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What? Skeleton of the most famous Musketeer, D'Artagnan, possibly discovered in Dutch church closet.
Dumas picked four names of real musketeers out of a history book, D'Artagnan, Athos, Aramis, and Porthos. So there was an actual D'Artagnan, though he made most of the story up. (Or, you know, all of it.)*
Charles de Batz de Castelmore, known as d'Artagnan, the famous musketeer of Kings Louis XIII and Louis XIV, spent his life in the service of the French crown.
The Gascon nobleman inspired Alexandre Dumas's hero in "The Three Musketeers" in the 19th century, a character now known worldwide thanks to the novel and numerous film adaptations.
D'Artagnan was killed during the siege of Maastricht in 1673, and there is a statue honoring the musketeer in the city. His final resting place has remained a mystery ever since.

A lot of Dumas's stories are based on bits of real history. The plot of the >Three Musketeers, about trying to recover lost diamonds from the queen's necklace, was cribbed from the then-almost-contemporaneous Affair of the Queen's Necklace. And the Man in the Iron Mask is based on real accounts of a prisoner forced to wear a mask (though I think it was a velvet mask).
* Oh, I should mention, Dumas says all this, about finding the names in an old book, in the prologue to his novel. But authors lie a lot. They frequently present fictions as based on historic fact. The twist is, he was actually telling the truth here. At least about these four musketeers having actually existed and served under Louis XIV.
Fun fact: You know the beginning of A Fistful of Dollars where the local gunslingers make fun of Clint Eastwood's donkey and Eastwood demands they apologize to the donkey? That's lifted from The Three Musketeers. Rochefort mocks D'Artagnan's old, brokedown farm horse and D'Artagnan is incensed.
A commenter asked which should be read first, The Hobbit of LOTR?
Easy, no question -- read The Hobbit first. It's actually the start of the story and comes first chronologically. It sets up some major characters and major pieces in play in LOTR.
Also, the Hobbit is Beginner-Friendly, which LOTR isn't. The Hobbit really is a delightful book, and a fast read. It's chatty, it's casual, it's exciting, and it's funny. In that dry cheeky British humor way. I love that the narrator is constantly making little asides and commentary, like he's just sitting next to you telling you this story as it occurs to him.
LOTR is a very long story. Fifteen hundred pages or so. The Hobbit is relatively short and very punchy and easy to read. If you don't like The Hobbit, you can skip out on LOTR. If you do like it, you'll be primed to read LOTR.
Oh, I should say: The Hobbit is written as if it's for children, but one of those smart children's stories that are also for adults. Don't worry, there's also real fighting and violence and horror in it, too.
LOTR is written for adults. (It's said that Tolkien wrote both for his children, but LOTR was written 17 years later, when his children were adults.) Some might not like The Hobbit due to its sometimes frivolous tone. Me, I love it. I find it constantly amusing. Both are really good but there is a starkly different tone to both. LOTR is epic, grand, and serious, about a world war, The Hobbit is light and breezy, and about a heist. Though a heist that culminates in a war for the spoils.
The Hobbit Challenge: Read two more chapters. I didn't have much time. Bilbo got the ring.
I noticed a continuity problem. Maybe. Now, as of the time of The Hobbit, it was unknown that this magic ring was in fact a Ring of Power, and it was doubly unknown that it was the Ring of Power, the Master Ring that controlled the others.
But the narrator -- who we will learn in LOTR was none of than Bilbo himself, who wrote the book as "There and Back Again" -- says this about Gollum's ring:
"But who knows how Gollum had come by that present [the Ring], ages ago in the old days when such rings were still at large in the world? Perhaps even the Master who ruled them could not have said."
In another passage, the ring is identified as a "ring of power."
I don't know, I always thought there was a distinction between mere magic rings and the Rings of Power created by Sauron. But this suggests that Bilbo knew this was a ring of power created by Sauron.
Now I don't remember when Bilbo wrote the Hobbit. In the movie, he shows Frodo the book in Rivendell, and I guess he wrote it after he left the Shire. I guess he might have added in the part about the ring being a ring of power created by "the Master" after Gandalf appraised him of his research into the ring.
I never noticed this before. I know Tolkien re-wrote this chapter while he was writing LOTR to make the ring important from the start. And also to make Gollum more sinister and evil, and also to remove the part where Gollum actually offers Bilbo the ring as a "present" -- Bilbo had already found it on his own, but Gollum was wiling to give it away, which obviously is not something the rewritten Gollum would ever do.
But I had no memory of the ring being suggested to be The Ring so early in the tale.
Finish the job, Mr. President!
Melanie Phillips lays out the case for the total destruction of the Iranian government and armed forces. [CBD]
CJN podcast 1400 copy.jpg
Podcast: Sefton and CBD talk about how would a peace treaty with Iran work, Democrats defending murderers and rapists, The GOP vs. Dem bench for 2028, composting bodies? And more!
Oh, I forgot to mention this quote from Pete Hegseth, reported by Roger Kimball: "We are sharing the ocean with the Iranian Navy. We're giving them the bottom half."
Forgotten 80s Mystery Click: Red Leather Suit and Sweatband Edition
And I was here to please
I'm even on knees
Makin' love to whoever I please
I gotta do it my way
Or no way at all
Tomorrow is March 25th, "Tolkien Reading Day," because March 25th is the day when the Ring is destroyed in the book. I think I'm going to start the Hobbit tomorrow and read all four books this time.
The only bad part of the trilogy are the Frodo/Sam chapters in The Two Towers. They're repetitive, slow, and mostly about the weather and terrain. But most everything else is good. Weirdly, the Frodo-Sam chapters in Return of the King are exciting and action-packed and among the best in the trilogy. (Though the chapters with everyone else in Return of the King get pretty slow again. Mostly people talking about marching towards war, and then marching towards war.)
Forgotten 80s Mystery Click
One day I'm gonna write a poem in a letter
One day I'm gonna get that faculty together
Remember that everybody has to wait in line
Oh, [Song Title], look out world, oh, you know I've got mine
US decimation of Iran's ICBM forces is due to Space Force's instant detection of launches -- and the launchers' hiding places -- and rapid counter-attack via missiles
AI is doing a lot of the work in analyzing images to find the exact hiding place of the launchers. Counter-strikes are now coming in four hours after a launch, whereas previously it might have taken days for humans to go over the imagery and data.
Robert Mueller, Former Special Counsel Who Probed Trump, Dies
“robert mueller just died,” trump wrote in a truth social post on march 21. “good, i’m glad he’s dead. he can no longer hurt innocent people! president donald j. trump.”
Canadian School Designates Cafeteria And Lunchroom As "No Food Zones" For Ramadan
Canada and the UK are neck and neck in the race to become the first western country to fall to Islam [CBD]
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« Kuwait PAO: "Burned Woman" Incident An "Urban Legend Or Myth" | Main | Max Blumenthal, Unreliable Smear Merchant (Not That There's Anything Wrong With That!) »
August 03, 2007

