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Attila the Hun is probably a name you've heard. He was basically the Genghis Khan of his time, really. He carved out the massive Hunnic Empire and did a really quick job of it. Dude didn't gently caress around; he ran around conquering everything in sight as hard as he loving could. Then he married an attractive young lady and celebrated by getting absurdly drunk, smashing his face into something hard, and dying of a nosebleed.
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Nov 7, 2015 03:41
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FreudianSlippers posted:One of the things that the Greeks thought was really barbaric and horrible about the Persians is that they allowed women to lead armies and inherit property. That and when you have a society that's entirely run on slave labor you need to keep the slave raids up to get more slaves. As badass as they were the Spartans were really not nice people and lovely neighbors. They were also hyper traditional and refused to change with the times, which ultimately destroyed them. Speaking of women another interesting thing about Sparta was that the woman was the head of the household. Reason being, her husband and her sons were very rarely actually there. There always seemed to be some war or another that Spartans wanted to run off and fight in. Plus the training of Spartans was pretty bonkers so the sons were sent off to it early and rarely saw home. Somebody had to run the place so that was mom. Granted part of it was that fighting was considered the most important thing so of course the men were off fighting all the time while women were forced to do the boring crap. Apparently Spartans also considered "adultery is bad" to be an absolutely alien concept. Making more Spartans was considered the most important thing in marriages but the men were often away for multiple years, if they came back at all. So Spartans would sleep with their friends' wives when they were gone. The story goes was that a prominent Spartan's wife had more children when he came back when he left and his response was "yup, these are mine." Another Greek was like "lol wut" and he was like "well their father was my one friend but they're part of my household. I gently caress his wife when he's gone. We're cool like that." The rest of Greece liked having Spartans around so long as they were on the same side but even Sparta's friends and allies considered Spartans weird, dangerous, and scarily unhinged. There was no unified entity that was Greece at the time and the various city-states often fought among themselves. When a greater thread (i.e, Persia) rolled up most Greeks could band together long enough to deal with the threat. The Spartans, of course, rushed to the front lines and were the first to fight because "gently caress you we're Spartans."
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Nov 10, 2015 20:53
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BlueDiablo posted:Uh, that "small time ruler in Central Asia" was the goddamn successor to the Persians Considering that a successful living thing is the one that has the most offspring Genghis Khan is the most successful recent human to have lived. Not only did his raping, murdering, and pillaging remove a lot of competition from the world (as far as his genes went) the raping, murdering, and pillaging left a lot of his bastard children in his wake. The theory is that he currently has over 1,000,000 descendants. Of course the most successful humans, by that metric, are Y-chromosomal Adam and Mitochondrial Eve. Every single human alive (yes, all seven billion of us) is a direct descendant of these two people. No, they did not know each other; they lived thousands of years apart.
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Nov 13, 2015 19:39
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I think my favorite thing about ancient fart jokes and dong-related art is that it pretty strongly says all of that "kids these days, I tell you" poo poo is actually pretty stupid. Suggesting that the new generation is somehow single-handedly destroying the world by laughing at farts and penises is dumb. Humans have been laughing about farts and sex for as long as there has been humans. History has a pretty long record of how we've pretty much always been that way and probably always will be.
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Dec 6, 2015 02:40
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Comrade Koba posted:Why is this terrifying? The children probably didn't know quite what they were dealing with when interacting with Stalin. They were playing with a man that would happily have them murdered when they became adults for pretty much any reason at all. Aside from that what happens if they grow up around Stalin and think that his policies and politics are completely normal? What kinds of monsters would he end up raising? Think about it for a second; would you let your children play with Stalin?
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Dec 27, 2015 11:50
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Pope Benedict XVI was both a member of Hitler Youth as a child and the Nazi military. Some people criticized him for that but really he was forced to. Membership in Hitler Youth was mandatory at the time and he was conscripted twice. He also deserted near the end of the war and was a POW for a brief time. After it was all said and done he went home and join the seminary. Apparently all he ever really wanted in life was to be a priest and didn't like the Nazis all that much.
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Dec 31, 2015 19:00
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BravestOfTheLamps posted:The Roman Empire fell about 563 years ago. Edward Gibbon began writing about the fall of the Romans a little over three hundred years after the fact. That depends on what you mean by "the Roman empire." Did you mean the actual, original one or the successor states? Or the Holy Roman Empire, which wasn't actually Roman at all?
