Straw Hat Day

Americans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries took the whole idea of fashion pretty damn seriously.  People were expected to dress in a fairly formal manner, even when it did not make a damn bit of sense to do so.  A good example of this would be many farmers and other workmen wearing ties while doing jobs where having a long piece of cloth hanging from your neck isn't really the best of ideas.  There were also all sorts of strange rules, that everybody followed for some mysterious reason, about when and where one could wear different types of clothing; the most famous being not wearing white after Labor Day. However, probably none of these stupid rules caused quite as many problems as the ones regarding the wearing of straw hats.

At the time, hats were a fashion necessity for all men, with felt hats seen as the acceptable norm for the discerning gentleman.  There was just one problem.  Felt hats were hot as hell during the summer, by which I mean wearing them was about the most miserable thing you could do outside of shutting your dick in a door.  Due to this rather unpleasant shortfall, starting in the 1890's, straw boater hats began to gain popularity for summer wear.  Boater hats are of course those wide brimmed flat top hats you always saw dandy's from back east wearing in old westerns.  You know, the hats barbershop quartets wear.  Anyways, at first resisted by the discerning as being uncouth, people eventually gave in to the notion that maybe it would be better to wear a something at least a little more comfortable during the summer months.  Hence, straw hats became acceptable attire, though within limitations.

As straw hats became popular, so did an unwritten rule on when it was acceptable to wear them.  Though there was never any super secret fashion committee making such decisions, somehow it became standard practice for it to only be okay to wear straw hats between May 15 and September 15.  As with any societal norm, anybody caught wearing a straw hat after September 15, creatively called Straw Hat Day, would face widespread public ridicule.  Over time, this public ridicule shifted into it becoming socially acceptable for youths to knock the straw hat off of any offender’s head and then stomp said hat into oblivion.  Rather than try to curtail such acts, society as a whole instead accepted it as a wonderful American tradition, with newspapers even warning of the impending approach of Straw Hat Day.

This was the state of affairs in 1922, when a group of young men in New York City, unable to hold back their excitement, decided to get an early jump on the festivities by going after straw hats two days early.  Unsurprisingly, things got out of hand when the youths tried to stomp the hats of a group of dockworkers, who being dockworkers, decided to solve the problem with their fists.  A brawl broke out which quickly spread, even stopping traffic on the Manhattan Bridge for a time before the police broke everything up.  Young men, reading about the brawl in the newspaper the next day, thought it sounded pretty fucking awesome, and before days end a mob of around 1,000 people, some armed with large sticks with nails driven through them, were roaming the streets, stomping hats, and beating the crap out of random people.  As with most things of such nature, the mob quickly devolved into a riot which lasted eight days before the police could get it under control.

Now one would think that such shenanigans would put a stop to the whole hat smashing tradition, but one would be wrong.  Straw Hat Day continued for years afterwards, with similar, albeit smaller, riots breaking out from time to time.  In 1924, one man was even murdered for wearing a straw hat.  In the end, the tradition died out by the 1930's as boaters dropped out of fashion to be replaced by straw Panama hats, which looked enough like the popular felt fedoras of the day that society collectively decided that people could wear whatever hats they wanted regardless of the time of year.

Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Buster_Keaton_in_costume.jpg

I'm Sorry for Your Loss Comrade

This story isn’t really all that funny as in funny haha, but not everything in life is funny.  I want you to think about World War II.  What is it that you picture?  Did you think about the heroic British, valiantly defending their island as the last bastion of freedom?  Did you think of America, the awakened sleeping giant who came over to Europe to whoop old Mr. Hitler's smarmy ass.  Did you think of D-Day and the Battle of the Bulge?  Did you think of the brave American G.I., putting it all on the line to take down the vilest dictator ever known?  Fighting it out mano a mano as the last hope for liberty, truth, and the pursuit of happiness?  Did you?  Is that what you thought?  Well, if it is, I got some bad news, because you're picturing World War II completely wrong.

During World War II, approximately 0.4 million U.S. servicemen lost their lives, of which 0.1 million died in the Pacific and 0.3 million died in North Africa and Europe.  When the Allies landed in France on D-Day in 1944, American deaths equaled 12,500.  The single costliest battle of the war for the United States was the Battle of the Bulge in the winter of 1944-1945, which cost an estimated 20,000 G.I. lives.  For reference, 4,500 U.S. soldiers died in the eight years we fought in Iraq and 2,300 died in the sixteen years we've fought in Afghanistan so far.  Of course, America wasn't fighting on its own. We had allies like Britain, Canada, South Africa, and numerous freedom fighters from the nations conquered by the Nazis.  In total 0.9 million Allied soldiers died freeing Europe from Nazi control, taking 0.8 million Nazi soldiers with them.  All together it adds up to some pretty grisly numbers.

Now what if I told you that the U.S. and its allies were only fighting two-fifths of the Nazi's military might.  Well, if so, then where the hell were the other three-fifths?  Just sitting around with their thumbs up their asses?  The more historically astute of you probably already know the answer and might even be screaming it at this book.  Something along the lines of, "the Soviet Union numb nuts, they were fighting the reds."  In 1941, the Nazi's invaded the Soviet Union, kicking off one of the bloodiest military campaigns in human history.  On one side was an insane fascist dictator, bent on exterminating entire groups of people.  On the other was an insane communist dictator, also bent on exterminating entire groups of people.  Neither gave even the tiniest piece of shit for the value of human life.  For the Nazi soldiers, the western front was considered a cakewalk compared to the certain death which awaited them to the east.  The Nazi's came a knocking with their best, and the Russians fought with everything they had to beat them back.

