Louis XIV – Lee Duigon

Quokka Eating Leaves Stock Photo (Edit Now) 144023728

Nothing false about these tasty leaves!

Acme False Facts Inc. wishes to squelch rumors that some of the false facts in their sets are, in fact… true.

Unlike TV nooze, Acme guarantees all its facts to be 100% false. Otherwise Quokka University wouldn’t be selling them as fund-raisers.

G’day! Byron the Quokka here–with the top five phony facts that certain low-life persons have asserted to be true. This endangers the credibility of all false facts! And hurts our fund-raising efforts, too.

Well, here they are. Guaranteed totally bogus!

*A lawyer in Mordor, Massachusetts, has successfully unionized the fleas in his state’s flea circuses–who are now on strike for higher wages and better benefits. His lawsuit is expected to win, hands down.

*Homer used a manual typewriter to write The Iliad.

*Popeye the Sailor was a real person who looked just like he does in the cartoons. He had to give up being a sailor when he moved to Shrivel County, Nevada, which has no water.

*For most of his life, Louis XIV, king of France, was only 18 inches tall. But later in life, treatments with Vigoro Plant Food shot him up to three feet. It also gave him a third foot, the use of which he never quite mastered.

*Rogue elephants have been sedated and hypnotized by providing them with non-stop reruns of Dance Fever. It doesn’t work with crocodiles, though.

I defy anyone to discover even an iota of truth in any of these.

Buckland’s great discovery–the first named dinosaur, Megalosaurus

I had a lot of trouble believing this, so I took some pains to check it out. And according to the official Westminster Abbey website, this outlandish anecdote is true ( http://www.westminster-abbey.org/our-history/people/william-buckland ).

Every dinosaur nut knows the name of William Buckland (1784-1856)–clergyman, scholar, and one of the founders of the science of paleontology. He was the first man to scientifically describe and name a dinosaur, Megalosaurus bucklandi, before the term “dinosaur” was ever coined. So Dean Buckland is an important figure in the history of science.

In 1848, Buckland was invited to dinner at one of England’s great country houses, where he was shown a priceless family relic in a silver locket. It was a little piece of the mummified heart of King Louis XIV, the great king of France, the “Sun King” whose reign, power, wealth, and glory shone over Europe like the sun itself.

Buckland snatched up the shriveled bit of meat and ate it before anyone could stop him. Adios, priceless family relic.

In this he was only following a lifelong custom he had of eating strange things.

Feh.

This was only the final indignity perpetrated on Louis XIV, who in his day had been the greatest man in Europe. When the French Revolution broke out, some 80 years after his death, the mob violated his tomb and destroyed his remains.

Dean Buckland, by the way, was one of the originators of the “Gap Theory” of interpreting Genesis–what we would also call an Old Earth creationist. He tried to reconcile a strict reading of the Scriptures–really, is there any other kind of reading that is properly respectful?–with current scientific findings: of which not a few were his own.

In all this strange history, there is much to contemplate.