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Jan 1, 2016 14:18
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Tasteful Dickpic posted:I'd really like it if The Fall of the Roman Empire was about Fellini. Multiple nations over the years have claimed to be the continuation of the Roman empire. The Roman empire itself didn't fall so much as decline and fracture. There were the Western and Eastern Roman empires which went on to form their own legacies. The fall of Constantinople could have been argued as the fall as the Byzantine empire was basically a successor state to Rome. But then that didn't even necessarily mean the "fall" as Mehmed II was like "lol we's Romans now, I'm sittin' on Rome's throne, bitches!" The Holy Roman Empire wasn't even remotely Roman. They were German as hell. The connection to Rome came from the fact that there were strong political connections between the Pope and the Emperor. It also wasn't really even an empire. Yeah they had a guy who was called "the emperor" but he had little centralized power over the other states. Generally he was the head of one state that was "elected" by heads of the other states. "Elected" isn't the term to use as it tended to be dynastic. Even so the various kingdoms under the empire were less subjects of an emperor and more a big conglomeration of alliances that agreed to not dick each other over too hard. It also wasn't at all an actual continuation of the Roman empire. It was multiple centuries after the western empire fell apart that one of the popes look at Charlamagne and was like "hey bro you is an emperor now lol." A lot of the Romanization of lands that had been occupied by Rome but no longer were was because people admired the gently caress out of Romans. Rome was big, prosperous, and powerful so people kept trying to recapture that legacy because they wanted to be big, prosperous, and powerful. Germanic tribes especially that hadn't been conquered once Rome fell tended to be all "hey let's be like Romans!" ToxicSlurpee has a new favorite as of 15:23 on Jan 1, 2016 |
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Jan 1, 2016 15:20
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syscall girl posted:At one point aluminum (aluminium?) was worth more than gold by weight. Better than that; aluminum was worth more than platinum too. It was the most valuable metal for a long while. Which is an odd thing to think about with how cheap it is now. It's also the most abundant metal in Earth's crust and a major component of clay. The reason it was so expensive is because raw aluminum or an ore that was easy to smelt aluminum out of is obscenely rare. Eventually somebody figured out how to get alumina out of bauxite (and I think clay and feldspar too) and then drive the oxygen off of that to get raw aluminum. Which is handy; aluminum is stupidly useful. It's still not exactly easy or cheap to make aluminum but the metal stays pretty cheap because it's balls easy to recycle it.
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Jan 1, 2016 22:10
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FreudianSlippers posted:The Carolingian renaissance was neat but the massacre of Verden was a pretty big dick move. A significant amount of medieval history can be summed up as "a pretty big dick move."
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Jan 4, 2016 20:11
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There were a lot of reasons. Lack of good agricultural land in Scandinavia was easily one of the biggest; kind of hard to support a growing population on land that's lovely for farming. Of course what people don't talk about when it comes to the Vikings is that while they did have a lot of "bloodthirsty raiders" in the culture not all of them were a bunch of angry, filthy guys with long beards just waiting for the next raid. They also were extremely good fisherman and traders. Their land sucked so they took to the sea. This is why the Hanseatic League became economically powerful and important. Germanic and Norse traders sailed all over the region shipping things around. Really that life also was a lot more attractive because it was easier to not die young when you made your living trading. Of course one major change was when the Vikings were convinced to quit raiding each other so drat much. Vikings, early on, actually raided their neighbors more than they raided the rest of Europe. Once centralized power finally started happening the rulers were like "you shits quit killing each other." Even so the thing the Vikings were the best at, that people seem to forget, was sailing. Yes they were good fighters but they were absurdly good seafarers.
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Jan 5, 2016 01:46
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Mans posted:The sack of Rome was an inside job. By time-travelling Vikings. With laser guns.
