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Ching Shih

leonardogavinci

Howdy you history loving fuckers. I’ve just stumbled across the story of a pirate from the 19th Centrury who had an absolutely massive pair of swinging canonballs on her. This is the story of the chinese lady who doesn’t give a fuck about your parley, because she’d rather be up to her nuts in blood and guts. It’s Ching Shih of course.

Born at the arse end of the 18th century Ching Shih had a bit of an unfortunate start working in a brothel. But not any old brothel, it was a floating brothel in Guangzhou, the origin of boats and hoes I can only assume. She soon caught the eye of a notorious pirate who went by the name of Cheng. Ol’ Cheng’s family had been in the pirate game a looong time since the mid-17th century and was pretty well established. Ching Shih was a bit of a smart cookie and had a contract written up when they got hitched that gave her 50% control of Chengs pirating empire. At the start of the 19th century Cheng kicked the filthy mop bucket and took a trip to Davey Jones. So Ching Shih started the hustle making the right friends and made her way to the top. She held control by laying down the law with a few strict rules. One for example was that anyone gives an order that didn’t come from her, they lose their head… on the fucking spot… O-Ren Ishii from Kill Bill style. Then there was the usual quartering, canonballs tied to the legs and swim, etc etc. You get the jist.

Her general technique was to roll in to a coastal village, behead a fuck load of people and take the rest to sell in to slavery. She really was chopping necks and cashing cheques. She took on the British empire, Portugese navy and the Ching dynasty gave them a fucking ass kicking and took their ships. She was on a 2007 Britney Spears style rampage. To give you an idea of how massive her fucking squad was, it’s estimated that she had 20,000 to 40,000 pirates in her fleet. Their eye patch bill was through the fucking roof.

Her later life turned a bit strange, she had the government dissolve her relationship with her son so she could marry him. For tax purposes right? Nah, they had a child too. Dirty fuckers. Anyway, she ended up going full circle and opened her own brothel in her retirement after she managed to secure a pretty sweet truce where only a couple hundred of her pirated got fucked over.

All in all a pretty successful pirate career.

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Nellie Bly – Definitely not crazy

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While watching Silence Of The Lambs over the Halloween period I started thinking about the dinghy portrayal of damp asylum basements portrayed in films reserved for the most heinously psychotic members of public that didn’t manage to land a job in corporate upper management. I assumed the inspiration must have stemmed from the real asylums of the late 1800s where they stuck anyone caught screaming weather reports at pigeons or wanking too much. In my search I came across a particularly remarkable woman called Nellie Bly. This is the tale of the woman who got up to her ovaries in the stinking broth of a Victorian asylum to expose the horror that they contained.

Nellie Bly was born in 1864 and although I refer to her with her pen name her real name was Elizabeth Seaman. She was an American journalist and a pretty fucking bad ass one at that. She got her start in journalism after responding to a bullshit article in her local paper that said women were just baby machines, she of course took offence and the editor was so impressed at her eloquently written “fuck you” that he offered her a job. For her greatest move (potentially, she did something else pretty amazing I’ll get to later) she essential created a whole new form of investigative journalism by pulling off some real Sacha Baron Cohen shit going undercover, having herself declared insane and having a court send her to an insane asylum to see what the fuck was going on there. Her book she wrote from this entitled “Ten Days In A Mad House” which detailed the horrific conditions that she witnessed first hand was of course a success. If someone did that today I’d sure as fuck read it!

So… how did you go about getting yourself declared mad as a women in Victorian times? Well that’s easy, she simply booked herself in to a boarding house (that’s an old school AirBnB) and told the owners that she thought they were crazy and didn’t want to go to sleep. Boom. She was in an asylum faster than you can say “The government are using tiny satellite dishes in my teeth to find out what toothpaste I use”. Several doctors assessed her and declared her “undoubtedly insane” noting a “wild haunted look in her eyes”. Once she was in the asylum she was acting normal again which they then described her normal behaviour as symptoms of her mental illness, even when she pleaded to be released they said it was a sign of her madness. So she was pretty well fucked at this point.

