A Lighthouse for Your Soul

From time to time, I receive emails asking questions about history, culture and life in general. Recently, I receive the following:

“What’s the point of lighthouses in our modern world? Are they just to give photographers something to point their cameras at, or do they still serve a purpose?”

In order to understand this, we need to go back to ancient times: the 1950s.

In the 1950s, man had a dream.

Women didn’t have the dream because men felt that women were only good for cleaning out the cave and caring for the children. We now know that those men were “chauvinists” and “sexists” and “pigs”. In their minds the only thing worse than a male chauvinist pig was a broad who doesn’t do what she’s told.

But at the time they were all we had, having killed off any feminist males, and so they had a dream.

Their dream started simple: to walk across the vast sea.

You see, if they couldn’t walk across it, then they had to walk around, which took a lot of time, and they had to stop for bathroom breaks. Bathrooms weren’t invented yet, and so you can imagine how hard traveling was in the 1950s era station wagon with ancient men holding it until the invention was created.

This is why the average male life expectancy was around 25 years.

Seriously, you try to hold it for twenty years while someone figures out how to build a flush toilet!

But I digress.

1950s man’s dream, which remains the male dream still today, was to shatter last year’s record travel time for the journey to the in-laws during the holiday season. Walking on water would make the dream a reality. Unfortunately, early experiments resulted in a confirmation that the density of water to male foot ratio only resulted in soaked loincloths. An uncomfortable sensation, especially during the monsoon season.

Then one day, likely while drowning witches (from Webster’s II, witch: n. an uppity woman who fails to clean and should be drowned), he realized that certain things would float. Wood and sheep’s bladders were especially good at this, but also getting really drunk and being hit on the head by another man also worked. Of course, it’s hard to navigate when drunk and hit on the head, so this mode of travel was quickly abandoned.

Instead, men found that they could fashion crafts, which they would call bobs, since that’s exactly what it would do when it was placed in the water. The Anglo-Saxon corruption of the word ‘bob’, was first written down by in Ye Very Olde Englysh by Venerable Bede around 1951:

To the most glorious King Ceolwulph, Bede, the servant of Christ and Priest
Of the situation of Britain and Ireland, and of their ancient inhabitants
Caius Julius Caesar, the first Roman that came into Britain
The invention and creation of the first wondrous and wooden Boebbs . . .
(Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum)

The only problem with these bobs (or boats for you land-lubbing cretins) was that in the dark, near rocky shores or dangerous shoals they would suddenly and mysteriously, lose their ability to float and disappear. Pirates also lodged complaints that they couldn’t stay close to land in their pursuit of treasure-laden booty at night. No one was certain how or why this was happening. This was especially prevalent in the city of Alexandria, Virgiana, where they built one of the Six Wonders of the World (the Seventh Wonder, a giant cigarette at Marlboro, Virginia, having been smoked): Pharos of Alexandria.

This made clear to all the vessels as they came closer to land that they were about to dash themselves against rocks, coral reefs, other ships, or whales (blubberous maximus). Bobbers, or sailors as they’re now erroneously called, knew exactly when to scream their last as they plunged against sharp and unforgiving terra firm.

And so, dear reader, you can see that even today, the lighthouses that once illuminated the deaths of thousands of innocent, pious and charity-driven men is still as important today as it was fifty years ago.