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Jan 5, 2016 03:15
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Speaking of fire and ships...how about FIRE SHIPS? So your navy has this leaky old boat that has seen better days. Thing is barely seaworthy and even then probably only by technicality but you want to get one last use out of her. So what do you do? You pack her with flammable/explosive things, light her on fire, and send her sailing fast as she can into an enemy fleet with no crew on board. Eventually people started building things specifically as fire ships. "What's the big deal?" you might ask? Well, because they were on fire, had no crew, and were in the middle of the water they were kind of unpredictable. If they were filled with explosives they'd blow up but you didn't know when. More importantly when a ball of fire is careening toward your wooden, highly flammable ship "get the gently caress away" is your best response. They would either cause destruction on their own or sow panic among enemy fleets. They were also kind of difficult to stop as you couldn't exactly board them.
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Jan 6, 2016 03:19
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My personal favorite theory is that Shakespeare wasn't one guy. Or even a guy all the time. There's a theory floating around that some of the plays were written by a woman and the name was just something they slapped on stuff with enough similarity because women weren't allowed to be important at the time.
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Jan 6, 2016 11:16
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People who know machines probably know what a Stirling Engine is. They're...kind of a big deal. They're a heat-based steam engine. They're also a rather early steam engine invention. They were invented by a Scottish minister by the name of Robert Stirling, hence the name. Now, at the time steam engines were...well...let's just say a bit temperamental. As in they tended to explode, vomit shrapnel and hot steam everywhere, and maim and kill people. This was also before the Bessemer Process came about that made steel cheaper and just plain better. The steel of the era was "meh" by today's standards and iron itself wasn't really up to the job. Steam engines were useful so they ended up being "literally everywhere" but they were also dangerous as hell. One of the prevailing theories for his motivation was that Stirling, a priest who actually loving acted like one, decided that enough was enough. There had to be a way for steam engine workers to not have such an incredibly dangerous job. See, the other side of it was that his dad was an engineer. Even though Robert himself studied to be a priest he was still interested in engineering and no slouch with machines. He got to work and created the Stirling Engine which was not only safer but just plain better. They were more powerful, more efficient, and way safer. Over time he worked with his brother to improve them. All told he spent a significant chunk of his life ensuring that industrial work was just plain safer. If memory serves he also came away with a decent paycheck out of it but also decided not to be an rear end in a top hat tycoon about it. The most interesting part is that he had no freaking clue why his engines worked. It wasn't until later that somebody else figured out the math behind it all.
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Jan 7, 2016 03:17
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Alkydere posted:There's also several different designs for Stirling engines. But the big thing is having two chambers that can take turns with hot air expanding in one chamber and the other chamber cooling/shrinking. Add a heat source and you're good to go. It's even possible to make a small Stirling engine you can heat by holding it in your hand. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zCGTNArwJ0s You just need a heat source that produces enough heat for the engine. Small engines can be run by candles.
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Jan 7, 2016 04:47
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BravestOfTheLamps posted:North Africa used to be home to elephants. It's where the Carthaginians got them. Romans actually drove a lot of things into extinction. Silphium was one of the most interesting, actually; it probably went extinct before 100 B.C. and is really a prime example of "loving humans never learn, do they?" Apparently it had a ton of uses. It was a spice as well as just plain edible by itself. It was used to treat all sorts of stuff from coughs, sore throats, and stomach maladies. It was also apparently useful as a contraceptive. A reliable contraceptive. How much of it was true and how much of it was bullshit? All told we don't have a freaking clue beyond "it was used as medicine" and "Romans ate it." No traces of it have been found and nobody is entirely sure exactly what it was. The theory is that it was a large fennel related to some other plants that have traits similar to what was ascribed to it. There's a scientific suggestion based on studies that silphium existed and was at least close to what was recorded in usefulness but really it's impossible to be 100% sure because it just plain doesn't exist anymore. There is a vague idea of what it looks like because it was so important to the economy in and around Cyrene they put that poo poo all over nearly every coin they minted at the time. Over harvesting and over consumption are obviously at play but one of the big theories is that it declined suddenly because of livestock. Apparently feeding it to animals gave them some desirable trait or another which led to people grazing animals on the land which...hosed it up completely. Humans, being humans, wanted to keep consuming the stuff so it was eventually driven into nonexistence.
