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FreudianSlippers posted:"Black Bart" Roberts: If I remember my manual for Sid Meier's Pirates!, the ABH AMH stands for A Barbadian's Head and A Martinician's Head. He had a real hate on for Barbados and Martinique in particular.
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Feb 3, 2016 00:31
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BravestOfTheLamps posted:Tiberius!? My god. The Isosceles lock.
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Mar 29, 2016 22:11
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from here.
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We used to have a "poo poo I just figured out" thread; I didn't see it in the first three pages so I'm assuming it's been mercifully killed. I just figured out that Roger Bacon the very clever monk, Francis Bacon the very clever proto-scientist, and Francis Drake the pirate/explorer were all different people living at different times. Shame on me.
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Apr 4, 2016 06:48
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I'm disappointed she's not standing on a Barbadian's head and a Martiniquian's head. Good balance, that Black Bart.
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Jul 4, 2016 18:33
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Sometimes when I'm preparing dinner I'll take a second to reflect on what a broke-dick 13th century dirt farmer would think of my utterly profligate use of salt and pepper, to say nothing of my cupboard shelf full of spices that would have beggared his city-state
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Jul 29, 2016 03:40
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bean_shadow posted:I'm always amused that there was an astronaut named Mr. Bean. Mr. Bean Goes to the Moon. I don't know if he's still doing it, but for a long time, Alan Bean painted moonscapes. In the paintings, he pressed in tiny fragments of keepsake patches from his EVA suit, patches stained with dust from the lunar surface. So he sells the paintings as including moon dust.
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Dec 13, 2016 18:38
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zoux posted:When I read The Making of the Atomic Bomb what raised my eyebrows the most was the construction of the world's first artificial reactor, Chicago Pile One. I guess our modern perception of nuclear reactors is that they are highly secure, shielded and protected facilities that must be carefully monitored and maintained lest we all die in a nuclear fireball, so learning the first one was literally a pile of graphite blocks, some with uranium in them, that were stacked by hand underneath the bleachers at Stagg Field at the University of Chicago seemed a little negligent to me. There's the old folk etymology for the word "scram" as it pertains to shutting down a nuclear reactor, as standing for something like Safety Control Rod Axe Man. There's supposed to have been a set of control rods, dangling over the reactor pile, held in place by a single rope. In the case of a runaway fission event, there was a guy stationed with an axe ready to chop the rope, drop the rods and stifle the reaction. Whether the Chicago Pile was actually built like that or not, I don't know, but it's a cute enough story. Also I always like the technical euphemisms hiding the horrible monsters of nuclear research. "Critical excursion", "physics package".
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Jan 9, 2017 23:28
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bean_shadow posted:I especially remember that episode because the few times I would catch an episode of I Love Lucy it was always THIS one. The gently caress is up with that, anyway? It's like, back when I would still watch a rerun of Seinfeld, half the time it was The Marble Rye. Do networks only buy like a quarter of the episodes for syndication?
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Feb 23, 2017 18:53
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ToxicSlurpee posted:There's also a certain kind of maggot that's used to get dead tissue out of bad wounds because they won't eat living meat. They'll devour every last shred of already dead tissue. Then you rinse them out, clean the wound again, and stitch it up. I learned about them when I was first getting into motorcycling because apparently maggot therapy is a whole lot more pleasant for road rash than traditional wound debridement, which features a medical professional angrily scrubbing the dead skin off of your live skin with a stiff-bristled brush
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Jun 26, 2017 00:08
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Aesop Poprock posted:I actually drive a Mazda 3 is this a real thing The first gen 3 is notorious for premature body panel rust, especially above the rear wheel wells. Not sure about frame rust.
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Aug 6, 2017 06:30
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Platystemon posted:He should have commuted it only on the condition that they climb Kilimanjaro. "We've talked it over, and do you have any mountains that don't have "Kill a man" in the name?"
