Come See the Violence Inherent in the System!

I suppose I should explain this:

I've been reading Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur lately (and Shan, you're right, they are all dicks).  One of the things about Malory, compared to some¹ of the other Arthurian romances, is that the Lady of the Lake has been split into multiple characters.

The one most people associate with the Lady of the Lake (the one who gives Arthur his sword, Excalibur²), gets her head chopped off about five chapters after she first shows up.  (By Sir Balin, for those keeping track.)  However there's another one, sometimes referred to by Malory as the Lady of the Lake, sometimes the Damosel of the Lake, (or sometimes "the chief lady of the lake," or "one of the damosels/ladies of the lake"), who is better known as Nimue.  (She of the sealing Merlin in a cave/glass tower/whatever-the-author-you're-reading-has-decided-is-best; Malory prefers caves.)

Of course, Malory is rather strange in his manner of referring to her.  Sometimes there's just a reference to "the damosel of the lake," or "one of the damosels/ladies of the lake," whilst at other times he goes out of his way to ensure that you know that this particular aquatic female is Nimue — despite the fact that the other, unnamed Lady of the Lake left her head on the floor of Camelot several books earlier, and therefore could not possibly be appearing again.

If one were wont to be silly (and when am I not?), it would be a simple matter to take this further and read these passages as indicating that there must be further women who hang around large freshwater pools.  From this arose the joke that surely they must have unionised by now and, combined with a dash of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, we get the idea of the Watery Tarts Local.

Since I want to experiment with some DIY screenprinting instructions I've found, I promised that I'd make a shirt with those words on it (not for me, obviously).  Of course, if you have words, why not add a picture as well?  Combine Aubrey Beardsley, a gear, and some fiddling in Illustrator, and you get the sample images below.  I'm posting them here for comments, so feel free to say whatever you want.  (I have no idea how much detail will have to be removed from the centre image to get it to print properly.  That will be one of the things that I shall be finding out on a cheap, thrift-store shirt before I try making a real one.)

I'm personally fonder of the non-small caps one, as I feel that the As look too much like Us in the other.

And, as a final note, the number 1470 is a further joke, as Malory notes that he finished the book in "the ninth year of the reign of King Edward the Fourth," or 1470 CE.

Edit: I forgot, there's also a black version.

1.  I say some, as many of the early Arthurian romances don't agree with each other.  In some the Lady of the Lake who gives Arthur Excalibur, and the one who seals Merlin away, are the same person, whilst in others (e.g. Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniæ) there is no Lady of the Lake (and hence no Lancelot).

2.  If I may be blunt, Malory didn't do the best job at making the various conflicting narratives into one coherent one.  Arthur's sword, the one he drew forth from the stone, is referred to as Excalibur in Book I, Chapter IX (to use Caxton's book/chapter divisions).  However, this sword is then noted as breaking in battle with King Pellinore (Chapter XXIII of the same book), at which point Merlin takes Arthur to the Lady of the Lake, and she gives him Excalibur (Chapter XXV).  So, in reference to the question of whether Arthur got Excalibur from the Lady of the Lake, or whether it was the sword in the stone, Malory says that the answer is yes.