesting christenings. One poor child was landed with the name Ramoth-Gilead as a result of this method, reportedly leading a rather bemused parson to ask, “Boy or girl, eh?” There’s some evidence that certain parents, whose reading was perhaps not the best, would simply open the Bible and choose a word at random – hence the existence in Connecticut of Maybe Barnes and a girl by the rather unfortunate name of Notwithstanding Griswold. One child in England was christened Sirs, the parents insisting that it was a Scripture name and citing as proof the passage “Sirs, what must I do to be saved?” Another Puritan named his dog Moreover after the Gospel passage “Moreover the dog came and licked his sores.”
Yet another story tells of a priest who was befuddled when a woman informed him that her child was to be name “Axe-her”. “What name?” he spluttered. “Axe-her,” repeated another woman. After much discussion he discovered that the women were referred to Achsah, the daughter of Caleb. This may also explain the existence of an Axar Starrs in Stockport – the daughter, appropriately, of one Caleb Starrs. The name Axar remained popular in Devonshire for some time.
A little boy called John wound up with an unfortunate bonus name due to his godparent’s strong accent and a misunderstanding at the baptismal font. “What name?” the priest asked, to which the godparent replied, “John honly.” The priest dutifully went on to declare, “John Honly, I baptise thee…”
Thomas and Elizabeth Pegden, residents of Kent during the late 18th and early 19th centuries, named their first four sons after the four evangelists, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. When Elizabeth gave birth to a fifth son in 1795, they decided to continue this theme by naming him after the next book of the New Testament, and thus he was christened Acts-of-the-Apostles Pegden. According to one source, his nickname was Actsy, “for the Vicar of Boughton has heard a parishioner speak of her uncle Actsy Pegden.” An older relative bore the name Pontius Pilate Pegden.
In the late 1800s, a Thurstonville man named his four sons Love-well, Do-well,Die-well and Fare-well Sykes. Around the same time, another boy, being the younger sibling of sisters Faith and Hope, was given the name And Charity.
Another fellow, rather bemusingly, named his son Judas-not-Iscariot.
Zachary Crofton, died 1672, clearly scoured the Scriptures in order to find names for his children. His five sons were called Zachary, Zareton, Zephaniah,Zelophehad and – presumably after all alliterative possibilities had been exhausted – John.
The Presbyterian clergy were fond of foisting on illegitimate children names reflective of the sins of their parents – names like Helpless, Repent, Repentance,Forsaken, Fly-fornication.
Among many other excellent Puritan names, there was also:
Abstinence
Abuse-not
Continent
Creature (a unisex name, apparently!)
Do-good
Experience
Fear-not
God-helpe
Hate-evil
Increased
Job-rakt-out-of-the-asshes
Joye-in-sorrow
Lament
Learn-wysdome
Magnify
More-fruit
More-triale
Muche-merceye
No-merit
Obey
Original
Preserved
Refrayne
Renewed
Safe-on-Highe
Silence
Sin-deny
Sorry-for-sin
Thanks
The-Lord-is-near
Unfeigned
What-God-will
All of these are trumped, however, by a Puritan girl who, when asked for her Christian name, replied, “Through-Much-Tribulation-We-Enter-The-Kingdom-Of-Heaven, but for short they call me Tribby.”
“no-merit” oh my god why
This is great and I’d just like to add that a member of Oliver Cromwell’s government was named Nicholas If-Jesus-Christ-Had-Not-Died-For-Thee-Thou-Hadst-Been-Damnéd Barbon.
What a good fight scene. This encounter could have been played a lot of ways, some of them unsavory given we start with one armed man and six unarmed women,.but the most terrified character here is easily Max. The Five Wives are frightened, but more angry and fed up, and Furiosa is just, well, furious. Meanwhile, Max spends the first half of the film acting like a nervous stray on the verge of fear-biting.
