As reported at the BBC today, Lord Lucas, the chair of the Enforcement Law Reform Group went on record denouncing Britain’s automated traffic enforcement policy. The headline: Parking charge system ‘medieval’.

I don’t do as many of those “hey, look, someone used the word medieval in a dumb way” posts as I used to. Or, more correctly, I do a lot of other types of posts now, so those make up a much smaller percentage of my overall output.*

I’m a little rusty at this, but here goes: I don’t know much about how the automated ticket-issuing traffic cameras work in Britain,*** but it’s a little weird to call the motion sensitive digital cameras that electronically surveill drivers of internally combusting vehicular apparatuses “medieval,” isn’t it?

I have learned to be okay with people using the word “medieval” to mean “unfathomably cruel,” because it makes me seem like more of a badass when people ask what I do and I say “Medieval Studies.” Suddenly, they’re not completely sure that I don’t have a broadsword hidden on me somewhere. Or maybe I know a guy who knows a guy who can get them excommunicated. But I don’t get anything out of being associated with parking tickets, so knock it off, Lord–wait, they’ve still got Lords in Britain? Seriously? Isn’t that medieval, Mr. Lucas?

[dub in sound of tires screeching to a halt here]

Actually, as it turns out upon reading the article past the headline, I found out that Lord Lucas was using the word “medieval” in a way that demonstrates some understanding of the Middle Ages. Here are his remarks in context:

It is extremely difficult to get local authorities to behave properly on this. There doesn’t seem to be an ombudsman who will take this seriously and central government really just treats this as part of the tax-raising system. There is no way in which central government checks that this is what local authorities are doing.

[…]

This way of raising revenue, this medieval fashion of taxation, really upsets people cumulatively and makes them less compliant citizens.

So long as the taxes keep flowing up the hierarchy, the local magnates are left alone to manage their fiefs as they see fit? Yeah, that’s pretty medieval. Not broadsword-wieldingly medieval, but still legit.

The problem is, now I’m knee-deep in a blog post with no one left to vent my spleen at. This is a Cartesian dilemma for a blogger. We mock, therefore we blog. With no one to mock, can we actually be said to be bloggers? Luckily for me, a little further in the same new story, we get this response from Nick Lester, corporate director of services for London councils:

We know that less than 1% of all penalty charge notices issued are challenged, and of those about half are upheld. That suggests that the system is 99.5% right.

Half of all the tickets they were forced to look at were dismissed, so the ones they didn’t look at must certainly be OK? By this logic, if a student gives me a paper that’s one-hundred sentences long**** and I determine that they stole half of the first sentence from some lecture notes posted to the Internet, I should stop reading and assume that 99.5% of the paper is original.

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*Even so, I must admit that it’s become harder to do those sorts of posts of late. When I type ‘medieval’ into Google News looking for some quick post fodder, I usually get hits for medieval fairs or medieval art exhibits or somebody’s tenth grade class that built a catapult instead.** Damn the Googlites for their ever more efficient search processing.
**The pedagogical theory is that building a catapult gets kids interested in history, or physics, or Latin, but I suspect that mainly it gets them interested in what sorts of things might be loaded onto a catapult when the history teacher isn’t looking.
***Because when I do a Google search for “automated traffic enforcement in britain” the first hit is for a site labeled “Automatic Traffic Enforcement in the United States.” I guess the searches aren’t as optimized for non-medieval things.
****What, you assign things in pages or words? Feh. How medieval.

This week’s medieval marginal image comes from an early 14th-century Festal Psalter (The Hague, KB, 78 D 40), available at the excellent, if slow, website of the National Library of the Netherlands.

This subject of our image is the famous Dance of Salome. You remember Salome from Sunday school, right? * If you’ve seen pictures of her, they probably looked more like these:**

As the masters of understatement who edit the Wikipedia put it, “This Biblical story has long been a favourite of painters, since it offers a chance to depict oriental splendour, semi-nude women, and exotic scenery under the auspices of a Biblical subject.”

The illuminator of our manuscript decided instead to take the opportunity to depict a woman with no skeleton, or possibly the first recorded instance of breakdancing. Somehow, this is not how I pictured the famous Dance of Seven Veils–a fully clothed woman bending herself into the letter “O” and winking back at me while she does.

