Stirring up the bah-humbug
Okay, I realise that I already missed Stir-Up Sunday, which was last week, but it's more than high time to switch over to my bah humbug seasonal icon, right?
Passing over with a wince and a sigh a double-header of exploded factoids about those weird Victorians and their sex lives: review of that Vibrator Play that takes it for Based On Utterly Troo Fax and a piece on lady-pubes that cannot resist invoking the canard about Ruskin -
- and trying to resist calling the Ponceyness Police on some of the Christmas gift suggestions, like the clutch bag that looks like ye olde 45 rpm disc and costs just under £1k, and the e-book cover that pretends you're reading Pride and Prejudice -
I am getting my seasonal and not-so seasonal pedant on at the following:
Battle decided to start up Lapland UK, a Christmas experience in Berkshire. "One year we took the boys to Lapland, but you can't do that every year, can you? So we decided to recreate that very traditional experience here, just to hang on to that innocence. And it's obviously what a lot of people wanted too, because we've just had our 200,000th visitor."
I really don't think that 'tradition' means what she wants it to mean there. In fact, a whole lot of invocation of 'traditions' of very recent inception.
Plus:
The Incas saw the drug as a gift from the gods and used it in sacred rituals. The empire's only method of communication was a chain of messengers who would walk hundreds of miles over mountainous terrain; the royal emperors would ply them with cocaine so that they could go for days without food or sleep.
That would have been coca leaves, not cocaine, the alkaloid finally isolated in 1855, rather too late for the Incas.
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