DLD 01-08-10 — Big Bridges, Hot Queens, and Randy Old Buggers

Recent DLDs have been dominated by movies, video games, pop music, XKCD comics, technogeek toys, and more video games. As micdoc2001 (the primary promoter of these things) would be the first to acknowledge, this is only because nobody else is posting a DLD with anything else, and it's not his fault if he's the only one willing to step up and fill the void.

Not that I'm out to push my own eccentric tastes or anything, but just for the sake of variety, here's a DLD with some different flavors.

One thing you'll notice is that none of my links are tied to the present. Everything I link would be just as "current" last September or next May. This is no accident. I am of the belief that anything that is no longer interesting once it stops being current, probably wasn't very interesting in the first place.

Let's start with presidential trivia. This was posted on some guy's blog way back in May, so some of you may have seen it. The blog is "Gin and Tacos", which I had never heard of and haven't heard of since, but a friend referred me to it. In that post, G&T challenges you to guess who is the earliest president of the United States to have a grandchild who is still alive today. He says: "Don't cheat. Guess."

Me, I don't care if you guess or cheat. If you like, you can ponder it for a while. Or you can jump to the answer, either in the link above or near the end of this DLD.

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One of my lesser eccentricities is that I have a passion for beautiful bridges. Usually that means big ones, but not necessarily.

One of my favorites which I have never visited in real life is the Natchez Trace Parkway Bridge, about a half hour south of Nashville in Tennessee.

Isn't that the most gorgeous thing you've ever seen? Pictures of bridges are like porn for me.

And since I'm also a size queen, a shout-out for the Confederation Bridge, which connects Prince Edward Island to the mainland. That one I have visited. When I crossed it about 10 years ago, the toll was $35 (Canadian), which they don't advertise on the New Brunswick side; you don't find out about the price tag until you try to come back. We vigorously complained, of course, and from the poor toll attendant's response it was obviously we weren't the first. But, we were told, N.B. decided not to post signs and P.E.I. can't tell them what to do.

Anyway, it's frickin' huge. It disappears out into the fog so you think you're driving to another planet or something.

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I am inordinately fond of piano music. If I were to list my favorite pieces, I'm sure I'd go well into the 50s before I started running out of ideas, but my clear #1 is Ravel's "Alborada del gracioso". Here's a YouTube (yes, that's right, YouTube) of a 1964 telecast of the piece played by the great Sviatoslav Richter.

On the list of "related videos" you'll also see a performance by child prodigy George Li. If we awarded points for age-relative-to-league, Li would surely beat everyone soundly. The only reason I don't link to him directly is that I prefer not to encourage the fetishistic attitude of preferring unlikely performances that you wouldn't expect from someone so young (or so old, so small, so gay, so handicapped, so self-taught, so non-human, so whatever). I prefer to judge every performance on its merits regardless of the advantage or disadvantage the performer brings. That said, Li's interpretation is also very very good, and even aside from age, he's right up there.

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You choral singers out there are probably familiar with Carmina burana. The original text is an old manuscript found in an abbey in Benediktbeuern, a town in southernmost Germany. (Carmina burana is Latin for "songs from Beuern", Beuern being short for Benediktbeuern.)

The manuscript is filled with 254 poems, some illustrated. Exact authorship of these poems is the subject of much scholarly debate, but suffice it to say they were probably written by a bunch of monks some time around the 12th century. The poems are by no means pious. Indeed, some are rather naughty, with sex and drinking being among the favorite topics.

In the 1930s, German composer Carl Orff picked out a couple dozen of them and set them to music in a faux-archaic musical style for chorus, soloists, and an orchestra that's heavy on the percussion, creating the "scenic cantata" which is now a staple of the choral repertoire.

One song from the cantata, "O Fortuna", was used as a recurring theme in the soundtrack of the 1981 film Excalibur. The tune soon became associated with clashing violence of the swords-and-sorcery variety, and ever since it has been used to evoke the same in numerous other films, television commercials, and other media (lovingly detailed with the usual Wikipedian thoroughness on this list). The song, or at least its noisy opening measures, is so well-known that when people say "Carmina burana" they're usually thinking of just that one piece, even though other songs in the cycle have a very different mood.

One of the other songs has these lyrics:

Were diu werlt alle min
Von deme mere unze an den Rin,
Des wolt ih mih darben
Daz diu chünegin von Engellant
Lege an minen armen.

Many of the burana songs are in Latin, or some variant of it, but this one is in an early form of German. Loosely translated, it says:

If all the world were mine,
From the ocean to the Rhine,
I would give up everything
Just to sleep with the Queen of England.

This is an ageless sentiment, mirrored even today in some of the comments near the end of this thread, in which some of us guys exchanged our thoughts on what we might do if we had the $120 million dollars the Matt Holliday recently signed for.