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Aug 25, 2017 21:42
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Ranestone posted:Some Turkish archaologists think they found the tomb of Santa Claus/St. Nicholas recently: The idea of maybe possibly not digging up St Nicholas was rejected out of hand. "What do you think is going to happen," one researcher was overheard to say. "What, like his revenant is going to stride the earth in some kind of grisly Santapocalypse? Superstitious nonsense."
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Oct 12, 2017 18:37
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Alhazred posted:In ancient China you actually had to collect a certain number of heads in order to be promoted. Of course, no-one said it had to be different heads each time. And thus began the legend of the Dragonballs...
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Dec 28, 2017 14:45
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Nth Doctor posted:London has rented a couple of properties from The Crown since the 13th century. Nobody knows where they are, but the city still pays rent annually of: a sharp axe, a dull knife, six large horseshoes, and sixty one nails. Ok ok yeah but what about the guy whose rent is that he has to fight anyone the king wants him to
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Mar 23, 2018 16:45
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One of the first Europeans to write sympathetically about Native American cultures was a conquistador named Cow Head. Like, he was Spanish so he had one of those long multi-name names, but his family name was Cabeza de Vaca. Head of Cow. It's a small thing but I like it. Wish my name was Cow Head.
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Jun 4, 2018 05:10
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I love that Philogelos exists. I love that it shows that some jokes were already old when they were written down nearly two thousand years ago. I think my favorite ancient text is the Edwin Smith Papyrus. It's not funny at all - it's an Egyptian medical text that is at least 3600 years old. It talks about various types of traumatic injuries - head, neck, chest, limbs - and tells the reader how to treat them if possible, and what to do for the poor sap if no treatment is possible. (This amounts to "sit them up, make them comfortable, wait for them to die or not".) There's a few magic spells in it, but most of the treatments are entirely realistic - wrap wounds or pack them with clean cloth, sew cuts closed, splint fractures, apply raw meat to stop bleeding, or honey to treat a wound long term (keeps the bacteria out). It describes various parts of the brain; it describes spinal injuries that might result in paralysis. I find it a moving and humbling read. It was written by people who cared about whether their charges lived or died, and presumably it was written so that more people could be helped to recover from trauma. It was also written by people who cared about the reputation of the medical profession. Each injury recommends the reader tell the patient, "this is an ailment I can treat", "this is an ailment I can contend with", or "this is an ailment I can do nothing for". It doesn't have the reader doing unnecessary treatments for fatal injuries, that would inevitably fail to solve the problem and make the reader look bad. A PDF of the original translation A more accessible translation, except it's a Flash page
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Jul 17, 2018 17:35
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Say Nothing posted:I find roman emperor Maximinus Thrax interesting solely based on the fact that his reported height was 8'6". I'm guessing there is some extreme exaggeration there, but he does look like he had gigantism. Uh, are we just going to gloss over that his name was "Max Thrax"? That's a name I'd expect for the protagonist of an Apogee shareware sidescroller.
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Jul 20, 2018 16:48
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Samovar posted:People received coats of arms that often alluded to their work. With that in mind, can anyone guess what Steven Varallyay's job was? (please note, v. NSFW) This is the 1997 Toyota Tacoma water pump gasket of heraldry
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Aug 1, 2018 19:54
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chitoryu12 posted:Do drunk elephants see pink humans? Mostly they drink so they can forget about pink humans
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Aug 13, 2018 18:46
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Did they also plan to label the monkeys 1-16 and 18-20 because I hear that works every tine
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Aug 24, 2018 05:07
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Off course
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Aug 30, 2018 16:38
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yea
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There's a few of those in English (and I've never taken Latin, I just like this poo poo, and it pops into my head on occasion) Brutus ad sum iam forte Caesar aderat Brutus sic in omnibus Caesar sic in at That's, Brutus had some jam for tea, Caesar had a rat. Brutus sick in omnibus, Caesar sick in hat alternatively Brutus aderat forte Caesar ad sum iam Brutus sic in omnibus Caesar sic intram
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Aug 31, 2018 19:06
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Plastik posted:According to Arnold himself, he can apparently speak perfect English. So that means, the person with the best Arnie imitation in the world is Arnie?
