The Lost PowerPoints

The Battle of Waterloo

Napoleon Bonaparte is an iconic character, not only because he was short, wore a silly hat, and had enough pirate brothers to conquer most of Europe, but because he is the only person in history to meet his Waterloo actually at Waterloo. (The rest of us tend to meet it in boardrooms, law courts, amateur beard-growing competitions, and if you’re English, in Surrey.) Had Napoleon won the Battle of Waterloo, civilization would be quite different. For starters, there wouldn’t be 2,050,000 results on Google for the term “French surrender” (there would only be 2,049,999.) Also, we would all eat a lot more snails.

But Napoleon did not win the battle. Later his opponent, the Duke of Wellington (also famed for rendering beef completely inedible and known as “Sally” to his friends), described the fighting as: “The nearest run thing you ever saw in your life,” which was Sally’s way of saying Napoleon almost won. To add insult to injury, Napoleon’s famed Imperial Guard — the closest thing the French Army had to crack assault pirates — ran away:

My pirate brothers and sisters include Captain Stanky and Rank Ol’ Pete.

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The Victorians

Charles Darwin and the Theory of Evolution

Unlike today, the Theory of Evolution was not accepted by all members of society, not even in the United Kingdom, where Charles Darwin pioneered his important scientific discoveries; while Darwin explored the marketing possibilities of ape-powered robots, other men like Thomas Huxley were left to convince the rest of the scientific community of Evolution’s validity. This debate came to a head when during a widely publicized discussion before the British Association for the Advancement of Science, one of the major opponents of Evolution, the Lord Bishop of Oxford Samuel Wilberforce, asked Huxley if it was his mother or father who was an ape.

Communism

The ideology of communism has its roots in the Victorian Era, when Karl Marx and his pirate brother, Friedrich Engels, wrote the Communist Manifesto, which was all about overthrowing capitalism, sharing the means of production and scoring chicks.

This site and this one are all about scoring laughs.

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Queen Elizabeth I

In her day, the first Queen Elizabeth (Queen Elizabeth I), was widely regarded as the scariest female to roam the planet since Lucy the Menopausal T-Rex. Of course, her closest advisers and the members of the English court knew that was far from the truth: Elizabeth would have destroyed Lucy.

However, amongst her subjects, she was known as Good Queen Bess; she was known as the Virgin Queen, and much beloved because she really did care about her people. The whole question of virginity was a potential PR nightmare, though in the long run, not as destructive as the lead-based makeup Bess spackled onto her face for public functions.

The Spanish Armada

In 1588 the King of Spain (Phillip II) finally got fed up with English privateers continually raiding his ships and colonies in the New World. (Note: Privateers were a kind of state-sanctioned pirate. Though they were obligated to give a portion of their booty to the monarch who licensed their pillaging, they still had hooks for hands, parrots for pets, and spent a great deal of time obsessing over “pieces of eight.”)

To put an end to English interference, Phillip amassed a ginormous flotilla — the didn’t call it an “Armada” for nothing — to support his invasion of England. The Spanish fleet might have sailed in 1587, had not the English hero, Sir Francis Drake, staged a preemptive raid on Cadiz.

For an armada of humor, set sail for the Isle of Laughter or the Archipelago of Chuckles. More Lost PowerPoint Slides can be found here.

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Many historians consider Ancient Greece to be a seminal culture, from which the foundation of Western Civilization sprung. A small group of non-conformists believe that seminal culture is something that should only be used during in vitro fertilization. Humor bloggers just giggle at the mention of the word “seminal”.

In any case, if you were alive in the years from 500 BC to about 146 BC, then Greece was the place to be. You also would have been fabulously old, and probably incapable of enjoying Greece’s many fine pastimes, such as philosophy, drama, hanging with your hoplite buddies, or a variety of activities with olives. (Some of them illegal nowadays.)

This time period is often broken up in to two periods, the Classical, and the Soft-Rock period (also known as the Hellenistic period).

Classical Greece

Prior to this time period, the Greek city-state had developed; these city-states were ruled by kings, tyrants and oligarchies. An oligarchy was a kind of large-headed pirate that owned land, slaves and enormous bronze helmets. The most powerful oligarchy was in Sparta, which was renowned for its powerful warriors, cruel child-rearing practices, and a susceptibility to sore necks. While the Spartans were at the masseuse, the city of Athens developed a new method of ruling, which they called democracy (though only a small number of male citizens were allowed to vote, no matter how big their heads were.)