Like last week’s image, this one, too, is paired with another to its left in the bottom margin. There’s not much to say about it, but here it is, for completeness’ sake, the scene of Salome receiving John the Baptist’s head, her reward for the forbidden dance of back-bending passion:

Since JtB’s head appears to have retained its halo after his death, Salome is now the proud owner of the world’s most gruesome night light.

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*Or perhaps you saw her in that Oscar Wilde play where she’s a necrophiliac. Depends where you spend your Sundays, I guess.
**Those pictures are High Art,™ and not prurient at all, and I’d buy your outrage more if I didn’t know where you spend your Sundays.

Just a quick post for this week. Please find enclosed an image from the famous Luttrell Psalter, currently housed at the British Library. You may have asked yourself sometime, did the Middle Ages know how to party? Let me answer that with this:

Even though he’s been stabbed with a stick, this fellow here is not going to let that get in the way of getting his drink on. Toward the end of the night, he’s probably going to end up like this guy, who graces a margin a few pages later:

The British Library’s website touts the Psalter as a depiction of the “rich panorama of medieval life.” But their list of notable scenes fails to mention the drunken blue guy being hauled around on a stick. Oh, and that red thing to the right? That’s the arm of a scary monster. Poor blue guy is being toted off to his death. What jerks his friends are.

Let this be a lesson, kids. Don’t get so drunk that painting yourself blue seems like a good idea, unless you want to end up as Monster Chow.

UPDATE: I’m not sure if this is really neat or really scary, but apparently The Luttrell Psalter: The Movie just finished filming and will be available on DVD later this year. Dare we hope for L2: Domesday or Luttrell 2: Electric Boogaloo in Summer 2010?

I’ve got a lot of deadlines looming right now, and I’m moving soon after that, so I’m not going to be posting much for a while. But thanks to the miracle of Blogger in Draft’s post-scheduler, I can still provide my readers with a little something each week. So, let me announce my blog’s obligatory self-important provacatively original repeated post feature: Mmm… Marginalia, ((It’s possible the three M’s in Mmm stand for Medieval Marginalia Monday, but that would be a little twee, wouldn’t it?)) because, let’s face it, everybody needs a good funny picture to start the week with.

The image I’ve chosen for this inaugural edition comes from a 13th-century Bible that now resides in the copyright-obsessed hands of the British Library:

Regardless of what Michael Camille ((Author of the most famous book on medieval gothic marginalia, Image on the Edge.)) would have you believe, the image here has nothing to do with the Bible verses hovering in midair off to the left of the unfolding battle ((It’s on the page with Isaiah 38:18-20:

For the grave cannot praise thee, death can not celebrate thee: they that go down into the pit cannot hope for thy truth. The living, the living, he shall praise thee, as I do this day: the father to the children shall make known thy truth. The Lord was ready to save me: therefore we will sing my songs.)) and everything to do with the inherent awesomeness of monkey fighting, as well as some bonus fox-hijinx. Let me call your attention to a few nice touches in the image:

Our three intrepid monkey defenders each have their own personalities and strategies. To the left, an angry monkey prepares to hurl a suspiciously poo-shaped projectile at the ineptly shielded fox below. To the right, a more thoughtful monkey prepares to drop a round stone on any attacker who should try to sneak around to the back. Maybe I’m reading too much into it, but our stone-hurling monkey’s expression seems to say, “Ah, brother fox, we are so alike, you and I. Were our situations reversed, I would hope that I could bear the ball you hurled upon me with the same dignity that you will, no doubt, soon have the chance to demonstrate. Alas, the roles that Fate arranges for us…” In the center, a red monkey puffs out his cheeks (poor form for trumpet playing, but he’s a monkey, so give him slack) and gives the cry to havoc and dogs-of-war slipping and all that. I’m reminded of Roland, moments before he sounded the horn to summon Charlemagne, blowing so hard that his brains squirted out his ears. ((Really, that’s what happens at the end of  The Song of Roland.))