They would beat anyone who wasn’t playing ball and if they became too wild they would tie the particularly mental patients together which even in those times they must have realised it was a bad idea to create some sort of mentally unstable rat king (Google ‘rat king’, the pictures are far more disturbing than any description I could make). They fed the patients with gruel and rotten beef, which normally people would only eat rotten meat from a kebab shop at 3am. One of the most horrific and sadly expected parts of the story was that she soon realised that many of the women in the asylum with her were just as sane as she was. Fortunately she had the foresight to arrange with a well known newspaper to spring her after 10 days which she was pretty stoked about, but obviously gutted that so many sane women were essentially stuck there being tortured. However this all led to a court case that made the requirement of mental assessments to be more thorough and produced a big government investment in these kind of institutions.

This wasn’t just a 15 minutes of fame for Nellie either, what is potentially more impressive is that she pulled a leaf out of Jules Verne’s novel and did a trip around the world in only 72 days! She travelled alone for the vast majority of the journey and managed to set a world record for fastest circumnavigation of the globe. Just for the whip cream and cherry on top, she actually met Jules Verne while going through France and for some fucking reason bought a monkey in Singapore… because, well why the fuck not.

History, Science

Sergei Burkhonenko – The Real Dr.Frankenstein

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Hello historyphiles, as it’s almost Halloween I’ve been able to put together a particularly unsettling story from the past that I’ve wanted to do for quite some fucking time! This is a big ‘ol warning to start with that the story of Sergei Brukhonenko is seriously disturbing and involves some unpleasantness that are not for the faint of heart. If you’ve never heard of him before this will most likely sound like complete science fiction, but fortunately there are videos of his experiments which I will link at the bottom of the article. HUGE fucking warning, if you think the story is bad to read, for the love of Hedes the god of the underworld there’s no way you should watch the video. It is unsettling. All that out of the way, let’s get up to our bollocks in the story of Sergei Brukhonenko – the real life Dr.Frankenstein!

Born 30th April 1890 Sergei was a soviet biomedical scientist with some pretty big ideas, unfortunately I can find fuck all about his early life but I think it’s safe to assume he was the kind of kid that spoke to road kill and sported a dead unblinking stare. Truth be told the poor bastard barely got a look in to the field of cardiological surgery in the western world with multiple credits of advancements in bypass and open heart surgery going to his western counter-parts. The first recognition of his work I could find in the scholar community not written in Russian was a paper from 1960 entitled “An early Russian heart-lung machine” by Probert and Melrose, where they were all “Yeah, the poor cunt probably deserves some credit here”. He was very gifted intellectually shown by him being a distinguished scientist and professor in Russia.

He was on a bit of a mission to produce a method of bypassing the organs to keep a patient alive while they were being operated on. Which in his defence, before I tell you all the fucked up shit he did, he did essentially make it possible for open heart surgery to be performed with the assistance of the heart-lung blood oxygenation machine he created. So just remember that while you read on. The thing is, the experiments he had to do to prove this concept were unfortunately on man’s best friend. This was of course not the nicest way of doing things but it was a fairly common practice back in the day. However, it seems that Sergei was a bit of an animal lover in his own twisted way. Although he did find it necessary to perform these experiments on dogs, he didn’t like that they would die. Soooo… he managed to find a method of keeping the dogs alive… even in the most unlikely circumstances.

 

One friendly Fido was kept alive for quite a surprising amount of time after a surgery even though all that remained of the dog was it’s head. It’s shown in the video I’ve link below because it really is completely unbe-fucking-lievable. The dog is there responding to touch, sound, licking it’s nose… but it’s just it’s head. Al hooked up to a Victorian looking piece of machinery just pumping and bubbling away like a steampunk toilet. I thought this was pretty remarkable, particularly for the time but then he goes on to completely drain all of the blood from a dogs body till it’s as dry as the fucking Sahara and dead for a minute or so. Then hooks up his Frankenstein machine minus the lightning bolts and maddening laugh and tells Igor to flick the switch. Just like magic the dog starts to come back to life breathing and reacting as usual. The dog is seen a couple days after completely normal, running around and doing it’s thing.

