DaVinci Kills Dracula

Did you know that Leonardo DaVinci killed Dracula with his own hands?  To think that I, a lifelong student of history, missed out on such an amazing fact blows my mind.  Fortunately for me, a cable TV series called “DaVinci’s Demons” filled that gap in my knowledge.  Of course everything on the show has to be true because it’s a cable series.  I’m a big fan of DaVinci, the artist/inventor/Renaissance man, so I figured that watching “DaVinci’s Demons” would be an entertaining and informative way to spend my scarce free time. This show is remarkably similar to “The Borgias” and “The Tudors.”  Like the other two shows, this one tells a version of history using gratuitous sex scenes (gay and straight), plus a very generous amount of graphic violence and torture. Most of the characters in these shows are depraved and the one or two good people get trampled on, thrown in the dungeon, and most likely executed in a horrific way.  The implicit message to the viewer is to not even try to be a good person, because if you do you will be crushed. 

In this show, DaVinci wears tight leather outfits with an open shirt and looks more like a hipster from Asheville, NC than a man of the Renaissance.  His hair obviously has gel in it and sticks straight up in the middle, a popular look among millennials and Starbucks baristas. He has weird mannerisms, like Captain Jack Sparrow from “Pirates of the Caribbean.”  I’m guessing they couldn’t afford to have Johnny Depp play DaVinci.  But I digress. What’s really important to discuss here is DaVinci’s killing of Dracula.

It is well into Season One that DaVinci and his sidekicks decide to stop by Dracula’s castle. The two historical figures actually did live at the same time. In the show, DaVinci rides by horseback to the castle of Vlad Dracul, also known as Dracula, or Vlad the Impaler.  At the time, DaVinci was living in Florence, Italy.  Out of curiosity, I did a Mapquest to find out how far it is from Florence to central Romania, where Vlad Dracul lived.  It is over 1,000 miles, roughly the equivalent of riding from Charleston, SC to Dallas, TX or from Los Angeles to Seattle, WA.  So according to the show, DaVinci and his assistants rode on horseback across Europe on trails and across mountains. Renaissance Europe was an extremely dangerous place to travel.  The system of roads was lacking and there were plenty of murderous thieves to be encountered along the way. He supposedly made this trek to rescue some guy from Abyssinia, who was held captive at the castle.  The Abysinnian was supposed to have knowledge about a magical key or book or something. The very unpleasant visit to the castle ends with DaVinci killing Dracula.  I won’t say how, because I don’t want to ruin it for anyone who watches. It was around that point that the show lost all credibility with me.  The stuff in Florence was somewhat believable, but DaVinci fighting Vlad Dracul? Are you freaking kidding me?

The show also devotes almost no time to DaVinci as an artist, but depicts him to be more like a mix of MacGyver and Sherlock Holmes. You rarely see him actually creating art, you just see him tinkering with new gadgets, solving mysteries, and engaging in sword fights.  It’s a shame that the producers of the show decided to go this route.  The special effects, sets, and the costumes are, overall, top notch.  I can tell that they spent a lot of money making this.  However, the producers missed out on a golden opportunity by bastardizing the story of DaVinci and throwing in porno scenes.  When I was growing up, I remember watching movies and TV shows that took place in the past.  My dad would explain the history behind the shows we were watching.  That’s how history is passed down.  But shows like “DaVinci’s Demons,” “The Borgias,” and “The Tudors” are filled with so much depravity that no child should ever watch them. What a waste! These shows could have made history more fascinating for the next generation, but, because of their content, cannot be shown in any classroom. In fact, these shows are too depraved even for a lot of adults. 

My Milestone Birthday

I’m having a milestone birthday this weekend. For my birthday weekend I’m getting a paid trip to Fort Jackson, SC to do Army reserve training. Hooray! I’m not going to say my age because it’s an obscene number and this is a family-friendly blog; but from reading this you’ll probably be able to take a guess.  To say that I’m not where I expected to be in life at this point would be an understatement.  On the other hand, I’ve seen and done a lot of things in life that I never expected to, many of them positive things.

The world has changed in a lot of ways since I was born. When I was in elementary school, they were still showing documentaries in class on reel-to-reel projectors.  I saw “Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back” when it was in theaters for the first time.  I remember seeing “Raiders of the Lost Ark” at the movie theater, which got me really hooked on history. I saw it about fifty times. Growing up, we had a rotary phone in the kitchen and one in my parent’s bedroom.  If you wanted to take your call into another room, you had to stretch the cord. It didn’t matter much to me at that age because I almost never talked on the phone. When I was a teenager, I got to have the crappy old rotary phone in my bedroom, while the other phones in the house were high-tech push-button phones.  There was only one line in the apartment, so when one phone rang, they all rang.  If a friend called at midnight, the phone rang throughout the house and my mom or aunt would pick up to find out who the hell was calling at such a late hour.

