"Diamonds are a girl's best friend"

These lyrics would today be considered at least old-fashioned (and more likely politically incorrect), but the song and dance sequence from "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes" is an iconic moment in an otherwise forgettable movie. 

Winston Churchill, nonsmoker. WTF??

The above photo was recently displayed above the entrance to a London museum.  Anyone with even a modicum of knowledge of 20th century history would know that this image has been digitally altered.  The classic photo looked like this:

No one admits to having perpetrated this travesty:

The Winston Churchill's Britain At War Experience, in South-East London, confessed to being astonished to discover that the image may have been doctored...

So just who did pinch the great man's Havana?

It wasn't the anti-smoking lobby, which has had no known contact with the museum; it certainly wasn't Churchill's family - his grandson Nicholas Soames said 'it doesn't matter one way or the other'; and it wasn't the museum itself - in fact it's got wartime posters advertising cigarettes on the walls.

But intriguingly the museum, which gives all profits to charity, declined to name who put together the display and, crucially, who enlarged the image for the poster.

Museum manager John Welsh was astonished to be told the image was missing one vital ingredient.

I'm a nonsmoking ex-smoker, and I'm frankly tired of this kind of manipulation of history for the sake of  modern political correctness.  The United States did the same thing when they honored Bette Davis on a postage stamp, using an image with a deleted cigarette:

Rogert Ebert offered some trenchant commentary:

Depriving Bette Davis of her cigarette reminds me of Soviet revisionism, when disgraced party officials disappeared from official photographs. Might as well strip away the toupees of Fred Astaire and Jimmy Stewart...

...Movies can't rewrite reality. The MPAA cautiously mentions smoking in their descriptions of movie ratings (even if it's the Cheshire Cat and his hookah). If, by the time you're old enough to sit through a movie, you haven't heard that smoking is bad for you, you don't need a movie rating, you need a foster home.

"... her head was burned right off..."

But the cooking-places were very very high up, and she could not reach them properly, so she pulled forward the big kettle in which the cook boiled the hot water. And got on to it. Then she found she could poke the fire splendidly, and she was very much pleased. But the kettle was round at the bottom, and not very steady, and suddenly it tipped over, and she fell into the fire, and her head was burned right off.

From The Story of Little Kettle-head (1904), by Helen Bannerman.  The rest of the story is at the link.  Via The Presurfer.

The Virgin Mary spanking The Baby Jesus

The proper title is The Blessed Virgin Chastises the Infant Jesus Before Three Witnesses: André Breton, Paul Éluard, and the Painter, painted by Max Ernst in 1926.  According to a Time magazine story in 1976 -

His father was a fiercely authoritarian Roman Catholic, an amateur painter who taught in a school for deaf-mutes in the Rhineland town of Brühl. Little Max briefly persuaded this eccentric sire that he was the child Jesus. Memories of this sort underlie Ernst's most notorious thrust of anticlerical wit, a spanking Madonna...

The painting is (not surprisingly) said to have been controversial at the time.  Now it hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Anti-global-warming advertisement

"They Will Come To Town" is supposed to frighten people about the prospects of the consequences of global warming.  From my viewpoint, it makes the future look a little brighter for the planet (if not for humankind).  A win for the whales...

Queen Victoria used cannabis for PMS

Queen Victoria was the first woman to use marijuana for PMS.

This occurred a few months after Dr. O’Shaughnessy brought cannabis to England about 1840...  It was prescribed by a Dr. Sir Russel Reynolds physician to Queen Victoria. The Queen had previously used Opium, Coca (raw cocaine), wine and chloroform...

The Queen obviously found that cannabis/marijuana worked well. She used it also for morning sickness and obstetrical anesthesia with no harm to fetuses.

Photo credit.

Norway hasn't had problems with its ocean drilling

After all, there is one country that has established an unrivaled record for environmental safety while exploiting its offshore petroleum reserves. That would be Norway, which created the company now known as Statoil Hydro as a fully state-owned entity and still controls nearly two-thirds of the company's "privatized" shares...

Statoil rigs in the North Sea are required by law to maintain special "acoustic switches" that shut down operations completely (and remotely) in case of a blowout or explosion...

What makes Norway so different from the United States -- and much more likely to install the most protective energy technology -- is that the Norwegian state can impose public values on oil producers without fighting off lobbyists and crooked politicians, because it owns and controls the resources...

Rather than debate the need for stronger environmental regulation with powerful private interests for the past quarter-century, the Norwegians were able to harness the profits of their oil resources to improve the environment (and provide a generous social security and universal healthcare system for their people).

Should Rahm Emanuel have called Liberals "retarded"?

The question isn't a matter of accuracy or truth, but one of political correctness.  To be precise, he referred to liberals as "f***ing retarded," but the controversy is about the second word, not the profanity.  According to Slate,

The current version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders—which is used by psychiatrists to make clinical diagnoses—still employs the phrase mental retardation to describe people who score below about a 70 on IQ tests. However, most who work in the field—including psychologists, activists, and bureaucrats—prefer the term intellectual disability.

They conclude that "Government offices have also been moving away from mental retardation" - a statement that needs to be interpreted strictly in context.

Several months ago I read an article in the Minneapolis Star Tribune online discussing the same topic.

The adjective “retarded” appeared in a headline on the front page of the Star Tribune last week, prompting complaints from dozens of readers who find the word to be hurtful, insensitive and out of date. They argued thoughtfully and passionately for alternatives such as “mentally challenged,” “developmentally disabled” and “cognitively delayed.”

The Star Tribune newsroom’s stylebook governs our use of terms such as “handicapped” and “developmental disability.” Here’s the entry on mental retardation, last reviewed in the late 1990s: retarded, mentally retarded. Use these terms rather than “developmentally disabled,” a hard-to-understand euphemism.

They note that the style will be reassessed, but close with a passage from the New York Times (citing the Philadelphia Record) illustrating how much style has changed since the nineteenth century:

The most pitiable case that has yet come under the notice of the Lunacy Committee was discovered last week in Fountaindale, Adams County, where Jacob Miller, a wealthy farmer, was found living with his eight imbecile children...

The mother of this miserable family had died several years ago insane, her reason having given way under the terrible strain to which she had been subjected. The poor woman had given birth to 11 children between 1860 and 1874, and not one of her numerous offspring was possessed of a sound mind...

Five of the children are driveling idiots, past all hope of improvement... The oldest child is the worst of all, scarcely possessing the instincts of an animal... It was learned that Mr. And Mrs. Miller were blood cousins of the first degree, and to this fact alone the members of the committee attributed the imbecility of their offspring. The father, however, had no explanation for the matter, and he looked upon the affliction as a stroke of Providence...

More at the link.