The Holy Roman Emperor and the Mothra Hordes

Dear readers, I begin this week’s edition with the happy announcement that recently I have been nominated for not one, but two blog awards. 

First, thanks go to Scary Carrie at the Travelin-gineer, for giving me the Liebster Award.  Her blog is a cute and funny look at stereotypes of traveling Americans abroad and how not to be an obnoxious tourist.

Many thanks also to CrakGenius for the nod with the Versatile Blogger Award.  CG is neither a plumber nor a drug dealer, but he is a man with hilarious experiences involving scorpions and allergy medication, among other things.

With these awards you’re supposed to follow various rules, answering questions about yourself in a blog post and nominating several other blogs to receive the award and do the same.  However, you do not come here to read about me, you come here to look at pictures of nude nuns and rabbits with guns, according to Google.  As such I am going to cheat and just direct you to my blogroll at the right of the page for some blogs I read which are funny and awesome, and thus you should check them out.

With that, we turn to this week’s picture.  In honor of receiving the award-nods above, I thought a bit of apotheosis would be appropriately modest.

The Apotheosis of Charles VI by Paul Troger is an 18^th century fresco found in Göttweig Abbey. 

Apotheosis, we recall, is the exaltation of a figure to divine status, the transformation of man into a god.  Here it is the Holy Roman Emperor Charles VI, depicted as the god Apollo.  Because that is the kind of association you make when you are a Roman Catholic ruler, apparently.

So he’s charging around in his golden chariot as a new god, leering death rays out of his eyeballs at the viewer.  But the stuff going on around the fringes is far more entertaining. 

First, we have Mothman, scattering flowers in his honor.  I kind of assume this is supposed to be an angel of some sort, but moth wings kind of make for the least impressive angel ever.  I mean, if anyone brushes against him, he’s crippled.  And no god wants an army of angel supporters that keep flying into bonfires.

Next, there is the most sarcastic angel ever.  She is playing that trumpet thinking, “Oh.  Yeah.  Great.  A new god-master.  Just what I wanted.  No really.”  I’m pretty sure she’d be making rude gestures if her hands weren’t full.

Then we come to the flying monkey gremlins.  This may be the missing evolutionary link to our ancient bird ancestors.  Either that, or the product of a jungle party where the chimpanzees and eagles got really drunk.

More moth-winged folks, but this time the wings are attached to nothing but baby heads looking lovingly at each other.  Because that’s not creepy.

Finally, we have a man with very large, fake elf ears being abducted by half-snake people with paws and dragon wings.  Or maybe they’re just playing invisible 3D Twister.  The woman with the spear they’re looking at might actually have the game spinner behind her shield.  I bet it is difficult to play Twister when you haven’t got legs.

So yes.  Turn into a god and get snarky followers with monstrous deformities.  Also blog awards.  Not that you turn into a god and automatically get blog awards.  Although I bet you would have some pretty great blog-fodder as a god.