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Alhazred posted:In 1140 Conrad III's army had besieged Weinsberg for several months and finally the town was ready to surrender. Enraged by the long siege the king swore to burn the town to the ground and imprison its defenders. However he was not a needlessly cruel man and allowed the women of Weinsberg to leave with whatever they could carry on their backs before his army assaulted the town. The women then proceeded to carry the men on their backs out of the town. Amused by their cunning the king let both the women and men live. Wife piggyback was an important skill among fishing communities in Scotland. You're a fisherman's wife in a small fishing community. Your husband is waking up in the wee hours, to go fishing on the North Sea from pre-dawn until late afternoon or the boat is filled. He's wearing oilskins over a thick wool sweater you crocheted for him. The stitches are asymmetrical with alternating patterns and directions. You've made it unique and have the pattern memorized, just in case you need to identify his bloated body washing up on the beach after several days or weeks in the cold ocean. You're up extra early, because you're getting a fire started in the stove for the rest of the family and making him breakfast and packing his lunch. Your fishing town runs such small boats, they all just drag them onto the beach at night. You walk down to the beach to see off your husband with him and his shipmates. You don't want him to have to wade out in the cold water and have cold feet all day. You tie up your skirt to your knees, kick off your shoes and socks, and wade out into the freezing surf carrying your husband on your back into the boat that's just now deep enough to launch. You wave them off, put your shoes back on, and go home to warm up your feet standing in front of the stove and finish cooking breakfast for the rest of the family. Then you get to look forward to a day of hard domestic labor, and if there's a cannery in town you'll head over there for your second job once the boats start coming back. You'll gut and clean fish on autopilot, because you've been doing this since you were maybe 10 years old. You stay until the whole catch is processed, which could be after dusk. Then you get to go home, sleep a few hours, and do it again. Every day but Sunday.
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Nov 13, 2021 22:54
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From the book I'm reading, a funny anecdote about Teddy Roosevelt's serial philanderer Uncle Rob.quote:"As a kind of territorial marker he gave elegant green gloves—purchased in bulk at A.T. Stewart’s department store—to the women he slept with. Society types used to laugh whenever they walked down Fifth Avenue or rode a carriage in Central Park and spied a woman wearing these gloves, which might as well have been the Scarlet Letter. Apparently, these women didn’t realize the negative connotation of the gloves."
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Feb 7, 2022 03:18
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Terror and Erebus were fit up for Arctic exploration built off the bones of old bomb vessels. Building a ship to withstand recoil from giant mortars overlaps with the design goal of withstanding sea ice. Also Antarctica and the surrounding seas are extremely windy all the time with strong currents. An experienced sailor will never want for wind power (but will often wish it was less windy)
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Mar 9, 2022 19:47
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BalloonFish posted:We can add the Belgian Antarctic Expedition of 1897-1899 to that list too - the organiser was an aristocratic naval officer who ended up captaining a cross-Channel ferry, got bored, wanted to become the next big name in exploration and realised that the Antarctic was the only blank bit of the map. So he bought a Norwegian whaling ship, stuffed it full of other Belgians (not a nation well-served by people with polar experience, but required to sell it to the public as a great patriotic scheme - in the end a number of Norwegians, including a certain Roald Amundsen, were added to the crew) and set out - but not before nearly ramming the Belgian royal yacht as the left port. If there's one thing the Belgian government is known for, it's mistreatment of hands.
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Mar 10, 2022 22:21
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Deteriorata posted:I recall a story of a guy (in Germany, perhaps) who was pissed about all the trees blocking the view from his castle. So he ordered them all cut down. There's a more modern one of the American whose life dream was to live in a castle, and bought one in Wales to retire in. Unsurprisingly, 400+ year old castles were not built to modern standards of comfort, and it's pretty drafty and miserable to live in one in the Welsh climate. Guy hires an architectural firm with experience in working on old historic register listed places to see what they could do by way of insulation, plumbing, electricity, HVAC etc. The estimate comes back at something like ~10x the original purchase price to do everything legally and lawfully within code. The owner then asks for a split out of what it would take to do just central heating, and it's about half of the estimate, still 5x what the guy paid for the property to begin with. The owner gets snippy with the estimator, thinking he's getting ripped off. Estimator explains that is the going rate for such sensitive work on a huge scale, and retorts, "you can't have archaic and heat it too"
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Mar 24, 2022 22:59
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Famed Victorian era plumbing fixture inventor Sir Thomas Crapper also had a great name. Crap as slang for excrement predates his birth, so he already had a funny name
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May 3, 2022 06:53
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:I would hazard a guess that the water would freeze on the mittens, which would create an air barrier that helps keep warm air from leaking out of your clothes. But that's only a guess. Wonder if it's also a friction thing, and pre-wetting one's mittens and getting a little ice layer might keep the ropes from sticking?
