Holy Shit, It's That Guy! (The Hobbit Edition)

We're gonna do another one of these things, because it's fun and it's my blog and I'll cry if I want to. But I don't want to cry. I want to point out relatively obscure actors in high profile roles that you probably missed. Speaking of which, I missed one last time. Tywin Lannister, as it turns out, also makes a great movie-within-a-movie villain. Here he is being ridiculously evil in Last Action Hero:

That glass eye doubles as a bomb. If that doesn't make you want to watch this masterpiece, you are dead inside.

Like last time, I'm going to ignore the bigger, more obvious ones. Yes, Martin Freeman was Arthur Dent, Ian McKellen was Magneto, Benedict Cumberbatch is a Benedict Sexybitch. Obviously.

I really am straight, I just call 'em like I see 'em

But what about humble Radagast the Hippie Brown?

Seen here making a mockery of his character

Did you notice that he's a freaking Time Lord?

I'm not saying all the Istari are Time Lords, I'm just saying Gandalf kind of regenerated

How about this handsome fellow? Does he look familiar?

And no, believe it or not, it's not your mom.

No?

What if you saw him with no prosthetics and no CGI...as you could when he played Marc Antony on Xena: Warrior Princess?

He's not the only Xena alum in the cast. See if you can find the others!

Finally, one of my personal favorites. This guy, who sparked a bizarre sub-fandom when he first appeared in The Fellowship of the Ring:

His official name is "Lindir," which is Elvish for "Singer."

...is none other than Bret McKenzie, the musician responsible for the rebooted Muppet Movie soundtrack. He's also one half of Flight of the Conchords, New Zealand's third most popular folk parody duo.

He's on the left. The other half is in the middle.

Holy shit, right? 

Let me know if I missed any good ones.

Holy Shit, the Fasces!

I'm doing something a little different this time. I'm going to give you a bit of background on this thing that you're seeing at the top of the post, then I'm going to tell you a story about something I saw when I was in Washington, D.C. that completely blew my mind. Sort of. I mean, it was more the fact that I picked up on it immediately that blew my mind. It was a seminal moment in my academic development that ultimately would lead me nowhere special. But hey, I've got a blog, right? So that's something.

Anyway, that thing is called a fasces. It's a bound bundle of birch rods with the head of an axe sticking out of it. It literally means power. It was the symbol of executive authority in Etruscan civilization. When the Romans took over, they adopted it as their own.

They took the Abzorbaloff approach to empire building

Here's how it worked: when a powerful official would stroll around their domain, they would be accompanied by subordinates called lictors. These lictors would carry around a fasces. The axe head would not always be a part of it - it was there to indicate that the official the lictors accompanied had the authority to mete out capital punishment. 

See, if a magistrate saw somebody being naughty, they could theoretically point at them and the lictors would be obliged to walk over and beat the fear of Jupiter into them. If they saw someone being really naughty, they could assign one of the lictors to the role of on-call executioner. The axe head was forbidden within the boundaries of Rome. Within the city, the power of life and death rested solely with the people. Well, you know, the rich ones. But putting a weapon on display was considered...in poor taste, at best. Treason, at worst.

They didn't exactly show leniency for treason, either

More importantly, the bundle of birch rods represented strength through unity. Alone, the rods could easily be broken over your knee. Tied together, they formed a cohesive, stronger unit that even Bane would have a bit of trouble getting through.

And he broke the Batman over his knee

Now, here's where the story comes in. I learned about the fasces in a high school Latin class, just weeks before I took a class trip to Washington, D.C. I don't know if you've noticed, but just about every important person in the history of the federal government has flashed some serious bedroom eyes toward Ancient Rome. So just about everything in our nation's capital pays lip service in some way toward Roman culture.

On the day we went to the Lincoln Memorial, I was able to put my new-found knowledge to use. Here's a picture of the statue of Abraham Lincoln that you'll find there:

Wait, that's not Daniel Day-Lewis

Notice anything familiar about it? Here's a hint: those aren't just armrests on his chair. He's got two old Roman symbols of magisterial authority under his arm. But there's more. These fasces have no axe head, because they're within the borders of the capital.

Lincoln presided over the country during the Civil War. What better symbol for his authority than one suggesting that strength comes from Union? One that conspicuously lacks a key element, which is only left out when it's in a place where people are forbidden from taking up arms against each other?

All this is basically to say that Daniel Chester French was the right man for the job of sculpting this memorial.

Holy shit.

