PYF Historical Fun Fact: (USER LOSETH POSTYNG PRIVILYGES FOR FOUR AND TWENTY HOURS)

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Peanut Butler: Jul 25, 2003

Drunk Nerds posted:

Obama is related to the English royal family?

Yep, or at least related to nobility, if not necessarily the current ruling family. He's something like the N-teenth cousin of Edward I. It's not just every president up to van Buren, it's all of 'em before or since.

You'd be hard-pressed to find anyone with English ancestry in the U.S. who isn't related to nobility nowadays, though. Van Buren's quirk is that he was non-Anglo in the days when even the wealthy merchant classes typically wouldn't stray far from home when seeking a spouse.

# ¿ Nov 5, 2015 10:58

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# ¿ May 3, 2024 08:29

Peanut Butler: Jul 25, 2003

I can't remember the context so this may be apocryphal, but I remember learning that in skirmishes with early German jet aircraft, Allied planes would make great use of their ability to actually be able to fly slowly, an ability the Nazis' air-hungry jet engines didn't have.

# ¿ Jul 23, 2016 01:31

Peanut Butler: Jul 25, 2003

xthetenth posted:

And yet.

Yeah I was gonna say it would be far, FAR from the first time that war and combat pushed people into irrationally suicidal behavior

in fact getting people to go to those lengths is like 95% of fighting a war

# ¿ Jul 23, 2016 15:56

Peanut Butler: Jul 25, 2003

steinrokkan posted:

A friend of mine makes historical replicas for living. Joining the rings of a mail is for the most part "just" a lot of hours with a pair of these:

that's nutty and rad- I knew a guy in high school who made bargain bin ren-faire level chainmail stuff out of thick gauge wire using a set of several modern pliers and vise-grips. Even with the modern tools it looked like a bitch of a time and was way, way slower than yarn knitting- and that's without fastening the rings, just bending them closed after threading

then again he didn't use heat and the tools were light enough to get some progress done on lunch break, so it probably doesn't compare well- but I'd really like to see a fake How Its Made book where industrial engineers imagine the machines we'd devise to mass-produce obsolete things like ringmail as though they were crucial to national defense and not just ornaments

Come to think, that reminds me of the resurgence of the pike during the Kansas/Missouri 1850s Border War (an event that is fuckin chock full of historical fun facts and historical sad facts)- John Brown is credited with designing a cheap, easy to produce polearm that was a bootleg of the Bowie knife favored by pro-slavery forces. In 1857 he took a looted Missourian knife to a blacksmith and had him forge 950 pikes at a buck a pop to distribute to freed slaves over the following years. Et voila, the creatively named John Brown Pike was born

gonna do a better effort post on Border War stuff; I'm from there and that conflict still shapes so much of the current economic and political conditions in Kansas City- in typical winding road of history fashion, there's possibly no Garmin without John Brown, no basketball as we know it without William Quantrill

Peanut Butler has a new favorite as of 11:01 on Feb 25, 2017

# ¿ Feb 25, 2017 10:58

Peanut Butler: Jul 25, 2003

Wheat Loaf posted:

everyone would be grumbling about Clinton's vice-president (Joe Lieberman) losing to Donald J Trump last year.

filled in some blanks here- there's no way the fat man stays out of it in Timeline-Kes-Lives, he just rides there on misogyny peppered with racism instead of the other way around

# ¿ Feb 25, 2017 11:23

Peanut Butler: Jul 25, 2003

Wheat Loaf posted:

Nah, hadn't Liberman spent the past eight years or so endorsing George Bush? I reckon he'd be on the outs with the Clintons by the time '08 rolled around.

We're going counterfactual here which is as fun as it is uncertain; but I don't think that'd faze the Clintons at the end of the day- Patrick is a pick that I think reflects more risktaking than Hillary would ever be willing to muster- if not Lieberman, then Chafee or some other GOP-lite dem that a spreadsheet chose

also I think you have a deep misunderstanding of Donny "Roy Cohn's Protege" Torp if you think his party affiliation or freak slight had anything to do with his lust for greater prominence. Maybe an obscure Harvard Law Professor has a popular Twitter account ragging on the guy, and he ruins Barry Obama's career- or does something else, anything, to attract the attention of the rising far-right. Like- I don't see Gamergate turning out any better in this timeline, and that radicalized shitloads of apolitical nerds directly to the alt-right. At the very least, even in this Obamaless counterfactual, I don't think a "normal" candidate would weather the shitstorm building since the Civil Rights Act that exploded into this boatwreck of an election- a Jeb! or a Cruz

I don't see him running as a democrat and succeeding- he doesn't have the same Islamaphobia/derk er jerbs/"the blacks" win button that he hammered to victory last year and I don't think he's a guy whose message works in anything but shithead dogwhistles, like its the one weird trick, the only one, he's genuinely talented at

# ¿ Feb 25, 2017 13:37

Peanut Butler: Jul 25, 2003

Suspect Bucket posted:

Then the world's best and cutest friendship never happens

That's one of them causality nexuses, they end up meeting as very old men on the LTR-9-EXODUS and are known as the old men who race Honda Sprees on the gravloop

# ¿ Feb 26, 2017 00:30

Peanut Butler: Jul 25, 2003

HisMajestyBOB posted:

Just use the Crown itself, no need for a monarch to wear it.

