Crabs and Beer!

Today is the birthday, in 1650, of Nell Gwyn, an English stage actress and celebrity figure of the Restoration period. Praised by Samuel Pepys for her comic performances as one of the first actresses on the English stage, she became best known for being a longtime mistress of King Charles II of England. Called “pretty, witty Nell” by Pepys, she has been regarded as a living embodiment of the spirit of Restoration England, and has come to be considered a folk heroine, with a story echoing the rags-to-royalty tale of Cinderella.

She was thought to be born in London, since Gwyn’s mother was born there and that is where she raised her children. Old Madam Gwyn was by most accounts an alcoholic whose business was running a bawdy house (or brothel). There, or in the bawdy house of one Madam Ross, Nell spent at least some time. She experimented with cross-dressing between 1663 and 1667, going under the name “William Nell” and adopting a false beard; her observations informed a most successful and hilarious character interpretation acting as a man on the stage in March 1667.

When theaters were once again legalized, Mary Meggs, a former prostitute nicknamed “Orange Moll” and a friend of Madam Gwyn’s, had been granted the licence to “vend, utter and sell oranges, lemons, fruit, sweetmeats and all manner of fruiterers and confectioners wares” within the theater. Orange Moll hired Nell and her elder sister Rose as scantily-clad “orange-girls”, selling small, sweet “china” oranges to the audience inside the theater for a sixpence each. The new theaters were the first in England to feature actresses; earlier, women’s parts had been played by boys or men. Gwyn joined the rank of actresses at Bridges Street when she was 14, less than a year after becoming an orange-girl.

Whatever her first role as an actress may have been, it is evident that she had become a more prominent actress by 1665. It is around this time when she is first mentioned in Samuel Pepys’ diary, specifically on 3 April 1665, while attending a play, where the description “pretty, witty Nell” is first recorded. The Maiden Queen featured breeches roles, where an actress appeared in men’s clothes under one pretense or another, and as Bax supposes “was one of the first occasions upon which a woman appeared in the disguise of a man”; if nothing else this could draw an audience eager to see women show off their figures in the more form-fitting male attire. The attraction had another dynamic: the theaters sometimes had a hard time holding onto their actresses, as they were swept up to become kept mistresses of the aristocracy. In 1667, Gwyn made such a match with Charles Sackville, titled Lord Buckhurst at that time.

Late in 1667, George Villiers, 2nd Duke of Buckingham, took on the role of unofficial manager for Gwyn’s love affairs. He aimed to provide King Charles with someone who would supplant Barbara Palmer. The plan failed; reportedly, Gwyn asked £500 a year to be kept and this was rejected as too expensive. Buckingham had an alternative plan, which was to set the King up with Moll Davis, an actress with the rival Duke’s Company. Davis was Gwyn’s first rival for the King. Gwyn slipped a powerful laxative into Davis’ tea-time cakes before an evening when she was expected in the King’s bed.

Having previously been the mistress of Charles Hart and Charles Sackville, Gwyn jokingly called the King “her Charles the Third”. Several months later, Louise de Kérouaille (Duchess of Portsmouth) came to England from France, ostensibly to serve as a maid of honor to Queen Catherine, but also to become another mistress to King Charles, probably by design on both the French and English sides. She and Gwyn were rivals for many years to come. They were opposites in personality and mannerism; Louise a proud woman of noble birth used to the sophistication of Versailles, Gwyn a spirited and pranking ex-orange-wench. Gwyn nicknamed Louise “Squintabella” for her looks and the “Weeping Willow” for her tendency to sob.

She had two children by the king and the king granted her houses and money. Gwyn died in November of 1687. Though Gwyn was often caricatured as an empty-headed woman, John Dryden said that her greatest attribute was her native wit, and she certainly became a hostess who was able to keep the friendship of Dryden, the playwright Aphra Behn, William Ley, 4th Earl of Marlborough (a lover of hers), John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester, and the King’s other mistresses.

She was one day passing through the streets of Oxford, in her coach, when the mob mistaking her for her rival, the Duchess of Portsmouth, commenced hooting and loading her with every opprobrious epithet. Putting her head out of the coach window, “Good people”, she said, smiling, “you are mistaken; I am the Protestant whore.

Portrait of Nell Gwyn as Venus with her son, Charles, as Cupid, by Peter Lely. Charles II had this hung behind a landscape, which he swung back to allow favored guests to peer at.