Honestly I read about this a few years back and thought, “this is a bunch of fucking shite mate”, it was only more recently I discovered that their was footage of the experiments and really was a mix amazed and disgusted. As I mention before this guy did some serious good in the long run but fuck me his Franken-dogs definitely belong in the past.

Sergei Burkhonenko, you crazy fucking bastard.

Link to the videos below for the more morbidly curious, as I said earlier they are very unsettling and as an animal lover myself quit hard to watch. Watch at your own peril.

 

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Bad Luck Of The Past

leonardogavinci

It’s been a while, but I’m back here to break off a little chunk of history for you. Have you ever though you have such terrible luck? Well I’ve got a little perspective for you while we dive in to look at some of the unluckiest cunts in history.

First off, let me take you back to the near past of 1954 where we find a particularly unfortunate woman by the name of Ann Elizabeth Fowler Hodges. Now we all know the terror of a thud followed by a cold clammy trickle of seagull shit oozing down your neck, but Elizabeth suffered a different kind of aerial attack. Unbeknownst to Elizabeth millennia before even the idea of her existence, a chuck of space rock started it’s long patient trip with plans to absolutely ruin Elizabeth’s day. As far as long cons go this meteorite (known as the Sylacauga meteorite) is the fucking don. So what heinous thing was Elizabeth up to when the rock came a knocking? Just having a fucking nap on the sofa, the lazy bitch! Then, yeah you guessed it, BOOOM! Do you smell what the rock is cooking? Straight through her roof at mach 3, and demolished her fucking pelvis like a Latin lover who spent the day snorting amphetamines and popping Viagra. She did survive and joined a club of people you could count of one had that have been hit by a meteorite. I’ll take bird shit over a flying space rock to the dick any day.

Next up lets cruise all the way back to 564BC to check on a fellow called Arrhichion, famous for being an Olympic champion. He was all in all pretty lucky as he was at the 54th Olypic games defending his title in a event called the Pankratiasts. Which is basically a mix of boxing and wrestling, aka a fucking punch up. So he was there again absolutely smashing cunts left right and centre until there was only one bad mother fucker left standing in the way of his victory. I’m pretty certain from what I’ve read that they used to do this naked so you can picture it like someone miss-aimed at an orgy and it’s escalated to fists. So his competitor had his legs wrapped around Arrichion and was choking him with his hands, it wasn’t looking good for the champ. Fortunately Arrichion made like a disgruntled donkey and stomped the fuckers toes breaking them. Which, again fortunately, made his opponent give the sign of defeat. Unfortunately, at the same time broke Arrichion’s fucking neck killing him instantly. But there is a happy ending! Because the opponent gave the sign of defeat first, the judges declared Arrichion’s corpse the winner. I’m sure a gold medal would have really complimented his blue lips…

One more tale of misfortune I think should do us. Lets move a little forward in time to 260BC for the battle of Changping where we meet an unlucky bastard by the name of Zhao Kuo. He was an army commander in ancient China that kind of got the job because his dad was a bad ass General. However, when his dad was on his death bed… He was all like “Don’t let that fucking idiot command an army”, but King Xiaocheng was all like “Nah, get fucked cunt”. So he’s in charge now and looking to destroy the army that’s run by a fellow called Bai Qi. Now Bai Qi WAS a bad ass mother fucker and happened to send some spies over to Zhao to say that Bai was a fucking pussy and didn’t want to get in to a punch up with Zhao. So Zhao being a dumb fuck, he grabs 400,000 men (yeah seriously almost half a million) and goes after Bai. As he comes across Bai’s “army” there seems to be not very many of them around but Zhao is just ready to bust their skulls. They all run off and Zhao starts chasing them like kids in a playground “chase me, chase me” kind of thing. But so they can go faster he just says lets leave all the supplies here. Dumb move Zhao. Then Zhao gets ambushed by 550,000 soldiers! He is waaaay fucked at this point and tries to run, but obviously they have no supplies now and you didn’t just pop to McDonald’s for 400,000 happy meals back in those days. So they hide in a fortress and damn near starved to death. Then Bai rocks up for them to surrender and he takes the reasonable approach of burying 400,000 people alive. What a fucking psycho.