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Jan 15, 2016 12:25
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AnonSpore posted:Kill a thing... so much... there is no more thing...?!!?! One of the beliefs was that you could repopulate a species quite easily with only a male and a female and there were bound to be more out there somewhere. The other snag was that nobody was actually bothering to go out and study or count things to notice declines. In the case of passenger pigeons nobody was bothering to study their mating habits until it was too late. It turns out to successfully mate and reproduce you had to have a rather absurd amount of passenger pigeons being social with each other in safe places as well as particular types of trees in particular places. It turns out that animals reproducing is way more complicated than we though. Then there were things like habitat destruction and what have you. The conservation movement really gained steam in the early 20th century thanks to the nonstop outright ecological rape that the U.S. had gotten up to at the time. The view was "whatever, we can waste however much we want, there will always be more." Which turned out to be, you know, not all true.
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Jan 16, 2016 00:14
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FreudianSlippers posted:Despite being Odin's weapon of choice spears were a lot more common than swords since they required a lot less iron and were therefore significantly cheaper and easier to make. Making a proper sword was very expensive and time consuming so if you saw a Norseman with a sword he was probably fairly wealthy and maybe even a nobleman of some sort. It also took a ton of training and time to learn how to fight with a sword properly. One of the reasons pole arms were extremely popular throughout history was that it didn't take much effort to train a bunch of peasants to stand in a line and point their sticks at the bad guys. In a way axes were similar; they used less metal than a sword and were also good tools. People had axes everywhere because they were useful. Peasant bowmen were also popular because a bow is pretty simple to make and your average peasant probably already knew how to use one on account of the fact that sometimes getting meat meant going out and hunting it. Actual sword guys like everybody fantasizes about were actually rather uncommon for a lot of reasons. Standing militaries also basically didn't exist for a very long time. Most fighting was done during the off season. Most people were still subsistence farmers so you kind of had to have everybody home on the farm for planting and harvesting. Major, long-term campaigns were uncommon and an exception rather than a rule. Fighting in winter was also often outright impossible. ToxicSlurpee has a new favorite as of 01:18 on Jan 16, 2016 |
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Jan 16, 2016 01:15
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Mans posted:there's a reason why the idea of the phalanx survived from Alexander all the way to the 19th century. Militaries would have used more elite sword guys if they could have but there was just no real way to. Incidentally this is also why swords, big shields, and horses were considered marks of the elite and why they show up on heraldry all the time. If you owned a horse, a sword, and a shield you were pretty damned wealthy and more than likely from a noble family. Oddly enough there were actually certain things in certain periods that were such strong symbols of nobility it was illegal for somebody who wasn't a noble to own them. Ruffs were one. Ruffs were considered a sign of nobility and there was this bizarre trend over time that the drat things just kept getting bigger. Of course people wealthy enough (i.e., merchants) to act like nobility but didn't have the blood for it would wear noble trappings anyway which pissed off actual nobles. The other thing about the times was that photographs hadn't been invented so it wasn't necessarily easy to know who was a noble and who wasn't at a glance. The king could dress like a peasant and blend in with common folks pretty easily if he really felt like it. This was the point of ludicrously expensive jewelry worn by royalty and why if you look at crowns some of them aren't really all that aesthetically pleasing. It was typically more like "let's cram as much expensive poo poo on this thing as we can." Whoever had a more expensive crown was higher up on the chain by raw wealth. This was especially true during the later middle ages when gold was everything. ToxicSlurpee has a new favorite as of 02:51 on Jan 16, 2016 |
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Jan 16, 2016 02:48
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We figured out how to farm a few specific things but farming different things takes different skills and conditions. It may very well have been that the stuff grew wild and nobody managed to figure out how to cultivate it. Some living things require extremely specific conditions in order to survive.
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Jan 16, 2016 08:25
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Gabriel Pope posted:It helps that the idea of species and subspecies was not terribly well understood. When lions and elephants disappeared from the fringe of Europe it didn't really register that anything much has been lost, because they knew that elephants and lions were still out there somewhere and if they're maybe not quite exactly the same who cares? If it looks like a lion and quacks like a lion, it's a lion. There was also a time before genetics was understood well enough. Or at all, really; it was believed that a male and a female was enough to repopulate an entire species. Now of course we know you need at least a certain critical number of individuals or you end up with a genetic bottleneck. If you only have a handful of the species then the species is effectively extinct as it is very unlikely to recover. A small enough number of individuals and the species can't recover. Granted this was also before people thought hard about things like "once the species is lost it is gone forever." People still struggle to think that way overall. Oh there's endangered ground birds in this valley? gently caress 'em, gotta graze mah cows.
