This Blog Rules | Why go elsewhere?

  • Home
  • strange news
    • Celebrity Dental Disasters
    • Early Signs of a Serial Killer
    • 12 World’s weirdest stadiums
    • Facebook default pictures are more fun now
    • Man living with a Grizzly bear
    • Top 10 largest concerts in history
    • Top 30 Funniest New Year’s Resolutions
    • Powerful Symbols And Celtic, Viking and Japanese Culture
    • 10 countries you probably never heard about
    • 10 Things You Should Never, Ever Search on Google
    • The Top 5 Worst Online Universities
    • Top 10 Ancient Greek Artifacts All History Buffs Should Know About
  • creative
  • art
  • street art
  • movies
    • 8 ATT Commercial Girl Facts
  • music
  • fun
    • Top 30 Funniest New Years Resolutions
    • Top 10 Funny Christmas Songs
    • Top 10 Famous Historic MISquotes
  • animals
  • sports
    • Finding a Good Accident Avoidance Course
  • Privacy
Home » 5 Real Librarians With Wrecking Balls for Gonads: Part 1 of 5: St. Lawrence the Librarian

5 Real Librarians With Wrecking Balls for Gonads: Part 1 of 5: St. Lawrence the Librarian

September 24, 2011 By Anne Burwell 1 Comment

by Will Conley

This is Part One in a series of five posts about real librarians who are completely and utterly badass. We at This Blog Rules are looking at you, and we’re thinking, “This reader looks like he hasn’t read a book since 1995. Well fuck him. If he can’t get his ass to a library every couple of decades, we’ll bring the library to him — except without the dust and that homeless dude rolling his daily cigarettes in a corner study station.” Thus was born this series. We hope you enjoy it.

Librarians come in three popular flavors:

Boner-inducing, dust-farting and Noah Wyle.

That selection seems a bit limited to us. We submit for your consideration a fourth kind of librarian: the prodigiously indestructible-nadded.

And no, we’re not talking about Conan the Librarian. He’s fake by two degrees. We’re talking about real, live librarians whose testicles or ovaries could balance the Encyclopedia Britannica on the Scales of Justice.

History is studded with librarians who thumped their hefty baby-coders onto the proverbial chopping block in the name of truth, justice, the church, poor people, gay people, and the right of all people to upend a urinal and make everyone call it art.

Take this patron saint of librarians and archivists, for starters…

Saint Lawrence the Librarian

In third century Italy, pagan was the thing to be. The phrase “I’m a Christian” was slang for “It would be my honor for you to burn and then pee on me.”

Most folks were glad to take you up on it, too. In August of 258, the Roman Emperor Valerian ordered his brute squads to seek and destroy all bishops, priests and deacons. Valerian’s headhunters martyred six deacons before nabbing a seventh—a deacon named Lawrence, whose job it was to keep track of the church archives—and dragged him before the emperor.

Valerian ordered Lawrence to use his insider knowledge to track down “all the treasures of the church” and bring them hither. Valerian gave Lawrence two days to deliver the loot along with the names and whereabouts of any remaining clergy for ransoming purposes, because metric shitte-tonnes of alms was apparently chump change.

So off Lawrence went, a suspiciously cheerful whistle on his lips. When he returned, he presented to Valerian not material riches, but all the poorest, filthiest, sickest Christians he could round up.

“These,” said Lawrence, his balls thundering throughout the land, “are the treasures of the church.”

Valerian killed him a lot for that little zinger.

Historians maintain that Lawrence probably died by beheading. The commonly accepted legend, however—which we choose to believe simply because it reminds us of Jack Bauer—was that he was slow-roasted on a huge grill in an attempt to get him to cough up the goods. But when the tantalizing smell of Lawrence’s cooking flesh had sufficiently perfumed the town square, Lawrence said to his torturers:

“Turn me over. I am done on this side.”

You could practically hear the spontaneous impregnation of every woman in Rome.

The church reaped a nice crop of groupies that year. The market had spoken: the grilling story must be true. Since then, artists have always depicted Saint Lawrence holding a grill. For that reason, this patron saint of librarians is also a patron saint of cooks, which is both true and adorably ignorant on the part of whoever made that call.

Sources:
http://valinor.ca/lawrence.html
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/09089a.htm
http://www.aug.edu/augusta/iconography/goldenLegend/lawrence.htm
http://www.terminartors.com/artworkprofile/Palma_Giovane-The_Martyrdom_of_St_Lawrence

Now, just because St. Lawrence was obviously a righteous son of a bitch, don’t go thinking church figures always play the honorable victim in this series. Fastforward a century and a half, and the power relationship between Christians and pagans is the exact opposite.

Tune in next time for Part Two, tentatively titled Hypatia: The Genius Scholar Who Advises Powerful Men, Defies the Maniacally Ignorant Establishment, and Throws Her Bloody Menstrual Rags at Lovelorn Suitors.

Author Will Conley has regular-sized gonads, for a horse. His opinions do not necessarily reflect those of ThisBlogRules.

Filed Under: fun Tagged With: archivists, chopping block, church archives, coders, conan the librarian, deacon, deacons, encyclopedia britannica, farting, flavors, headhunters, insider knowledge, noah wyle, ovaries, patron saint, roman emperor valerian, scales of justice, truth justice, urinal

About Anne Burwell

Daughter, sister, wife, mother and writer. I spend half of my free time writing and the other half reading contemporary literature. I like to start my day with half an hour of yoga and then I head over to my desk with a cup of green tea to start working on my sci fi novel. On weekends I like to head over to the country side for a breath of fresh air and to catch up with my mom.

Comments

  1. claudia says

    September 24, 2011 at 10:27 pm

    As a librarian, it’s nice to know that are still people out there who appreciate our work. Maybe a SFW version so I could show this to my manager? 😛

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

As an Amazon Associate, this site earns from qualifying purchases. We may also earn small commissions on purchases from other retail websites.

About Us

  • Home
  • strange news
    • Celebrity Dental Disasters
    • Early Signs of a Serial Killer
    • 12 World’s weirdest stadiums
    • Facebook default pictures are more fun now
    • Man living with a Grizzly bear
    • Top 10 largest concerts in history
    • Top 30 Funniest New Year’s Resolutions
    • Powerful Symbols And Celtic, Viking and Japanese Culture
    • 10 countries you probably never heard about
    • 10 Things You Should Never, Ever Search on Google
    • The Top 5 Worst Online Universities
    • Top 10 Ancient Greek Artifacts All History Buffs Should Know About
  • creative
  • art
  • street art
  • movies
    • 8 ATT Commercial Girl Facts
  • music
  • fun
    • Top 30 Funniest New Years Resolutions
    • Top 10 Funny Christmas Songs
    • Top 10 Famous Historic MISquotes
  • animals
  • sports
    • Finding a Good Accident Avoidance Course
  • Privacy

Recent Posts

  • A Beginner’s Checklist for Aspiring Cellists
  • The Best Kpop Songs Of The Last 10 Years
  • The 10 Best Action Anime Out Now
  • Top 10 Fastest Cars Ever Created In The World
  • The 10 Best Horror Anime Out Now

Categories

  • animals
  • Anti-virus
  • art
  • brews
  • creative
  • food
  • fun
  • gaming
  • infographic
  • interview
  • movies
  • music
  • sports
  • strange news
  • street art
  • tech
  • top list
  • Uncategorized

Copyright © 2022