Velociworld

Fruits of the Loom

Whoever invented the loom in ancient times must have been a radical bastard. Or a free thinker. Or a free radical, for you chemistry geeks. There being no patent office, or concept of specie, I'm sure he also died in poverty of infection from a boar tusk to the testicles. Or, if the inventor was a woman, from giving birth to Siamese triplets. (An aside: did prehistoric midwives perform episiotomies? If so, with what? A jagged piece of flint? Or was it just Tear and Bear?)

But thinkit: to go from foul, smelly, vermin-infested, poorly tanned pelts and hides from yesterday's luncheon entree to raiments of cotton, and wool, and silk! Those Chinese bastards! must have been incredibly liberating. And the quality ramped up quickly, as evidenced by those cave drawings of Stone Age men sporting all those shimmering toiles.

Gandhi was a fan of the loom, of course. Those were his two great joys in life: drinking his own piss and working the loom. Now that's a spectacular level of civilized development by anyone's reckoning, I would think.

The loom: what a complex machine for the unibrow set to create. I'm impressed. By God, I am.

One more question: where did the Indians get all those cool blankets? Did they bring the genius of the loom across the Bering Land Strait 13,000 years ago? Or did they purchase their blankets from crusty general store mercantilers, who charged them double, then spit tobacco juice on them to "whiten 'em up a bit"? I need to look into that.