The foxy attackers seem to be having a harder time of it. I’m not sure how you’re supposed to hold your shield as you climb a siege ladder, but I’m pretty sure this is not it:

UPDATE: In response to a comment, a little more information about the image. Tidor suggested that the monkeys would soon receive their comeuppance once the wolf tunneling under they walls was done, which would make this image the equivalent of the Stupid Monkey endtitles for Robot Chicken. Given the skill of this particular miniaturist, I’m pretty sure that what looks like a wolf burrowing underground is actually supposed to represent a rabbit in its burrow, like these in this image here:

This is a picture of Arthur, preparing to fight the Giant of Mont Saint-Michel, I believe, though Arthur is a habitual giant-slayer, and I’ve misplaced my notes on where that image is from, so it’s hard to say for certain. Regardless, here’s a closeup of those brownish lumps in this much less skilled miniaturist’s hill:

I think this was originally sort of medieval visual cue to let the viewer know that the expanse of green is meant to be a hill. Often, they’ll include fish visible in an expanse of blue in order to indicate the sea, too. There may be some deeper meaning, to it as well, though, because I seem to recall seeing bunnies in hills fairly frequently in depictions of battles and sieges. Nature’s indifference to the concerns of man, perhaps?

Oh, yeah, I was supposed to be using these posts as ways to limit my procrastination. Stupid internet, be less interesting!

Medievalists occasionally have non-medieval hobbies and interests. Weird, but true. For example, I find myself adding a disturbing number of webcomics to my Google reader these days. One wonders why newspapers even have a comics section anymore, when things like this can be found for free online:

Wonderella, pictured above, is hardly medieval, but the author’s pop cultural sensibilities overlap substantially with my own. Fortunately, the Grail joke makes this comic eligible for linking here.*

The other new item in my RSS feed reader these days is Photoshop Disasters, a non-medieval site dedicated to, well… disastrous photoshopping. They’ve not yet caught up with Henry VIII’s spooky ghost cat, but they did catch this disaster on the cover of a medieval-themed romance novel:

Most people know Arthur had a wife named Guenevere. Readers of the Old French Vulgate Cycle know that Guenevere had an identical half-sister also named Guenevere, AKA “False Guenevere.” Readers of this romance novel know that one of the two Gueneveres had a parasitic twin, possibly also named Guenevere, AKA “Conjoined Twin Guenevere.”

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*If you’re interested in comics in general, check out this blog from some friends of mine: Satisfactory Comics. Not much medievalism, but one of the bloggers is an Arthurian.

Sometimes, I think the good folks at Google must be having a laugh at my expense. How else to explain why this weekend my blog was the top hit for the question “What’s the deal with all those medieval midgets?” even though my blog has never, to my knowledge, mentioned midgets?* Bald, stabby children, yes. Midgets, not so much.

So, what is the deal with all those midgets? As it turns out, WikiAnswers (Q&A the wiki way!) has already answered this one.** I quote:

Midgets, were considered being magical elves, dwarfves, and leprahuans. People would walk up to them and ask them for wishes, gold, or just hire them to be in front of their midievil lawns and scare away people they didn’t want to see. Nah, just kidding, I have no Idea.

Is that all clear, then?

I realize that some of you reading this blog were possibly not aware that there was a “deal” with midgets in the Middle Ages. Certainly, midgets must have made up a greater proportion of the medieval population than the modern, since in the last few decades medical science has been able to identify and treat many of the causes of abnormal shortness.*** But were midgets a medieval “deal”?

Readers of medieval romances, Arthurian romances in particular, might think so. Arthur’s knights often go adventuring with dwarves in tow or encounter them on their quests. Chrétien de Troyes’ Erec and Enide mentions in passing Bilis, the king of the Antipodes, who is said to be a dwarf, as tiny as his brother Briens (the Big) is big, and in Chrétien’s Lancelot, Lancelot is forced to shame himself by riding on a cart driven by a rude dwarf. When evil villains want to root out the identity of the incognito hero Gareth in Malory’s Morte, they kidnap his dwarf, naturally, which leads to this touching and heroic exchange (from Caxton’s edition, adapted into a screenplay, should anyone in Hollywood be reading this and need a tentpole for Summer ’09):

SIR GARETH

Thou traitor, Sir Gringamore, deliver me my dwarf again, or by the faith that I owe to the order of knighthood, I shalt do thee all the harm that I can.

SIR GRINGAMORE

Sir Gareth of Orkney, leave thy boasting words, for thou gettest not thy dwarf again.

SIR GARETH

Thou coward knight, bring him with thee, and come and do battle with me, and win him and take him.

SIR GRINGAMORE

So will I do, and me list, but for all thy great words, thou gettest him not.

