Entirely unrelated to history, but if you have two minutes of time you’re just dying to shoot in the face, You Touch My Hands for Stupid Reasons is currently the delight of the von Luckner household.
Benjamin Disraeli is known to most as a Prime Minister of Great Britain and moulder of the Conservative Party. But before all of that he was the dandiest dandy in Dandytown. A few quotes from his letters home:
“To repose on voluptuous ottomans and smoke superb pipes, daily to indulge in the luxuries of a bath which requires half a dozen attendants for its perfection… and to find no exertion greater than a canter on a barb; this is, I think a far more sensible life than all the bustle of clubs, all the boring of drawing rooms, and all the coarse vulgarity of our political controversies.”
“Yesterday, at the racket court, sitting in the gallery among strangers, the ball entered, and lightly struck me and fell at my feet. I picked it up, and observing a young rifleman excessively stiff, I humbly requested him to forward its passage into the court, as I really had never thrown a ball in all my life. This incident has been the general subject of conversation at all the messes to-day!”
And, of course, my favorite:
“I have also the fame of being the first who ever passed the Straits with two canes, a morning and an evening cane. I change my cane as the gun fires, and hope to carry them both on to Cairo.”
And now I realize that I wanted to talk a bit about Thoreau’s beans today, but I suppose that will have to wait. Beans ARE a dish best served cold…
– Count Dolby von Luckner
http://www.ftg-comic.com/2008/01/03/index.php
What happens when you don’t let everyone’s favorite French Emperor invade England? And what is the dire cost of implying that British coinage is cursed? Things are not going at all well, even by Frederickian standards, but at least… no, actually things are just not going at all well without qualification. It’s a long hard road to anything resembling victory, and it begins here in Episode 90: Dropping the Pilot!
– The Count and Geoff
The New Year of 2008 means that our web statistics have reset themselves to a pure, largely unvisited state. What entertains me most about the webstats is the “search keyphrases” section. So far, for all 48ish hours of 2008 we have had seven people visit us by searching for “frederick the great”, two people from “ftg comic”, and another two from the misspelled “fredrick the great”. These sorts of searches are to be expected.
However, we have had one person check out our site from each of the following searches:
“j ai grand appetit” – Which makes sense to me since I referenced this rebus here.
“ftg girls” – The ftg must have done it. Kudos to you, person who I presume to be a sir, for making a brief stop at our humble comic amidst your search for, what I presume to be, pr0n.
“punched in the nuts” – Indeed. Indeed.
“stinkface wrestling” – The Count provided a shout-out the mighty Rikishi in his comments for this episode.
“prison gags” – Why, I used this very phrase in this episode! However, I was meaning more “jokes that happen in a prison” and less “here is how we do things in Gitmo.”
–Geoff
In later life, Napoleon tried to pass off the planned invasion of Britain as a feint to pull attention away from his real plans with the Army of the Rhine. I don’t quite buy that one. At unheard-of expense, from 1801 to 1805 he built up a fleet of nearly two thousand transport and light gunships along with assembling a navy of some thirty four warships, complete with newly trained crews and newly built ports to accommodate them.
So how did it all go so wrong? Well, part of it was that Napoleon fired out no less than six different battle plans, each more complicated than the last, causing no end of delay as the admirals tried to figure out exactly what they were supposed to be doing. Part of it was that the guys Napoleon entrusted with the job were entirely dishonest, often reporting double the amount of ships and construction as had actually been accomplished (“We totally have two thousand boats, sir. Right out that window, see ‘em? No, don’t bother counting. Matter of fact, let’s just close this curtain here…”) And then there’s the small fact that he expected to build from scratch a force that could take on the ass-kicking-British-Navy using primarily old fishing boats that had been converted into transports by charlatans.
But Napoleon was Napoleon, and he pulled it off. He built his fleet, his warships, his ports, all as he said he would, and then watched the fleet diminish by a third with each winter that his plans were delayed until finally, in 1805, Lord Nelson sunk seventy percent of his warships in a single battle without losing a boat of his own. With that, the invasion of Britain was over before it even started.
So, to feel better about himself, Napoleon whooped Austria again. And everything was great.
– Count Dolby von Luckner