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May 4, 2022 21:34
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Carthag Tuek posted:surnames are only necessary for bureaucracy History of surnames in Korea is fun too. For most of Korean history, surnames were granted by the king to royalty or the aristocracy, so most people in the rigid caste system just did not have one. Late 19th century Japanese occupation bureaucrats did not like this, so they forced everyone to choose a family name and stick with it. People often chose names that belonged to wealthy and prestigious families in the area. And that's why literally half of South Korea today has one of four surnames (Kim, Lee, Park, Jung). If the same thing had happened in the US, one out of every ~4 people would share the last name Rockefeller.
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May 12, 2022 04:47
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Ichabod Sexbeast posted:One of each! like a domino. dominads.
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May 12, 2022 22:34
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There's a suburb by Phoenix named Ahwatukee. You'd think perhaps it was a name from the language of one of the many indigenous peoples nearby. The origin story is that a woman who owned a gigantic ranch there in the early 20th century named it "House of Dreams" in the Crow language. Arizona is hundreds of miles from Crow country, and that lady did not speak or understand the Crow language. Ahwatukee is a total gibberish word in Crow, and sounds nothing like the supposed translation of "House of Dreams"
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May 17, 2022 06:16
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Philippe posted:That's a bigger feat than you'd think, because it's difficult to find fishnet nylons in that size. I think of all hippopotamus sized stockings, fishnets might be the MOST available, no?
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Jul 29, 2022 06:42
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Papyrus labels from a labelmaker reading "PROPERTY OF NED FLANDERS"
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Oct 10, 2022 06:12
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Wipfmetz posted:[Edit: There's also a follow-up question: what happens if somebody misses their scheduled deathday? Would the hospice ensure a punctual death? ] Then they'd just refer to you as the late Wipfmetz
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Nov 11, 2022 05:42
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"Elgin" is nowhere to be found in the British Museum. The curators prefer not to draw attention to the manner in which they were "acquired" One of the very first things I saw when I walked in was an Egyptian obelisk with an inscription from the early 19th century from the such and such cavalry boasting about how they captured this obelisk for the king. I wonder how much of a fight the obelisk put up before surrendering
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Dec 9, 2022 18:02
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Carbon dioxide posted:The snow in 1939's The Wizard of Oz was 100% pure asbestos. Poppies will put them to sleep [eventually]
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Dec 15, 2022 21:26
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Sounds like that translation didn't go according to keikaku
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Mar 9, 2023 17:19
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Alhazred posted:We found a document in my grand father's attic where the local police chief attested that he had not collaborated with the germans during the occupation of Norway. My did not collaborate with Nazis certificate has people asking a lot of questions that are already answered by my certificate
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Mar 19, 2023 22:20
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My wife's grandfather was an RAF Hurricane ace in France before Dunkirk and during the Battle of Britain, pictured on the right. https://twitter.com/WWIIpix/status/1033314980349784064 He was South African, and his squadron gave him the extremely badass callsign ZULU  He also had many pictures of him you may have seen before. They were published in a March 21, 1941 Life magazine article titled "The Few."   When you're slaying Jerries all day, RAF brass lets you grow your hair long. But you really should get a haircut before you receive a Distinguished Flying Cross from King George  In order to be considered an ace, you need to have 5 confirmed air victories. He had a unique record where he got 5 confirmed in a day, making him an ace in a day. He repeated this in another day with 8 air victories. Ace in a day, twice. He was shot down three times. Once on his first ace day over France, and a second time during the Battle of Britain. Second time he was badly burned and sustained a serious head injury, both of which shortened his life dramatically. After that he was transferred to Ceylon. Took off from an aircraft carrier miles away from the airfield and immediately had engine troubles. Knowing he wasn't going to make it to land, he radio'd for permission to land on the aircraft carrier. His aircraft was not equipped with carrier landing gear like an arrestor hook, and he had never attempted a carrier landing before. He was granted permission, and somehow managed to land safely on the carrier, describing it in his report extremely British-ly as "RN very pleased with my effort"  Third crash was after taking fire from Japanese fighters in Ceylon, bailing out just 200 feet above ground level. His life after the war was sad and somewhat brief. Went to England to farm, married, had kids and died in his early 60's. He was also abusive and cruel to his family, and all but one of his children became abusive narcissists. Mixed legacy! A genuine war hero who did amazing things in his service career but was not a nice father. He probably had undiagnosed mental illness, likely had lasting brain damage from his several crashes, and almost certainly had lingering PTSD from combat. He had breathing problems ever since his lungs were burned in the second crash, but the brain scramblies were certainly worse. More stories from him and his squadron at the site below, including the one where he splashed three fighters in less than a minute. https://saafmuseum.org.za/one-of-the-few/
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Mar 25, 2023 20:48
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Animal-Mother posted:So here's a question for history goons. There's so many stories about all these airmen who got shot down multiple times inside warzones. After you get shot down... What exactly do you do? I mean, you survived, obviously, but do you really just dust yourself off, break out a map and compass, and start walking back to your side of the war? Another question is what happens when you don't survive and your body is left behind enemy lines? Happened to my great uncle. He was shot down during one of those extremely dangerous low altitude strafing missions in Italy. He bailed out too late and did not survive. An old Italian couple found his body near their home and found his rosary in his pocket. Recognizing him as a Catholic, they got the priest and gave him a proper burial in their garden. When the lines advanced enough they found his commander, handed over his personal items, and showed them the grave site they had been maintaining for "the American boy". He was disinterred and sent to the states to be reburied. Reminds me of some early hominids found in North Africa that had received Muslim burials. 80,000 years ago, this guy died. 500 years ago, some travelers passing through found remains they recognized as human, perhaps assumed they were recent, and reburied them with their head facing towards Mecca. I think both are examples of the best parts of human nature. Showing kindness and respect to strangers, even to their bodies in death.