The deadliest battle on the eastern front was the Battle of Stalingrad where 0.5 million Soviet soldiers met their demise.  More Germans were killed trying to take a single house in Stalingrad than were killed in the taking of Paris.  Nothing on the western front even came close to matching the scale of the devastation.  The Germans were better armed and better trained.  All the Soviets had was a grim stubbornness to never surrender, no matter what the cost.  Men of all ages fought for comrade Stalin, even women and children heeded the call of the motherland.  Any who tried to retreat were shot as traitors.  By the time the Soviet army entered Berlin, 5.5 million Nazi soldiers had been killed, nearly seven times the number killed in the west.  However, the victory had a high cost.  In total, an estimated 11.3 million Soviet soldiers lost their lives, nearly thirteen times more than all Allied deaths in the west.  Another 23.0 million were wounded.  Of the estimated 25.0 million soldiers who died during World War II, 46% were Soviet.  Of the 59.0 million civilians who died, 29% were Soviet (only surpassed by China who made up 31%).  In total, 14% of the population of the Soviet Union died in the war.  Only Poland, the main victim of the holocaust as well as numerous purges by both the Germans and Soviets, lost a larger percentage of its people, 17% in total.

While most of Professor Errare's stuff is written with a smattering of humor and a bite of sarcasm.  There's no way the above can be made funny.  The U.S. and its western Allies were not the ones to defeat Hitler.  We were at best just a sideshow, a pleasant distraction in comparison to the hell on earth that was the war in eastern Europe. History is a messy thing and sometimes it is hard to find someone to cheer for.  Hitler and his fascists killed around 11.0 million people via the Holocaust, mass civilian executions, and the purposeful starving of prisoners of war.  Stalin and his communists killed around 9.5 million via the gulags, manufactured famines, and military and ethnic purges.  Hitler was a monster, but in the end it was not a chivalrous knight that slew him, just another monster.

Image: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_Union_in_World_War_II#/media/File:RIAN_archive_61150_Great_Patriotic_War.jpg

The Horse Breeder

Ilia Ivanov was not your normal dude.  I mean sure, he was Russian, the name makes that pretty obvious, but even for a Russian he was a pretty weird guy. Ilia was a biologist who lived during the end of Czarist Russia and the beginning of the Soviet Union.  No, that doesn't really make Ilia that weird either. What made Ilia weird was that from the time he was a child he was fascinated by animals fucking.  Yes, that's right, Ilia was that kind of weird.

It wasn't just watching the act of animals fucking that fascinated Ilia, it was what exactly was going on inside that really got his mental gears turning.  In essence, at a time when people mostly understood pregnancy as men putting their peeders in women's hoo-haws until a baby popped out, Ilya wanted to understand exactly how babies were made.  Hence all the watching animals going at it, or at least, I hope to god that was the only reason.  Anyways, in order to not seem like some kind of weirdo, Ilya went to university and trained to be a biologist, which gave him carte blanche to watch and study all the animal sex he wanted.....for science.

With his biology degree in hand, Ilya then spent years studying semen, including how to transport it outside of the body for prolonged periods of time and how to clean it, because obviously one does not want to be dealing with dirty semen.  From this research, he developed the first method for artificial insemination, demonstrating with horses how the semen of one stallion could be used to impregnate 500 mares in a single year, whereas with natural copulation they could at best do fifty.  Ilya's discovery promptly caused the whole world to lose its shit, except of course the stallions who probably felt pretty disappointed about the whole thing.  Now most people would probably think ruining sex for horses everywhere would have been a good place to stop, but not Ilya.  From artificial insemination, his research branched off into putting the semen of one animal into another to see if he could create any new cool hybrid animals.  He created zorses (zebra-horse), zedonks (zebra-donkey), zubrons (bison-cow), and about every combination of rats, mice, guinea pigs, and rabbits you can think of.

Things began to get weird in 1910 when Ilya got up before a big science conference and declared that one could probably make a human ape hybrid, at which time everyone had a good chuckle.  You know who didn't chuckle, the Soviet Union, who fifteen years later gave him a shit ton of money to do just that.  Now the first thing you need for an ape human hybrid is of course apes, and not having any, Ilya went to one of the top ape research centers in the world, which of course was in Paris, to get some.  It was there that Ilya met the famed surgeon Dr. Serge Voronoff, who thought it was all a grand idea.  Of course, Serge was grafting splices of ape testicles onto the balls of rich old men at the time, theoretically to improve their vitality, so it shouldn't be that surprising.  Serge helped Ilya transplant a human ovary into a chimp and then impregnate it with human sperm, because why the hell not at this point, then helped Ilya get some apes from Africa and sent him on his way.

Ilya returned to Russia with his chimps and then tried inseminating three of the females with human sperm.....through artificial means of course you sick bastard.  It didn't work.  Ilya, not to be deterred, decided that the problem was it needed to be the other way around.  He scoured Russia and somehow found five women who were willing to be artificially impregnated with ape semen......you know, for science.  However, before the fun could begin, all of Ilya's apes died.  Ilya tried to get more, but before he could he was arrested by the Soviet secret police and sent to the gulag, though for reasons involving the Soviets just loving to arrest random people, and not because he was trying to breed ape people.  Ilya died a year later.

Image: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilya_Ivanov#/media/File:Ilya_ivanov.jpg