My brother has this sweatshirt he found at a thrift store that proudly exclaims, "I'm not only perfect, I'm Italian as well!" The words perfect and Italian are bold and in red and the shirt is laid out in such a way that you could just read it as "perfect Italian."

He likes the shirt because he isn't Italian in the slightest, so the implication is that he isn't perfect as well.

The direction I'm going with all this is that even Italians aren't perfect. We will be exploring this shocking statement in the weeks to come.

--Geoff

Frederick was historically not a fan of the female gender. Part of this came from the fact that, as a way of getting out of the prison his father had thrown him in, he agreed to marry the woman of his family's choosing: a dullard who didn't remotely understand Frederick's intellectual interests. Then there was the influence of his friends, who wrote Enlightened tracts Scientifically Demonstrating that 'female brains are 30% smaller than male, and composed primarily of quicksilver, which is of course unreliable...' and other such charming bits of salon trivia....

Peter and Frederick were actually in similar situations. Peter also was wedged into a marriage with a generally good person whose only problem was Not Quite Getting what Peter was trying to do. He was a thorough dick to her, eventually forcing her into the convent which, by Russian custom, was equivalent to a divorce, allowing him to remarry a hot peasant woman. He was constantly unfaithful, though in later life he would berate his own son when the lad put his mistress before his wife. By contrast, Frederick stayed married, but just never talked or had anything to do with his wife pretty much ever. Who was the bigger dick?

YOU DECIDE!!

- Count Dolby von Luckner