These city-states existed not only in Greece itself, but in Asia Minor, or what is now the Aegean coast of Turkey. This area was called Ionia, and the Persian Emperor, Darius the Great, thought it would be nice to own, so he did. (According to Darius’ younger brother, Whinius, he always taking things without asking.) When the Ionian Greeks rebelled, the Greek Greeks (in Athens and a few other cities in Greece) supported them. Then Darius thought it would be nice to own Greece too.

Darius wasn’t all bad — he was one of the few ancient rulers to ban slavery, but this didn’t help him invade Greece. The Persians landed their fleet at a place called Marathon, which is about 25 miles from Athens. Knowing the large-headed pirates of Sparta were excellent soldiers, the Athenians sent a runner to ask for their help, a round-trip jog of nearly 300 miles, which the messenger, a long-legged freak of nature named Pheidippides did in three days. We celebrate this magnificent feat of athletics by strapping on running shoes (often named after the Greek Goddess of Victory, Nike), and clogging the streets of Boston during their annual short constitutional run:

Humor-blogs.com and Alltop like to do “things” with olives.

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The ancient Egyptians were famous for taking the concept of “work” and the mysterious burial chamber to new heights (and depths), when they began building massive edifices they called “pyramids”.

Though initially it was thought these were sophisticated storage receptacles for a variety of mummified sweetmeats, it turns out that they were in fact a form of political propaganda.

In either case, whether they were constructed to later enable Bud Abbott’s cinematic career, or if they were created to show posterity how seriously kick-ass the Pharohs were, there were certainly side effects. The most serious, at the time, was the pressure it put on the economy responsible for work motivation. Today, this has morphed into something called “human resources”, but back in the Pharoh’s day it was a much less complicated affair, something called Khufu’s Productivity Pyramid:

These fine websites provide humorous whippings daily.

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Continued from the Paleolithic or Emo Stone Age

.

After the confusion of the Esoteric Age (or Middle Stone Age), things got really strange. The Neolithic (or New Stone Age) is known for the “Neolithic Revolution”, in which humans started to give up their earlier hunter-gatherer lifestyle in exchange for farming. Many experts still think this was a mistake, though it did eventually lead to the Bronze Age and improved beard-grooming implements.

Some researchers are still trying to figure out why human beings would give up the free existence of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle for the unending toil necessary for successful farming, but they’ve obviously never met anyone with a Protestant work ethic and a deep suspicion of the human body’s naughty bits.

Of course, the cultivation of grains could lead to food surpluses, but these benefits were sometimes offset by bad harvests and an increase in disease. Some believe that humans started farming for another, more compelling reason:

Some researchers will refer to this as the “beer theory of history”, but it is really just an antecedent to the Beard Theory of History, which is much more important because it is capitalized (and not in quotation marks). (Grammatically, CAPITALS kick “quotations’” ass, and (brackets) are just kind of embarrassed to be there.) Still, the “beer theory of history” is a compelling idea — the notion that we gave up hunting because of beer. This new sedentary way of life is where our current 21st century obesity “epidemic” began. (And is certainly a contributing factor for the “epidemic” striking the population of humor writers.)

In addition to farming, the Neolithic brought us home renovation. Before the Neolithic “Revolution”, we were happy to live in caves, mossy ditches and an assortment of bark-lined nests. But after the Neolithic “Revolution” we had to start building permanent dwellings, with “features” and “amenities”. Home improvement shows would begin soon thereafter. It was the downside of beer.

We also started domesticating animals. Paleontologists believe we had already domesticated dogs, but it was during the Neolithic Age that humans began to keep animals for more than their companionship and their inspiring ability to lick themselves. Some have suggested that this control over nature led humans to believe they could control other humans. Others have suggested that increasing population densities, specialized occupations and more complex societies called for a ruling class.

In either case, this is called civilization.

So one of prehistory’s greatest ironies is that the invention of beer led the majority of humans to be ruled over by a privileged class, making the majority of humans want to drink more beer. (The privileged class preferred wine, even then.)

