"All over the world, there were people who, for reasons they could not quite articulate, had fallen into a kind of fugue state and dedicated their lives to digging underground — a whole case file of Mole Men."

"There was Lyova Arakelyan, a man in rural Armenia who, while excavating a potato cellar beneath his home, became transfixed, and spent the next three decades digging winding tunnels and spiral staircases. To those who asked why, he only explained that each night he heard voices in his dreams telling him to dig. And the entomologist Harrison G. Dyar, Jr., who excavated a quarter mile’s worth of tunnels beneath two separate houses in Washington, D.C. When the tunnels were revealed in 1924, after a car fell through the street, Dyar told the press, 'I do it for the exercise.' And an old man in the Mojave Desert, William 'Burro' Schmidt, who spent thirty-two years pickaxing a 2,087-foot-long tunnel into the side of a solid granite mountain. ('Just a shortcut, I suppose.') And a young man named Elton Macdonald, who covertly excavated a thirty-foot-long tunnel beneath a city park in Toronto, which caused a city-wide panic after the police announced the tunnel as a potential hideout for terrorists. When Macdonald revealed himself as the burrower, he could only explain, 'Digging relaxes me.' And then Lord William Cavendish-Scott-Bentinck, a nineteenth-century duke, who, along with a crew of laborers, hollowed out an entire tunnel metropolis beneath his estate, complete with an underground library, a billiards room, and a ten-thousand-square-foot underground ballroom made entirely of clay, which the duke used as a private roller-skating rink."

From "Underground: A Human History of the Worlds Beneath Our Feet" by Will Hunt. I highly recommend this book, which I read right after another book with the same title, different subtitle, "Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche," by Haruki Murakami.

Is there some natural urge to burrow underground? Will Hunt writes: "Physiologically speaking, there is no environment so intolerable as a tight, dark, underground enclosure, where oxygen is scarce. To burrow is to experience claustrophobia in its most crystallized form, like enclosing yourself in a tomb. And yet, throughout history, in every corner of the world, we have burrowed...."

"The song wasn’t identified, but 'gang signs soon led to 95 percent of the room' hitting each other...."

From "Song prompts 200 teens to explode into massive fight at skating rink, witnesses say."

IN THE COMMENTS: You can tell I want to know what the song is. Fortunately, Ignorance Is Bliss helped me out — "I'm guessing this was the song":



AND: If you can skate the hell out of that hitting-everyone-in-the-rink scene, here's music to skate on home by:

Comedy is when a white man falls into an open sewer and dies.

Jack Hamilton has a piece in Slate subtitled "Forget Walter White. Eastbound & Down is the most original, disturbing, wrenching show on television. (And it’s hilarious, too.)"

If we live in a golden age of great television shows, the vast majority of these shows have featured angst-ridden white male protagonists. This shift from heroes to anti-heroes has been frequently and rightly characterized as a broader interrogation of masculinity itself, one occasioned by crises of its creators, crises of culture, or both. But while current prestige-magnets like Mad Men and Breaking Bad might offer revisionist takes on white maleness, they also offer their audiences renewed fantasies of the same. Young men buy suits cut to look like Don Draper’s; aggrieved Internet communities close ranks in protection of Walter White’s right to be the One Who Knocks.

So what's great about Eastbound & Down is that it deprives the beleaguered white male of hope.

Eastbound & Down isn’t so much a show about white masculinity in transition or decline as it is a biting send-up of male fantasy itself. Powers fancies himself an alpha dog, gunslinging, rock ’n’ roll outlaw, a fiction he believes to be reality, and to which he believes himself to be entitled. Kenny Powers’ problem, in a sense, is that he’s watched too much TV. If Mad Men is a drama about the encroaching demise of a certain white male dominance, Eastbound & Down is a satire of its vacancy, and its bankruptcy. The latter is a whole lot funnier, and often more daring.

Because hopeless, pathetic decline is hilarious. To paraphrase Mel Brooks: Tragedy is when a woman or person of color feels disrespected or bullied. Comedy is when a white man falls into an open sewer and dies. (Here's the disemparaphrased Mel Brooks quote.)

I quoted the subtitle of the article above — because it made the content of the article clearer— but now I see enough additional meaning to make me want to quote the title. It's "Breaking Ball." That's not just a play on "Breaking Bad" and a reference to crushing testicles, it's an allusion to the show's milieu, baseball. Eastbound & Down shows baseball as "gross and debauched, a morass of juiced-up players, abusive fans, godforsaken locales, bored and boring spectacle."

Many of the actors on-screen... boast hilariously unathletic physiques, and seem to have last donned a glove back in the days when home plate came with a tee. It’s the ugliest depiction of the game in recent memory, a hilarious and welcome desecration of one of the old white America’s favorite civic religions.

Take that, white America.

LIFE's sexiest photographs.

A nice collection. My favorite as a photograph is Jayne Mansfield. The sexiest, in my personal opinion, is "Clint Eastwood... bare-chested and bandaged after a brutal beating...."

And for those of you who were sad that I laughed at Raquel Welch yesterday — in her uncomfortable dancing singer guise — she's looking much more at ease here in a roller derby outfit — possibly because it's a still photograph.

Speaking of photography, here's a question I thought of yesterday and realized I couldn't answer: Who was the first U.S. President to be photographed? It's easy to think of photos of Abraham Lincoln, but was there anyone before him? It turns out to be crucial how you ask the question. You'll get a different answer if you look at the list of Presidents in the order that they served and find which is the first of them to have been photographed than if you look for the oldest date on a photograph of a U.S. President.

Do you even have a rough idea of when the earliest photographs were taken? Clue: it was not during the Civil War. Do you know the date of the earliest photographic portrait of a human being? You can see this person at 0:55 in this video, which collects many photographic firsts. The man looks like someone you would find — I would find — attractive if he walked down the street today. And at 1:12, you'll see the earliest-born person that we have a photograph of. Try to guess the year she was born before you look.



ADDED: By coincidence, it's Louis Daguerre's birthday, and Google has a doodle for him today:

Durango costumery.

There was — as far as I could see — exactly one person in town wearing high heels:



Now, what book do you imagine this individual was reading?

Then there were these characters on roller skates:



Note the tail.

And yeah, I know: men in shorts. But this is beyond the normal men in shorts problem (which is, to refresh your recollection, that a grown man is making himself look like a boy). This is skating in hot pants. I have always had a sports exception to the "no shorts" rule. And this is the best costume for today.

Roller dancing babies — an ad, but what an ad.

(Via LGF.)