WARNING: BI-CURIOUS ALERT
Being Valentines Day, my better half and I felt it appropriate to sit down and watch Disney's Beauty and the Beast. Like you do. And, as the title makes obvious, it reminded me of a fact that was so apparent to me in my formative years. Gaston is truly awesome.

If it really makes you happy, you can listen to that feminist kook Belle's side of the story and go on about how she didn't want to be 'the little wife' of Mr Truly, Utterly Awesome. Yep. Do me a favour, luv.

Gaston is a single-minded man of purpose. He's the greatest hunter in the whole world. No beast alive stands a chance against him. And he knows it.

There was only one girl for him - the most beautiful girl in town (as beautiful as he), yet that wasn't good enough for her. With a PG-13 rating, I believe the correct Disney term is "bitch". 

Who does she think she is? The girl tangled with the wrong man! No one says 'no' to Gaston!

To be dismissed (!), rejected (!), publicly humiliated (!) as he, would have created such a postmodern angst riddling in his awesome posterior. Why, it must have been more than he could bear (!)

Yet there was no man in town as admired as he, being, as he was, everyone's favourite guy. 

Truly everyone was awed and inspired by he, and, let's be honest, it wasn't very hard to see why.

As disturbing as it was to see Gaston looking so down in the dumps
I truly must confess, that everybody here, myself included, would like to be (you) Gaston.

Even when taking your lumps. (?)

But to be a little more contrite, allow me to compile the comprehensive list on why Gaston is awesome.

The Comprehensive List of Why Gaston is Awesome

1. He's the slickest
2. He's the quickest
3. His neck be the thickest
4. There's no man in town who is as manly as his perfect, pure paragon
5. Tom, Dick and Stanley would prefer to be on his team
6. No one's been (?) like him
7. No one's a kingpin like him
8. No one's got a swell cleft in their chin like him
9. He's quite the intimidating specimen
10. He can douse lights
11. He can fight
12. He can bite
13. He has biceps to spare
14. No scraggly bits, plus he's hairy
15. He can match wits
16. And spit
17. He can eat five dozen eggs
18. He's the size of a barge
19. He can tromp around with boots
20. He has fans and hangers on.

Excuse me while I swoon.

Le Petite Corporal was a pretty major dude of his time. For one thing, he spoke French, which in my books is a dead certain way to be awesome. He was also fond of muskets, bicornes and naval battles.

Oh, and he got exiled. Twice.

The first time he got kicked off the mainland for being a bit of a tactical genius, he arrived on the little tiny island of Elba, which had anywhere up to 100,000 inhabitants. In a few months, this dude rocks up, builds an army and navy for the island, spruces up its iron mines, and completely re-invigorates their agricultural sector. Not bad at all in the alpha male stakes.

After a little incident involving running Paris for 100 days (plug! zing!), a run in with the Duke of Wellington and subsequent meeting with known socialite Exile II of St Helena, Monsieur Bonaparte chanced upon another encounter with the God of Awesome.

Bonnie was going to escape. And he was going to do so by cunning use of a submarine.

He had friends in high places within the remnants of the Grande Armee in the USA (well, what would become the USA in a few orbital cycles), and as conspiracy theories go, secret orders came from TEXAS (Cowboy land) to rescue the Emperor from his rock in the Atlantic and bring him to America. With the army, they'd establish a new Napoleonic Order in Cowboy Land.

At roughly the same time, some dude who rated himself the Che Guevara type, also harboured plans to sneak Napoleon into South America, and form a new empire in the continent with Bonaparte.

(All refered to by Wikipedia, so it has to be true)

So essentially, you have a Frenchman with a penchant for sneaking booze onto the battlefield, a cool hat, the whole of Europe in the palm of his hand, TWO naughty corners in the form of island hideouts...

...and a choice between teaching cowboys French or starting up a JUNGLE EMPIRE.

That sort of awesome should come with a PG-rating.

Cast your mind, if you will, to a little piece of modern American history made famous by some fat documentarian in a cap:

Stirring, stirring stuff. But regardless of what side of the political picket fence you loiter, you just have to wander how much MORE effective his rallying cry would have been with some kind of pulsating beat backing it up.

A little something like this. (use as background music, the video is as dated as Heston's musket).

Only in America, then, the home of them kids' hippity hoppity music with the bippin' and the boppin' and malarkey and bein' up late, and the National Rifle Association, could form the incredible amalgamation that is the weaponised guitar.

Behold!