Despite the advent of agriculture, the domestication of plants and animals, and the first hierarchical societies, humans were capable of behaving even more oddly. At this time, humans also started building elaborate tombs for the dead. Some of these magnificent structures remain today. One of them is the passage tomb at Newgrange, situated in modern-day Ireland. To this day, we have no definitive explanation of what the tomb is for, though we suspect commercial motivations:

Next: The Ultimate Pyramid Scheme

Humor-blogs.com and Alltop are proof of the Beer Theory of History.

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Human societies existed long before the written word, but luckily for us, not before PowerPoint technology. This makes it much easier for anthropologists, historians and people who enjoy humor to understand how humans developed as a species — from a sort of limited ape with no concept of how to style facial hair or take to the high seas and become a pirate, to the fully bearded, eye-patch wearing civilization we are all familiar with today.

Continued from Prehistory 1.1…

But being eaten was not the only worry. It was the major worry (apart from starving to
death), but eventually the weather started to get a bit cooler, and early humans started to think about
other things …

At this point, Homo erectus had finally achieved their goal of a much less amusing species name, and they became two different species, Homo neanderthalensis (or Neanderthals) and Homo sapiens.

The Neanderthals immediately started to improve on Ahk-ahk’s early “thing” technology, coming up with all kinds of intriguing designs, including a tool that “slices, dices and makes julienne mammoth!” Though the Neanderthals have been characterized as squat, hairy and unsophisticated, they greatly improved tool technology with what paleontologists now call the Mousterian Tradition. How such squat and hairy humans came up with the unsophisticated idea of using mice in the
creation of stone tools, we may never know; those paleontologists are a secretive group.

The Neanderthals were out-competed by Homo sapiens, and though their final fate remains a mystery, it appears as though they disappeared about 30,000-25,000 years ago. It has been suggested that Neanderthals did breed with Homo sapiens, the proof of which is the existence of otherwise modern humans with uni-brows.

While the unfortunate and soon-to-be extinct Neanderthals were happy with their mousedriven stone technology, modern humans continued to tinker with things, coming up with greater and more creative inventions. They made fine blades, harpoons, fish hooks, needles, and even created oil lamps. Paleontologists believe modern humans were forced to improve their technology because of the increasingly severe Ice Age. This is only partially true. Certainly, it was getting much colder, but much of the technological innovation was driven by a lack of beard-grooming implements.

Humans also started to create art at this time:

This flourishing of culture had unfortunate consequences too, leading the new species to experiment with drugs, find religion and start objectifying women, sometimes all in one go:

Next: The New Rock Age: Your Era at Work!

Also posted at humor-blogs.com and alltop.

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Human societies existed long before the written word, but luckily for us, not before PowerPoint technology. This makes it much easier for anthropologists, historians and people who enjoy humor to understand how humans developed as a species — from a sort of limited ape with no concept of how to style facial hair or take to the high seas and become a pirate, to the fully bearded, eye-patch wearing civilization we are all familiar with today.

Roughly speaking, human prehistory is divided into three ages: The Stone Age, The Bronze Age, and The Iron Age (although amongst golfers this is known as The Difficult Short Game Age).

1. The Stone Age — Thag Do Invention!

The Paleolithic

In a similar fashion, The Stone Age is usually subdivided into three eras — the Paleolithic, the Esoteric and the Neolithic. Some paleontologists call the Esoteric the Mesolithic, or Middle Stone Age; like all middle children it is usually overlooked, but it was nevertheless the period after the Paleolithic and before the Neolithic.

The Paleolithic Age, or literally Old Age of the Stone, is the period we usually now associate with Disco, but actually predates the Seventies by up to a million years. (Though hairy chests were fashionable in both eras.)

In the Paleolithic, early humans were hominids we now call Homo erectus, and had few tools (apart from PowerPoint). In addition to inventing tools, these primitive ancestors worked hard to evolve into the species we are today, not only because their lives were unpleasant, dangerous, and filled with nasty smells, but also because they couldn’t stand it when other animals made fun of their name.

The first major achievement of Homo erectus (stop that) was stone tools. At first, the tools they used were really no more than rocks they found lying around the mosh pit (few paleontologists are willing to admit that Homo erectus were committed slam dancers), but soon they discovered that rock could be shaped.

