Chim Chim Cheree!

Hwaet.  According to my professor, in Victorian England, chimney sweeps would climb up to the housetop, strip naked, and skitter down the chimney like Santa to do their sweeping duty.

Not this:

This is a somewhat fictionalized image of a sweep's life. 

Real sweeps looked like this:

Disregarding the questionable notion that they did their jobs naked -- which is actually a reasonable idea, given the filth they worked in and their lack of large wardrobes -- being a sweep was a terribly dangerous profession.  A typical sweep risked falls, possible traumatic injuries from falling bricks or stones in chimneys, and lung damage as a result of breathing the dust and soot all day.  Another lovely benefit of a sweep's life was a high risk of penile and scrotal/testicular cancer, again because of all the soot and combustion by-products that would collect in the nether regions and not be washed away because of lack of suitable bathing facilities in the average sweep's home.

Scrotal cancer, did you ask?  Yep.  Well, it kinda started there, but spread.  In fact, it actually earned the cheery moniker of chimney sweeps' carcinoma.  Go read that wikipedia article; I have time.  So, are we clear on this?  Sweeping chimneys was a hellish occupation, doubly so because your average sweep was a pre-pubescent boy who could look forward to developing a huge sore on the underside of his scrotum shortly after puberty, said sore being the precursor to a painful, fatal cancer.  Oh, those plucky Victorians!


The people that brought us children working 14 hour days, 6 or 7 day workweeks in unheated and uncooled factories with no safety equipment.

And mining!  Oh, yes, let's consider coal mining in England in the mid to late 1800s:

Yep, those are kids. 

(This post started out to be a recollection of a funny one of my profs uttered, and has turned kinda grim.  Be patient, my dears, the funny is coming.)

So, let us be grateful that here in good old USA, we do have some laws protecting our workers and preventing our children from being enslaved to the tender mercies of Commerce.  Can we agree on this?

So, in the midst of a discussion about all this grim and cheerless shit, my instructor slapped hell out of his podium.  The resounding CRACK! jolted the semi-somnolent class into a state of hyper-vigilance, and not a few audible gasps were heard.  Then, to my everlasting delight, my genuinely intelligent and wise professor stated in a voice like unto the voice of God, "Gentlemen, you need to stretch out yo' strotum and WASH IT."

Sage advice from a man who knows, my friends.  Heed it well.

Number 1!

Hello, blogfriends!

I have been meaning to start a new blog for some time.  Today is the day.  I am back in school, and my professors are providing me a wealth of hilarity to share.  Please note, my quotes are revised for clarity (?) but the wrongness will be quoted as it was misspoken. 

Today's wrecks:

"Please refer to the figure regarding food chains in your books.  The aquatic web is to the left, the torrential one is to the right."  [terrestrial]

"We call them Escheraries."  [estuaries]

"...inhabiting the borer forest..."  [boreal]

(Perhaps because of the large number of borer beetles that live there?)


"Numbers that are way off are called outliners." [outliers]

And a leftover from yesterday from a discussion about security, and the need to have multiple layers of security, referred to as the multi-barrier approach:

"We need to use a multi-barrel approach..."

(That totally works, actually.)