Michelangelo’s 600-year-old sculpture of the biblical figure of David before his storied face-off against Goliath is one of the most enduring symbols of Italy’s Renaissance period. The towering David was sculpted without clothes, an example of the “heroic male nude” trope of classical antiquity that depicted heroes in idealized forms.
But after complaints from three parents that their middle-schoolers were exposed to “inappropriate adult content” in their class by their art teacher, the principal of that Florida school was given an ultimatum by her school board to resign or be fired.
Apparently David’s nude depiction was a little too revealing for the Tallahassee Classical School, despite its emphasis on “content-rich classical education in the liberal arts and sciences.” One aggrieved parent deemed the statue to be “pornographic.”
Barney Bishop, the head of the school’s board, showed Hope Carrasquilla, the school’s principal, two letters in a meeting with she had with him. One was a voluntary resignation, and the other a letter that said if she decided not to resign, the board would terminate her without cause. Carrasquilla resigned.
The ousting of Carrasquilla rides a growing wave of conservative educational legislation in Florida and across the country. GOP governors and state legislators are targeting tenure, affirmative action, and diversity, equity, and inclusion measures at the their states’ public universities. American history is being whitewashed and education is being sanitized and sterilized. And Michelangelo is now considered to be a purveyor of pornography. Sheesh.
For Friday Faithfuls this week, Jim Adams has informed us that a rare, large planetary alignment of Jupiter, Mercury, Venus, Uranus, and Mars will be visible in the night sky with March 28, 2023, Then he’s asked us to respond to this Friday Faithfuls challenge by writing anything about outer space, or we can go with anything else that we thinks fits.
I’m going to respond to Jim’s post by flashing back and reposting something I posted back in August of 2021 that I think fits. I hope Jim doesn’t think this is cheating, but I admit this is a shortcut to responding to his Friday Faithfuls prompt. So are you ready?
MLMM Music Challenge — Moonstruck
For this week’s Mindlovemisery’s Menagerie Music Challenge, Jim Adams gave us The Grateful Dead’s “Standing on the Moon” as inspiration. The first song that came to mind was Pink Floyd’s “Brain Damage,” which features the line, “I’ll see you on the dark side of the moon.” But I realized that I already featured that song in one of my Song Lyric Sunday responses last August.
And that’s when the old Frank Sinatra song, “Fly Me To the Moon” popped into my head.
“Fly Me To the Moon” was written by Bart Howard in 1954 as “In Other Words,” and it was introduced on the cabaret circuit by Felicia Saunders. Two years after Kaye Ballard recorded the first commercial version of the song, Johnny Mathis released his rendition as “Fly Me to the Moon.”
In 1962 the composer Joe Harnell revived the song, giving it a bossa nova arrangement. His version peaked at number 14 in and won a Grammy for Best Pop Instrumental Performance. Two years later, Frank Sinatra recorded the song with the Count Basie Orchestra arranged by Quincy Jones. Though it was never a hit, his is considered the definitive version.
Sinatra’s 1964 recording of “Fly Me to the Moon” became closely associated with NASA’s Apollo space program. A copy of the song was played on a Sony TC-50 portable cassette player on the Apollo 10 mission which orbited the Moon, and also on Apollo 11 before the first landing on the Moon.
Here are the lyrics to the song.
Fly me to the moon Let me play among the stars Let me see what spring is like on Jupiter and Mars
In other words, hold my hand In other words, baby, kiss me
Fill my heart with song And let me sing forevermore You are all I long for All I worship and adore
In other words, please be true In other words, I love you
Fill my heart with song Let me sing forevermore You are all I long for All I worship and adore
In other words, please be true In other words In other words I love You
Di (aka Pensitivity101) hosts Fibbing Friday, a silly little exercise where we are to write a post with our answers to the ten questions below. But as the title suggests, truth is not an option. The idea is to fib a little, a lot, tell whoppers, be inventive, silly, or even outrageous, in our responses. For this week’s Fibbing Friday, Di is bringing back some old Fibbing Friday questions and posing some new ones, too.
What did the quick brown fox leap over? The slow green turtle.
What were the Window Cleaner’s confessions? He left streaks.
What was The Mad Hatter’s true occupation? He was a crazy shoemaker.
