Leaving It On a High Note

Living in mid-sixteenth century Italy was boring as shit.  There was no television to watch, no video games to play, no internet to....uh.....look up cat videos on, and to top it all off, most people were illiterate.  About the only forms of entertainment available to most people were listening to some douchey jack ass play a lute, dying of the plague, and gossiping about which member of the nobility was putting what in whom.  All together it just wasn't all that exciting.  That's probably why church choirs were so popular at the time.  In the middle of an entertainment vacuum, church choirs stood out as the rock and roll shows of their day.  Now we're not talking about a choir like at your Granny's church.  This wasn't just a couple of frumpy looking people in robes singing about Jesus.  No, the church choirs of the era were massive ensembles made up of singers who trained for life in order to give the listener a hint of the pristine sounds made by the angels.  So you know, they were pretty good.

Originally the music sung by the choirs was a descendant of the monkish chants of the Middle Ages.  Deep booming voices plodding forward endlessly.  However, starting in the sixteenth century, people began to view heaven as hopefully sounding a little more light and airy.  After all, every painting of an angel at the time showed a fat little childlike cherub, so it didn't make much sense for heaven to sound like a Football team locker room.  The only problem with this change in trend was that there were very few men who could hit the higher octaves, and women weren't allowed to sing in choirs because a single passage in the bible suggested that they needed to keep their damn traps shut in church.  Luckily, people back then were just as logical as they are today.  So the solution was easy.  No, they didn't let women sing in choirs.  They instead began forcing children to sing, literally taking those with the most beautiful voices away from their families and forcing them into singing schools.  However, this wasn't the best solution either. It cost a lot of money to train a child to have the voice of an angel, far too much considering the fact that those beautiful voices would shift into making guttural man sounds in just a few years’ time.

It was at this time that they began letting women into the choirs.  Just kidding.  They began castrating the boys.  That's right.  Just because of one stupid six word passage in the bible they cut the balls off of a shit ton of children.  Called castrati, these lightened singers became popular throughout Italy, France, Germany, and Spain.  Renowned for the range, flexibility, and magnificence of their singing, nobles paid any price to have the best castrati in their choirs.  Even the Pope got in on the action.  Though the church officially condemned the practice, excommunicating those who carried out the castrations, they also at the same time seeked out the best castrati for its choirs.

The poor gave their children to the singing schools, willingly letting them get castrated in hopes of them living a better life.  Some children even volunteered, preferring to give up the family jewels rather than live a life of hardship and toil.  At the height of the castrati's popularity in the mid-seventeenth century, it is estimated that 4,000 or more boys were castrated each year.  They were the rock stars of their day, singing not only in choirs, but also in operas.  Like rock stars, they threw tantrums and had sexual escapades with both women and men (which is kind of impressive when you think about it), and were mostly thought of as vile creatures of sin and over indulgence by the general god fearing public.

By the start of the nineteenth century, the castrati craze began to die down.  While there were definitely groups who found the whole idea repugnant, it was changing public preferences which eventually stopped the practice.  Tastes in both choir music and opera had changed and people were becoming more okay with the idea of women singing in church.  However, a few diehard fans kept the practice going for the next century, with the practice not becoming illegal throughout Europe until the 1870’s.  The few surviving castrati were gathered up and hidden away at the Vatican for their protection, where they were allowed to continue singing in the Sistine Chapel choir until 1903.  The last castrati died in 1922.

Image: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castrato#/media/File:Scalzi_by_Flipart.jpg

Bone Wars

Think about dinosaurs.  Which one did you think about?  Was it the triceratops, the allosaurus, the stegosaurus, or maybe one of those long necked bastards?  Well, whatever one you thought about, there's a good chance that the only way you know about it is because of two crazy dumb ass sons of bitches named Edward Cope and Othniel Marsh.

Prior to the nineteenth century, nobody really gave a shit about dinosaurs.  Sometimes people would find giant lizard bones in the ground, but mostly they would just shrug, assume it was a dragon or some such shit, and get back on with their day.  However, things quickly began to change when scientists began to science things up, calling the new area of study paleontology.  However, paleontology was not all that popular or interesting to the public at first, probably because it brought up uncomfortable questions regarding exactly how giant lizards from millions of years ago lined up with the whole Adam and Eve thing.  It was at this time that two men named Cope and Marsh got involved in the field.

Cope and Marsh couldn't have been any more different if they tried.  Cope, a quick tempered man, was born wealthy, allowing him to get the finest of old timey educations.  Marsh, a methodical man, was born dirt poor, but luckily had a rich uncle who took a liking to him in his teenage years.  Marsh's uncle liked him so much that he built Marsh a museum.   As well, thanks to Marsh's uncle thinking all women were crazy bitches, which resulted in him having no heirs, Marsh inherited a butt load of money upon his uncle's death, which allowed him to basically do whatever the hell he felt like.  For whatever reason, both men chose to get into paleontology.  At first, Cope and Marsh got along well, or as least as well as could be expected given they were both insufferable asses.  However, things quickly soured when Marsh started bribing Cope's workers to send him fossils, and then very publicly pointed out that Cope had accidentally put the head on the wrong end of a recently discovered dinosaur, which was a pretty sick burn in paleontologist circles.