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COOKING ADVENTURES!

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Moulin Rouge? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQa7SvVCdZk

On this day in1889, Archduke Crown Prince Rudolf of Austria, heir to the Austro-Hungarian crown, is found dead with his mistress Baroness Mary Vetsera in the Mayerling. Rudolf was was the only son and third child of Emperor Franz Joseph I and Empress Elisabeth of Austria. He was heir apparent to the imperial throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire from birth. In 1889, he died in a suicide pact with his mistress Baroness Mary Vetsera at the Mayerling hunting lodge. The ensuing scandal made international headlines.

Rudolf was raised together with his older sister Gisela and the two were very close. At the age of six, Rudolf was separated from his sister as he began his education to become a future Emperor of Austria. This did not change their relationship and Gisela remained close to him until she left Vienna upon her marriage to Prince Leopold of Bavaria. Rudolf’s initial education under Leopold Gondrecourt was physically and emotionally abusive, and likely a contributing factor in his later suicide.

In Vienna, on 10 May 1881, Rudolf married Princess Stéphanie of Belgium, a daughter of King Leopold II of Belgium, at the Augustinian Church in Vienna. Although their marriage was initially a happy one, by the time their only child, the Archduchess Elisabeth (“Erzsi”), was born on 2 September 1883, the couple had drifted apart.

In 1886, Rudolf became seriously ill and the couple was directed to the island of Lacroma (off present day Croatia) for his treatment. In transit, Stéphanie also became seriously ill and described “suffering terrible pain”. Stéphanie’s symptoms and outcome indicate Rudolf had most likely infected her with gonorrhoea. Rudolf himself did not improve with treatment and grew increasingly ill. It is likely he had contracted syphilis in addition to gonorrhoea. In order to cope with the effects of the disease, Rudolf began taking large doses of morphine.

In 1886, Rudolf bought Mayerling, a hunting lodge. In late 1888, the 30-year-old Crown Prince met the 17-year-old Baroness Marie von Vetsera, and began an affair with her. On 30 January 1889, he and the young baroness were discovered dead in the lodge as a result of an apparent joint suicide. As suicide would prevent him from being given a church burial, Rudolf was officially declared to have been in a state of “mental unbalance”, and he was buried in the Imperial Crypt of the Capuchin Church in Vienna. Vetsera’s body was smuggled out of Mayerling in the middle of the night and secretly buried in the village cemetery at Heiligenkreuz.

Crown Prince Rudolf

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This weather…

Here’s Carly Simon. A lot of the shots in this video are home movies from her youth. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0A7jAVDPJU

On this day in 1891, Lydia Liliʻu Loloku Walania Kamakaʻeha (Liliʻuokalani), ascended to the throne of the Hawaiian Kingdom, nine days after her brother’s death. During her reign, she attempted to draft a new constitution which would restore the power of the monarchy and the voting rights of the economically disenfranchised. was the only queen regnant and the last sovereign monarch of the Hawaiian Kingdom, ruling until the overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom on January 17, 1893, in a coup that was led by the Committee of Safety, composed of seven foreign residents (five Americans, one Scotsman, and one German) and six Hawaiian Kingdom subjects of American descent in Honolulu. The overthrow was bolstered by the landing of US Marines to protect American interests, which rendered the monarchy unable to protect itself.

After an unsuccessful uprising to restore the monarchy, the oligarchical government placed the former queen under house arrest at the ʻIolani Palace. On January 24, 1895, under threat of execution of her imprisoned supporters, Liliʻuokalani was forced to abdicate the Hawaiian throne, officially resigning as head of the deposed monarchy. Attempts were made to restore the monarchy and oppose annexation, but with the outbreak of the Spanish–American War, the United States annexed Hawaiʻi. Living out the remainder of her later life as a private citizen, Liliʻuokalani died at her residence, Washington Place, in Honolulu in 1917.

Liliʻuokalani

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History repeats itself

Here’s Robert Palmer. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DlPHmYtqSdA

Today is the birthday, in 1873, of Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, known as Colette. She was a French author and woman of letters. She was also a mime, actress, and journalist. Colette is best known in the English-speaking world for her 1944 novella Gigi, which was the basis for the 1958 film and the 1973 stage production of the same name. Her short story collection The Tendrils of the Vine is also famous in France.

Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette was born on 28 January 1873 in the village of Saint-Sauveur-en-Puisaye in the department of Yonne, Burgundy. Her father, Captain Jules-Joseph Colette (1829–1905), was a war hero. Her mother, Adèle Eugénie Sidonie, was nicknamed Sido. Colette’s great-grandfather, Robert Landois, was a wealthy Martinican mulatto, who settled in Charleville in 1787.

In 1893, Colette married Henry Gauthier-Villars, an author and publisher 14 years her senior, who used the pen name “Willy”. Her first four novels – the four Claudine stories: Claudine à l’école (1900), Claudine à Paris (1901), Claudine en ménage (1902), and Claudine s’en va (1903) – appeared under his name. Fourteen years older than his wife and one of the most notorious libertines in Paris, he introduced his wife into avant-garde intellectual and artistic circles and encouraged her lesbian dalliances. And it was he who chose the titillating subject matter of the Claudine novels: “the secondary myth of Sappho.

Colette and Willy separated in 1906, although their divorce was not final until 1910. Colette had no access to the sizable earnings of the Claudine books – the copyright belonged to Willy – and until 1912 she conducted a stage career in music halls across France, sometimes playing Claudine in sketches from her own novels, earning barely enough to survive and often hungry and ill. To make ends meet, she turned more seriously to journalism in the 1910s.

During these years she embarked on a series of relationships with other women, notably with Natalie Clifford Barney and with Mathilde de Morny, the Marquise de Belbeuf (“Max”), with whom she sometimes shared the stage. On 3 January 1907, an onstage kiss between Max and Colette in a pantomime entitled “Rêve d’Égypte” caused a near-riot, and as a result, they were no longer able to live together openly, although their relationship continued for another five years.

Colette was 67 years old when France was occupied by the Germans. She remained in Paris, in her apartment in the Palais-Royal. Her husband Maurice Goudeket, who was Jewish, was arrested by the Gestapo in December 1941, and although he was released after seven weeks through the intervention of the French wife of the German ambassador.

In 1944, Colette published what became her most famous work, Gigi, which tells the story of the 16-year-old Gilberte (“Gigi”) Alvar. Born into a family of demimondaines, Gigi is trained as a courtesan to captivate a wealthy lover but defies the tradition by marrying him instead. In 1949 it was made into a French film starring Danièle Delorme and Gaby Morlay, then in 1951 adapted for the stage with the then-unknown Audrey Hepburn (picked by Colette personally) in the title role. The 1958 Hollywood musical movie, starring Leslie Caron and Louis Jourdan, with a screenplay by Alan Jay Lerner and a score by Lerner and Frederick Loewe, won the Academy Award for Best Picture.

Upon her death, on 3 August 1954, she was refused a religious funeral by the Catholic Church on account of her divorces, but given a state funeral, the first French woman of letters to be granted the honor, and interred in Père-Lachaise cemetery.

Colette, possibly around 1910

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BADA BING

I tried making skimmed milk, but it was too hard to throw the cow across the lake.

A person learning English as a second language just asked me the difference between “burned” and “burnt”, and I just stared blankly back with a 404 error screen running through my brain.

You might be in a CULT if you buy a red hat made in China to support a felon who married an immigrant and has convinced you that all your problems are caused by immigrants and felons. Or maybe you’re just stupid.

(phone ringing) Boss: Why the hell aren’t you picking that up?! Me: I always answer on the third ring, makes me seem cooler. Boss: PICK IT UP! Me: Fine… 911 what’s your emergency?

BREAKING: The cold weather is set to last until it gets warmer.

I celebrate every touchdown my team makes by drinking nearly a liter of beer. That’s a two pint conversion.

What were electric eels called before electricity was discovered? 

Me to dog: I’m out of treats. Dog: I’ll hold your beer ’till you get back.

Minute and minute shouldn’t be spelled the same. I’m not content with this content. I object to that object. I need to read what I read again. Excuse me but there’s no excuse for this. Someone should wind this comment up and throw it in the wind.

I saw someone with a tattoo that read, Comparison is the Thief of Joy. I’m going to get the same tattoo…but mine will be bigger!

How big is Greenland? It’s so big that it covers up 99% of the Epstein files.

I had a leak in the roof over my dining room so I called a roofer to take a look at it. “When did you first notice the leak?” he asked. I told him, “Last night, when it took me two hours to finish my soup!”

