Possibly, but they might be better known for their tours with the Dresden Dolls.
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Oscar Wilde was forced to crank on this machine, I believe. Or maybe it was a treadmill.
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Huh, pretty much the same reason the treadmill was invented. So I guess in
an alternate timeline not too different from ours, these are a staple in pretty much every gym.
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Wilde wrote De Profundis between January and March of 1897, near the end of his internment in Reading prison. His health had improved slightly since his early time in Pentonville, where he suffered miserably from dysentery and malnutrition. Sentenced to hard labor but ruled too weak for truly back-breaking work, he’d initially been ordered to pick oakum—a mind-numbing job involving the unraveling of rope into strands—alone in his cell. After his transfer to Reading, he was put in charge of distributing books from the prison’s limited library. When he eventually won the right to compose a letter in his cell, it was with the stipulation that each day’s pages be collected at nightfall. (Wilde only had occasional chances to read over the manuscript in full.) These odd restrictions suggest why so many thoughts and phrases—“the supreme vice is shallowness”—recur unchanged throughout De Profundis, but Wilde’s goal was clearly to produce a text that could transcend the circumstances of its production. “As for the corrections and errata,” he writes near the end of the letter in reference to the many edits he made once he had a chance to revise it,
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When the Russian plane carrying Griner to freedom touched down in Abu Dhabi, and she walked across the tarmac to board the American plane that would take her home, she crossed paths with Bout [the arms dealer she was exchanged for, who was imprisoned in the US], walking in the opposite direction. The man whose nickname was “the merchant of death” nodded his greeting and shook her hand. “Unlike my bruised hands,” Griner noticed, “Viktor’s hands were soft. So were the creases on his face. He’d spent much of his sentence doing artwork, I’d heard—painting portraits of cats. I’d spent mine with a table saw.”
(Italics my explanatory addition)
Of course, as an arms dealer he got the white collar prison treatment. I don’t think most prisoners in the US get to spend their time painting kittens.
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This machine could be used to determine the heat equivalent of work by measuring the temperature increase of the sand. There’s more to it, of course, but that’s the idea.
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Definitely a Steampunk NIN band.
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What the hell is his issue??
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He advanced an argument that we still see today-- that members of the criminal classes are not sufficiently deterred by the prospect of prison.
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This is almost definitely not the etymology of “screw” for guard. “Screw” was slang for key.
This has all the hallmarks of a folk-etymology.
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I think you’re mistaken here. As an arms dealer, he just knew where he could get new softer hands.
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I am surprised they didn’t have the prisoners engage in some sort of useful labor instead.
That was part of the idea of the punishment, though. Not only did prisoners have to perform this tedious, labor intensive activity, it produced nothing useful. I’m sure someone thought they were being a clever wag with that one. (See also the quote from Sydney Smith above.)
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