This is it exactly. Max keeps flicking the guns around and snatching things because he’s honestly on the very edge of panic. He’s just been chased down, tattooed, used as an unwilling blood donor, made a hood ornament, nearly died in a car chase and dust storm like 5 million times, and is plagued by hallucinations on a GOOD day. Everything he does up until he starts realizing Furiosa needs his help and she TRUSTS him is someone fueled completely by terror. It says something about Furiosa that she figures out very quickly that Max isn’t so much a threat as he’s also a victim, useful, and SCARED.
Something my boyfriend pointed out is that Max is remembering how to talk through the first chunk of the movie.
I thought he was just grunting and stuff because “rawr I am a badass male action hero man” and didn’t wanna use words. But no, no he’s remembering how to talk. He’s been wandering the desert for who knows how long, not speaking to another soul, hallucinating, and when he’s confronted by the Wives and Furiosa he can barely communicate beyond the violence he’s been subjected to at the hands of the War Boys and in his interactions previous to that. He remembers how to speak as the movie progresses.
Also, Max clearly isn’t interested in killing anyone in that first fight. Furiosa puts a gun to Max’s head and pulls the trigger – twice – but Max walks up with a busted shotgun, wastes six bullets on warning shots, and disables Nux with a punch in the solar plexus even though he’s holding a loaded pistol.
Even at his most feral, just out of an experience that would curl most people into a ball of helpless panic, Max just wants to get away, not kill anybody. It breaks my heart.
This movie is honestly a master class in show not tell. This is the reason why the script is probably like six pages – we really don’t need dialogue. The fact that Max doesn’t straight up kill Furiosa – when it’s made perfectly clear that she would kill him in a heart beat if their roles were reversed – is such a heavy and telling moment, character wise. Max doesn’t kill anyone until he has to. Not when he’s escaping in the very beginning (when he has that war boy up against the wall of the cave he could easily snap his neck but he doesn’t), and not when he could very easily kill Nux for what he’s put him through.
Because he’s not out for vengeance. Not like Furiosa. Furiosa is angry, she wants revenge, she wants to tear people apart with her bare hands. Max is a kicked dog. Feral and crazy, yes, but ultimately his overarching driving force is fear. And Furiosa sees that immediately. Plays off that fear, of being trapped and locked up (”you want that thing off your face?”). Gives him things to do because she knows he’s terrified but obviously can also handle himself. Immediately sees his value as an ally. Gives him time to pull himself together.
And she’s rewarded, in the end, for trusting her gut. I’m so sad.
Ok, things I’ve found in the Mad Max artbook, comics and interviews that shed light on daily life with Immortan Joe and the wives:
– Joe doesn’t actually need his mask. It’s just an air purifier so he doesn’t breathe in dust and gas.
– Cheedo is the youngest, and also the only virgin. This could be because Joe has issues with sleeping with young girls, which is an interesting quirk for someone who otherwise has no problem with using and abusing human bodies. It could also be because Cheedo hasn’t menstruated yet; malnutrition, stress, and/or illness can delay puberty – all quite likely factors in a post-apocalyptic wasteland.
– Part of the reason Cheedo is willing to return to Joe is because she hasn’t realized how horrific the reality of being his wife truly is; he has not yet forced himself on her.
– Splendid self-harms, creating deliberate scarification on both her arms and her face. This is basically her only means of rebellion prior to the escape (harming Joe’s ‘property’).
– Joe intentionally sought out one of the few historians in the world (Miss Giddy) to tutor his wives and give them a good education. Despite seeing his wives as his property, he clearly takes pride in having them be the best in every way, including in their intelligence and knowledge. Miss Giddy is more than just their caretaker; she’s their teacher and mentor.
– The wives regularly see Joe at his most intimate, not just when he wants sex. They see enough of him to know that he is 100% human and that he’s “full of shit.” This would imply that Joe is at his most relaxed around them, that he spends real “quality” time with them.