I remember 8-track players. We had one but almost never used it. We did, however, use our record player throughout my childhood.  Back then they were called “records,” not “vinyl.” I don’t care how trendy “vinyl” has become, those things were ****y. One scratch could totally ruin a good record, and if you picked the record jacket up the wrong way, the record slipped out and shattered on the floor.  I know this because I shattered quite a few records accidentally as a little kid.  Ask my dad, he’ll tell you.  Cassettes were better, unless the tape got jammed in the machine or the motor on the tape-player was slow.  Then, all of your music sounded a little off.  There’s nothing like hearing your favorite song drag or sounding like something from beyond the grave.  Only people who lived through the 80’s truly know the aggravation of trying to carefully extract tape from a machine that decided to eat it.  You’d try not to rip the tape and then use a pencil to wind the tape after it was out.

However, even with all the drawbacks, I was still listening to cassette tapes as a teenager, mostly because they were in the discount bin, and were cheap as hell because of CDs.  My brother and I had a few CDs in high school, but they were expensive, like $15 apiece in the 90’s. I’m a creature of habit and still listen mostly to CDs, although I do occasionally listen to satellite radio and live streaming online.

Getting back to the early days, the first TV I used had a knob and antennas.  Whenever you got tired of watching a channel, you had to get up and turn the knob. You also had to play with the antennas if the picture was fuzzy or distorted. It was so annoying. I think we had about five channels. Eventually we caved and got this newfangled thing called “cable,” which included a couple of new channels like MTV and Nickelodeon.  It even came with a remote, so we could flip through all 30 channels without leaving the couch.

Whenever Dave (my brother) and I reminisce about the old days to my nine-year old niece, Summer, she looks at us like we’re talking about an alien planet. It’s kind of funny, because I remember being her age and listening to stories from my parents about their childhood and thinking how old they were and being amazed that human beings could even live for thirty or forty years. My aunts were about forty at the time. Forty was so old! To me, that was ancient.

Santa Gets Regulated

“This can never, never, never happen again!” shrieked Senator Nutcracker of New York on the Senate floor.  She had received complaints that millions of children nationwide did not get what they wanted for Christmas.  Senator Nutcracker cackled like a witch when she laughed and her voice was like nails across a chalkboard. “Year after year, these children are not getting what they want for Christmas.  Doesn’t Santa know that children have the right to get whatever they want for Christmas?  It’s a right guaranteed by the Good & Plenty Clause of the Constitution! I will not stand by while children are deprived of the latest Playstation or iPhone! Therefore, I am proposing a new law called the Santa Regulation Act.”

Senator Yogatofu of California rose to his feet to second Nutcracker’s motion, “Anyone who rejects this bill hates children!” The majority of Senators were snickering if not doubled over in laughter.  Surely this was some kind of joke.  To their dismay, they soon found out that this was not a joke.  The cable news networks and NPR launched an around-the-clock assault on the opposing senators and blasted anyone who opposed the bill as a “Grinch,” a “Scrooge,” or a “children-hater.” The President also weighed in, announcing that if Congress did not pass this bill, he would issue an Executive Order in its place.  Fearful of the next election, most of the senators caved in. The Santa Regulation Act passed in the House and Senate by an overwhelming majority and became law.

The Santa Regulation Act is a 5,000-page law.  It regulates everything from the dimensions of the sleigh to the types of food Santa is allowed to eat while delivering toys.  The new law prohibits Santa from eating cookies, because they contribute to obesity.  However, he is allowed to eat fruit and granola bars.  The new law also limits how fast the reindeer can fly, only allowing them to fly half as fast as before, for safety reasons.  In accordance with federal aviation laws, the reindeer can only fly for eight hours per day and need at least eight hours of sleep before resuming flight.  The reindeer are also prohibited from flying if the weather creates poor visibility.

By regulation, handwritten letters from children are no longer accepted at Santa’s Workshop.  Now, a child must submit a standard Christmas Gift Request Form by mail or they can visit the website.  The website, which cost billions of tax dollars, was designed and launched by elves who live on the South Pole.  “They have no #%&@ing idea what they’re doing!” complained one elf who works at Santa’s Workshop. “They’re literally on the other side of the Earth!” When the website first went online, it crashed within a few minutes.   There is a “minor glitch” in the website, said the President at a press conference, referring to the fact that the “submit” button deletes 80% of the requests.

The new eight-hour workday for elves includes a fifteen-minute break every hour, and an hour for lunch.  Many of the elves pretend to work for the last hour of the day. “I don’t give a ####! I’m getting paid the same either way,” one elf stated anonymously.  It is almost impossible to fire an elf under the Santa Regulation Act.  Under the new law, Santa has to write up extensive documentation on an elf’s poor performance before the elf appears in administrative court.  The crowded docket at the North Pole Labor Board means that it could take a year for a really bad elf to be dismissed. Most of the time, an elf attorney will have the case thrown out on a technicality and the elves return to work.  The meanest, laziest elves who cannot perform the normal duties of an elf are usually put in key administrative positions.  All paperwork and requests must first be cleared by these elves.

