Once Upon An April 8th

Does the name Yorgos Kentrotas ring a bell? 

A while back, my Amazing-Missus reminded me of a great line that Ricky said to Lucy numerous times throughout their married-on-TV life: "You've got some splainin' to do."

I don't know Yorgos' actual story, but I'm guessing, based on mankind's long, long history of being caught red-handed, that he had some splainin' to do.

BTW: "To be taken with red hand" in ancient times was to be caught in the act, like a murderer with his hands red with his victim's blood. The use of red hand in this sense goes back to 15th-century Scotland and Scottish law. Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe (1819) contains the first recorded use of taken red-handed for someone apprehended in the act of committing a crime. The expression subsequently became more common as caught red-handed. --Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins by Robert Hendrickson (Facts on File, New York, 1997), pp. 135-136 and 138.

You see, on this day, April 8th in 1820, Yorgos, a peasant farmer on the Aegean island of Milos found something while digging rocks from his field. It turns out it was the famous Ancient Greek sculpture the Venus de Milo (created between 130 and 100 BC).

Picture the scene. Yorgos comes home dragging this 6' 8" statue of Aphrodite herself. I'm guessing the first words out of Mrs. Kentrotas mouth were something like, "Where did you drag HER up from?"

It's that scene that has been around since the first junior high boy was caught with a "girlie" magazine. When you think about it, it goes back to the beginning with Adam and Eve and the whole "apple" conundrum. 

Weirdly enough, it was also on this day a few years back that the tele-evangelistic Jimmy Swaggart was defrocked for cavorting with prostitutes when he should have been converting them.

Not that there's really any connection between Yorgos, Junior-High boys, Adam and Jimmy Swaggert. Or is there?

This is just Pops having some fun with the events of April 8th.