– The Citadel’s upper floors are climate controlled, and the girls are dressed accordingly, able to live in their sheer sarongs with little discomfort due to temperature or weather.
– Despite most of the books in the world being burned, Joe has collected what remaining books he can for his wives, likely to contribute to their education.
– Joe’s Gigahorse is designed to represent animalistic copulation.
– The five women we meet are in no way his first wives. He has been a slaver-polygamist for a long time, giving each wife three chances to produce a healthy heir before he divorces them and sends them out among the Wretched. Until Splendid, there was no ‘success.’
– When the wives escape, Joe blames only Furiosa, thinking that she’s fed them lies and intentionally undermined his relationships with them. This indicates that he probably thought they were devoted to him before Furiosa ‘got to them’.
– Joe legitimately sees himself as the savior of the wastes. Whether he actually considers himself divine is up to debate, but he certainly views himself as reasonable, benevolent and paternal to both his people and his wives. He provides for his wives (as long as the marriages last) and sees himself as a good husband. They are precious to him, but still objects in his eyes.
1) It could be that a particular kind of tumor is common in the Citadel, courtesy of Founder’s Effect; this would explain why everyone from the Citadel’s genetic pool has tumors/boils/buboes, but individuals from outside populations–Furiosa, Max, the Wives (possibly), the Vuvalini–don’t have them. This would also explain why supposedly pervasive radiation toxicity appears only to affect one population instead of all populations.
2) The War Boys’ and the Wretched’s ailments are curable. The tumors are relatively benign and easily removed (there was no sign of cachexia in populations that weren’t starved, and Nux didn’t seem to be suffering from organ failure); the night fevers are a series of infections endemic to the War Boys’ shitty living conditions; and the reason they need blood transfusions so often is because they’re highly active while on a subpar diet, and thus chronically anemic.
3) If maintaining a death cult is critical to your holding power, one of the best ways to keep the members of said cult properly suicidal is to assure them their lot will be better in the next life. For them to believe it, their lot has to be suitably miserable in THIS life. That’s really not hard to do in Mad Max Land, but it’s even easier if they believe they’re running out of time. How to do this? Tell them their ailments are fatal. Tell them they’re living half-lives on borrowed time. Tell them only cowards die in bed, and that the bravest, the ones who die in battle, are the only ones who get to paradise.
Conclusion: Immortan Joe is a dick. News at 11.
All possible, especially given the apparent uniformity of the War Boy’s illnesses which would either suggest that they come from the same genetic pool (not likely given how many of them there are) or that they’re being exposed to some environmental contamination that is causing that same illness over and over again. Could be the fuel, honestly. Who knows what “Guzzoline” even really is.
I did have a theory myself… that they were that sick, even to dying, but it was being caused deliberately. Immortan Joe controls water supplies and presumably food as well; he could poison them easily enough for all the reasons you outline in point #3. That way when they are (very) young and strong they’re devoted to him, but as they get old enough to possibly start questioning him they sicken and die so he never has to deal with a potential rebellion or movement against him.
I was wondering about this too, mostly because the thought of the surviving women and Furiosa heading back to a place that was so irradiated most of the population dies in their early 20′s was pretty horrible; I finished the movie weirdly anxious about how they needed to to find whatever in the Citadel was giving people half-lives and get it the fuck out of there and dump it at the local This Place Is Not A Place Of Honor ASAP.
But whatever illness the War Boys are all dying from, the women being milked don’t have it, the wives and Miss Giddy are fine, Joe’s sons respectively have OI and some kind of mental disability but no cancer, no tumors, no need for blood transfusions. The only people dealing with anything like what’s going on with the War Boys are the War Boys and Joe himself, which makes me think you’re right that they’re being poisoned, and that suspect #1 for whatever contaminant is making them all sick is in that white war paint. Joe wears it for public appearances but washes it off when he’s at home. The War Boys ritualistically cake themselves in it from an early age and apparently wear it 24/7, so by the time they hit Nux’s age, they’ve got at least a decade of built up exposure.
