Last week, I was reading about posthumous execution.

In a nutshell, a person dies, but you hate them so much that you have them dug up, desecrated, defiled and otherwise fucked up, just to make you feel better about yourself. Often, this would take the form of public “torture”, complete with mock trials.

For example, the Cadaver Synod of Pope Formosus in 897:

Pope Stephen VI, the successor of Boniface, influenced by Lambert and Agiltrude, sat in judgment of Formosus in 897, in what was called the Cadaver Synod. The corpse was disinterred, clad in papal vestments, and seated on a throne to face all the charges from John VIII. The verdict was that the deceased had been unworthy of the pontificate. The Damnatio memoriae, an old judicial practice from the Ancient Rome was applied to Formosus and all his measures and acts were annulled, and the orders conferred by him were declared invalid. The papal vestments were torn from his body, the three fingers from his right hand that he had used in consecrations were cut off and the corpse was thrown into the Tiber (and later retrieved by a monk). [source]

Good times, right? It’s even immortalized in art.

My current favorite is the exhumation and punishment of Oliver Cromwell’s corpse:

In 1661, Oliver Cromwell’s body was exhumed from Westminster Abbey, and was subjected to the ritual of a posthumous execution, as were the remains of John Bradshaw and Henry Ireton. (The body of Cromwell’s daughter was allowed to remain buried in the Abbey.) Symbolically, this took place on 30 January; the same date that Charles I had been executed. His body was hanged in chains at Tyburn. Finally, his disinterred body was thrown into a pit, while his severed head was displayed on a pole outside Westminster Hall until 1685. Afterwards the head changed hands several times, including the sale in 1814 to a man named Josiah Henry Wilkinson,[88][89] before eventually being buried in the grounds of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, in 1960.

Here’s his head:

An eyewitness, Samuel Sainthill wrote: “they were hanged by the neck from morning. Cromwell in a green seare cloth, very fresh embalmed; Ireton….hung like a dried rat.” Mmm, dried rat. NOM!

I think I have to award this video as the most badass commercial of 2008. Clowns and Kung Fu, you can’t go wrong. It’s brilliant.

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This couldn’t have been edited and framed better. Brilliant.

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Amon Amarth has posted a new video. I can’t wait to get their new album next week. Come October, I see them live again. They put on a great-ass show. Vikings!

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I’ve watched this video about 10 times. At this point, I am in love.

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I was in a really bad mood this morning. Now, now thanks to watching this video several times over, I feel much better.

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Thank you, Nawasye Ahmad Shah Abdali Koni Baba…thank you Pashtun Midget, wherever you are.

I am envious.

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Yesterday I went on an awesome tour of the Atlantic Avenue tunnel. Built in 1844, it’s the oldest subway tunnel in the world, it was lost from the public and a bit of an urban legend until it was rediscovered in 1979. Now, you can take tours.

I showed up at the corner of Court St. and Atlantic Ave., and climbed down a manhole in the middle of the street, into a passage way, carved out from the dirt. Squeezing through a narrow hole in a concrete wall, I entered the tunnel.

The space is massive and runs for four city blocks, over a quarter-mile long, four stories deep and dark as shit with rubble strewn all over.

Walt Whitman wrote of the tunnel:

“The old tunnel, that used to lie there under ground, a passage of Acheron-like solemnity and darkness, now all closed and filled up, and soon to be utterly forgotten, with all its reminiscences; however, there will, for a few years yet be many dear ones, to not a few Brooklynites, New Yorkers, and promiscuous crowds besides. For it was here you started to go down the island, in summer. For years, it was confidently counted on that this spot, and the railroad of which it was the terminus, were going to prove the permanent seat of business and wealth that belong to such enterprises. But its glory, after enduring in great splendor for a season, has now vanished—at least its Long Island Railroad glory has. The tunnel: dark as the grave, cold, damp, and silent. How beautiful look earth and heaven again, as we emerge from the gloom! It might not be unprofitable, now and then, to send us mortals—the dissatisfied ones, at least, and that’s a large proportion—into some tunnel of several days’ journey. We’d perhaps grumble less, afterward, at God’s handiwork.”

It definitely ranks as one of the neatest tours I’ve ever been on. Tours are infrequent, but you can check for dates here and make reservations.

Here’s a set of photos that I took while down there.

AWESOME! I want hang to with those guys!

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An insanely good and long overdue idea. I’m renting this as soon as it hits DVD.

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