—Publilius Syrus

As the tale goes…

The Newfoundland Department of Employment claimed that a boat owner wasn’t paying proper wages to his help and sent an agent from St. John’s to Burin to investigate him.

Government Agent:

“I need a list of your employees and how much you pay them.”

Boat Owner:

“Well, there’s Clarence, my hired hand, he’s been with me for 3 years. I pay him $200 a week plus free room and board. Then there’s the mentally challenged guy. He works about 18 hours every day and does about 90% of the work around here. He makes about $10 per week, pays his own room and board, and I buy him a bottle of Lamb’s rum and a dozen Labatt Lite every Saturday night so he can cope with life. He also gets to sleep with my wife occasionally.”

Government Agent:

“That’s the guy I want to talk to—the mentally challenged one.”

Boat Owner:

“That’ll be me. What’d you want to know?”

Thanks to ex-Maritime designer colleague David Peters

(no relation) for the yarn.

Best wishes to my many Chinese and East Asian friends… I can hear the fireworks and partying all the way up here in the great white north!

(re-posted from Ars Technica)

A new hypothesis from economist Andrew Francis argues that the terror of syphilis was so great among US residents that the sexual revolution of the 1960s simply wasn’t possible without getting the dreaded disease under control first. In his view, the development of effective treatments—most notably, penicillin—had a more profound effect on culture than even birth control measures.

This may be hard to grasp at first, since the fear of syphilis has fallen off so dramatically today. But there’s an easy way to transport yourself back in time 70 years or so, just before the rise of common antibiotics, to get a sense for life in a world where infectious diseases could prove so much more difficult to control. Thanks to the Work Projects Administration (WPA), a federal initiative in the late 1930s and early 1940s that put hundreds of thousands of American to work on public projects, we have an incredible visual archive of life at the time: 2,000 posters created by government-employed artists.

A surprising number of them relate to syphilis; indeed, it’s the largest public health issue addressed by the posters, many of which are now archived at the Library of Congress and available online. The posters are alternately terrifying, paternalistic, comforting, and informative, but they are never uninteresting.

View more many more posters on syphilis here, each with a written rationale for its design… Thanks to Gregor Brandt for the article link.

(Any questions?)

The most unfair thing about life is the way it ends.

I mean, life is tough. It takes up a lot of your time.

What do you get at the end of it? Death!

What’s that, a bonus?

I think the life cycle is all backwards.

You should die first, get it out of the way.

Then you live in an old age home.

You get kicked out when you’re too young,

you get a gold watch, you go to work.

You work forty years until you’re young enough

to enjoy your retirement.

You party, you get ready for high school.

You go to grade school, you become a kid, you play.

You have no responsibilities, you become a little baby,

you go back into the womb, you spend your

last nine months floating…

…and you finish off as an orgasm.

(thanks George Carlin)

Krakow, Poland

Photographer Marcin Ryczek recently captured this once-in-a-lifetime photograph of a man feeding swans and ducks from a snowy river bank…

(detail shown below)

—James Joyce (1882-1941)