ZZ’s shaving grace rocks
QUESTION
How long would it take me to grow a ZZ Top-length beard?
THE American rock band ZZ Top has been performing for 50 years and is famous for the trademark, chest-length beards of two of its members, Dusty Hill and Billy Gibbons.
They have been sporting their extensive facial hair since the end of the 1970s. Despite his name, the third member of the band, Frank Beard, prefers to remain clean-shaven.
If human hair grows at the rate of six inches in a year and allowing for a 10% spurt during the summer due to humidity and changes in blood circulation, it would take two years to grow a foot-long beard.
Hill and Gibbons turned down an offer of a million dollars to shave off their beards for a Gillette advertising campaign. Gibbons remarked that seeing himself clean-shaven in the mirror would be like watching a Vincent Price horror film.
Ian MacDonald, Billericay, Essex.
QUESTION
Why are the Founding Fathers on the Mayflower given the credit for establishing America when the colony of Jamestown had been settled years before?
THE first British colony in the New World was Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607. It was named after James VI and I of Scotland and England. The Crown dispatched merchants and profiteers to the New World under the auspices of The London Company.
Of the 104 settlers who settled on a peninsula along the James River, 80% were dead within a year from fighting the local Paspahegh tribe or through disease.
The Jamestown camp only survived due to the sheer will of its leader, Captain John Smith, and the work of John Rolfe, whose successful experiments with tobacco plants established a financial lifeline.
In 1619, the General Assembly convened in the Jamestown church, ‘to establish one equal and uniform government over all Virginia’.
It wasn’t until the following year that the Mayflower arrived in
Massachusetts Bay and the Pilgrim Fathers established their Plymouth Colony.
The Puritan separatists and their families wanted religious freedom from the Church of England. Their story became a central theme in the history and culture of the US, beginning around the time of the American Civil War, 1861-1865.
A key indicator was Lincoln’s proclamation calling for ‘a day of thanksgiving’ in 1863.
This was supposedly a celebration of the First Thanksgiving celebrated by the Pilgrims after their first harvest in the New World in October 1621.
In reality, it was morale-boosting propaganda.
Post civil war, the dominance of the north took hold in the classroom and the tradition of the Pilgrims as the ‘true’ founders took hold. It wasn’t until the 20th century that this notion was challenged. Southern historian Frank Owsley explained in his 1930 essay, The Irrepressible Conflict, how intellectual life in the south was stifled for decades after the defeat: ‘The rising generations read northern literature, shot through with the New England tradition.
‘Northern textbooks were used in southern schools; northern histories, despite the frantic protests of local patriotic organisations, were almost universally taught in southern high schools and colleges – books that were built around the northern legend and either completely ignored the south or insisted upon the unrighteousness of most of its history and its philosophy of life.
‘One would judge from the average history text and from the recitations conducted by the northern schoolma’am that the Puritans and Pilgrim fathers were the ancestors of every self-respecting American.’
Uncomfortable facts such as the Massachusetts Bay Puritans wiping out the Pequot Tribe in 1636 are still brushed under the carpet to support the Pilgrim Fathers foundation myth.
John Allen, Richmond, Surrey.
QUESTION
Is The Decameron, the 14th-century book by Giovanni Boccaccio, banned in Australia?
THE Decameron, published in 1353, is the foundation stone of the Italian language and inspired Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. This controversial work of literature was effectively banned in Australia until 1973.
It tells the stories of seven young women and three young men who, during the Black Death in Florence, go into self-isolation in a villa in rural Tuscany. To keep themselves amused, they tell stories. Over ten days, a ‘King’ or ‘Queen’ sets a theme for the stories for that day. In all, 100 stories are told (hence Decameron), ranging from the erotic to the tragic, through practical jokes and lessons in life. It was popular for centuries, not least for its depictions of a corrupt clergy, explicit sexual content and many combinations of these two themes.
In 1559, Pope Paul IV put it on an index of problematic books before banning it in 1564. This led to a public outcry, causing Gregory XIII to accord it a special allowance.
The Church got around this by commissioning the monk and scholar Vincenzo Borghini to ‘correct’ the work.
Interestingly, the Deputati edition, published in 1573, retained much of the erotica, though the priests involved were recast as lay people.
It was the erotica that saw the book later banned in various countries. When the English language version was first published in 1886, The Decameron was banned in the US under the Federal Anti-Obscenity Act (Comstock Law) of 1873.
In Australia, it was banned under the powerful Customs Act of 1901. ‘Cheap editions’ were banned from 1927 to 1936 and from 1938 to 1973. ‘Expensive sets imported for genuine literary purposes’ were allowed.
Matt Delaney, London SW15.
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