Ruination & Despair

1934: “You can tell your banker friends to go to hell.”

  —  Marriner S. Eccles to Elbert G. Bennett upon being told that Wall Street would relent in its opposition to his appointment as chairman of the Federal Reserve if he would consent to the weakening of a New Deal banking bill; quoted in Sidney Hyman, Marriner S. Eccles, Private Entrepreneur and Public Servant (Stanford, 1976), 175. Eccles went on to be confirmed despite the bankers’ opposition. The headquarters building of the Federal Reserve in Washington, D.C., is named after him.

2011: “Wall Street is our Main Street — love ’em or hate ’em. They are important and we have to make sure we are doing everything we can to support them unless they are doing something indefensible.”

  —  Kathryn S. Wylde, member of the board of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, reproving New York State Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman, for his unwelcome investigation of the mortgage securitization scandal; quoted in the New York Times, 22 August 2011. It is difficult to avoid the inference that Wylde regards blatant, widespread fraud by the banking industry as defensible.

“[T]he nobility both of England and Scotland [are] inferior to brute beasts, for they do that to women which no male among the common sort of beasts can be proved to do to their female: that is, they reverence them, and quake at their presence; they obey their commandments, and that against God. Wherefore I judge them not only subjects to women, but slaves of Satan, and servants of iniquity.”

  —  John Knox, The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women (1558).

Having written previously about naming children after such things as fabrics, animals, birds, plants, and food, I thought it time to push the envelope even further and explore the use of names from the Periodic Table of Elements. (Continue reading . . .)

There was an old hen
    And she had a wooden leg,
And every damned morning
    She laid another egg;
She was the best damned chicken
    On the whole damned farm —
And another little drink
    Wouldn’t do us no harm.

Last week Archelaus’s entire staff attended an orgiastic corporate retreat in Dayton, Ohio, all details of which must be suppressed to avoid criminal prosecution. While taking a break from the festivities, however, Customer Service Minion #3 snapped this quick photo of an Egyptian mongoose at the Dayton Art Institue. Crafted from bronze, the creature dates to somewhere between 663 and 525 B.C., and bears a strong family resemblence to our own much-beloved specimen from approximately A.D. 1580.

Check out this exciting offer from an advertisement found on a Slovak website.

The ingredient list for Original Slim Jims includes “mechanically separated chicken.” Now, that sounds tasty!

In 1934 the small Russian fascist movement based in the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo declared Joseph Stalin to be a “concubine of American capitalists and Jews.”

Source: John J. Stephan, The Russian Fascists: Tragedy and Farce in Exile, 1925-1945 (New York, 1978), 58, citing a Japanese consular report.

When a garulous barber asked him how he would like his hair cut, King Archelaus of Macedonia (reigned 413-399 B.C.) replied: “In silence.”

Source: Plutarch, Morals, vol. 15: On Talkativeness.

“Two boys arrived yesterday with a pebble they said was the head of a dog until I pointed out that it was really a typewriter.”

  —  Pablo Picasso

“There have been rains of milk, blood, flesh, iron, sponges, wool, and baked bricks.”

  —  Pliny the Elder, Natural History (circa A.D. 78)

(If you think you have nothing to be thankful for this Thanksgiving, consider the infrequency of recent reports of any of the above.)

As I noted in my previous post on plant names, fruit and vegetable names constitute their own subcategory, which I will consider now, together with names relating to other kinds of food and drink. Notwithstanding the well-publicized decision by the actress Gwyneth Paltrow to name her baby Apple in 2004, food names are generally rare. Somewhat unexpectedly the chief exceptions — indeed the oldest and the most popular names in this category — are related to olives. (Continue reading . . .)