The elves receive a generous salary with a full federal benefits package. The reindeer are not so lucky. Recently, the reindeer went on strike. “I’m sick of this ####!” exclaimed one reindeer who did not wish to be named. “Every freaking year we have to literally run all over the Earth in 24 hours.  Then the rest of the year we’re unemployed. Meanwhile, those damn elves are sitting on their keysters in a nice warm cabin making toys and getting a fat paycheck year-round.”

During the first year the Santa Regulation Act went into effect, only five percent of the gifts arrived before or on Christmas Day.  Santa did not complete his deliveries until April Fool’s Day.  There were also millions of complaints about the quality of the toys.  “Those are some busted, ####y toys!” complained Karen, a disgruntled mother of four children. “Where are our tax dollars going?”  Unbeknownst to Karen, her tax dollars are going to an elf government contractor at the South Pole who manufactures toys with sub-standard parts at ten times the market price.  The shoddy toys are then shipped by jet to the North Pole, from where they are supposed to be delivered on Christmas Eve. 

“We have a large fleet of cargo jets that guzzle a lot of fuel and require a lot of maintenance,” said the elf in charge of air operations.  “As provided by the Santa Regulation Act, we had these jets built from scratch specifically for this purpose.  I estimate it’s costing about a billion dollars a week to fly the toys from the South to North Pole.”  When asked if it would make a lot more sense to manufacture all of the toys at the North Pole, he simply shrugged his shoulders.

Of course there were millions of complaints about the sub-standard toys and the extreme lateness of the deliveries, some of them several months after Christmas.  “The first Christmas this happened, my children were devastated,” said one mother.  “They cried all day on Christmas.  Now, they’ve come to expect not to see any presents from Santa under the tree until around Valentine’s Day. We obviously don’t use a real tree anymore.”

The government responded by setting up a complaint department at the North Pole.  Those who make complaints by phone have an average wait time of 45 minutes, during which time they listen to the Yanni Christmas Album.  In many cases an automated voice comes on and says “goodbye,” thereby ending the call. Those who actually get through speak to the mean, lazy elves referred to earlier.

After several years of this, the public outrage has been palpable. “The problem is a lack of funding!” shrieked Senator Nutcracker.  “We need to raise the debt limit and increase the budget for Santa’s operations!  I propose a spending bill in which funding for the Santa Regulation Act is lumped in with national defense, highways, schools, hospitals, and animal shelters…” 

 Image from "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" (1964) NBC

American Christmas Traditions

When people think of our Christmas traditions, and the way Christmas was in America going back to colonial times, most of us picture something very similar to today’s Christmas, save the electric lights and artificial trees.  However, the differences were much greater than that.   First off, in colonial times Christmas was a twelve-day celebration, called Christmastide.  Today, most churches still follow the old traditions of the twelve days, but most Americans today only celebrate the holiday on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.  For my family, Christmas Eve was the big day.  In colonial times, there were parties and feasts throughout the twelve days, which was probably pretty exhausting, but very exciting. Families would alternate who was entertaining on a given night, so that one would make the rounds during Christmastide.  Some of these parties lasted all night, until the early morning hours.

Amazingly, most families (except Germans) in early America did not have a Christmas tree. The Christmas tree did not become popular in America until the mid-1800’s.  It was originally a German tradition and became popular when the British Royal Family set up their first Christmas tree at Windsor Castle in 1848.  After the trend swept through England, it became big in America. 

Then there is the tradition of the Yule log, which was usually a log so enormous it took several men to drag.  The log was usually kept burning for at least twelve hours and sometimes as long as twelve days.  Many believed that the log had magical powers and that as long as the log burned, the house would be protected from witchcraft. The ashes of the Yule log were then used in rituals to do things like increase the fertility of soil or keep bad weather away.  Holly and ivy were originally used around doorways and fireplaces to keep evil spirits and witches from entering the home.

On Christmas day, bells would be rung to celebrate the birth of Jesus, just like today. However, there was another tradition called “Shooting In the Christmas,” in which people would go outside with their muskets and fire into the air in celebration.  Also, gifts were generally not exchanged on Christmas two centuries years ago. If a gift was given, it was usually a small gift from a master to his servant or a small gift to a child.  So in that sense, Christmas was once celebrated more like Thanksgiving is today. 

Santa Claus, or St. Nicholas (the 3^rd Century saint from what would now be Turkey), did not begin to take his modern form of a fat man wearing a red suit until 1822. In that year Clement Mark Moore, an Episcopal minister, wrote a long poem titled “An Account of a Visit From St. Nicolas.” In 1881, a cartoonist named Thomas Nast, drew the earliest version of today’s Santa based on Moore’s poem.  Nast’s version showed Santa as a fat man in red suit with white trim, who lived at the North Pole with his wife and elves.

Sources: The History Channel Website:  http://www.history.com/topics/christmas/santa-claus

Colonial Williamsburg website: http://www.history.org/Almanack/life/christmas/index.cfm

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