History, Women

Belva Ann Lockwood

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The second instalment of this week of inspirational women goes to another feisty fucker who got shit done and pioneered for women in her field. This bad bitch took on the world to lay down the law… she was one of the first female lawyers, pun intended.

Meet Belva Ann Lockwood, born October 24th 1830 in New York. I’m always surprised I’ve never heard of these people because she seriously fucking smashed it; prepare to have your silly fucking judge wig flipped.

When Belva was 18 she married a local farmer and thought everything was fan-dabby-dosy, then the inconsiderate douche decided to die of tuberculosis a couple years in. Belva realised she was up shit creak, and like any sensible person would turned to the all knowing power of books. She started prepping to go to college, and I’ll give you one guess about how everyone else felt about it. Yeah, not cool.

She initially thought teaching would be a good shout and moulded a few cheeky little minds, encouraging the expansion of women’s curriculum to include public speaking, botany, etc. She climbed the ladder of success in this field shitting upon those who doubted her on the lower rungs. Once she’d filled her boots of the whole teaching thing she stepped it up with trying to get her law on. Of course this was a whole other pain in the vag and she had to keep applying for a few years before someone gave her a shot. Then they pulled the biggest piss take since… Well I couldn’t find a historical urine theft but you get what I was going for. After completing all of her classes and work they straight up said nah fuck you, you can’t have the degree. Obviously she was fucking livid and wrote to the fucking president! A few weeks after the degree was magically granted.

Her law career was riddled with people being cunts as you can imagine, but her persistence got the best and she managed to get into the Supreme fucking Court!!! It’s here she rallied hard for equality in various areas and even sponsored the first black member of the Supreme Court. I’d say that’ pretty good going.

This is getting longer than I planned so I’m gonna just give you the glory reel. She ran for president, received an honorary doctorate of law, had several statues of her carved, towns named after her, a ship named after her, her portrait in the national gallery and to top it the fuck off she was inducted into the national women’s hall of fame.

What more can you ask for? The girl was a fucking beast.

History, Women

Elizabeth Blackwell

leonardogavinci

It has been a while so I’ve got to start this series of inspirational woman off with an absolute fucking banger! Hold on to your codpieces history fans and let me introduce you to Elizabeth Blackwell.

Elizabeth Blackwell, born 3 February 1821 in Bristol, just happens to be known as the first ever woman to receive a medical degree in the United States and the first woman on the UK medical register. She was such a good-hearted motherfucker she makes Mother Theresa look like Fagan from Oliver Twist. Blackwell was a bit like Nicholas Tesla in the sense that she thought finding a romantic partner was a waste of her massive brain. So she fobbed that off and hit the books pretty fucking hard. A reverend in the town she was living in used to be a physician and liked the way she was thinking so let her borrow his books while she saved for her medical course. She had to save $3,000, which was a fucking toe-curling amount of money at the time. Roughly speaking (and according to an online value of currency convertor) it amounts to about $97,000… Fuck that.

While working as a teacher to save enough cash money dollar dollar bills, she started a Sunday school for slaves as she thought the whole slavery thing was bullshit, fair play. She started sending letters to get her feelers out there for where she could study and everyone were being assholes and palming her off. She was quoted in her autobiography as saying, “As to the opinions of people, I don’t care one straw personally”, which roughly translates today as “Fuck you”. She then just moved up to Philadelphia to hassle these cunts in person. They kept nay-saying her and even admitted that she may be equally as good and then become competition so they’re not going to help her fuck them over.

She finally had her persistence pay off in 1847 when she was accepted to Geneva Medical College. It was pretty lucky as well. The big-wigs of the college were all like “oh fuck, I don’t know what to do”, so they let the class of 150 students vote if she could join on the condition that if even one student said no then she was out on her arse. Everyone was cool though and said yeah fuck it.