Things became worse when new fossil discoveries started being made across the western United States, sparking a veritable rush for paleontological prestige.  However, just heading out west was a little dangerous, given the hostile tribes of Native Americans.  Both men solved this in unique ways; Cope by getting a bullshit government surveying job and Marsh by basically just hiring a bunch of grad students and giving them guns.  This kicked off nearly thirty years of competitive fossil hunting, with both men eager to discover as many new species as possible before the other could.  Now if you're thinking this was probably a friendly rivalry, then you would be an idiot.  At first it started small, such as bribing each other's employees or digging in areas claimed by the other.  Then it began to escalate, with both trying to claim the discovery of a species at the same time, each using a different name.  Then things just got ugly. In order to be able to claim a greater number of species discovered, both men began haphazardly slapping together random bones. When this strategy didn’t work, they started burying or blowing up possible dig sites to keep the other from accessing them.  Things eventually devolved to the point where rival workers literally started throwing rocks at each other.  Eventually, such shenanigans got out to the press, and the wondering public suddenly found dinosaurs not as boring as they had once seemed.

Cope and Marsh kept up their rivalry throughout their lives, breaking each other both professionally and financially.  Both men spent their later years surrounded by hoarded yet to be cataloged fossils, spending most of their time spreading nasty rumors about each other.  Cope was the first to die.  As a final fuck you, Cope claimed his brain was bigger than Marsh’s and donated his skull to science upon his death to prove it.  Marsh, perhaps finally growing up a little, did not rise to the challenge.  He was buried with his head still firmly in place.

Image: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Triceratops_front.jpg

The War for Drugs

For most of China's history, its view on global trade has been somewhat lopsided.  On the one hand, China always had a lot of cool stuff to export that the rest of the world really wanted. Silk, porcelain, and tea just to name a few.  Even as early as Roman times, China was the only source for many of these luxury goods, and thus benefited from the flow of silver and gold into the country.  However, while China was pretty cool with the whole exporting thing, it was much less down with idea of imports.  After all, imports meant that gold and silver would flow out of the country, and China was all about that bling.  To limit imports, China restricted overseas trade to only a few cities in southern China and required all transactions to be done through Chinese merchants.  In this way, the Chinese rich could have access to cool things from Europe, but not to a level that would reverse the flow of gold.

This system lasted for several hundred years until the British entered the picture.  The British had a real hard on for laissez faire economics, and the world’s most powerful navy to back them up.  The very thought of China restricting trade put them into a tizzy, but not nearly as much as the fact that the widespread popularity of Chinese tea in England was emptying the country's coffers of silver and gold.  This was a bit of a concern at the time, given that the various British colonies were all losing money.  None more so than India, where the cash crop of cotton was no longer able to compete with increased production from the United States, probably because the U.S. was using slaves.   However, being clever bastards, the British found a way to solve both their problems in one fell swoop.    

That fell swoop was opium. Around 1780, British merchants shipped the first cargo of Indian opium to China, which proved quite popular amongst the Chinese given that opium (which is what morphine and heroine are derived from) apparently is pretty awesome to smoke (you know, if you just ignore all of the negative health effects).  It was the perfect answer.  Farmers in India could grow opium poppies instead of cotton, which would then be sold to China, thus slowing the flow of British silver and gold into the country.  Now opium smoking wasn't a new thing in China, but the stuff the British brought from India could be had for a much cheaper price, which as one can imagine, resulted in more people smoking opium.  This trend was further exacerbated when the Americans, not to be outdone, began bringing in lower quality opium from Turkey, driving down prices and making the drug even more affordable for the Chinese masses.

At first, the Chinese government was pretty cool with the whole thing, mostly because the British selling opium led to them having more money to buy tea.  However, they soon became much less okay with it when an estimated 25 percent of their male population became addicted to it (fun fact, opium addicts aren't exactly the most productive people in the world), and more importantly, because it was reversing the flow of gold and silver from into China to out of China.  In 1838, China declared opium imports illegal and started seizing and destroying cargoes.  Britain responded by sending its navy to China to blow the shit out of everything within cannon range of the coast for the next three years in what became known as the First Opium War.  Given the technological differences between Britain and China at the time, the war was a lot like a grown man beating up a kid in middle school.  The Chinese were forced to sign a treaty in 1842, which along with relegalizing the opium trade, also opened many new ports for trade and gave Hong Kong to the British.   

Now obviously this solved nothing for China, so they spent the next fourteen years attempting to modernize their military so that it wouldn't be so easy to have their asses handed to them.  It was basically a Rocky training montage for a whole country.  It was a long fourteen years of getting bullied by every western country imaginable, but finally in 1856, China was ready to do some flexing of its own.  What followed was known as the Second Opium War, which was basically another four years of China getting its ass beat.  In the end, China, fully humiliated, did the only thing it could; legalize the production of opium within its own borders.  While this did nothing to stop China's huge opium addiction problem, it did at least ensure that people were smoking a home grown product, ending the need to import it from India.

Image: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Opium_War#/media/File:Destroying_Chinese_war_junks,_by_E._Duncan_(1843).jpg