Homo erectus continued in this upright fashion for some time, slowly improving their “whacking” technique until they could fashion all kinds of tools — stone axes, knives and eventually arrow points. They became proficient hunters, but even with sharp “things” they found eating raw meat a major challenge to their erectness. (It’s tough to stand up straight when you’re experiencing abdominal cramping.)

Luckily, the precocious great-great-great-great-great-great-(imagine 22850 more “greats” in this phrase) grandson of Ahk-ahk, Unk-ook, made a major discovery:

Yes, being eaten by lions and other predators was a constant problem in early human society, and
so, a method for dealing with the challenge was implemented, and it had some side benefits:

Next: Clothes, Art & The Advent of the Uni-Brow

Also appearing at humor-blogs.com and alltop.

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Anaxagoras of Ionia presents “Hot metal, man” (circa 450 BC) –>slide 6

• sun is not Helios riding a chariot in the sky
• it is a blazing ball of metal
• hot metal, man, hot metal
• hey, it makes as much sense!

Diagoras the Atheist presents “Miracle, my ass” (circa 415 BC) –> slide 3

• so this wooden statue prevented ship from sinking?
• throw it (Herakles) on fire
• if it can perform miracles, then it should have no problem
• otherwise, his thirteenth labour shall be to boil my turnips!

Democritus presents “Ungulate theory” (circa 400 BC) –> slide two

• all things made of atoma (atoms)
• soul is just an exceedingly fine and spherical kind of atom
• or perhaps superstition
• in any case, it’s not that different from a goat.

Socrates presents “Method to my madness” (circa 399 BC) –> last slide

• you have accused me of atheos (refusing to acknowledge the state gods) and corrupting the youth of Athens
• it’s a fair cop
• you should know I’ve been inspired by divine voice, Daemon
• also, enjoy a nice pint of hemlock.

Epicurus presents “It’s all good — not God — baby” (circa 300 BC) –>slide 12

• if gods exist (if!) then they’re not interested in humans
• death is the end of body and soul (if it exists)
• not to be feared
• what is good is pleasure, baby, but not too much pleasure
• why I let women into my philosophy school.

More about the History of Atheism here [wiki] and more ungodly humor here. The disembodied floating head of Epicurus (who rocked) is based on a photo by dithie.

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Germanicus presents “On Campaign with My Three-Year-Old Son” (circa 15 AD) –> slide 4

• Put him in miniature set of armor
• Army mascot
• They call him “Little soldier’s boots” (Caligula)
• Isn’t he adorable?

Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus (Caligula) presents “A normal childhood” (circa 35 AD) –> Slide 3

After father Germanicus died:

• lived with mother until the Emperor Tiberius (adoptive grandfather) banished her
• lived with adoptive great-grandmother (Livia) until she died
• brother Nero died in exile
• brother Drussus died in prison (either from eating bedding or starvation)
• went to live with Tiberius on Capri
• good times!

Pullox the fishmonger presents “A good start” (circa 37 AD) –> Only slide

• Lots of gladiatorial games
• Animals sacrificed
• He’s the son Germanicus (great general that)
• And let’s face it, after Tiberius anyone looks good!

Lollia Paulina presents “Something’s not right with that man” (circa 38 AD) –> Slide 12

• My husband the Emperor has been acting odd since he got sick
• I can live with the whoring
• Excessive killings
• But I really wish he’d stop insisting I call him “Hercules”.

Julia Agrippina (the younger) presents “My brother is a mad, mad pig” (circa 40 AD) –> Slide 2

• Has sex with me, Drusilla and Livilla
• Then declared us Vestal Virgins
• Also, he thinks he’s a god
• Dresses up like Hercules, Apollo and Venus.

Caligula presents “I’m not crazy” (circa 40 AD) –> Last slide

• I only kill people when they upset me
• Like, when they call me “little boots”
• I really hate that
• Besides, I’m a bunch of Gods, so I can do what I want
• Now, I’m going to make my horse a Senator.

Cassius Chaerea of the Praetorian Guard presents “He’s gotta go” (41 AD) –> Slide two

• He calls me “noodle dick”
• (It’s a war wound and I can’t help it)
• Luckily, there are lots of other groups that want him dead too.

Anniversary of Caligula’s death: January 24. Here is a group that has not slept with their sisters. Photo credit: mharrsch.

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