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In This Issue

• The Mighty Hunter
• The Orphan: Victim or Commodity?
• Sex and the City, Victorian Style
• Choose Your Own Victorian Adventure!
• Letters to the Feditors
• Lay A (Caucasian) Burden Down
• Missives From My Mother
• A Cautionary Invective On Throttling One's Own Fowl
• Change Comes To Constants
• London's Burning!
• "Green Sickness": For That Vintage Venereal Burn
• Dear Fundamentalists: Get Down And Get With It
• Fed Sudoku Challenge!
• Connect-the-Dots
• THEY Watch
• The Staff of 21.6

Andres Vedova

Marriage, good for what ails ya! 'Specially your vagina.

Any hipster asshole can talk your ear off about how vintage things are really cool. Victorian blouses, classic cars, and even old-timey sailor tattoos are common sights wherever these smug bastards congregate. But even though it's right in front of them, these bright young things literally fail to see the coolest goode olde thing of all... microbes and viruses. Yes, I'm talking about vintage diseases. Diseases from back in the day are way cooler than the diseases we have now, especially ones from the Victorian era.

First, diseases back then were sexier. What we now refer to by the ugly name of "tuberculosis", and insist upon "treating" with "antibiotics" used to be a lovely affliction by the name of consumption. Instead of being stuck in a smelly hospital, you got to go on vacation to the mountains or the countryside. Without the fancy "medicines", you became pale, skinny, and pretty damn sexy... dead sexy, even. You had passionate fits (now labelled "night sweats"), and often got ass from others with the same hott condition. You became beautiful like the courtesan from Moulin Rouge, occasionally coughing up a little bit of passionately red blood and then withering down onto the divan. You became madly creative like Edgar Allan Poe. Even your pee was creative...or as modern party-poopers would call it, "discolored." The fact that you almost always died from it may seem like a downside to some...but I think it is much more appealing to depart this earth when one is still young and attractive. Do you really want to be remembered by everyone as that wrinkled old lady who eats applesauce and shits into a diaper?  I, for one, would rather be recalled as the soul too lovely to be bound by this world, the girl who was "consumed" by her own passion (and lung fluid).

Diseases back then were also funnier. For example, "green-sickness" was a disease thought to afflict young women due to the stoppage of their menstrual flow. The green color of the skin, the vaginally-challenged male doctors reasoned, appeared because all the terrible things in menstrual blood were staying in the body, causing a veritable pile-up of "vicious humors." This disease made the girls eat inappropriate foods like ashes, dirt and oatmeal (a silly dish fit only for Scots).  The "vicious humors" also caused the girls to make catty jokes at other people's expense. Just imagine the scene: Mary, daughter of Sir Lordy Snobbington, appears at father's fancy dinner all smeared in dirt and oatmeal and God knows what. Before the visiting French aristocrat's wife can hold a hankie to her face in hôrreur, she lets fly with "Are those not last season's petticoats? I believe I donated mine to the orphans and inverts at the asylum. But then again, I suppose the infrastructure of your country is of a condition such that news does not travel swiftly." And remember folks, she's green while she says this.  The cure for this disease, I shit you not, was "marriage" (i.e. a severe pounding of the sweet green vag.) Way more fun than millions of people with ebola dying in Africa from massive ocular hemorrhaging (i.e. bleeding from the eyes). Ocular hemorrhaging is so not funny.

In addition to being sexy and fun, most of these diseases were easily cured. Whether you had "The Jews' vapors," "colonic asthenia," or "spermatorrhoea," all you had to do was let a leechwife lay a few leeches on you, sit back, relax, and bleed your way back to strapping good health. After just one of these leech-sessions, most people reported themselves to be feeling much better. Call me crazy, but I think a lot of the world's problems could be fixed if only we still had those angelic leechwives around to help. Corruption, crime, ebola...all would fall prey to that wonderful invertebrate panacea, and every last evil pharmaceutical executive would be out of a job.

So there you have it. If you really want to be cool, you should contract some retro ringworm. But do it quickly, because before you know it, it will catch on and people will be displaying their sores on the Antiques Roadshow and asking how much their particular make of smallpox is worth. It won't be long then until they are selling wackily shaped bottles of cholera at urban outfitters with pictures of the Olsen twins on them. I myself have already contracted trenchmouth, scurvy, foot-and-mouth, and an extremely advanced (i.e. far out) case of the gout. So go ahead, start collecting...gotta catch ‘em all!