Holy Shit, It's That Guy! (Game of Thrones Edition)

I'm gonna take a different approach today. I'm going to go all pop culture and throw educational value to the four winds. See, I've been watching Game of Thrones lately, and it keeps occurring to me that I've seen a lot of the characters before, often in surprising roles. Sometimes, the moment of anagnorisis makes me utter the sacred words of this blog, so I've decided to dedicate this post to those actors.

Here's the rules: It has to be a smallish role in something that was a pretty big deal back in its day. These rules are loosely defined and subjective. I just want everyone to know that I'm aware of that. Anyway...

What started me on this track was actually Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which I just recently started marathoning for the first time. Turns out it was way overdue. So, in the first episode of the fourth season, this awkward college freshman turns up, is promptly turned into a vampire, and is subsequently slain by the eponymous heroine:

This is what handsome looked like in the late '90s

He looked vaguely familiar, but I couldn't quite place him. Not three days later, Pedro Pascal did an AMA on Reddit wherein he mentioned that he had made an appearance on Buffy. If you're not sure who that is, just think of the sexiest Game of Thrones character you know. Whether you are male or female, gay or straight, the correct answer is:

Speaks for itself.

Next up is Maester Pycelle, or "that perverted old prick in King's Landing." Here he is in the show:

Look at his stupid, smug little face.

And here he is piloting an AT-AT walker in the Battle of Hoth for The Empire Strikes Back:

Gotta hand it to him. He survived serving under Darth Vader. Few officers did.

And here he is choosing poorly in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade:

"A cup for the King of Kings." Dumbass.

How about this guy:

Essence of brooding distilled to a human face. After it's been set on fire, of course.

Surely he hasn't been in anything too big, right? He's such a memorable character, you'd know for certain if you'd seen him before. Right? Well, all I can say to that is, "Narp."

Yarp

That's him as the simple grocery boy Michael from Hot Fuzz. Maybe you would have recognized him if he had said more than one mangled word in the film.

This is fun. How about this guy? Joffrey Baratheon, First of his Name, spoiled little shit of a king, played by the only actor who has successfully made me want to stab a child in the face:

Ugh. Just look at that face. It's begging to be knifed.

Well, here he is with Rachel Dawes during R'as al Ghul's attack on Gotham City in Batman Begins:

The fact that I don't even want to kick him a little bit is a testament to his acting chops.

I could go on and on like this. Catelyn Stark, for example, was Hermione's mom in the second-to-last
Harry Potter film. Jorah Mormont (aka General Friendzone) was in an episode of Doctor Who. There are so many characters in the series, you'd be hard pressed to not find one with a surprising career history. Let me know if I missed your favorite.

Holy shit. This was fun. I'll do more for other shows with big casts.

Holy Shit, Richard Parker!

In 1838, Edgar Allen Poe published his only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. In doing so, he set off a strange sequence of events that freaks out literary snobs and nautical enthusiasts alike. The events are centered around a character named Richard Parker.

In the novel, several sailors are left adrift at sea after a terrible storm incapacitates their ship. It's more complicated than that, but that's the important part. After a few spots of false hope, one of the sailors -- a man named Richard Parker -- suggests that, in order for any of them to survive, one of them will need to be killed and cannibalized. They draw straws, and Richard Parker is the unlucky victim.

Tragically, he only remembered his sweet fishing pole after they set upon him with knives

A few years earlier, a similar situation had played out in reality. A ship called the Frances Spaight sank in the north Atlantic, and the survivors practiced cannibalism when it became clear that they would starve otherwise. Given how close the event was to when Poe was writing, there's a decent chance he found some morbid inspiration in reality. Here's where it starts to get a little bit weird.

In 1846, eight years after Poe's novel, another Frances Spaight sank. One of the victims of this shipwreck was a man named Richard Parker. That's enough to be a little odd, but it's not quite freaky. Not yet. Not until 1884, when another ship went down (not a Frances Spaight this time), and a 17-year-old cabin boy named Richard Parker was counted among the survivors.

I mean, I say survivors. But he only lived through the initial disaster. It was decided, like in the book, that one of them had to become food for the others. And, like the book, that one turned out to be Richard Parker. As a sidenote, this case ended up setting a legal precedent that murder is super not okay, even if you're murdering someone out of desperation for food.

It's even less defensible if you're just kind of hungry. And violently psychotic.