I like this theory a LOT. Especially if their white paint is based off of titanium dioxide, the same chemical that goes into pretty much every white dye that we have, as well as sunscreen. Normally it’s not exceptionally hazardous, as it can’t penetrate our skin; but it’s classed as a carcinogen if inhaled:
“Titanium dioxide dust, when inhaled, has been classified by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) as an IARC Group 2B carcinogen, meaning it is possibly carcinogenic to humans. The findings of the IARC are based on the discovery that high concentrations of pigment-grade (powdered) and ultrafine titanium dioxide dust caused respiratory tract cancer in rats exposed by inhalation and intratracheal instillation.” (courtesy of Wikipedia).
When Joe applies the white paint, it’s applied as a powder. Tack on high concentrations of harmful environmental radiation and you’ve got yourself a health problem. Added to that, there’s a lot of toxic chemical slag that goes into titanium dioxide production. And if the War Boys produce the powder themselves, then that’s another cause.
I mean, dystopian stories about revolutions and redefining social order in the wake of worldwide catastrophes are cool, but you know what’s #1 on my list of wasted post-apocalyptic plot devices?
This is a thing that exists right now and was created as a safeguard against accidental loss of crop diversity. 700,000+ seed samples from all over the world are stored inside a giant concrete vault in a remote location in permafrost conditions so in case we fuck up everything like we’re probably going to we’ll be able to re-invent agriculture from scratch.
Also it looks like this
and it might as well have FREE PLOT DEVICE TO GOOD HOME written all over it, because can you imagine a bunch of exhausted, discouraged, hungry and injured kids travelling thousands of miles in search of this place they weren’t sure even existed, coming up a frozen slope and finally seeing it
walking through this tunnel in stunned, reverent silence because they’re afraid to let themselves believe this is real
coming inside the actual vault that’s lined floor-to-ceiling with the stuff that’s going to feed what’s left of humanity and jump-start new ecosystems.
If you know about this place and can’t imagine a fantastic post-apocalyptic story of hope and discovery and spiritually-tinted science about the equivalent of present-day millenials pulling the world out of darkness by learning to grow kidney beans
I don’t know what to tell you, man.
Get a rat and put it in a cage and give it two water bottles. One is just water, and one is water laced with either heroin or cocaine. If you do that, the rat will almost always prefer the drugged water and almost always kill itself very quickly, right, within a couple of weeks. So there you go. It’s our theory of addiction.
Bruce comes along in the ’70s and said, “Well, hang on a minute. We’re putting the rat in an empty cage. It’s got nothing to do. Let’s try this a little bit differently.” So Bruce built Rat Park, and Rat Park is like heaven for rats. Everything your rat about town could want, it’s got in Rat Park. It’s got lovely food. It’s got sex. It’s got loads of other rats to be friends with. It’s got loads of colored balls. Everything your rat could want. And they’ve got both the water bottles. They’ve got the drugged water and the normal water. But here’s the fascinating thing. In Rat Park, they don’t like the drugged water. They hardly use any of it. None of them ever overdose. None of them ever use in a way that looks like compulsion or addiction. There’s a really interesting human example I’ll tell you about in a minute, but what Bruce says is that shows that both the right-wing and left-wing theories of addiction are wrong. So the right-wing theory is it’s a moral failing, you’re a hedonist, you party too hard. The left-wing theory is it takes you over, your brain is hijacked. Bruce says it’s not your morality, it’s not your brain; it’s your cage. Addiction is largely an adaptation to your environment.
[…]
We’ve created a society where significant numbers of our fellow citizens cannot bear to be present in their lives without being drugged, right? We’ve created a hyperconsumerist, hyperindividualist, isolated world that is, for a lot of people, much more like that first cage than it is like the bonded, connected cages that we need.
