The Holy Grail Press
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Word of the Every So Often
paleontrope: (noun) (pronounced: pay-lee-on-trope) Note the Latin prefix “paleo,” mean old. A paleontrope is someone who explores or studies ancient things, or even an ancient thing. OK, really, this is a word that only Cormac McCarthy used in his novel Suttree, because he made it up. But that doesn’t mean we can’t use it, too. Because some day we all will be paleontropic.
Everyday History
It was on November 10, 1871, that the journalist Henry M. Stanley stumbled into an encampment in Africa and uttered the famous words, “Dr. Livingstone, I presume.” Or not. There’s no verified evidence that he ever uttered those words. But, hey, it’s a good story.
The Reverend David Livingstone, born on March 19, 1813, in Scotland, was a Christian missionary. He first arrived in Africa in 1840, quickly becoming an avid explorer, mostly looking for new places to evangelize from, and trying to create a “Christian highway” into deep Africa. As such, he was the first white dude (that we know of) to see Victoria Falls, arriving there on November 16, 1855.
After several failed missions into Africa, Livingstone returned in 1866 to Zanzibar, determined to find the source of the Nile. He believed if he did, then he could stop the African slave trade. The attempt was doomed from the start. His helpers quickly abandoned him, reporting that he had died, which wasn’t far from true. Livingstone would pretty much spend the rest of his life in poor health. Still Livingstone soldiered on, eventually becoming so ill that he would have died had not Arab slave traders saved him. Talk about irony.
And then he got lost for six years. Well, maybe he knew where he was, but nobody else did. So in 1869 the New York Herald sent a reporter to find him. Yup, Henry Morton Stanley. Stanley tried to persuade Livingstone to come back with him, but Livingstone refused, still determine to find the source of the Nile. Livingstone died on May 1, 1873, in Zambia, from a combination of dysentery and malaria. Chief Chitambo, who was with him when he died, had has body returned to England to be buried in Westminster Abby.
By the way, aside from those millions of Africans who always knew where the source of the Nile was, the first white guy to find it was British explorer John Hanning Speke, on August 3, 1858, who figured out the source was Lake Victoria. Trouble is, nobody believed him at first, which is why Livingstone was still looking for it. It wasn’t until 1875 that Stanley (yup, our Stanley) definitively proved that Lake Victoria was the source of the Nile.
Cartoon of the Week
Flies Under the Radar
Stuff
The History of the Future: The End of Sagging
It was in the summer of 2032 that the dress fashion known as "sagging" came to an abrupt end. As one fashion critic stated, sagging, which featured wearing one’s trousers no higher than somewhere well below the crotch, “was just taken too far.” A group of young men in Detroit began the short-lived fad of “dragging,” which was simply putting only one foot through one’s trousers and then dragging them as one walked. The fad lasted a little over two weeks before others, seemingly all at once, came to the sudden realization of just how fantastically stupid that was. What followed was the equally sudden realization of just how stupid sagging was, as well. And that was followed by what became known as “neo retro anti-sagging,” where the trousers were increasingly worn higher and higher in an effort to prove that the wearers definitely were not sagging, and that anybody whose trousers were worn lower than theirs was considered sagging, and that person was therefore what one fashion pundit described as “dweebified.” Wearing a belt around one’s neck was briefly popular, and surprisingly very few people were asphyxiated. The fad peaked with the adherents wearing their trousers so high that they had to unzip their flies to see. A few purists, who became known as “those assholes who keep running into everything,” refused to peek out of the fly, stating that it was demeaning. The height of one’s trousers suddenly became irrelevant by the spring of 2034, when the craze of church hats – a miniaturized, sanctified steeple that one could wear on one’s head, and thus be in church always – captured the public whim. See Eldridge’s concise history of fashion, How Dumb Can We Get? (Holy Grail Press, 2034)
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