Things that are utterly bloody fascinating

I wonder what Invisible Talc was!

@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.

I'd love to find out more about life for ordinary folk after WW2. My grandad couldn't get work where he lived so him and a mate ended up in Africa working on the railways - no colonial overlords, they were working alongside black africans and being paid the same. I wanted to do a deep delve into this to see if it was common/how they even know about it but came up with nothing. Of course I should have done this when he was alive... I did find correspondence from one company to another with someone asking if their wages could be subbed ahead as both my grandad and his friend were "financially embarrassed" and too poor to travel to their next job.

My grandad loved it and was very reluctant to come home. I think he caught the travel bug from being in the Royal Marines in the war and going to North Africa and Italy. He said that was the positive he took from it, and watching Vesuvius erupt in 1944! Maybe the "no jobs" thing was just an excuse for more adventures and an escape from what would have been a pretty grey - if safe - life.

I wish the internet had been as common and easy to access when he was alive - I reckon we'd have had hours of fun looking for evidence of his early life.

Me too. You should follow www.facebook.com/AbandonedNi

Timeslips - I would love and hate to experience one in equal parts.
Absorbed memories/recordings in buildings; by which I mean what some might call 'ghosts' - I have had a few strange encounters that I can't rationally explain but I can't honestly say that they were ghostly encounters. My current thinking is that we don't understand quite how to examine the relevant phenomena, and that there are many factors that may bring about hallucinations both visual and auditory, but that doesn't mean that there are other explanations.
Inherited memories - where children have recounted things from past lives that they can't possibly have known about, and things people remember that actually happened to others (parents or grandparents)
And finally - ecosystems and how they work. It's such a delicate balance, and it seems, without humans, the planet would function perfectly well, if we didn't keep imposing 'pattern' and stasis.

there used to be Paternoster lifts at Birmingham College of Food and Domestic Arts. No idea if theyre still in use

I’d love to watch that!!!

would anyone else want to contribute to crowdfund it? Show of hands please?

I hope it’s not too morbid, but I’m fascinated by The Staircase. I always think I’m quite good at reading people and my gut instincts have rarely let me down, but Michael Peterson is an exception. I’ve watched and read so much about this case and I’d hate to have been on the jury as there are so many contradictory facts, both for and against his wife’s death being murder.

www.netflix.com/gb/title/80233441

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Staircase

@KrasiTime 😁

My mate used to freak out the freshers by doing a handstand coming down. We all went “over the top” all it did was stop the lift ( and you’d get a telling off)
I like fractals.

@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.

@Ka@Kate0902900908@Kate0902900908

We were young and gullible!

Highly recommend that. It will not only change your viewpoint but make you rather angry. I reviewed it for a blog

enoughofthistomfoolery.wordpress.com/2022/05/13/book-review-the-five-the-untold-lives-of-the-women-killed-by-jack-the-ripper-halle-rubenhold/

**@Kate09@Kate0902900908

It slightly blew my mind when I realised that the barbed wire on the Western Front in WW1 wasn't like a fence to keep livestock in but miles and miles of it. A historian called Peter Barton presents a programme about the Somme from the perspective of both sides, and in one clip he has a piece of German barbed wire - as lethally sharp as it was 100 years ago.

You get a few moments of darkness and clanking noises and then it's light again, which was slightly disappointing to my younger self!

The impact of barbed wire on life as we know it today is completely fascinating and generally under appreciated. ideas.ted.com/why-barbed-wire-yes-barbed-wire-was-as-transformative-as-the-telephone/

@Roussette I’ve got a book by a slightly mad American dentist and it’s just called ‘Teeth, Teeth, Teeth’. I couldn’t resist it with that title. One of the few reviews on Amazon just goes, and I quote:

‘teeth teeth teeth teeth Teeth TEETH TEETH TEETH’

Says it all, really 😂

We were never quite sure if it was true or if they were teasing us? We weren't brave enough to try!

That is so poignant @ElizabethBest . I'm going to look at it in depth. Thanks for such an interesting and refreshing post.

We just missed each other as I left in 1988.

they'd flip over

I've tested that 😀

I took some exams at Sheffield Hallam uni in around 1990 so was there for just a couple of days. Our group were allocated students to haul us in and out of the paternoster lifts, and we were warned we MUST get out at the bottom or top floor or they'd flip over. We were terrified! 😂

If you like fungus....you must watch 'The last of us.'