The only difference is that whereas now we say, "If I had a gazillion dollars I'd bang [name of favorite supermodel]", the medieval monks said they'd bang the Queen of England.

This seems odd to us today, when we don't really think of the queen of England as a sex symbol. Indeed, some of them were famous for being downright ugly, such as George IV's bride, Caroline of Brunswick, of whom Wikipedia relates:

According to Lord Holland, the Duke of Wellington had claimed that it was Lady Jersey who had selected Caroline as George's bride. She chose, so Wellington said, a woman "of indelicate manners, indifferent character and not very inviting appearance, from a hope that disgust with a wife would secure constancy to a mistress.

On meeting his future wife for the first time, George called for a glass of brandy. He was evidently disappointed. Similarly, Caroline told Malmesbury, "[the Prince is] very fat and he's nothing like as handsome as his portrait."

England's most celebrated queen, Victoria, has a name commonly associated with the very antithesis of sex appeal. And among the nicknames of Elizabeth I was "the Virgin Queen". Neither looks particularly attractive in her portraits. Even in the HBO miniseries, even played by AN rally favorite Helen Mirren, Elizabeth still looks more frightening than appealing.

The current queen, Elizabeth II, who has been queen since before most of us were born, looks rather nice by comparison, but she's still not exactly a hottie.

This begs the question: Who was the hottest Queen of England?

I vote for Henry III's bride, Eleanor of Provence.

Hubba hubba!

Queen Eleanor was the second of four daughters of Ramon Berenguer IV, count of Provence, and Beatrice of Savoy. All four were renowned for their beauty, and all four became queens, though never all at the same time. The third sister, Sanchia, Queen of Germany, died in 1261, five years before the youngest, Beatrice Jr, attained her throne as Queen of Sicily. The oldest sister, Marguerite, enjoyed a 36-year reign as Queen of France, from her wedding at age 13 until the death of her husband Louis IX. Louis was preparing to lay siege to the city of Tunis, as part of the Eighth Crusade, but he died of stomach flu. In spite of this inglorious end, he was such a fine king that they made him a saint and named several cities after him, including the one in Missouri where the Cardinals now play.

Eleanor was also married at 13 but was already stunning, according to contemporary accounts. But before long she became exceedingly unpopular with the people of London, who blamed the young queen for high taxes, corruption, and every other ill, thus demonstrating an eternal truth that we all learned in high school: If a girl is beautiful, she can become extremely popular so long as she remains likable; but as soon as people decide she's a bitch, the better-looking she is, the more viciously they'll turn against her.

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I have more, but this is already too much for one DLD. Perhaps another day.

The answer to the presidential trivia question is John Tyler, 10th president of the United States. If it sounds absolutely insane that our nation's tenth president has a grandchild still alive, that's partly because the numbers are deceiving, but mostly because it really is insane.

Presidents went by more quickly in those days. Between Jackson and Lincoln (famous for the $20 and $5 bills respectively), no president served for more than one term, and four of them served partial terms on account of either dying in office or taking over for someone else who died. As a result, they went through eight presidents in 24 years, whereas we today are only just starting our fifth in 30 years

Tyler was one of the take-over guys, replacing William Henry Harrison, who died a mere month after taking office in 1841. The following year, Tyler's first wife Letitia became the first First Lady to die in office. She and he were the same age, and their marriage seems to have been a happy one. Happy enough to produce seven children, anyway.

But Tyler was not the sort of man to retire into lonely old widowerhood. Among his female acquaintances was Julia Gardiner, daughter of a Congressman from New York. In 1844, Tyler and several important men of state embarked on a pleasure cruise down the Potomac on the USS Princeton. The President thoughtfully invited Congressman Gardiner to join him on the trip, along with his charming daughter, who would provide pleasant company for the lonely widower.

Part of the purpose of the trip was to show off the Navy's newest weapon, an enormous cannon named the "Peacemaker". At several stops, the gun was fired in demonstration. Alas, its defects were not revealed until one fatal firing when it blew up in a huge explosion, killing several of the dignitaries present, including the secretary of state, the secretary of the navy, and Rep Gardiner from New York. According to legend, when Julia found out that her father was among the fatalities, she fainted into the arms of the President, who consoled her in her grief. Four months later, Tyler shocked the country by marrying Miss Gardiner, in spite of the fact that she was 30 years younger than he.

The age difference did not prevent them from enjoying a happy marriage (Tyler's second). True to form, he remained vigorous well into old age, fathering seven more children, the last of whom was born in 1860, when Tyler was 70 years old. The fifth of these seven, Lyon Gardiner Tyler, born in 1853, proved to be even more virile and long-lasting than his presidential dad: Lyon G Tyler fathered sons born in 1924 and 1928, when he was 71 and 75 years old. These two sons, now aged 81 and 85, are still alive today.

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Like most things I write, this is way too long. Dump away.