My brother thinks he’s a turtle. I’m taking him to the best terrapist in town.

Whoever said 10°F is better than 100°F better be sitting outside enjoying it today.

They say the machines of the future will be as smart as people. Okay, but which people? Because that’s gonna make a big difference. (Bilbo)

Smart people underestimate themselves and ignorant people think they’re brilliant. 

When in grizzly territory, always hike in groups and carry sedative dart guns. Remember, there’s safety in numb bears.

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Today is the birthday, in 1968, of Canadian musician singer songwriter, Sarah McLachlan, who had the 1997 US No.2 album Surfacing. McLachlan has won three Grammy Awards and has sold over 40 million albums worldwide. After becoming frustrated with concert promoters and radio stations that refused to feature two female musicians in a row, she founded the Lilith Fair tour in 1997. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nSz16ngdsG0

On this day in 1945, the Soviet 322nd Rifle Division liberated the Auschwitz Concentration Camp. The camp was was a complex of over 40 concentration and extermination camps operated by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland during World War II. It consisted of Auschwitz I, the main camp, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, a concentration and extermination camp with gas chambers, Auschwitz III-Monowitz, a labor camp for the chemical conglomerate IG Farben, and dozens of subcamps.

Of the 1.3 million people sent to Auschwitz, 1.1 million were murdered. The number of victims includes 960,000 Jews (865,000 of whom were gassed on arrival), 74,000 non-Jewish Poles, 21,000 Romani, 15,000 Soviet prisoners of war, and up to 15,000 others. Those not gassed were murdered via starvation, exhaustion, disease, individual executions, or beatings. Others were killed during medical experiments.

When the Soviet soldiers arrived, They found 7,000 prisoners alive in the three main camps, 500 in the other subcamps, and over 600 corpses. Georgii Elisavetskii, a Soviet soldier who entered one of the barracks, said in 1980 that he could hear other soldiers telling the inmates: “You are free, comrades!” But they did not respond, so he tried in Russian, Polish, German, Ukrainian. Then he used some Yiddish: “They think that I am provoking them. They begin to hide. And only when I said to them: ‘Do not be afraid, I am a colonel of Soviet Army and a Jew. We have come to liberate you’ … Finally, as if the barrier collapsed … they rushed toward us shouting, fell on their knees, kissed the flaps of our overcoats, and threw their arms around our legs.”

Female prisoners at Birkenau

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By mail…

Only in Britain – Complaints to Councils Extracts from letters written by council tenants:

1. It’s the dog’s mess that I find hard to swallow.

2. I want some repairs done to my cooker as it has backfired and burnt my knob off.

3. I wish to complain that my father twisted his ankle very badly when he put his foot in the hole in his back passage.

4. Their 18 year old son is continually banging his balls against my fence.

5. I wish to report that tiles are missing from the outside toilet roof. I think it was bad wind the other day that blew them off.

6. My lavatory seat is cracked, where do I stand?

7. I am writing on behalf of my sink, which is coming away from the wall.

8. Will you please send someone to mend the garden path. My wife tripped and fell on it yesterday and now she is pregnant.

9. I request permission to remove my drawers in the kitchen.

10. 50% of the walls are damp, 50% have crumbling plaster, and 50% are just plain filthy.

11. The next door neighbor has got this huge tool that vibrates the whole house and I just can’t take it anymore.

12. The toilet is blocked and we cannot bath the children until it is cleared.

13. Will you please send a man to look at my water, it is a funny color and not fit to drink.

14. Our lavatory seat is broken in half and now is in three pieces.

15. I want to complain about the farmer across the road. Every morning at 6am his cock wakes me up and it’s now getting too much for me.

16. The man next door has a large erection in the back garden, which is unsightly and dangerous.

17. Our kitchen floor is damp. We have two children and would like a third, so please send someone round to do something about it.

18. I am a single woman living in a downstairs flat and would you please do something about the noise made by the man on top of me every night.

19. Please send a man with the right tool to finish the job and satisfy my wife..

20. I have had the clerk of works down on the floor six times but I still have no satisfaction.

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He wants it all!!!

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Today is the birthday, in 1951, of Brian Downey, Irish drummer and founding member of Thin Lizzy, who had the 1973 UK No.6 single ‘Whisky In The Jar’ and hits with ‘Jailbreak’ and ‘The Boys Are Back in Town’. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=quyB8PMTD3o