I'm afraid this won't be much of anything either. I'm tired and I'm still out of stories for the moment. The Boy is playing Metal Gear Solid and I am sort of halfheartedly trying to help him but it's really very complicated. At least it's not the horrible Grand Theft Auto game. I bought him 5 new games in the hopes that he would move on, and he has. This is definitely better.

I did feel rather good today, however. We had a staff meeting (it's weekly), and I spent well over two hours hanging out with the gang and answering their questions and telling them whatever they wanted to know. And they said they felt better after talking to me. Which was good. I felt like a proper boss. And I hung out with them late and bought everybody beer and stuff.

Somebody tell me I'm a good boss lady?

Also, along with my usual "old lady feet" (if I keep mentioning that in lots of entries the freaky old person foot fetish people will keep finding me, hee) googles, I got one for "elephantiasis" which I had mentioned in an entry a really long time ago in which I bitched about the propensity on the parts of the young men of NYC to completely fail to close their goddamned legs on the subway when I want to sit down. I think that's pretty funny.

And I offered to help noalarms to help her out in the bubonic plague/middle ages department but she hasn't responded.

If she had I would have told her that the bubonic plague, combined with the christian tyrannism of the middle ages, had a profound effect upon the art of the time. If you look at a timeline, you will see a major coinciding of religious imperialism with the spread of the disease. Alongside that came a deep revolution in the art of the period. While disease was scaring the shit out of everybody, the christians were informing the artists that no one would be allowed to create anything outside of the realm of religion, notably the new testament.

The result of this was a phenomenal number of depictions of sin. Of the seven deadly. Of all possible sins. Of the apocalypse. Of Satan. Of satyrs and adultery and bacchanalia of all sorts. While the world was going mad, the artists were trying - desperately - to depict it while remaining within the confines of the christian authorities.

Simultaneously, the disease was ravaging (over the course of several years, of course) over a quarter of the population of Europe. This time is where the phrase "bring out your dead" came from -- carts would, quite honestly, and not just in the realm of monty python, come through the streets, asking for each household's corpses. The poorest people would be paid to perform this task, as well as burial tasks. They either figured that it wouldn't matter because they would die anyway, or they would believe that god would bring them through and hope for the best.

Many religious authorities were informing the populace that this was punishment for their sins. The Plague led the way for much of the transformation of Europe into Christianity. The Crusades, of course, had been well before, starting approximately 400 years prior to the beginning of the outbreak. However, at the presence of the plague, conversions happened en masse across Europe. Saints happened, martyrs and zealots.

Ugh. I'm too pooped to embark on either a fact-checking mission (I have checked almost none of my facts for the above except the timing of the crusades) or continue to write a history lesson for people who mostly don't care. Since I don't think noalarms is paying attention. Plus my poor dying metal gear boy needs my help.

The point though is that I highly encourage you to look at art pre- and post-bubonic plague. The difference is fairly apparent. Not as apparent as pre-plague of thucydides (pelopennesian war) grecian art and post, which was unbelievably striking, but apparent nonetheless.

Anyway. I'm off to help my Boy and hopefully manage to get some sleep tonight. G'night, all.

onehanded