I guess the moral of this whole story is that, if your name is Richard Parker and you're about to set sail on a ship called the Frances Spaight, you are woefully uninformed and will surely be eaten by your fellow sailors. Of course, Yann Martel didn't see it that way. In an effort to speak out for the Richard Parkers of the world who had been victims of the sea, he named the tiger in Life of Pi after them all. Spoiler alert, it turns out the tiger may have actually been a metaphor for the main character eating one of the other survivors of a shipwreck.

I'm sorry, what was that about drawing straws?

Vengeance, right?

Holy shit.

Holy Shit, Tommy Westphall!

What if I told you that almost all of your favorite television shows and most of your least favorite ones take place in the mind of an autistic teenager? I suspect you'd call bullshit and tell me that's just lazy writing. It sort of is, which the "in his head all along" plot twist isn't used very often anymore.

But when St. Elsewhere ended its six year run in 1988, it was groundbreaking. The whole series, as it turned out, was a day dream of Tommy Westphall, the autistic son of one of the main characters. Instead of everything taking place in a hospital, we find out that it was actually in a construction worker's apartment, in his son's mysterious imagination.



Here's where it gets weird. Weirder.

Fourteen years after the series ended, a writer named Dwayne McDuffie publicly wondered what the implications of that bizarro ending where for the greater TV universe. Any show worth its salt, after all, has a crossover with another show worth a comparable amount of salt.

Ever think about the troubling socioeconomic implications of this?

St. Elsewhere had one of these with Homicide: Life on the Street. Two doctors from the former appeared in episodes of the latter. McDuffie's theory holds that this crossover means both shows are figments of Tommy Westphall's imagination. Do you know what other shows had crossovers with Homicide?

Lots of them.

Like this one.

Homicide turns out to be something of a nexus for little Tommy's mind. Through it, literally hundreds of other television shows are connected in degrees that would make Kevin Bacon blush. According to one of the St. Elsewhere writers, "Someone did the math once... and something like 90 percent of all television took place in Tommy Westphall's mind. God love him."

Here's my personal favorite: through Homicide, Tommy imagined The X-Files, which leads to Veronica Mars, then Lost, Diagnosis: Murder, Mission: Impossible, The Jeffersons, The Fresh Prince of Bel goddamn Air, Diff'rent Strokes, the legendarily bad Hello, Larry, then Hi Honey, I'm Home, The Brady Bunch (!!!), Petticoat Junction, Green Acres, Hogan's Heroes, and finally....

Booya. Or bat-ya. Whatever.

Fucking BATMAN.

That's right. Batman. The Dark Knight was invented by an autistic kid staring at a snow globe.

Holy Shit.

Holy Shit, Stanislav Petrov!

Recognize the guy in the photo? It's unlikely that you do, but I'm not going to tell you not to feel bad about it. Because that man is Stanislav Petrov, and you very likely owe him your life.

The year was 1983, and the U.S. and Soviet Union were playing for keepsies. Their on-again-off-again relationship was decidedly in the off-again setting, and the U.S. said, "Hey, you know what would be a lot of fun in an atmosphere of extreme geopolitical tension and nuclear paranoia? A war game with unprecedented realism that makes it look like we're about to nuke the shit out of Russia!"

Shit's on fire, yo.

The Soviet Union wasn't too fond of the idea. Especially since it kind of looked like their longtime rival was actually planning to rain hell fire onto their faces. They saw enormous forces massed on their borders. They saw fully armed nuclear bombers coming right to the edge of and sometimes slightly within their airspace before turning away. They saw unprecedented mobilization. And they started to flip a shit.

That's where Mr. Petrov comes in. Stanislav Petrov was an officer in the Soviet Air Defense Program in charge of monitoring their Early Warning System. On September 26, 1983, said system blipped. A blip on your "We're All Gonna Die" radar is literally the last thing you ever want to see in that situation. But there it was. A blip headed straight for the Motherland.

OH GOD, DEFINITELY DO NOT WANT.

Stanislav the Manislav, being a reasonable man(islav), figured that a single blip could easily be a defect. "Something must be tripping up the system," he told himself. So he decided not to report it. As he came to that decision, four more blips appeared. So now there were five possible missiles headed into town to get rip-roaring, rowdy, and...you know...nuclear.

At this point, Stanislav neglected his duty. He declined to report the attack. It was still a small number, and the reliability of the system had been questioned before, so he took it upon himself to not worry the top brass with it. It's a goddamn good thing, too, because the top brass had an itchy trigger finger and an unhealthy dose of panic at that moment. If they had any reason to believe the U.S. was launching a nuclear strike, they would not hesitate to end life on Earth.

