efaucheux

Via Forgotten Weapons coming up for sale at James D. Julia in early October, Lot 1717, a 12 gauge takedown over-and-under shotgun by Lefaucheux with a very unusual double swinging breechblock mechanism.

4:29 video

Humor

Brian Sewell

Art critic and cultural commentator Brian Sewell deservedly received one of the Telegraph‘s celebrated obituary tributes.

Brian Sewell, the loquacious art critic and broadcaster known for his acerbic wit, has passed away at the age of 84. He had been suffering from cancer.

He was an award-winning contributor to the Evening Standard and presented a series of travelogues for Channel 5, as well as often appearing on panel shows such as Have I Got News for You.

He was known as the UK’s “most controversial art critic”, and would openly criticise those who he deemed worthy of it, once calling Damian Hirst “f—–g dreadful” and stating that Banksy “should have been put down at birth”. …

n 1994, 35 figures from the art world, including Bridget Riley, George Melly and Maureen Paley, signed a letter to the Evening Standard attacking Sewell for “homophobia”, “misogyny”, “demagogy”, “hypocrisy”, “artistic prejudice”, “formulaic insults” and “predictable scurrility”.

This was followed up by a counter-letter in support of Sewell, signed by 20 other art figures. …

He maintained his negative opinions about female artists throughout his life. “The art market is not sexist,” he said in interview with The Independent in 2008. “The likes of Bridget Riley and Louise Bourgeois are of the second and third rank. There has never been a first-rank woman artist. Only men are capable of aesthetic greatness. Women make up 50 per cent or more of classes at art school. Yet they fade away in their late 20s or 30s. Maybe it’s something to do with bearing children.”

He was also a vocal critic of the Turner Prize, calling it an “annual farce” and its nominees “a sad little band of late labourers in the exhausted pastures of international conceptual art”.

But it was not only art that he was scornful of. Despite being bisexual himself (though he preferred the term “queer”), he also spoke out about gay marriage, saying, “The recent institution of civil partnerships seemed to be the final necessary reform… Why, then, do they and lesbians demand the right to marry? Indeed, how many of us have made that demand? One in 20? One in 10?… But every minority has within it a core of single-issue politicians and protesters who are never satisfied and always ask for more, and homosexuals, both male and female, are no exception.”

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There was a time when homosexuals naturally gravitated to the upper class lifestyle, adopted an arch reactionary perspective, and were champions of high culture and civilization. Brian Sewell’s negative commentary on a masked ball in Venice could easily have been delivered by Brideshead Revisited‘s Anthony Blanche.

More Anglophilia.

“”They had him thrown out of the club in Bombay
For, apart from his mess bill exceeding his pay,
He took to pig-sticking in quite the wrong way.
I wonder what happened to him!”

Hat tip to Rafal Heydel-Mankoo.

Scene from The Riot Club (2014), a film based on Oxford University’s Bullingdon Club.

Decadent British undergraduate clubs are at the top of international news items today. An unauthorized biography of British PM David Cameron links him in his undergraduate days at Oxford to the posh Bullingdon Club, whose members wear a custom-tailored white-tie uniform in special club colors costing something in the neighborhood of £3,500, and (far more scandalous) the Piers Gaveston Society, named for the catamite of King Edward II.

The Tatler describes the latter club:

The Gav is theoretically men-only, and slightly camp – it’s named after Edward II’s lover and its motto is Fane non memini ne audisse unum alterum ita dilixisse, or ‘Truly, none remember hearing of a man enjoying another so much’. The joke is it was only founded in 1977. The 12 members, a self-selecting group of good-looking former public-school boys, each invite 20 guests to the ball, ideally the most beautiful girls at Oxford. Plenty of rumpy in the bushes ensues. For last summer’s debauch, guests were given only 72 hours’ notice with a stiffie in their pidge (pigeonhole) and told to present themselves at a hired coach, which drove them deep into the countryside. Phones and cameras were confiscated and the location kept secret. Guests arrived to find a live sex show on a stage and a decadent dance tent.

Michael Ashcroft’s forthcoming biography of David Cameron has made the news in a big way on the basis of one particular anecdote, which the Daily Mail summarized:

A distinguished Oxford contemporary claims Cameron once took part in an outrageous initiation ceremony at a Piers Gaveston event, involving a dead pig. His extraordinary suggestion is that the future PM inserted a private part of his anatomy into the animal’s mouth.