So she got her degree and everyone actually thought it was pretty cool. She started working as a physician in a maternity hospital and all was going well. Then, as fate is a cruel cunt, while treating a kid with opthalmia neonatorum (gross scabby eyes) a heaving dollop of eye slop hit her right in the face and completely fucked her left eye. They had to surgically gouge out her eye and shat on her chances of being a surgeon.

However we can end on a happy note as she didn’t let that shit stop her. She went on to open her own infirmary (hospital of sorts), adopt an Irish orphan called Kitty and started a medical school for woman so they didn’t have to deal with all the shit that she did.

All in all I say well fucking done Elizabeth, 10/10.

History

Ambroise Paré

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This is a special addition dedicated to the guys at ‘The Groom Room Torquay’. We’ll be taking a look at a clever cunt by the name of Ambroise Paré, who back in the day was in the profession known as Barber-Surgeon. Yeah that’s right those bastards would trim your fringe and your foreskin in one sitting.

You’ve probably all heard the reason for the red and white barber pole representing the blood involved in surgery. Well it was fairly common for barbers to pull teeth, amputate limbs, etc. fucking etc… Ambroise was no exception he was balls deep in the surgery game and even made some pretty cold-hearted advances. When treating a bunch of soldiers for gunshot wounds it was fairly standard to pour boiling oil on the wounds to cauterize the wounds. Ambroise was splashing that shit around, obviously like he was applying aftershave and ran the fuck out. So then he’s all like “Oh fuck, I’m out of boiling oil to pour on these wounded people” and decides to not be an asshole and makes some concoction of rose water and egg whites. In the morning, all the guys he deep-fried were fucking dead (surprisingly) but the others were healing up. So he realised it wasn’t fucking cool throwing hot oil on people, like Einstein getting a handjob a stroke of genius.

He didn’t stop there! Between shaving the Nike tick into the sides of peasant’s heads, he had time to investigate a nifty little form of medicine that he had suspicions about. The medicine in question was Bezoar stones, these were essentially a rock that you swallow and it was meant to cure any poison. Ambroise called bullshit on this and was all like “fuck you guys, they don’t work”. So they got a cook that was caught stealing silverware from Ambroise’s house and said you can either get hung (survival rate = fuck all) or you can get poisoned and have an Bezoar stone (survival rate = who the fuck knows) and if you survive you’re free. So the cook chug-a-lugged the poison and gobbled down a rock. Needless to say the cook then spent several hours dying a horrible slow death. You can imagine the smug look on Paré’s face as the cook rolled around dying, what an asshole.

Believe it or not, I can’t find shit about how he cut hair but I imagine he was all right…

History

The Iron Maiden

leonardogavinci

Welcome to the second instalment of this week long series of tortures. Today we’ll be looking at the iron maiden, with a story that may surprise you.

The iron maiden is a big ass metal monster that takes the form of a lung-lacerating lady. It’s essentially a metal coffin filled with spikes that allows for the doors to be closed nice and slow. This would leave anyone inside looking like Swiss fucking cheese.

The first report of it being used was to punish a coin forger on 14th August 1515. Now this is where you’re going to notice an inconsistency. When I tell you that the iron maiden wasn’t invented until 1793 by a cheeky chap who went by the name of Johann Phillipp Siebenkees. I know what you’re think, this guy obviously made the device, travelled back in time and tortured people to be a massive cunt. Well if only that were true. When I say it was invented, I mean he made it up. It was never actually used in medieval times as a method of execution. It was used in the 1700s as a tourist attraction. Yeah, yeah, I know, your life’s a fucking lie.

This is where it actually gets pretty fucking dark. So just because it wasn’t used in the middle ages and when it was invented it was just a tourist attraction, doesn’t mean it was never used.

We all remember Sadam Hussein. Well his son Uday was the head of the Iraq Olympic association. How did he get his athletes motivated? Torture of course. This sick fucker had an Iron maiden built and kept it on the first floor of the soccer department. He would lay down some old school punishments on players who lost tournaments. When they found the iron maiden it was noted that the spikes were blunted from and worn from use. Fuck.