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Mar 26, 2023 18:49
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:Europeans butchering native names of things is one of the fun* tidbits of colonization. Sometimes it happens multiple times over, like how a huge swathe of the US is named the "original" thing but filtered badly into 17th century french, then browbeaten again to be english. And thus you get bullshit like Arkansas Lot of this in Arizona, though without the French influence. Some not-really indigenous names include: Papago There are a zillion things in central AZ named Papago, including a stretch of Interstate 10. It's an exonym for the Tohono O'odham people from the name given to them by their rival neighbors the Pima. In the Pima language it's "bean eaters", run phonetically through the Spanish language turning into Papago. The name is wholly rejected by the O'odham people but continues to be used everywhere. Navajo is an odd one, because it's also an exonym run through Spanish as Apaches de Navajó . Navajo is a corruption of a Pueblo people word for farms. Despite this, the Navajo nation has sorta rolled with it and uses Navajo as a synonym for their language and people. Their language's word for their people is Diné, which literally just means "the people" Ahwatukee is a suburb of Phoenix, surrounding the excellent South Mountain park and bordering the Gila River Indian Community. The name is supposed to mean "house of dreams" in the Crow language. It was named by a white person who didn't speak the Crow language, and certainly didn't have anyone to ask because the Crow people live thousands of miles away. It's a totally made up, nonsense word. (I've posted about it in this thread before) It's also fun that in many indigenous languages the group's autonym can usually be translated as "the people" and the word for any other people is literally "not us", or "the others" when it's not a specific disparaging term like "the bird eaters" or "mud people". My favorite is the Pawnee people's autonym, translated as "Men of Men."
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Jun 12, 2023 16:12
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Deteriorata posted:You can go ahead and call Americans Yankees. No one actually cares. Yankee or yankee doodle is fine, but don't you dare call me a dandy!
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Jun 19, 2023 08:00
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GhastlyBizness posted:Man of Aran is great, as is the score from Sea Power I was about to Well Actually you both on the band's name but then looked it up and found that British Sea Power had their own personal Brexit and dropped the British in 2021 to avoid any associations with nationalism, the actual Brexit and probably Eric Clapton.
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Jun 25, 2023 19:28
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Woolie Wool posted:Gandalf? They would have murdered the gently caress out of Gandalf. me and my friends would have killed gandalf with hammers I can tell you that much
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Jul 28, 2023 19:11
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CharlestheHammer posted:Also Roman aristrocrats named their daughters the female version of the name so every girl in the Juli was named Julia. Reminds me of the firefighter naming his twin sons José and Hose B
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Aug 1, 2023 15:48
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Chamale posted:I'm morbidly fascinated by the stories of the unluckiest people to die in war. There was an American in WWII crushed by an air-dropped crate of food when its parachute failed to deploy. I also know of at least one person hit and wounded by celebratory gunfire on VE Day. I think all the 10k+ who were killed in the final hours before the armistice that ended WWI count as extremely unlucky.
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Sep 10, 2023 02:10
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Oates was out of touch until he finally ran out of time
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Jan 17, 2024 07:45
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Joe Medicine Crow also lived to age 102. Guy was too cool to die
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Mar 15, 2024 02:49
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500excf type r posted:It's been a few years since I was there but I'm almost positive Ellis Island has a whole exhibit refuting the name change myth It's going to stay alive forever thanks to Godfather Part 2. Not nearly as bad as the myths that Gone With The Wind will continue to perpetuate
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Mar 28, 2024 23:59
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Standardized spellings of everyday words wasn't a thing in written English for a long time. I suppose it's not that strange that spellings for names was also all over the place.
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Mar 29, 2024 05:45
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Edward Norton is a descendant of Pocahontas.
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Mar 29, 2024 16:56
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| # ¿ May 14, 2024 02:32 |
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There were laws preventing animal cruelty in the US before there were laws about child abuse. Some early convictions for beating kids used the animal abuse laws. Same idea, right? Kids and animals are both living creatures that belong to you!
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May 9, 2024 17:12
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