Luckily, Mr. Petrov was 100% correct. Sunlight was in perfect alignment with a few high altitude clouds and the satellites used to track potential missiles, which caused the false alarm. After a brief moment of panic on November 9th, when Able Archer 83 simulated a movement to Defcon 1 (meaning imminent nuclear strike), NATO forces packed it all in and went back to their regularly scheduled mild panic.

As for Petrov, he was removed to a less sensitive position. A lateral move, you'll be happy to know. He was neither punished nor rewarded for his actions, but his direct superiors praised him and said that his actions were "correct."

Many years later, after the story was made public, Petrov was much more justly rewarded. The Association of World Citizens gave him their World Citizen Award. Twice. And a documentary was made about him, aptly titled The Man Who Saved the World.

Because he did that.

Holy shit.

Holy Shit, Lupercalia!

This time of year always calls to mind certain old traditions that surround the concepts of gender interaction and fertility. I speak, of course, of Lupercalia.

Season's Greetings!

Lupercalia was a Roman holiday celebrated on February 13th-15th back in the day. By "celebrated," I mean, "Men got bare-ass naked and ran through the streets whipping people." No really. That's how it was done. Roman holidays were hardcore.

It's just how they rolled.

The naked men dancing through the streets may have donned wolf skins (though not enough to cover any important bits of their physique), and they whipped anyone they encountered, especially women. Women ran away in terror at the horrifying display. Just kidding, they scrambled to be among the lucky ones to receive the lashings.

You see, the point of this orgiastic parade, and the point of most pagan holidays, centered around a very crucial concept:

This guy.

Babies. Specifically, the creation and delivery of babies. Pregnant women who were whipped by naked men during the incomprehensible sausage-y festival of Lupercalia believed their pseudo-violent encounter would bless them with a safe and peaceful labor. Non-pregnant women believed, and let me lay out these details carefully lest we forget, that a naked man smacking them with a whip would magically grant them a superbly fertile womb.

Ancient fertility drug?

Like most awesomely bizarre pagan festivals, Lupercalia was doomed by the rise of Catholicism. Some say (without any tangible evidence other than the convenient date and...you know...fertility...) that Valentine's Day was meant to replace it. More likely is that the convenient date was just a coincidence, since Valentine's Day had nothing to do with romance or fertility until about a thousand years after Lupercalia was abolished.

The point, though, is that Romans were weird. Don't think modern society is going to get off easily. We have weird enough festivals that we'll get into later.

But running through the streets in the buff, merrily whipping willing young women?

Holy shit.

Holy Shit, Henry Tandey!

Henry Tandey was an Englishman in his early twenties in 1914. As you may recall, being such an age in such a year was bad news bears in a big way. Tandey didn't mind. In fact, he volunteered for combat. He remained a lowly private for most of the war, because he preferred collecting trinkets to rising in the ranks. Trinkets like the Victoria Cross, the most prestigious award in the British armed forces. He was the most decorated English Private (heh) in the First World War.

Not too exciting yet, right? Don't worry, we're getting there.

In October of 1914, Tandey was stationed in Marcoing, France. After a bout of the nasty sort of fighting The Great War is known for, a young German soldier stumbled directly into Tandey's line of fire. The poor guy was exhausted. He saw an enemy soldier staring down a rifle at him, frowned, and resigned himself to death. He didn't even reach for his weapon because he knew he wouldn't get to it in time. Tandey pitied the guy, and his pity moved him to lower his rifle.

Pictured: Pity

With a nod of thanks, the young German soldier wandered away. Then he took over his country and murdered six million Jews. Because the tired German soldier Henry Tandey had just spared was none other than Lance Corporal Adolf motherfucking Hitler, the Bastard from Baunau.

Yeah, that Adolf Hitler

Since Tandey went on to become a hero and win Britain's highest honor, Hitler was able to recognize his face in a newspaper article.

Later on, when Hitler and Neville Chamberlain were shooting the shit in Berghof after deciding that Czechoslovakia should be annexed by Germany (a decision made without the consent of Czechoslovakia), the Führer asked the Prime Minister if he could deliver a message of thanks to Henry Tandey, the man who spared his life. Chamberlain, ever the appeaser, agreed.

Imagine, with the benefit of hindsight, getting that call. Imagine the head of your government calling you up and saying, "Hey, you know the greatest threat to international peace in the world? You know, the one who's on the cusp of committing the most infamous case of mass murder the world has ever known? Yeah. He says thanks. For not stopping him earlier."

Holy shit.