The opposite of addiction is not sobriety. The opposite of addiction is connection. And our whole society, the engine of our society, is geared towards making us connect with things. If you are not a good consumer capitalist citizen, if you’re spending your time bonding with the people around you and not buying stuff—in fact, we are trained from a very young age to focus our hopes and our dreams and our ambitions on things we can buy and consume. And drug addiction is really a subset of that.
so i was searching scanned archives of historical books for references to the names of the amis outside of les mis, like you do, in order to try and find clues for why hugo picked the names that he did. i found a few things (which i’ll make a post about later), but i wasn’t having much luck overall… until i found this sentence in a french scientific journal (Cosmos: revue des sciences et de leurs applications) from 1895:
for those of you who don’t speak french, allow me to translate:
A Frenchman by the name of Pierre Grantaire has, near Philadelphia (United States), the largest spider “farm.”
…okay cosmos, you have my attention. the full article is even better:
and another rough translation:
The art of giving bottled wine the appearance of age. – More and more things are counterfeited in our age. This is why there are forged diamonds and other precious stones, ivory, gold, rubber. Now, here’s an example found in the sale of phony old wines, that is, wine stored in bottles having the appearance of age. To make bottles appear older and obtain a better price for their contents, a new industry was created, that of spider cultivation. A Frenchman by the name of Pierre Grantaire has, near Philadelphia (United States), the largest spider “farm.” His stock usually consists of thousands of spiders originating mostly from the selection of spiders imported from France.
This industry also exists in the Loire region, but on a smaller scale. There are however ten establishments devoted to the cultivation of spiders in this department. These spiders are sold for around 60 francs per hundred, and the clientele consists of french wine-growers who use them for a clever, if not recommendable, purpose.
Three months after the introduction of 60 francs’ worth of spiders to a newly stocked wine cellar, the bottles are covered from cork to cork in spiderwebs. The uneducated person, seeing these bottles completely covered in spiderwebs, naturally concludes that the wine which they contain is old, and so one can get a better price for it.
COUNTERFEIT WINE
SPIDER-FARMER GRANTAIRE
IS A THING
and it gets better — apparently this story went “viral,” in a nineteenth-century sense, appearing throughout different american newspapers and journals, including the scientific fucking american. here’s an excerpt from the story about it in the hartford locomotive:
aka:
“average ami raises 3 spiders a year” factoid actualy just statistical error. average ami eats 0 spiders per year. Spiders Grantaire, who lives in pennsylvania & raises over 10,000 each day, is an outlier adn should not have been counted”
here’s the headline of the san francisco call’s article:
HE HAS A MOTHERFUCKING SPIDER FARM.
the text of the article (which we can all read because it is available online, thank the old gods and the new) includes an interview with spiders grantaire, in which he waxes rhapsodically about his charges in exactly the way that you imagine the grantaire of les mis would:
“They think I feed them now,” said Pierre, “but I ford them for you. They have brains, these little creatures. Ah, they are cunning. After you see them and I tell you of them you will not oush them more. You will say, ‘The spider can teach me something. I will Watch him. He is a diplomat, an architect, a mathematician. His knowledge is worth having.’ Ah, there is a fine fellcw running on your neck. Don’t knock him off. He will not bite you. They are harmless. He wishes to give you a bon jour and make your acquaintance. […] “But what money is there in it, you ask. Men Dieu, money, money—always money. I, who love my pets, to be always thinking of what they sell for! I will tell you now, and then you will talk no more of money, and I can show you something. A customer comes to me. He is a wine merchant from New York or Philadelphia, or perhaps he writes. He says that he has just stocked a cellar with five-year-old port or Burgundy, or something else. The bottles have brushed clean in shipping. They look like new and common. They will not sell for old wine. He has attached to them labels of twenty, thirty or forty years ago, some year of a grand vintage. He tells me so many hundred bottles. I know how many of my pets will soon cover his cellar in cobwebs of the finest old kind. I put them in little small paper boxes, a pair in a box. I ship then, in a crate, with many holes for air. Maybe I send 200, 300 or 400 spiders. For them I ask half a franc each, si, for every hundred. In two months you would think his cellar was not disturbed for the last forty years. It has cost him $40, or $50 maybe, but he may sell the wine for $1,000 —yes, more than that—above what it had brought without any pets had dressed the bottles in robes of long ago.”
