Theoretically deep but basically shallow thought for the day

[fridgepunk]

What does it say about the universe we live in that there exists a mutation that gives certain black & white cats a fur pattern that looks almost exactly like hitler's lopsided hair-cut + hitler-tache?

Unless either a group of mad nazi scientists (or the cats themselves) have been responsible for a secret cat-eugenics program to breed a better Kitler in the years since ww2,

which isn't entirely that far fetched, except neither cats nor nazi scientists are especially known for their ability to follow through with their elaborate schemes (only 10 million dead over 4 years nazi scientists? And you still lost? Apparently we never bombed Germany's weak sauce factories...).

...So we're left with two possibilities:

We just happen to live in a universe where not only did life arise, but so did cats that look faintly like hitler do, by random chance, within the time span where "cats that look like hitler" makes any sort of sense in a socio/psychological sense.

Or God thought cats that look like hitler would be funny and spontaneously generated the damn things.

Neither fills me with a great deal of hope.

However this transvestite thief from the 16th and 17th century does, I give you: Mary Frith,

Born of a shoemaker in the mid 1580s, Mary presented herself in public in a doublet and baggy breeches, smoking a pipe, and swearing, if she felt like it.

*snip*

Mary seems to have been given a fair amount of freedom in a society that so frowned upon women who acted unconventionally, even performing (in men's clothing, as always) in 1611 at the Fortune Theatre. On stage she bantered with the audience and sang a song while playing the lute. Although it can be assumed that the banter and song were rather saucy[citation needed], even by playing in public at all she was defying convention.

Such public actions led to some reprisal, being arrested for being dressed indecently on 25 December 1611 and accused of being involved in prostitution. On February 9, of 1612 Mary was required to do a penance for her "evil living" at St. Paul's Cross. She put on a performance then, as well. According to a letter by John Chamberland to Dudley Carlton, "She wept bitterly and seemed very pentinent, but it is since doubted she was maudlin drunk, being discovered to have tippled of three-quarters of sack".

This is the correct way to faux-apologise for something you don't feel the slightest bit ashamed about by the way. None of that "I'm sorry you're offended" business, smoke a sack or two and let the crocodile tears flow in between singing rude songs about the laziness of hedgehogs.

By the 1620s she was, according to her own account, working as a fence and a pimp. She not only procured young women for men, but also respectable male lovers for middle-class wives. In one case where a wife confessed on her deathbed infidelity with lovers that Mary provided, Mary supposedly convinced the woman's lovers to send money for the maintenance of the children that were probably theirs.

*snip*

She is recorded as being released on 21 June 1644 from Bethlem Hospital after being cured of insanity.[1] Which may or not be related to the (possibly apocryphal) story that she robbed General Fairfax and shot him in the arm during the Civil War. It was said that to escape the gallows she paid a 2000 pound bribe.

...And that, and all the other cross dressing, gender-fuck women in history starts to give us a very interesting archetype to play around with

Comments

[dharma_slut]

well, we tamed a clan of those cats, when they were abandoned feral younglings. One little lady was dubbed "charlie" in an attempt to prevent her from being called "Hitler cat." To me she looks a oddly like Geraldine Chaplin, and for some reason... that does give me hope.

[mmoa_writes]

Hey, someone else who knows about Moll Frith! Sad to say the first I heard of her was when I was around 8 or 9 and reading Terry Deary's Terrible Tudors books so it's great to read some actual primary sources about her.

*saves*