My friends, colleagues and haters among you: this truly is awesome. A grotesque thing of beauty, an interrupted cadence of musico-political malaise, the no-scope shot on a stairway to heaven.

The interrupted cadence, FYI, is known in musical theory terms as a "5-6". Assuming you're in the key of C, it means linking a G-major chord to the a-minor (usually from tonic to second inversion) to create a jarring effect that demands the melody continue on to resolve itself.

Anthropologists speculate the Weaponised Guitar owes much to patriarchal developments in hunter gatherer societies. By emulating bird calls and staking territory through song, primitive males sculpted phallic instruments to best each other in the arena of mortal rock-offs.

Women, instead, prefered to play steel drums.

As centuries progressed and jamfare developed from an agrarian recitatives to today's more post-modern, bullet-riddled angst, the instruments changed with technology.

Dating back to medieval times, musical swords developed a greater timbre and ability to hold a note through the forging of damascus steel, which coincidentally was also great for the lopping off of heads.

Several hundred years later, the discovery of gunpowder changed the face of the weaponised guitar forever. Musical notes could now be propelled at targets hundreds of yards away, with deadly accuracy.

The utility and usefulness of the foot-soldier, in short, was now over. Ambient virtuoso performances were now all the rage, while plonking along at muddled low frequencies became obsolete.

Virtuoso tunes quickly encompassed the value of individual performance and with it came the weaponised guitar solo, the most exalted of which involved extreme physical endurance, masterful improvisation, death and destruction, and a new high score.

Because of police clampdowns on such things, underground subcultures exist to this day where the weaponised guitar is lauded for its musical carnage and long-distance kill counts.

With the renaissance period came global trade and musical colonisation of the unknown world. Imperialist musicians made their way to Africa, who blindly taught euro and amero-centric melodies to the Dark Continent's masses.

Hamfisted borders were drawn like a child with a ruler, as Sudan's Drum 'n Bass became fatefully crossed with Ethiopian House, while Nigerian classic rock jarred heavily with the Central African Republic's punk rock generation.

Despite all the best of intentions, rock and roll was now a tool for bloodshed.

Don't worry, though. Apparently some cool UN dude showed up and all was well. Now all them Africans gotta do is open their borders to Walmart and eat US-patented GM crops. What am I, an expert?

As with all things post-modern, the spiraling technological development meant society had come so far, it had to go backwards. Futurist thinkers speculate the future of the weaponised guitar indeed lies in its primordial past.

Combining the greatest of electric sounds, brutal power and reproductive joy, the weaponised guitar now truly puts the 'gun' in '21 gun salute'.

Dimetrodons. The Kelly Slater of the dinosaur world. One angry, over‐sized Gila Monster with a penchant for thermoregulatory dorsal accessories.

An affiliate member of the Pelycosaur Windsurfing League, Dimetrodon has won a record 14 PWL premierships as well as seven Permian Period cups, second only to Titanophoneus. It's favoured position is fullback but can also deputise as a mean attacking winger.

Pelycosaur Windsurfing League Premiership winners:

1. Dimetrodon (14)
2. Edaphosaurus (9)
3. Ianthasaurus (6)
4. Sphenacodon (2)

In popular culture, Dimetrodon was cast as an aggressive, fire breathing carnivourous menace that chased redheads on beaches and ruined perfectly innocent raft-building exercises.

Such depictions were the result of propaganda stemming from conflicts during the Paleozoic period in which little critters would attempt to hitch a ride on the hip and happening Dimetrodon (Dimitri to his associates) only to be denied by the rather obvious appendage running the length of its spine.

As a result, films and theatre to this day, eons from its own era, undermine Dimetrodon's great legacy as an icon and pioneer of its age.

What may be closer to the truth was Dimetrodon was an amalgamation of many youth and anti-establishment subcultures - fighting against planet earth's oppressive heat regime, the symbolic 'punk' sail allowed Dimetrodon and his kin to expel heat from his body (the mere mention of which made the aristocratic lizards of his age quiver with prudish disdain) and left him all rather 'cool' as a result.

Dimetrodons were also distantly related to the first mammals in that despite it's impressive array of rip-snorting teeth (see above), it had developed some dental quirks allowing it to CHEW it's food. It's run with the cold-blooded establishment knew no bounds.

Dimetrodons are also credited with being the planet's first recognised tattoo artists.

Run into near-extinction, very few Dimetrodons exist in the modern age. Rumours abound that one sings in a sort-of-famous band, but this cannot be verified.