one million stories, please, about a grantaire who miraculously survives the barricade and moves to the united states where he starts a spider farm and keeps the flame of the revolution alive by bilking snobby fat cats out of their wine money.
“In America in particular, if a young man attempts gentle platonic contact with another young man, he faces a very real risk of homophobic backlash either by that person or by those who witness the contact. This is, in part, because we frame all contact by men as being intentionally sexual until proven otherwise. Couple this with the homophobia that runs rampant in our culture, and you get a recipe for increased touch isolation that damages the lives of the vast majority of men.
And if you think men have always been hands-off with each other, have a look at an amazing collection of historic photos compiled by Brett and Kate McKay for an article they titled: Bosom Buddies: A Photo History of Male Affection. It’s a remarkable look at male camaraderie as expressed though physical touch in photos dating back to the earliest days of photography.”
Platonic touch is crucial to human development and happiness, and this article discusses the damage done to everyone when two men can’t casually touch without fear of backlash, and when the burden of physical affection is solely placed on women.
Men from other parts of the world and different cultural histories often have to be told, literally, “don’t do what you normally would with friends: people will think you’re gay.”
It’s also part of the bullshit that contributes to the sense many men have that being denied a (usually female) sexual partner is a massive attack and hardship: in our society the only relationship that allows adult men human touch is a sexual-romantic one.
That means we’re training our boys to truly believe the only way to get this thing is by having a girlfriend. (And even then, too much cuddling or whatever that’s NOT overtly sexual or seen to be the woman providing sexualized attention is seen as emasculating and unmanly.)
And that very easily becomes “this is what women are FOR.” And even when it doesn’t quite, the need for contact doesn’t go away, and can be psychologically corrosive in the extreme.
And we start teaching this VERY young. Young enough that when today at playgroup I saw a father with his five year old SON acting like he would with a daughter or like a mother would with a son that age, it was actually remarkable (and nice to see) because it so often doesn’t happen: about three or four is usually the cut-off for fathers (or grandfathers) cuddling and kissing sons.
Moms are allowed to do it much longer, but again, sons WANTING it rather than Putting Up With It is viewed as a sign of weakness, babyish, unacceptable.
It’s fucked up, and it costs not only these men, but every woman they cross paths with. Our entire culture is set up to tell them that they HAVE to have access to a woman to be emotionally well, and that woman has to have sex with them, and then they go out and live it and everyone pays.
(Note, of course: this code and behaviour is mostly reinforced by OTHER MEN. Just like almost all the others.)
Researchers have announced a new understanding of Roman concrete – a versatile artificial stone that allowed Roman builders to create magnificent, open interiors of unprecedented scale. Collaborators used X-ray beams to study samples under the auspices of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory to understand better why Roman concrete does not crumble and how monuments like the Pantheon, Colosseum, and Markets of Trajan stand to this day. Not only does this research enhance our comprehension of ancient building practice but also it offers hope for more environmentally friendly methods today.
Roman concrete uses a volcanic ash-lime mortar that is virtually crack-resistant combined with chunks of volcanic stone and other materials, often brick. Today’s concrete is made with limestone-based Portland cement, which requires a temperature of 1,450C (2,642F) to create and releases upwards of 7% of the world’s carbon emissions annually. Roman concrete, by contrast, does not require such high heat and could lead to the development of greener concrete through the use of volcanic material as the Romans did over two millennia ago.
EY FATTY BOOM BOOM 