[From a tower nearby, a lady calls down]

DAME LIONESSS

Ah! Fair brother, I would he had his dwarf again, for I would he were not wroth, for now he hath told me all my desire I keep no more of the dwarf.

SIR GARETH

Shall I have my dwarf?

DAME LIONESS

Yea, sir, and all the pleasure that I can make you.

I’m pretty sure that it’s supposed to be funny in the original, but you never can tell with Malory.

So, what’s the deal with all these romance midgets and/or dwarfs? Fortunately, the definitive work of romance midget scholarship was written fifty years ago, Vernon J. Harward, Jr.’s The Dwarfs of Arthurian Romance and Celtic Tradition. Though it suffers from the “Celtic analogues explain everything” syndrome that so plagues early Arthurian scholarship, the book does debunk fairly well the idea that these romance dwarfs were inspired by experience with actual dwarfs. The sight of a dwarf in a court, even a dwarf acting as a jester, was strange enough that when it is described in early medieval writings, the writer goes out of his way to state how remarkable it was. In general, the dwarfs of Arthurian romance probably started out as a magical race, like those in Welsh and Irish myths: fair haired, helpful little guys who live in a magical kingdom under the ground. As the stories moved out of their original cultural context, the magical origin of the dwarfs was left behind, leaving our knights attended by human midgets and dwarfs.

Aside from Arthur, is there any other medieval midget deal? Possibly, it has something to do with Baby Jesus, as most things medieval ultimately do. One of my undergrads recently noted in a paper on the visual arts in Renaissance Italy: “In the Middle Ages, people did not have geometry to do perspective with, and so when they drew baby Jesus, they made him out of proportion, especially in the leg region.” Here is a fairly typical medieval baby Jesus, or as my students like to term him, “Midget Jesus”:****

As you can see, the infant Jesus is proportioned like an adult: even newborn, he’s already able to sit up by himself, and he’s even begun practicing his “Bless you, my child” for when the Magi arrive later for their scheduled adoration.

My essay-writing student above was trying to explain that linear perspective, that trick that makes a 2-D Renaissance painting look 3-D, was not one that medieval artists knew how to do. They were not, however, incapable of drawing babies–Baby Jesus is just a special case. Like with most medieval religious art, matters of scale and realism take a back seat to the religious content. Jesus is the Word Made Flesh, and a fair number of medieval theologians had problems with the idea of The Word Made Flesh ever being unable to speak. So, as it turns out, Medieval Baby Jesus is quite the conversationalist. Just to be safe, he can walk and talk and pretty much do anything that Jesus Classic can do, and so is usually (but by no means always) drawn accordingly.

One final thought on the medieval midget deal is that the Googler was perhaps asking about pygmies. Like dog-headed men and pretty much every other weird semi-human race, these were thought to live at the edges of the world, or at the least, in a land far, far away. Medieval pygmies were more or less like modern pygmies, with one exception: they absolutely hated cranes and would flip out and kill them pretty much all the time. Read all about the wars between crane and pygmy here.

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*My best guess is that I am overly fond of the phrase “What’s more” as a transition, and so questions with what’s in them come here. What’s more, I’m also overly fond of “overly fond,” but so far, Google hasn’t punished me for that.
**For those of you who refuse to follow every little cute link I add to my post, some other questions in the “midget” section of WikiAnswers include “Are midgets real?”; “Can thirty midgets kill a full-grown tiger?”; and various queries about the possibility that midgets have non-midget sized private parts.
***A decade of university life has left me constitutively unable to not add the following disclaimer: I understand there is a very important technical difference between dwarfs and midgets, and it’s offensive not to mind that, and that many people are likewise offended in principle by the casual use of terms like “abnormal” or “condition” when it is used to describe people who are happy and productive members of society. Many apologies for my cretinity.
****The image is taken from a twelfth-century psalter, swiped from a digital database here.

People keep telling me that I need to watch The Tudors on Showtime and blog about it, to which I reply that my blog is already medieval porntastic enough as it is. Nonetheless, this advertisement for their “King Me” contest caught my eye. See if you can tell what in particular did the eye-catching:

Did you guess the badly photoshopped black cat there down by Queen Boleyn’s arm? It’s phasing through her dress! That’s one spooky ghost cat.