Enough With The Gay Shit

If lefties (such as Max Blumenthal, currently serving in the Peshewar area; google it, I won't link) want to say an allegedly gay dude's claims are inherently suspect because he digs on cock, then maybe they ought to address Beauchamp's apparent deficiencies in this area:

Rehn "The Bird" was in town (you can see him staring at my ass in my profile picture), along with a cheeky limey bastard named Sam. I wish I could say that we three queens had an insightful conversation about the recent British elections...

I will stress again: I have not said a word about this since the story broke. I knew about this since Beauchamp's name was released. I have not made an issue of it. It didn't occur to me this could be an issue, even though it does tend to suggest a reason for anti-military animus.

However, if full and umblemished record of lifelong heterosexuality is now, according to lefties, some sort of requirement for reliability, well, it seems Scott Beauchamp's got a whole new credibility problem.

I'm so sick of the fucking left. If someone says something they don't like, they just bleat over and over "FAG! FAG! FAG! FAG!"

Well, fuck self-restraint. If that's the game we're playing, then game on.

gse_multipart8863.jpg

That's Scottie and "Rehn," mentioned in the post above, who is "obviously gay" by his own self-assessment.

Now, I'm not going to say anything about that picture, but I think if I worked for Page 6, I just might call that some light-to-moderate "canoodling," if you know what I mean, and I think you do.

We havin' fun now kids?

Isn't this a riot?

I don't like being the first guy into the gutter.

I have less of a problem with being the second.


Yeah I Know... He claims to have had any number of girlfriends in Germany and proposed to, I think, half of them.

Which is, you know, completely consistent with typical heterosexual behavior.

Some days I can barely make it to lunch without proposing to a woman.

Gay Porn = Dishonesty: Does this pic, from Scottie B's myspace page, count as gay porn?

true_love.jpg

I guess not. What's the rule for gay erotica?

I wonder if we'll have any stories along these lines on the Scott Thomas: International Soldier of Mystery blog.

I'm informed that if one goes to his My Space page one can find all sorts of pictures in which he looks... well, I don't want to say gay. I'll say, possessed of a colorful and far-ranging sex life.

Since This Is Relevant... I had not previously understood this to be relevant. But now Max Blumenthal (son of "Sid Vicious" Blumenthal, who called Monica Lewinsky a crazed "stalker") attacks Matt Sanchez, yet again, for supposedly have been in gay porn.

Along the way he implies a source in the TNR story is gay too, just for fun. Depsite the fact that everything this source has said has been accurate, unlike the "reportage" of Scott Beauchamp. And despite the fact that Matt Sanchez' major contribution to the story thusfar has been his finding that no soldiers at FOB Falcon ever saw a "melted" woman -- something TNR itself now concedes, as it admits "error" in mistaking Camp Beurhing in Kuwait for FOB Falcon in Iraq.

So why on earth would someone push the Sanchez-is-gay thing so hard? He contributed one major bit to the story (before today), and that is already proven. We don't have to rely on his credibility for that -- it is now a fact admitted by TNR.

Today he breaks the major story that investigation has "proven the claim to not have been true," but then, Blumenthal didn't know that when he penned his little smearjob.

So why, of all the hundreds of military men, bloggers, and milbloggers adding to this story, focus only on Matt Sanchez?

Well, because he's one of the few Blumenthal can call a queer, of course.

So, given that heterosexuality is now required as regards credibility--

What's Max Blumenthal's sexuality, I wonder? I have no idea, but he kind of looks like the sort of guy who might enjoy a colorful and far-ranging sex life.

These questions need to be answered. A man's sexuality is a crucial component of his credibility, so we really need to know if Max Blumenthal maybe experimented a bit in middle school.


posted by Ace at 11:44 AM