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Jan 16, 2016 17:52
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Full Battle Rattle posted:To be fair, I believe the anthropocene begins at the end of the 18th century (with industrialization), so the idea that humanity was too insignificant to meaningfully affect the biosphere wasn't too terribly off the mark. That depends on the scale you're talking about. Humans in some places did a drat fine job of wrecking the area. The big thing there was that they could easily move elsewhere and didn't farm as intensively as we do now. Monoculture is also largely a new thing; actually ancient farmers were pretty clever though didn't always understand why what they were doing worked on a scientific level. There just plain weren't enough of us to seriously gently caress the rock up and we were real busy murdering each other when we weren't farming so we kept ourselves in check. We did manage to drive things into extinction over our existence, though, which is part of why the antropocene starts with humans numbering in the millions. If you look at things on a geological scale the entire history of civilization is small enough to effectively not exist. Extinction events actually happen over tens of thousands to millions of years. Which is kind of scary to think that humans are one of the worst and we're doing it so drat quickly.
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Jan 16, 2016 18:56
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szary posted:Do you even read what you post? The article says the attack dispersed a German infantry battalion, but failed when armoured cars appeared. In no way was that a "successful" charge on German armoured units. The point of the charge wasn't to fight the tanks but to give the other units enough time to gently caress off. It was both successful and not direct charge against tanks.
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Jan 17, 2016 18:18
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Sucrose posted:Humans drove plenty of species into extinction in prehistory. Mammoths, the New Zealand Moa, the American and probably Australian megafauna, etc. Basically, whenever humans were able to get to an area of the earth that had previously been blocked off, at least one species bit the dust from overhunting. That's where the argument has a lot of grey area; a lot of those species were already on the decline. Some were pretty much on their way out before humans ever encountered them. Humans just sped it up. Of course that gets into the argument of what "natural" is. Humans are part of nature whether we like it or not and have spent a gently caress load of time adapting nature to ourselves. Agriculture and selective breeding are the big ones. What we found along the way is that preserving species is kind of a big deal because they might to out to be useful to us somehow and sometimes knocking a species that seems insignificant out completely wrecks an entire region and ends up with humans at a net loss. Whether or not it's natural what has been pointed as as "a big loving deal like seriously huge you guys" is that human civilization is an extinction event. We're wiping out species by the dozens and hundreds constantly, some of which we just plain didn't even know about. And now they're gone. Once it's gone it's gone forever and it's seriously upsetting how the world functions in a lot of ways. It's looking more and more like we're creating a world that humans can't survive in which is...yeah. We might not be able to destroy the world but we can sure as hell change it into something we can't survive on.
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Jan 21, 2016 11:10
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Fun fact about the natives living in Mexico when the Spaniards showed up! One of the reasons the Spanish considered the Aztecs and pals primitive and stupid was because they didn't have steel. Well, their metalworking wasn't that great in general and they were more concerned with decorative and utilitarian stuff rather than implements of war. This was especially true of decorative stuff; they liked experimenting with gold or silver alloys to make good looking things. They had copper axes and what have you but they didn't see metal as Europeans did. See, the issue was that Europeans decided that civilization always develops the way it did in Europe and you have specific orders that things are developed in. Metalworking was a big one because, let's face it, for European civilizations iron is a huge loving deal. What they ignored was that the Aztecs, Mayans, and such had easy access to poo poo loads of obsidian and made their tools out of it. Obsidian is sharper than steel when used properly and they figured out obsidian tool making before they figured out metal working. When they learned how to make copper and bronze they considered it shittier than obsidian and shuffled metalworking off into a secondary role. The obsidian club/sword things that Aztec troops used were reported to cut right through a horse's neck in a single swing with ease.
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Jan 23, 2016 11:27
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Byzantine posted:I thought it was because people bathed in the leftover old Roman communal baths, and when the Black Death ripped through the continent, anything communal became a deathtrap, which led to bathing being shunned. That was part of it. It was also believed that the bath houses were one of the causes as people were laying in the same water. Which was kind of bullshit; actual, proper hygiene would probably have done a ton to make the Black Death less awful. If memory serves the church at the time wanted people to congregate in the church and started speaking out against other public places, including bath houses, pubs, and inns.