I suppose the prizes offered in the contest are also somewhat eye-catching, though hard to see at the resolution I used. If you hurry over to the contest website, you have maybe five more chances to enter your name into the drawing for a fabulous package that includes:

• A $50,000 King’s Ransom
• A $25,000 Donation to a Noble Charity
• An Authentic English Title such as Lord or Lady
• A 7 day/6 night Luxury Vacation at a Sheraton Resort

According to the fine print, the prize package is worth approximately $80,000. Unless the vacation is worth negative money, that means that Authentic English Titles are basically worthless, m’lord.

Given what constitutes a King’s Ransom for Showtime, this seems about right. Using the historical currency converter, one 16th-century British pound is worth a little over 454 21st-century British pounds. Since the dollar today is worth jack squat about 50p, that means our King’s Ransom of $50,000 is worth around 55 16th-century British pounds. By contrast, King John II of France was ransomed just a century and a half earlier for 700,000 14th-century British pounds* (or 663,000ish early-16th-century British pounds, if you want to get technical about it). Clearly, kings, like Beanie Babies, ain’t worth what they used to be.

Our old pal Geoffrey Chaucer was ransomed for 16 pounds around the same time as King John went for 700,000, so to be more accurate Showtime should say that they’re giving away Three-and-a-Half Squire’s Ransoms.

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*Henry VIII was born on the cusp of his century, and John’s ransom was in the middle of his. So yes, the 14th-century was a century and a half before the 16th century.

I’ve always wanted to learn to play chess well.* Now I may have a reason. Available for pre-order in July, it’s the Lego Castle Giant Chess Set:
I do not know why it’s called a Castle Giant set, since I can see no giant, nor castle giant, nor even a giant castle in the publicity stills. There is an itty-bitty castle there in the corner, big enough for maybe four Lego people to stand shoulder-to-shoulder in. At first, I thought that it was supposed to be the rook there in the corner, which would make this the most awesome chess set ever created, because then the rook would take up at least four spaces on the board and possibly crush my enemies before me when I castled with the king.** But now I’m pretty sure that’s just board decoration, and the rook is a normal sized piece.*** Maybe if Lego’s promotional department would take a hint from the makers of the Beowulf Uncut DVD, I’d know where the giant castle giant comes in.

*hint* *hint*

Actually, I’m tired of making these veiled pleas for review copies of items. They don’t work. All they get you is a copy of Wealtheow that stares down at you from your bookshelf with faint disapproval, demanding to know why you haven’t reviewed it yet.

Attention, retailers and publicists of the world. Got Medieval desperately desires to sell out in exchange for your cheap medieval trinkets and your shockingly expensive medieval brick-a-brack–actually, come to think of it, the shockingly expensive would be better. Send those first. I promise not to look too shocked. The queen from the famous Lewis chess set shows the precise amount of shocked I’ll be:

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*I understand in theory that the game involves lines of attack and controlling the board, but whenever I play, all I ever try to do is make it so that no piece of mine is immediately under attack. Also, I spend an inordinate amount of time between moves making horsey noises with the knights, and I refuse to use bishops at all, because their pointy heads give me the creeps.
**Also, I spend a lot of time setting up the king and the rook so that I can castle. Castling is the wheelie popping of chess, as far as I’m concerned. And don’t get me started on queenside castling…
***The inconsistent scaling of pieces in chess has always bugged me. A king’s castles should be taller than a king’s pointy-headed bishop friends.

As some of you may have heard by now, The US Government has launched an effort to keep tabs on terrorists who meet in online games like World of Warcraft, Call of Duty 4, and Second Life. This is old news, I know, dating back to the beginning of March, but as a medievalist I have no pretensions to timeliness. In my defense, The Daily Show just got around to making fun of it this week, and they’ve got dozens of writers on staff.*

I first learned of the US government’s program to track the threat of Al Quaeda in Azeroth through this BBC story. The best part of the story, for me, is the judicious understatement in the captioned image that accompanies it:

Experts say terror groups are unlikely to use games such as World of Warcraft.

The medieval angle that makes this bizarre waste of taxpayer money news appropriate for Got Medieval is not the elven babe pictured above or World of Warcraft in general, but rather the name that the US has chosen for the program that eavesdrops on MMORPG- and FPS-gamers: Project Reynard.