It'd be like the unusual American system where the President is Head of Government, and Head of State is Ben Franklin's favorite merkin

# ¿ Jul 13, 2017 01:17

Peanut Butler: Jul 25, 2003

Powaqoatse posted:

True, but it's lost almost all meaning and is no longer considered a swear but instead a dialogpartikel (discourse marker is the English term I think).

It's mild enough that nobody will raise an eyebrow even if say a politician uses it. The queen hasn't used it, but it wouldn't surprise me if the crown prince did at some point.

At the time it'd be considered somewhat more powerful, so I went with bloody/damned.

in plains midwestern american english, it would translate to either 'fuckin' or 'dang ol' depending on how mean your dad was

# ¿ Dec 9, 2017 11:05

Peanut Butler: Jul 25, 2003

a civil war story about a woman who pretends to be a teenage boy to fight in the war except she wants in on that sweet FOR MEN ONLY airplane steak

# ¿ Jul 19, 2018 23:43

Peanut Butler: Jul 25, 2003

TooMuchAbstraction posted:

The most important thing about Bite Me is that it's a farce. There are not nearly enough farcical webcomics.

oyvind thorsby just woke up in a cold sweat and doesn't know why

# ¿ Jun 12, 2019 00:23

Peanut Butler: Jul 25, 2003

Grand Prize Winner posted:

Apparently not:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_telescope

Funny, I thought they were older than that too.

how could uncharted waters: new horizons lie to me like this

# ¿ Aug 11, 2019 02:27

Peanut Butler: Jul 25, 2003

welp I'll come back to this thread in a day or two

# ¿ Sep 5, 2019 08:40

Peanut Butler: Jul 25, 2003

FreudianSlippers posted:

"Awesome John" is also perfectly valid.

"Johnny Bigtime"

# ¿ Nov 12, 2019 15:57

Peanut Butler: Jul 25, 2003

duckmaster posted:

In 18th century England the post was delivered down “postal roads”, roads designated for use by mounted postboys. About every twenty miles there would be a “post” (where we get the name) with at least three fresh horses, so when the post boy approached he would sound his horn and the next horse (and post boy if needed) would be readied. He could then simply dismount his own horse and mount the fresh one and carry on.

Quite a good I system, except that the roads were quite unsafe at the time (both from disrepair and crime), postboys were paid quite badly (and usually before they’d even delivered the post, so the temptation to just go and spend it in an ale house was quite strong) and the fact that the postal roads all ran to London.

sounds like the Pony Express system of 19th century US, made necessary by enormous distances pre-rail- kind of a wonder at a time when it took the better part of a year to travel westward with sufficient supplies across almost no infrastructure

# ¿ Dec 1, 2019 18:12

Peanut Butler: Jul 25, 2003

Zudgemud posted:

It's tasty

Also, everyday drinking of milk might be a scandinavian thing, here its normal for natives to drink loads of milk, especially my millennial generation.

also true of the midwest us, probably d/t all the scandinavians who settled here and all the cattle ranching

i like to get half-pint cartons to drink with lunch every day, like in school, which they did there because it's cheap good calories!

# ¿ Feb 17, 2020 16:12

Peanut Butler: Jul 25, 2003

Alhazred posted:

Stuff like hakarl (but also potatoes) makes me wonder how they discovered when the plant/meat was detoxified. Like, "Leifur, it's your turn to taste the piss shark, remember to give a thumbs up if it isn't lethal anymore."

I wonder if it's often some variant of,

"the Hibernian slave who tried to kill me survived the rotten shark punishment, and the only difference I can think of is that Hralfr soaked it in piss as a joke"

# ¿ Feb 25, 2022 17:20

Peanut Butler: Jul 25, 2003

SgtScruffy posted:

There is one place in the US where this isn't the case, and that's the Northeast Corridor, which goes from DC to Boston. Having taken the train from DC to New York a ton and to Boston as well, I can say that was a one-off where it took 12 hours and is an unreliable hellscape. It sounds like there were technical issues with the train that caused a large delay, which I totally get. The Northeast Corridor is the one part of the country where rail travel is actually pretty ideal - I drove from baltimore to Boston and back in the past week and it took 11.5 hours each way; we're going to take the train next time.

it's not bad in the flat middle part IF there happens to be a route

Chicago-KC is a lovely trip through rolling fields and farms that you don't get to see from the highway (for real! it's different when you're right up next to the crops), it was cheaper than driving solo in my 35mpg car, and was 12hrs vs 8hrs drive, a fine payment to not have to drive in either city

# ¿ Nov 28, 2022 21:00

Peanut Butler: Jul 25, 2003

bulletsponge13 posted:

Recent posts reminded me of the time an English Professor put the emPHAsis on the wrong sylLABle to demonstrate to native English speakers a way of understanding how inflection matters.

I'm probably loving up the lesson, but the way it was said has stuck in my head ever since.

my grandmother used to say this all the time, usually after goofing up a word

# ¿ Mar 17, 2023 08:40

Peanut Butler: Jul 25, 2003

my grandpas were in wars and also i miss them

# ¿ Mar 24, 2023 04:26

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# ¿ May 3, 2024 08:29

Peanut Butler: Jul 25, 2003

Hippocrass posted:

We have a grand total of six examples of William Shakespeare's signature and he never spells his own name the same way twice.

yeah ive seen his signatures and people are full of poo poo if they think he's even a good writer

# ¿ Mar 29, 2024 13:27

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