Things that are utterly bloody fascinating

There's a Youtuber I follow that does this kind of thing, but not in London. He's called Martin Zero and he goes underground around the Manchester area. Underground rivers, stormwater tunnels, mines, and also looks at the changes industrialisation brought to the area.

You and @SlayB both might find that interesting.

The castrati! What they sounded like or might've sounded like en masse. I saw a programme where they tried to recreate what they would've sounded like in a cathedral using some technology.

I think there are just a couple of recordings left, of this bloke

Supposedly this guy naturally never had his voice break so he's the same, with a choirboy's voice but a bloke's lungs/chest to back it up.

But imagine the life of a castrato, or the parents choosing it for their child. Wow.

Supposedly, as they didn't have functioning bits they put a lot of effort into pleasing a woman (if she liked that kind of thing.)

Musically, that's a cracking song, it really is. If you listen closely to the lyrics though, they bear your story out " I always get it up for the touch of the younger kind"!

Thread even!

Brilliant threat, Op

There's a very funny 'chase scene' in David Lodge's novel Changing Places, where one of the professors goes round the top of the paternoster, and, expecting to be flipped upside down, does a headstand to prepare.

I am still boggling at the idea of there being an Edinburgh UNDERNEATH modern day Edinburgh...

I find spontaneous combustion fascinating

@LuckyDipForTheEuro I don't know if that is necessarily less weighty. Those things can function a bit like cults. And anything about cults is interesting.

The Capuchin Crypt in Rome. The monks had to move and took the bodies of the deceased monks with them. The skeletons were not kept as individuals but used piecemeal to make decorative scenes in the chapels. Gruesome, weird, even weirder for being in a still active religious setting and as ever the church makes money from it.

My mum grew up in a semi 4 bed & they still had the servant bells in the kitchen. I really wish I’d taken a photo of them. Front door, dining room & front room. Think there was also one for the main bedroom.

Totally love looking at photos of abandoned St Peter's Semenairy in Scotland. Wonderful example of modern architecture.

Sasquatch Chronicles.

I've only read up to page 4 so this may have been posted but I periodically go down a rabbit hole of looking at unsecured webcams - sites like
this one.

Most of them are gardens, security cams. But I find the shops etc fascinating - you can filter by country/location and watching people live in a say a corner shop in Minnesota is just oddly addictive. I also used to sometimes go back to a restaurant kitchen in Lincolnshire 😂I once spent a long time coming back to one in a family kitchen in America. I thought I could work out the address based on the view/where the camera was and somehow tell them their kitchen was public. Never managed it.

Can you show evidence that they exist?

And the Great Vowel Shift, a change in the way that we pronounce words. Nobody is quite sure why it happened, but it’s why a lot of English words appear to have obscure spellings

Yes this fascinates me too. Pity we don't have recordings from back then :)

I find the subject of sasquatch utterly intriguing. They exist but it's fascinating how so many people deny it, governments included.

There was a whole racket in Ireland. You can read about it here en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magdalene_Laundries_in_Ireland There's a film 'The Magdalene Sisters' which used to be on Netflix I think. I watched it on the edge of my seat. Those asylums were still running in the mid-1990s.

Paternosters are fascinating too, you see one on Babylon Berlin.

My mum and I both have a recurring dream about a horizontal lift with brick walls. We both feel sure that it actually exists/existed but are not sure where. I have it in my head that it was between the Spooner and Yeo buildings in Dingles in Plymouth, but I will probably be told I have dreamt that too

My friend lived in a grand Victorian street full of large houses. Back in the 1970's an elderly lady knocked on the front door, explained that she had been the maid there decades earlier and asked if she could see her old room, one last time.
She came in, did the tour, explained the bell system in the scullery, had a cup of tea and was never seen again.
I wonder if she was having to move out of the area, move into a care home or was passing and fancied tea and cake. My friend's mum has dementia and lives in a care home herself now, but can still remember 'the visit'.

I find disused railways fascinating. I can spend many hours with the National Library of Scotland's side by side maps, looking at how places looked say in 1920 and now, and tracing old railway lines.

I also like running/cycling along old railway lines.

Today I watched Tim Gunn's "Architecture the Railways Built" and he visited the Manchester version of the New York High Line. Who knew I'd turn into a railway geek in my middle age!

@MrsMorton wow I graduated from Birmingham dental school in 1990, I'm not practising anymore; there was also a paternoster in the library on the main campus, techincally you weren't supposed to take dental cabinets on paternoster but everyone did as main lifts took too long.. have you seen the photos of the old hospital on 28dayslater, fascinating!

that is just heart breaking

I have never ever been interested in barbed wire before, but that article, together with the concept of ownership was interesting.

I knew a nun who rescued a woman from a mental hospital in the 1970's.

The woman had been raped as a child, had a baby at 14 or 15 - which 'proved' she was a sex maniac and she spent nearly fifty years in the asylum.

Despite being institutionalised, she lived twenty happy years with the nuns, spending her time knitting baby clothes. Her chance of a life was stolen.

This thread is a breath of fresh air!