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Sep 3, 2018 18:50
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:Whether or not it's true, it should be standard practice to this day. Doo doo doo, lookin' out my front door
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Sep 26, 2018 23:26
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This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a slow quiet fart E: I just remembered the clathrate gun hypothesis and now I'm sad and scared
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Sep 27, 2018 06:15
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Nessus posted:They largely disproved that one. Well! That's a nice thing to have read this morning.
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Sep 27, 2018 16:13
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drrockso20 posted:It's a shame no one picked up on the Boney M reference I used I refuse to acknowledge boney m ever since I saw that docudrama about the guy stranded on the mountain who hallucinated "Brown Girl In The Ring" for hours on end
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Sep 27, 2018 19:59
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Keru posted:As always:
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Nov 4, 2018 15:13
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A couple years ago when I was reminded this existed, I thought, man, Grace Slick must roll over in her grave every time this is played. Then I found out a. she ain't dead, and b. she was still the singer for Starship when they recorded it. She's Bush-scale culpable.
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Nov 7, 2018 20:47
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The guy who drew that political cartoon of a merry fatass farting on a picture of King George (That is TREASON Johnny!) was a prolific cartoonist and died super early, of typhus at the age of 21
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Nov 15, 2018 23:24
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Scandinavian explorer: ok Giant wearing an enormous fur coat: makes sense Had a wooden leg: that's only fair Caught in an avalanche, escaped via frozen poop knife: understandable Won tens of thousands of dollars on a game show: my brain does the mental equivalent of the horrible grinding sound when you shift gears in a manual car but you let the clutch out before putting it in gear
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Mar 29, 2019 14:11
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If they did it was Jonesy's pubes from Seventh platoon, he's a real prankster that Jonesy
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Jul 22, 2019 20:18
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Vindolanda posted:Joseph Lister, 1st Baron Lister (1827-1912), was the pioneer of antiseptic surgery. And now I understand where the name of the mouthwash came from
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Jul 23, 2019 13:15
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Byzantine posted:Public hair sounds reasonable if you're wanting a lock of hair but it's a secret affair so you can't cut the hair on your head Cutting a lock of public hair in honor of a secret affair seems counterproductive
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Jul 23, 2019 20:12
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I'm not used to seeing the word "bulgar" and my brain keeps trying to interpret it as a horn player, a thief, a type of wheat, or a hot ground beef sandwich. I am aware of the nation of Bulgaria.
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Aug 8, 2019 20:25
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ToxicFrog posted:And is also where we get the words czar, tsar, and kaiser. In the Aubrey-Maturin series, author Patrick O'Brian crams five or six years worth of sea voyage and character development into six historical months of 1813. For an earlier book, he suggested that its events take place in a notional 1812a and 1812b. What a shame that the Napoleonic Wars did not last another thirty years... (Also he had no idea when he wrote the first few novels that he'd be writing boat fight adventures right up until he died, and these first ones involved some large time skips that could have been used rather more efficiently, if he'd known)
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Dec 1, 2019 23:32
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Meanwhile alligator is just an anglicization of El Lagarto (The Lizard)
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Dec 13, 2019 00:00
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wheatpuppy posted:Is it a family name like Boutros Boutros-Ghali? I will never not sing his name to the Davy Crockett theme thanks to an episode of Letterman I saw once
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Dec 13, 2019 05:41
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I don't know the full story here, but Stalin died in '58 and his successor, Nikita Khrushchev, was notable for his policy of de-emphasizing Stalin's influence on the Soviet government. I'd bet he ordered whoever was in charge of reissuing the film to remove as much of Stalin as possible from it.
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Apr 23, 2020 16:36
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barbecue at the folks posted:I just learned that Renato Bialetti, the son of the inventor of the Moka Pot and the long-time CEO of the eponymous company, was buried in an urn shaped like... you guessed it, If this becomes a trend the funeral for the guy who invented the aeropress is going to be wild
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May 31, 2020 09:26
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