Why did Cinderella lose her glass slipper? She didn’t lose it. She took it off because the glass started to crack and she didn’t want to get a sliver of glass stuck in her foot.
Why do people in old TV shows and movies spend so much time sitting on their front porch? Because their homes weren’t air conditioned and it was too damn hot to sit inside.
What happened to the three little pigs? Bacon.
What is Air Force One? The highest ranking officer in the Air Force.
Who brings the Easter Eggs? The Easter Chicken.
Who was Harvey? The milk man.
What is quick silver? It’s another way of describing a person who is hot tempered.
Wouldn’t you like to expose your newer readers to some of your earlier posts that they might never have seen? Or remind your long term followers of posts that they might not remember? Each Friday I will publish a post I wrote on this exact date in a previous year.
How about you? Why don’t you reach back into your own archives and highlight a post that you wrote on this very date in a previous year? You can repost your Flashback Friday post on your blog and pingback to this post. Or you can just write a comment below with a link to the post you selected.
If you’ve been blogging for less than a year, go ahead and choose a post that you previously published on this day (the 24th) of any month within the past year and link to that post in a comment.
This was originally posted on my old blog on March 24, 2012. You might notice that back then I used to write much longer posts.
Cutting Your Nose to Spite Your Face
Who hasn’t heard, at one time or another, someone say, “He cut off his nose to spite his face”? It’s an idiom, a common expression used, perhaps even overused, to describe a needlessly self-destructive response to a problem, like when you do something crazy that will get you in trouble and cause more harm than good.
Legend has it that the expression originated way back in the 12th century when pious women disfigured themselves in order to protect their virginity. Hey, you’ve come a long way, baby, over the past thousand or so years.
Speaking about cutting off body parts, an Egyptian woman turned out to be quite the cut-up. She decided to exhaust her husband by having sex with him all night long. Once he fell asleep, exhausted as planned, this human praying mantis stabbed him to death and cut his body into little pieces, which she then threw into her backyard, where they were consumed by stray cats and dogs.
The woman calmly sat on her balcony, she confessed, and watched the cats and dogs eating the pieces of her dead husband’s body. “Every time they finished a piece, I threw them another,” she said. I guess she didn’t think the sex was that good.
How about the Californian who tried to poison his wife by putting paint remover in her cereal? Fortunately for his wife, she detected a “horrible taste and smell in her Rice Krispies” and stopped eating, thus avoiding any serious harm.
Of course, the husband claimed that he “accidentally” spilled paint remover into his wife’s cereal bowl. One way of preventing such “accidents” is to be sure that you’re not keeping paint remover in your refrigerator.
And as long as we’re talking about ingesting toxic liquids, did you hear about some guy in North Carolina who decided to light up a cigarette after having taken a swig from a jar of gasoline? Sure, having a cigarette after sex back in the day…before smokers were stigmatized…seemed to be the norm. Maybe it was the calm after the storm or just some way of avoiding that post-sex awkwardness or having to actually talk to the person you just diddled.
But what was this dude thinking when he decided to grab a smoke after drinking from a jar filled with gasoline? Supposedly he mistook the jar of gas for a beverage, and once he took a big gulp and realized it was gasoline, he spit it out. He then went outside to smoke a cigarette and guess what happened to him? He burst into flames, Duh! He was transported to the UNC Burn Center in Chapel Hill, NC, were he later died.
Here’s an idea for a new warning label to put on cigarette packs. SMOKING CIGARETTES IMMEDIATELY AFTER DRINKING GASOLINE MAY BE HAZARDOUS TO YOUR HEALTH.
It’s March 24, 2023. Welcome to Fandango’s One-Word Challenge (aka, FOWC). I will be posting each day’s word just after midnight Pacific Time (U.S.).
Today’s word is “urge.”
Write a post using that word. It can be prose, poetry, fiction, non-fiction. It can be any length. It can be just a picture or a drawing if you want. No holds barred, so to speak.
Once you are done, tag your post with #FOWC and create a pingback to this post if you are on WordPress. Please check to confirm that your pingback is there. If not, please manually add your link in the comments.
And be sure to read the posts of other bloggers who respond to this prompt. Show them some love.
This, That, and the Other 