Things that are utterly bloody fascinating

I'm oddly fascinated by indoor fish ponds. I just love them.

@chuffaluffa that is fascinating. Brilliant thread.

I'm always fascinated by the period just after WW2, that Europe was in ruins, people had been through the most awful traumas and they just had to carry on.

Meshuggah by Isaac Bashevis Singer is a really interesting novel about Holocaust survivors in New York. I also like The War After by Anne Karpf, her family try to adjust to taking back the servant they had had in Berlin in London but everyone is too traumatised.

For the devepment of complex foodstuffs, it is much easier to understand if you stop thinking about it as a single invention. It's not a case of 1 day munching on grass seeds, and the next day inventing the baguette.

First you eat the seeds.

Then you pick more seeds than you need for that day and find that they get drier but stay edible. So you can pick and dry grain to use through the winter.

But it's a bit hard by the time you're getting to the end of your stock, so you try soaking it in water to make it eater to eat, and maybe bashing it up a bit so it absorbs the water better.

Then one day you get carried away chatting while bashing the grains and they are ground to powder. Which is really difficult to eat, but you don't have enough food to waste so you mix it with water to make it edible. And probably stir in some herbs, or strongly flavoured seeds to make it taste nicer.

One day, sitting by the fire eating your paste, you drop a bit on a hot stone. Can't waste food so you peel it off and eat it, and it tastes much nicer than the uncooked paste.

Then you make a big batch, to cook over a few days, and it goes a bit bubbly because wild yeast has got into it. You have invented bread. (Or beer, if you were making a fruit bread and put too much water in the mix so it's too runny to cook.)

My mum worked in mental health and cared for an older man who was detained as a 9 year old for stealing a bottle of milk. He never got out of mental health institutions. Barbaric

Lucid dreaming, though it's hard for me o find info about it that isn't too 'woo'.

The life of David Livingstone and his wife, is the most fantastic story, it would make a fantastic film.
He was born in a wee town in Scotland not from a wealthy family, yet was driven to go to Africa ( to spread Christianity) but really he preferred exploring, and used this as a pretext of funding his trips.
He tried again and again to find the source of the river Nile, was attacked by a tiger but his tweed jacket( unbelievable in the African climate) saved him as it’s teeth caught on it, although his arm was damaged.
His wife following on, giving birth to many children at the same time! This woman alone deserves a film.
When he died the African men who explored huge areas of Africa with, carried him hundreds of miles, risking their own lives as carrying dead bodies through villages was not allowed and punishable by death. They returned his body to a ship bound for Britain as a tribute to him allow him to be buried at home. They must have thought highly of him to attempt this feat,
No fancy equipment, no malaria tablets, no comforts of any kind in blistering heat covering hundreds and hundreds of miles on foot! This is a fascinating story as I’ve zero idea how anyone could do all this.

oh and then hidden in the attack so the many "death" "record of life" "disappearances" coulsnt be found.

Another plea for this to go in Classics, MNHQ ⭐ It'll take years to go down all these rabbit holes, I need the reference to stay available!

Another plea for this to go in Classics, MNHQ ⭐ It'll take years to go down all these rabbit holes, I need the reference to stay available!

Foundling Hospital in London, where mothers left half a swatch of fabric with their baby and kept the other half so they could show it to reclaim their baby. Most didn't so there are pages and pages of these coloured fabric swatches. This is an old link but it gives you an idea.

Trigger warning: some of the linked image reference babies and young children who died at the hospital.

There was a butterfly or bird migration who would fly around a massive lake rather than cutting out several miles flying over it.
Scientists couldn't figure out why they didn't go over it.
Until they went way back in history and discovered that this lake used to be a mountain and the butterflies/ birds have followed the exact same path despite the mountain turning into a lake over years and years.

I was astonished!

Also I love mushrooms and fungi.
There is evidence that trees communicate using fungul networks of mycelium underground, a tree on one side of a forrest can warm trees the other side of the forrest, 40 miles away and those trees can make their leaves taste bitter or put up other defences before the pest is even close to them.
it's amazing.

Also a tree stump 'grandparent' can be sustained for years (decades) by theor 'grandchildren'. They share nutrients with fallen members. There's a great book about it.
hidden life of trees.

@DailyMaui that's incredible. Not as interesting but another general chaos story, my great aunt lost her fiance in Singapore and there is some story about how she set off to look for him after the war and came back married to someone else.

I also really want to know more about post war London, where people lived and how it all got rebuilt, London in the fifties fascinates me too.