A reader submitted to Stachist Mustache Headquarters a mustache all the way from Izegem, Belgium. Apparently this is their town crier. I don’t even know what a town crier does but if it’s a government job that involves growing a Van Buren stache and shouting, then I’d like to be the San Francisco town crier please. Just give me a bell…

Now, I, like many others, remember first hearing of this band only after their hit single “Take Me Out” permeated the radio waves in 2004.  And I thought that would be all I would care to hear.   But after acquiring the Scottish post-punks’ album, I took a greater interest in their other songs, and their sound in general.  So when asked to write about the kids from Glasgow, I leapt at the chance to—

What?  Wait, what?  Dammit.  You mean to say, I’m supposed to write about the Archduke?  That mustachioed man killed in Sarajevo in 1914?  The heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire gunned down on a side street while touring the provincial capital?  The European leader whose death at the hand Gavrilo Princip—of the radical Serbian nationalist organization, the Black Hand—was the spark that set off the powder keg that was the Balkan Peninsula, that began the chain of events which culminated in the inevitable war every sword-rattling belligerent imperialist in Europe was clamoring for at the dawn of the 20^th century, a war which set a bloody precedent for a hellishly catastrophic hundred years of world history—war, conflict, and suffering at an unprecedented scale?  Him?  That guy in the helmet?  Oh, well, I can do that.

Born several years before his death, Franz never aspired in particular to start a world war, or to become an archduke for that matter.  Unfortunately, history—and his father—had other plans.

Read the rest of this entry »