The New Yorker Ponders Cave Painting

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A little archaeology/ anthropology humor for your Monday.

The New Yorker Ponders Canine Cuisine

“Something is definitely going on. We’re back to eating dog food.”

The New Yorker Ponders Board Meetings on the Savanna

The New Yorker Presents Museum Humor

I love a good diorama.

Remember Ross and Rachel in the diorama?

The New Yorker Addresses Incompetence

Whales Return to the Sea in Disgust

A Foam Finger from God: The New Yorker Ponders Moses

Hope your Easter weekend was just grand. I made my whole family watch all five televised hours of Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments. I also baked a Breton flan with prunes.

If you had to go back up the mountain and re-carve the ten commandments all over again by your own muscle, you might get distracted and carve the a stone foam finger too.

The New Yorker Addresses Luggage Loss & I Relive Vacation Hell

Here’s another cartoon from my New Yorker tear-away calendar. It spoke to me.

One summer I went to Italy for eight weeks.

With my family.

As if that was not stressful enough, our luggage did not make it on to the connecting trans-Atlantic flight.

We waited over a week for clean clothes.

Pajamas. I do not even remember what was done in regard to sleeping attire.

My mother wouldn’t even let us buy razors for about 3 days. I still cannot talk about the deodorant and underwear situation.

It was summer.

In Italy.

My mother was apparently was under the impression that if she made us live as though on a desert island, our luggage would magically make it through Italian airport bureaucracy, customs and shipping company disorganization faster. Like penance or something.

My sister still hates Italy because of that trip.

Thanks to March 10, 2011 and The New Yorker, it has all come rushing back.

***

Feel free to share your worst travel stories. If only to convince my sister that it could have been worse.

The New Yorker Ponders DNA & I Take Issue with the Man’s Lip

More from my The New Yorker daily calendar. For history buffs.

Either the Hapsburg inbreeding and and lip-sticking-out has finally been eradicated, or somebody is lying to impress/irritate the wife.

Because that dude is missing the quintessential Hapsburg trait.

For those of you who are not European history geeks… the Hapsburg/ Habsburg royal family of the Holy Roman Empire and other far-reaching European thrones were known for a jutting lower lip/jar situation, a trait passed on and exacerbated by generations of highly disgusting inbreeding. Nowadays, it is often referred to as Habsburg Lip or Habsburg Jaw.

One mustn’t dilute the sovereign blood.

Anyways, poor Charles II of Spain (the last of the family line to rule there) was so inbred that his deformity made chewing impossible, speaking was difficult and he was impotent in addition to other ailments (hence, the end of the line).

“The motto of the Hapsburg dynasty –’Let others wage wars, but you, happy Austria, shall marry’– extolled the tendency of family members to marry within their ranks. Charles’ father, Philip IV, was the uncle of his mother, Mariana of Austria; his great-grandfather, Philip II, was also the uncle of his great-grandmother, Anna of Austria; and his grandmother, Maria Anna of Austria, was simultaneously his aunt.” (The Independent)

Eurk.

Some of the Hapsburgs were prettier though—don’t worry. Marie Antoinette was one, and she looked good for a while, despite people mocking her lip. The French can be so judgy.

Way to focus on a person’s worst feature en route to the guillotine, Jacques-Louis David.

That’s just rubbing it in.

…

All this from a daily tear-away calendar.

The things you study in graduate school linger despite having little-to-no real-world application.

The New Yorker Ponders the Conundrums of the Unemployed

I have a daily New Yorker cartoon calendar. This came up last week and I loved it.

Enjoy.