History

Brazen Bull (Bull of Phalaris)

leonardogavinci

 

A big thank you for the suggestion of the coming series of the week to Samantha Gifford! Grab you black hoods and raise the fucking guillotine, this week will hold a daily dose of terrible tortures!

Today we’ll be looking at the metallic man melter called the ‘Brazen Bull’. Now this cheeky little number was essentially a human scream powered music box. It of course took the shape of a bull made entirely of bronze, so as far as the aesthetics of torture devices go it doesn’t get any better. The inside was hollow with a convenient side door to check the survival rate of it’s occupant (generally very fucking low). The pièce de résistance was the metal tubing rigged up to allow whichever poor bastard that happened to be inside to breath. When breathing out or I should say screaming out it would turn the screams into the sound of a raging bull.

So how did it work? Fucking simple. You get some unlucky cunt who just told the boss man his flies are down, stick ‘em in the bull and light a fire below it. Bish bash bosh, you’ve got toasted traitor. The way bronze conducts heat means that wherever they move inside the bull they’re gonna be getting slow roasted. If they’re lucky they may pass out from the heat. Chances are though they slowly dehydrate, while being cooked from the inside out.

So what piece of shit came up with this bright idea? Well it was a fellow called Perilaus over in Sicily (I couldn’t find an exact date, but it’s somewhere between 570 and 554BC. Plus I’m fucking sick of searching old manuscripts). So he makes this thing for a tyrant by the name of Phalaris. From what I understand they were both sick assholes. Anyway, Perilaus comes around with this big fucking bull to kiss the tyrants ass and says how much pleasure he will get from hearing the screams of the victims. Phalaris is all like “This guy is fucking gross”, but keeps his disgust on the down low.

Phalaris says, “Oh, Perilaus. You should jump in that thing and prove the horn works.” Perilaus obviously doesn’t realise he’s in peril and the dumb cunt does it! They slam the door on him and set it ablaze. Low and behold it all works perfectly, but they don’t roast him completely. They decide to pull him out half dead and just throw him off a cliff, because why the fuck not? Phalaris went on to use the bull all the time, including dinner parties and banquets. He of course had incense added to the room didn’t smell like burning human flesh.

But there is a happy ending. A few years on when Phalaris gets overthrown, can you guess what they did with him? Oh yes, Roasted ruler.

History

John Stonehouse

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We all know politicians can be slippery bastards, but today’s person of interest doesn’t just take the biscuit. He takes the whole packet and shits in the biscuit tin. John Stonehouse, born 1925 was a Labour party politician (among other things). Coming from a good family with his mother being a mayor, Stonehouse knew he wanted to crawl his way to the top and bite as many ankles as needed on the way.

I will first mention some good the cheeky bugger did, he was an activist for black rights in Rhodesia in the early stages of his career but that just got him thrown the fuck out of Rhodesia. I warn you now, it’s pretty much down hill from here. So he gets appointed as minister of technology only to goof that the fuck up by jamming radio broadcasts after Labour lose the 1970 general election, this obviously rubbed people the wrong fucking way. Some poor bastard was probably phoning in to win some tickets and got shafted because he couldn’t hear which fucking Elvis Presley song was playing.

He sets up a load of businesses because, why the fuck not, which all went tits-up with he dodgy accountancy. So when your businesses are floating in the toilet next to your fat turd of a career, what do you do? Well generally you realise you’re fucked. But not John Stonehouse! He goes to a beach in Miami while running from the shit going on back home and leaves a pile of clothes on the beach before fucking legging it to Australia under a new name with his mistress.

So everyone decided he’s dead and doesn’t really give a fuck. But this guy can’t catch a fucking break. A bank teller spots him thinking he’s some Lord (Lord Lucan) that went missing after his children’s nanny was murdered and calls the cops. The cops put two and two together and bust his bitch ass. The shocking thing was, when on bail he was still allowed to act as an MP! After a trial, in which he defended himself he managed to get away with only seven years in prison. After he died (not a particularly special death), just to put the rotten cherry on this shit sandwich it turned out he was a Czech spy.

Fucking hell, Stonehouse!