The Tatler, in 2014, published a guide to secret Oxford drinking clubs.

James Delingpole, a contemporary of Cameron’s at Oxford, published in 2012 a description of the ethos and activities of a variety of scandalous Oxbridge clubs, complete with photos.

Gavin MacInnes explains why Donald Trump’s candidacy, no matter how you look at it, is a Good Thing.

I still believe Trump is a snowplow who is paving the way for Ted Cruz. At the last second, he endorses Cruz and we get all the bravado of the former with the brains of the latter. However, it’s possible Trump goes to the finish line. I ain’t mad at that, either. The Democrats, the mainstream media, neocons, liberals, and college kids are all part of the same hive. They want to fight but they don’t want to win. They’re like that crazy Latina girlfriend in a screaming panic who won’t shut up until you grab her by the wrists and say, “Shut the fuck up. I got this.” We need to throw her onto the couch, grab a beer, and get back to work. That’s ultimately what she wants too. She just doesn’t realize it yet.

Hat tip to Vanderleun.

IFLScience has the story of Atlantropa, a colossal 1920s plan by German architect Herman Sörgel to dam the Mediterranean and create an African-European supercontinent.

Dams across the Strait of Gibraltar, the Dardanelles, and eventually between Sicily and Tunisia, each containing gigantic hydroelectric power plants, would form the basis for the new supercontinent. In its final state the Mediterranean would be converted into two basins, with the western part lowered by 100 meters and the eastern part by 200 meters and a total of 660,200 km2 of new land reclaimed from the sea – an area larger than France.

Later plans for Atlantropa also included two dams across the Congo River and the creation of a Chad and Congo Sea, which Sörgel hoped would have a moderating influence on the African climate making it more pleasant for European settlers. In line with the colonial and racist attitudes of the times, Sörgel envisaged Africa with its resources and its land to be entirely at the disposal of Europe, a continent with plenty of space to accommodate Europe’s huddled masses.

While Sörgel’s proposal may sound absurd to our ears, it was taken seriously by architects, engineers, politicians and journalists at the time. The extensive Atlantropa archive in the Deutsche Museum in Munich abounds with architectural drawings for new cities, the dams and bridges of the future continent as well as letters of support and hundreds of articles about the project, which appeared in the German and international popular press as well as in specialised engineering and geographical magazines.

What made Atlantropa so attractive was its vision of world peace achieved not through politics and diplomacy, but with a simple technological solution. Atlantropa would be held together by a vast energy net, which would extend from the gigantic hydroelectric plant in the Gibraltar dam and provide the entirety of Europe and Africa with electricity. The power plant would be overseen by an independent body who would have the power to switch off the energy supply to any individual country that posed a threat to peace. Moreover Sörgel calculated that the construction of the supercontinent would require each country to invest so much money and people power that none would have sufficient resources to finance a war.

Read the whole thing.

Ratak Monodosico blogs female combatants throughout history, ending with:

Capt. Kim Campbell, US Air Force, A10 Warthog pilot during the Iraq War, the pictures speak for themselves.

Lekdijk Bovendams, Beinecke Library, Yale University.

Yale University acquired a 17th century Dutch bond as an acquisition for its rare book & manuscript collection, but that is not stopping Yale from collecting the interest due on the perpetual bond.

Bloomberg Business:

Yale University will receive 136.20 euros ($153) in interest on a perpetual bond issued in 1648 from Dutch water authority de Stichtse Rijnlanden.

The 1,000 guilder-bond ($509), which is written on goatskin, is among five of the world’s oldest bonds that still pay interest, according to Clarion Wegerif, a spokeswoman for the water authority. The money will be paid out on Monday.

Yale contacted the agency to collect the interest, Wegerif said in a phone interview from Houten, the Netherlands. “We’ll be handing out a symbolic check and wire the rest.”

Yale, which has an endowment of $23.9 billion, paid 24,000 euros to acquire the bond in 2003 as an artifact. The university hasn’t been paid interest since the acquisition, according to the agency. The bond was issued to pay for a small pier in the Netherlands’s Lek river.