Reynard the Fox is one of the pieces of medieval popular culture that modern culture** (particularly the English-speaking part of it), has almost entirely forgotten. At best, he has been reduced to a single trivia fact: the explanation for why in Disney’s 1973 Robin Hood movie Robin is a fox (after Reynard), Richard a lion (after his king, Noble), and the Sheriff of Nottingham a wolf (after Reynard’s antagonist, Isengrim). More than likely, the government official tasked with finding a good name for this stealthy spy initiative looked Reynard up at Wikipedia, which, as of this writing, describes Reynard rather mildly as “a trickster figure whose tale is told in a number of anthropomorphic tales.”

So then, allow me to re-introduce the real Reynard the Fox (pictured center) who has licensed his name to the US government’s virtual data-mining program:***

So, obviously, Wikipedia is leaving a few things out, but in this, the web encyclopedia is in good company. One of the more famous early modern English printed versions of the Reynard (fr: Renart) cycle billed itself as The Most Delectable History of Reynard the Fox. Newly Corrected and Purged, from all grossness in Phrase and Matter. Augmented and Enlarged with sundry Excellent Morals and Expositions upon every several Chapter.

Trust Got Medieval to bring back the grossness in both phrase and matter! In the picture above from an illuminated manuscript of the cycle, we find that our merry trickster Reynard has gotten Hersent the She-Wolf, the wife of his rival Isengrim, to chase him back to his house and in through the door. Since she is wider than him, she doesn’t quite fit through the door to his cute little fox hole, and so she gets stuck. Reynard, the cheeky little scamp, goes straight out the back door so that he can circle around and use Hersent’s back door. On the left, that’s Isengrim arriving to find Reynard thrusting away at his wife enthusiastically. As the story proceeds, Reynard convinces Isengrim that he was merely trying to help push Hersent through the hole to help her get unstuck and enlists Isengrim to help him push harder. It’s just like that story where Winnie the Pooh gets stuck in Rabbit’s hole, except everyone’s having sex. Dirty wolf-on-fox-on-wolf sex.

From this seminal act of furry eroticism, a multi-branching cycle of dirty, bloody tales spins off. The main characters are, as Wikipedia says, anthropomorphic animals, but unlike in Aesopian fables or Saturday morning cartoons, the animals in the Roman de Renart are not just little humans with fur and ears and tales. Yes, they walk and talk, they wear clothes, they have a king, they go to church, and they even bring adorable little lawsuits against one another, but, from time to time, one of them (usually Reynard), is going to have to eat one of the others, because that’s what animals do. Yes, Reynard’s cute little animal friends have names like “Browny the Bear,” but the story about Browny’s love of honey ends with him getting all the skin ripped off of his head, courtesy of a trap in a tree laid by Sir Reynard, who then taunts the horrifically wounded bear for the unfashionable red hood he’s now “wearing.”

Reynard is a trickster, but the sort of trickster who shows up to confession and eats the priest and mails the priest’s head to the king. He’s the sort that sneaks into your home, sleeps with your wife, and pisses on your aghast children before running off with all the food from your cupboard.****

But maybe I’m selling the government short when I propose that they didn’t research past Wikipedia. Maybe the FBI intended just this sort of allusion. Perhaps they wanted to send a message to the terrorists: while you’re in Second Life busy pretending to be an anthropomorphic diaper-wearing wolf as part of an elaborate plot to get somebody to blow something up, the US government will be eating your friends and making sweet, sweet love to your wife, possibly at the same time.

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*Keep watching until 2:53 in the clip linked in that sentence to meet “Beowolf Porpoiseburg.” Well worth the click.
**Especially by culture warriors who look back to the Middle Ages as a time unencumbered by irony when respect for religion and authority flourished–the sort of account you’d get in a book like Brad Miner’s Compleat Gentleman.
**Frequent readers of my blog will perhaps suspect, as do I, that Lancelot and Isengrim use the same architect.
***And in the later tales, things get progressively trippier. In one, Reynard poses as a doctor and tricks the king into eating his subjects. In another, Reynard paints himself yellow as part of an elaborate parody of Tristan and Isolde. In yet another, Reynard finds a stick that lets him dig holes that magically become female genitalia.****
****I wish I had a good explanation for why magical private parts come up so often here on my blog, but the Yale health plan only covers one semester’s worth of therapy. I suppose it’s technically possible to study the Middle Ages without the subject ever being broached, but honestly, everywhere I look, there they are.