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Jan 23, 2016 17:03
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Snapchat A Titty posted:It's rarely deliberate. I think I read that during the Indian Wars, they put a bounty on killing buffalo, just to gently caress with the native americans. Somehow they didn't manage to kill all buffalo, which is kinda weird, but good. One of the major issues with extinction right now is poaching and trophy hunting. There are more people that want to hang a lion head on their wall than there are lions in existence. It reminds me of an old quote I like; "no drop of rain believes itself responsible for the flood."
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Jan 24, 2016 10:43
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hard counter posted:The ultimate killer re: isolation, however, is that civilizations that achieve high population densities with a close relationship with domesticated animals tend to develop horrible contagions. Consider recent fears over Swine and Bird Flu. A new pathogen derived from an existing pathogen that attacks animal populations that, through mutation, can now attack humans is likely to be a total unknown to our immune system, making us very susceptible to illness and even death. AIDs, for example, is a recently derived pathogen that initially just targeted chimps. The conquest of the New World was achieved mainly through depopulation of the local peoples who were exposed to new pathogens the Europeans inadvertently carried with them, first unintentionally then intentionally. The local populations, thanks to isolation, had no chance develop any sort of resistance. I've read that that 90-95% of New World fell to disease. To give more weight to those abstract numbers imagine that you're on the other side and that the enemy can eliminate 95% of your army and support population just by arriving. You have next to no chance full stop. Diamond notes that equatorial areas with terrific tropical diseases have generally been resistant to colonization for similar reasons despite the technological superiority of any potential colonizers - the local peoples can tolerate tropical pathogens that easily kill Europeans leading to poor opportunities for conquest and subsequently limited, if any, colonization. While European diseases didn't help there were actually awful plagues that were wiping out the American indigenous people before Europeans got there. When the Vikings showed up the place was way more densely populated. In fact after Columbus rolled up the Europeans started believing the Americas were a promised land deliberately set up by God to give to them because of how welcoming the land was. They kept finding fruit trees neatly growing in rows, land that was perfect for farming, and so forth. It was almost as if there had been a civilization there before them that set things up for human civilization! Only there was apparently a set of catastrophic diseases that just flat out devastated a lot of areas so badly what Europeans were dealing with was practically a Mad Max scenario. These were the few survivors of a collapse just trying to scrape by, which is part of why they seemed primitive. Trade, travel, and complex social structures had been thoroughly destroyed by population decline. There aren't records of it partly because it apparently happened terrifyingly quickly. The theory is that millions upon millions died off before Columbus rolled up. It was easy to smash their faces in because they were scrabbling just to survive and rebuild their civilization. Generally speaking Europeans encountered American civilizations in states of massive problems and serious declines. Then the Europeans showed up and made matters worse. There are theories that the population decline in the Americas actually led to the Little Ice Age; the forests began to recover, the land became more wild, and it bound up a rather significant amount of carbon.
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Jan 25, 2016 11:10
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From what I read it's highly likely that he was, in fact, a massive dude but his size was overstated later. Or during his lifetime because how many people in the Empire would ever actually meet the guy in person? It sounds impressive and scary to tell everybody your emperor is a 9' tall firebreathing monster that will eat your head if you misbehave.
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Jan 27, 2016 01:14
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A White Guy posted:Except he was assassinated three years into his reign It's actually kind of interesting to read about historical figures that were just plain big. Chalamagne is estimated to be at least six feet tall, probably more, during a time when people didn't get much past 5'6" very often. Peter the Great was enormous; dude was 6'8". Less fun but more interesting thing I just read; apparently the ancient Egyptians ate kind of poorly and suffered as a result, up to and including pharaohs. Apparently Hatshepsut, typically portrayed as thin and beautiful, died relatively young as a fat, bald, diabetic woman with terrible teeth.
