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Am I the only one who thinks this grizzly bear chair presented to Andrew Johnson in 1865 really seals his image as a villain? Who can’t see him drunkenly spewing racist epithets while sitting here? Did he click his fingers against the grizzly bear claws while undermining black rights? The possibilities are endless.
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Count the paws.
(can’t unsee)
Speaking of 8-legged frogs….
It’s polymelia day at LGM!
Why am I getting the image of Andrew Johnson as a Bond Villain with Grant, Thaddeus Stevens, or even Thomas Nast as the hero.
This chair is also in very bad taste even for the standards of the time.
I was gonna say…
It’s just ugly and creepy.
Indeed.
It certainly suggests an image of him as a supervillain breeding insect-bear hybrids.
Gives new meaning to the old fantasy standard Bugbear.
Way more exciting than the band.
Aww. The band is exciting in its own subtle way.
Presented to the president by a private citizen. I bet all Barack Obama gets is hate mail and weird photoshops.
It suggests to me that Sagamore Hill is somehow incomplete.
I had the exact same thought.
The chair used to be owned by Dr. Moreau.
Are we not men?
We are Devo.
Now picture Andrew Johnson on a chair with a bear head snarling underneath Johnson’s crotch.
Well, so much for sleeping tonight.
Whatever you do, don’t look at the chair maker’s wikipedia page.
I want to be “Known for: presidential chairs”
Not for “playing for President Lincoln on a fiddle made from a mule skull?”
I take that after he was done with the chair he used the leftover grizzly parts to make his beard.
Nope, quite the opposite in fact: he put a little bit of himself into everything he made.
He’s not as bad as The Chairmaker in Use of Weapons…
Just because you brought it up
http://i34.tinypic.com/vfjslk.jpg
Can you imagine what the folks from “Queer Eye For the Straight Guy” would say about that?
“OMG! What? Even the moose-head ran off when it took one look at that monstrosity?”
something tells me that chair didn’t get a lot of use in the white house, if it even saw the light of day, and wasn’t stuck in a basement closet. it’s pretty disgusting, even by 1860′s standards. although, it was probably pretty warm during the winter.
It’s terrible, but how could my opinion of Andrew Jackson be any lower? Answer; there is no way that could be achieved. So this is merely an example of appalling tacky Americana.
Or appealingly tacky. It’s entertaining to think that we’ve discovered something that Theodore Roosevelt would find too unsubtle for his tastes.
I’m still laughing AND it’s true.
Well-played, old man.
Andrew Johnson, not Andrew Jackson.
And it was presented to him as a gift to the President, so it’s possible he didn’t even like it.
He put it on display in the Yellow Oval Room.
Buchanan, Lincoln and Hayes all got elkhorn chairs–didn’t rate bears.
By the standards of today, Buchanan might have rated a bear
I got that.
Zing!
Eh, it’s not like there’s been a non-awful President named Andrew.
Wait, you mean they’re not the same person? I am 100% serious… I only just now realized that.
Now that you mention it, I’ve never seen a picture of Andrew Jackson and Andrew Johnson together. Hmmmmmm…..
I am going to have to ask you to step outside, sir, for pistols at 4 paces.
…although I want Sam Raimi to option it for the next Evil Dead chapter.
So is that sucker still in the White House somewhere, or did they move it to that giant warehouse where we keep the Ark of the Covenant?
Yeah, what do they do with all the weird gifts the President gets? I totally want in on that yard sale.
I want one. I wonder if CB2 or West Elm has them?
It’s a Second Amendment thing, the right to Bear Arms.
Wikipedia reports about the chairmaker: “He died in 1888 after accidentally shooting himself in the leg.”
So really Grover Cleveland got the best chair?
He got two, but separated by four years
Omigaud.
And we go around bemoaning Andrew Johnson’s lack of decency?
The Internets, you win them.
You’re jealous that you don’t have your own.
I am sick and tired of all the Game of Thrones coverage.
LOL
The throne of Bear Island?
It’s all freaks today at LGM – 6-legged bears, eight-legged frogs and two-backed beasts.
Not to mention the troll on the Detroit thread.
“the great feature of the chair was that, by touching a cord, the head of the monster grizzly bear with jaws extended, would dart out in front from under the seat, snapping and gnashing its teeth as natural as life.”
How the heck did this chair not make it into Wild, Wild West?
Oh dear God, i thought you were kidding until I read the link.
This would be great as a Santa chair.
This is almost as creepy as the passage in Vidal’s “Burr” where someone tries to sell Burr “Indian shoes”–which are just that.
OT: hilarious mistake made by TV dude stealing picture off the internet and using it without checking it out. Bet you didn’t know about “All In My Snatch” by Paula Broadwell…..
The first thing I thought of was 2 people spooned, kneeling on the seat of that chair, facing backward, leaning forward onto the fur of the….uh…
Okay, never mind. I apologize. Utterly disgusting.
But…
…No. Excuse me. Unforgivable.
.
.
Fur-cushioned knees, though…
Now we know why Newt tried to see if the Smithsonian had this chair in its collection…
$10 says Jeffrey Loria has one of these in his office.
Loria’s chair is made of Miami and Montreal fans
Loria would have to go using endangered species for his extravagant symbol of cartoon villainy, wouldn’t he?
You actually have to give Loria some kind of credit. Remorse over his role in moving the Expos out of Canada seems to have motivated him to buy up an expensive team and then ship it to Toronto.
Thanks for not pointing out the Humboldt County origins of that excrescence. Those bears were some of the last of the Lost Coast.
I didn’t realize it was Humboldt County until commenters above pointed us to the Wikipedia page. Which was plenty disturbing.
That would make a fine crapper.