The Holy Grail Press
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Word of the Every So Often
cabining: (verb) to confined within narrow bounds. Political descent was slowly cabined until it finally disappeared altogether.
The Almost Daily
On April 28, 1789, Lieutenant Fletcher Christian and 25 crewmen led a mutiny against Captain William Bligh – the Mutiny on the Bounty. Why Christian led the rebellion is historically unclear, though the various movie versions always portray the captain of the HMS Bounty as being excessively cruel. What we do know is that the Bounty had a six month layover in Tahiti, during which many of the crew members lived the good life, and weren’t particularly wanting to go back out to sea. Regardless, Bligh and 18 loyalists were put adrift in the ship’s launch, which they navigated 3,500 miles to safety. By April of 1790, a year after the mutiny, Bligh and company made it back to England, and the Admiralty promptly sent the HMS Pandora out to find those mutineers. And they did. Well, they found the 16 mutineers who were still hanging out on Tahiti. Of those they found, ten survived the trip back to England, where four were acquitted, three were pardoned, and three were hanged.
The other 9 mutineers, including Fletcher Christian, along with their Tahitian wives, and 6 Tahitian men, were long gone when authorities came looking for them. They took the Bounty to the island of Pitcairn (officially in the middle of nowhere), where they stripped the ship and then set it on fire, so they had no way to escape.
Of the mutineers who made it to Pitcairn, only one didn’t come to a violent death, a guy named John Adams, who died on the island in 1829. His ancestors still live there. Everybody else pretty much ended up murdering each other, including Fletcher Christian. So... yeah. I’m pretty certain there’s a greater lesson to be learned here, but I’ll be darned if I know what it is.
Cartoon of the Week
The Emperor shows his appreciation for being told he was naked.
Stuff
A First Class Funeral
We gave Uncle Adolf one helluva send-off.
The ladies that had known him
before he was ninety
just had a wonderful time crying,
and we all got to take our turns
walking by and wondering
how in just three days
Uncle Adolf could be made to look
like somebody no one knew.
Father Bauer did it up, too.
All in starched white,
not the ordinary Sunday stuff,
swinging a fresh supply of incense
and saying the very best of prayers.
He had practiced.
Even the Altar Boys were top rate.
You could tell it wasn’t the first
really first class funeral they’d ever done.
It’s those little things,
like not dropping the Holy Water
just short of the Father’s reach,
while everyone looks on in terror,
and then having to go running back for more
that they’ll probably get out of the drinking fountain
because they’re too scared
to touch the real stuff
without having been properly blessed themselves.
And they didn’t even sit on their heels
when the Father dragged on,
saying wonderful things about Uncle Adolf,
who wasn’t even there,
because we had all decided
that the funeral home had goofed
and sent over the wrong guy,
but no one was brave enough to admit it,
at least not out loud, that is.
Even the pallbearers were a class act.
No one let on for a moment
that the casket was really heavy,
undoubtedly the deluxe model.
Made to last.
And not a one stumbled
while carrying that casket to the car,
where they slid it in without a hitch.
No broken feet.
No hernias.
No busted lid that refused to stay shut.
And I had this really wild idea,
that at the very same time across town
there was this other funeral
where Uncle Adolf really was,
and no one there would admit
that the funeral home goofed, either.
But somewhere on the way
both lines of cars would get all mixed up,
and we’d get the right coffin
under the right headstone after all.
But it never happened.
At least, not in real life.
Someone had called a cop
who knew the right way
to the right graveyard
and never once acted the least bit concerned
about getting lost.
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