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Jan 27, 2016 02:59
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Aesop Poprock posted:I've always wondered about this kind of stuff. I bet there are still kids who are medically or accidentally castrated, how unethical would it be to try to raise one into a castrati singer? And if I was the manager a bunch of them do you think they'd let us play on Conan? Moreschi was probably actually castrated for medical reasons. One of the differences between now and then is that a boy who for whatever reason lost his nuts growing up is likely going to get hormone treatment which is a major difference. It's also far less likely for a boy to be castrated for any reason nowadays. If memory serves the castrati were also only specifically castrated to preserve beautiful, young voices; the chances of a kid castrated now for any reason also happening to have a voice to be preserved is pretty slim. Of course making it at all acceptable behavior in any situation encourages it. You'd end up with parents "accidentally" castrating any vocally talented boys they might have hoping they'd go on to a career of wealth and fame. Better to just say "nah, let's knock this poo poo off."
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Jan 30, 2016 21:16
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Fun facts about Coolidge! He was known as "Silent Cal" because of his tendency to just plain not talk. The guy was just plain quiet and said as few words as possible. Even when he declined to run for president again he didn't even say. He just wrote something to the effect of "I'm not running again" on some scraps of paper, handed them to some reporters, and went home without saying a single word to them. As non-social as he was he generally ate dinner at dinner parties and gatherings. When asked why a quiet guy would eat at big gatherings so often he just replied "have to eat somewhere." This last bit my be apocryphal but apparently at one particular party a young woman followed him around and chattered at him for most of the meal. Coolidge, being Silent Cal, didn't talk to her at all. Eventually she said "you know I bet a friend of mine that I could get you to say three words to me." He looked at her, said "you lose," and never spoke to anybody else the entire evening.
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Jan 30, 2016 21:32
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Lord Lambeth posted:Probably because you could be executed or castrated for loving another dude. Michelangelo worked exclusively with male models and just added tits if the statue was supposed to be female.
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Feb 2, 2016 03:27
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If memory serves a lot of the time it was done with a screw driver and a hammer or something like that. Whatever was laying around that could punch holes in a can, really. That's fine for cans of juice or sauce but terrible for tinned meat or soup. If it could punch a hole in a can it was used to open a can at some point; eventually somebody figured "hey why don't we just cut the whole drat top off?"
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Feb 2, 2016 19:05
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NLJP posted:Seems a weird explanation. It's not like scaling wasn't understood reasonably well back then. I think part of it was that the sculptors of the time (including ol' Mikey) were being heavily influenced by ancient Greek or Roman sculpture, which involved a lot of dudes. Greek sculpture in particular had a ton of naked athletes and there was this bit of belief that athletic young men were the most aesthetically pleasing thing ever. So, making a beautiful statue of a woman involved making it of an athletic young man with boobs stapled on. Another fun fact about Michelangelo; he was a cranky, angry jerk that absolutely nobody liked. One of the reasons there was a rivalry between him and Leonardo when they lived in the same city was because Leonardo was the polar opposite. If he had some extra cash laying around he'd sometimes head down to the market and buy birds just to let them go.
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Feb 2, 2016 20:26
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Alhazred posted:I honestly wouldn't be surprised if he was. I'm pretty sure JFK found a way to have sex with people that didn't even exist. Dude humped everything.
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Feb 4, 2016 20:29
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Present posted:Now we use that word to describe where dots go when writing numbers It also actually gets used as basically a synonym for devastate.
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Feb 5, 2016 02:20
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Nessus posted:I thought malaria usually doesn't directly kill you (though it can). If billions of people had died of malaria in recent history, even if they were poor people in the global south, I imagine there would have been somewhat more urgency regarding its treatment. Yeah malaria isn't all that deadly. There are over 200 million cases a year but it kills less than a million people right now. It's also caused by a parasite rather than a virus so it's easier to treat without vaccines. Given that it's spread by mosquitoes it's also not a horrifyingly virulent death plague like smallpox.
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Feb 11, 2016 12:52
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| # ¿ Apr 29, 2024 16:31 |
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People always complain about how juvenile humor is these days and how everybody needs to grow up and stop telling rancid jokes. I'm sure we've all heard it as long as we've been alive; somebody bitching about how awful things are now and pointing to dirty humor as proof. Shakespeare's works contain a "your mom" joke. One of the oldest written jokes found in English was a dick joke. In an old Viking epic one of the heroes is cursed with a penis so huge he couldn't have sex with his wife anymore.
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Feb 13, 2016 00:32
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