Black Velvet

Black Velvet is the name of a song that was popular a while back, when I was younger.*  Apparently, it was about Elvis. "Mama's baby's in the heart of every school girl // "Love me tender" leaves 'em cryin' in the aisle"

"Black velvet," as it turns out, is apparently also a term used in Australia to refer to, shall we say, the proclivities of well-situated Caucasian males in the field of Aboriginal extracurricular activities, or possibly to those "activities" themselves.  Ahem.

A "black velvet" is also a drink made from Guinness and champagne, which to me at least, sounds completely wretched.  What a horrible thing to do to champagne.  It was created in honor of the death of Britain's Prince Albert.

Finally, it is, of course, the material of choice for paintings of sad clowns and unicorns.

I am reasonably certain that these things are essentially unrelated, with the possible exception of black velvet paintings of Elvis.  At the very least, we can hope so.

*Yes, I'm aware that that statement is semantically somewhat redundant, or at the very least extremely unhelpful.

Thomas Nast

Some heretofore unknown (by me) facts about Thomas Nast, famous post-Civil War political cartoonist.

He was not American-born.  He was instead born in Landau, Germany to a Bavarian trombonist and his wife, and moved (with his mother) to the USA when he was 6 years old.  His father joined them a few years later when a tour of naval duty ended.

He was credited not only with creating the iconic figures representative of our current political parties (the elephant and the donkey) but with the "modern" image of Santa Claus as well.  It's NOT COKE'S FAULT.  I am actually a bit dubious about that claim, since A Visit from St. Nicholas predated Nast by several decades, and even though its depiction of Santa isn't quite how we usually portray him, it certainly lay a lot of groundwork ("chubby and plump" especially).  And of course, there are apparently pieces of evidence predating that with a lot of the same imagery.

Theodore Roosevelt appointed him the United States' Consul General to Ecuador in 1902, where he died a few years later during an outbreak of yellow fever.

That Face

Man, the stomach flu sucks.  But I already knew that, so I guess I'll have to post about something else.  Fortunately, I have a few gems set aside for such an occasion...

The original manikin upon which most people learn CPR was not just a randomly sculpted generic face.  It was modelled in 1960 by toymaker Asmund Laerdal, based on L'Inconnue de la Seine, a young unidentified Parisienne who drowned in the late 1880s.  The air of romantic mystery surrounding her body inspired quite a few artists, and for a time death masks made from her visage were quite the rage in Bohemian society.  It was one of these masks, seen hanging on a wall, that inspired Laerdal in his creation of Resusci Anne-- a doll inspired by a drowned woman that helps train people in saving (among other things) drowning victims.  Beautiful, no?

Except of course that it's not quite true.  According to a recent episode of Radiolab, there probably wasn't actually any drowned woman.  An interview with a gendarme who worked the riverbanks revealed that women who were pulled from the Seine simply did not look that good.  Other reports agree-- these plaster masks were based on a living girl, probably just some model doing a day's work.  So much for romanticism.