Things that are utterly bloody fascinating

The other day there was a MN thread on recommended non-fiction books about WW2... I looked one up on amazon to read the reviews... it had another book by him on the same page... I checked it out & it was about a survivor of a German army brothel... never heard of this so I checked out the history of it...

Wow. You need a strong stomach just for the revolting intent & the way the women were treated administratively, let alone anything else. I had no idea. And any young woman could be rounded up at any time.

As a piece of social history it was fascinating; but it stayed with me for days.

Post war prefab housing in the UK. www.prefabmuseum.uk

As a child in the 70s/80s I was always fascinated by the prefab estates that were near my Grandparents in Bristol. Some of them are still there now, 70 odd years after they were first erected as ‘temporary’ measures.

There are a few sites on the internet that map and document them and hold archive social information about the people that once lived and live in them still, by happy choice.

This rabbit-hole widened to social housing history in the UK, accounts like this one twitter.com/MunicipalDreams providing more links and books, and new fascinating topics to explore.

Been lurking on this thread. Corvid fans, may I recommend the book I’m reading at the moment - Esther Woolfson’s Corvus? She has shared her home with various birds for years and has had particularly close and fascinating relationships with a rook called Chicken and a magpie called Spike. A really good read.

It's been my life's work to make friends with a corvid.

I'm supposed to be running the hoover round but on the back of this thread I have delved into The Old Bailey online and have found the original trial transcripts of the trials of Dr Crippen and Ethel Le Neve. Absolutely fascinating.

The hoovering can wait!

For me, it's the Corning Museum of Glass

It traces the whole history of glass making, from glass formed by lightning hitting sand to the development of fiber optic cables. It covers the chemistry of glass, how it is manufactured and how it has impacted society, history and culture.

You can also see glass-blowing demonstrations and give it a go yourself. The gift shop and cafe are also fabulous.

Someone upthread mentioned Scientology. I'm pretty fascinated and have spent many hours down a rabbithole around "new religious movements" (I think that's the politically correct term now; I'm aware the C word is pretty charged) in general. From the Order of the Solar Temple to Branch Davidians, Mansons and Jim Jones, The Family or Rajneeshpuram and the Unification Church all the way up to something like NXIVM. How and why do these "movements" take off? Why, after all these years, do people still get sucked into them and why can't we spot stuff like this before it becomes catastrophic?

Testimonials of Holocaust survivors on YouTube - USC Shoah Foundation - listened to a lot of them: survivors, soldiers, nurses. Found plenty of rabbit holes to go into by listening to them

Fab thread thanks!

Corvids - really clever birds, www.ranker.com/list/smart-bird-corvids-facts/chase-christy

Area 51. Obviously the thought is they have extraterrestrial beings, but surely it would leak? Even if it didn't, I get very fascinated by the ordeal. It originally started as a military base but over years has turned into something much more than thay.

On a holiday to China a few years ago we went to see the Terracotta Warriors.
The bit that blew my mind was that when they found them they were in bits and they had to put them together. An eternal jigsaw.
They all have different faces and most of them are still buried because when they meet the air their colouration disintegrates.
All completely mind boggling

Romea grave stele for pets. The past was a different time and their values and morals often diverge hugely from ours. But sometimes we are so alike - these Romans loved their dogs.

I was thinking about that before. All those mothers of children and teenagers, posting about their abusive/cheating husbands or hating their children. Would any of those now-adult children recognise their mother's from the old threads?

My daughter absorbed her twin brother and there’s a huge mark on her hip from it. I don’t think she is classified as a chimera from it however. He died in utero because of unknown reasons. They called it vanishing twin syndrome. He was clearly not growing well as he was significantly smaller than his sister.

More strange is they were sharing a amniotic sack which means they would have been an extremely rare set of twins called semi-identical which basically means two of my husband’s sperms successfully entered one of my eggs and it split into two people. Which is the only type of twins that can be different sexes and share 75% DNA.

This is apparently due to the fact that my egg for one reason or the other had a delayed hardening of its shell. As most eggs harden their exterior to prevent multiple sperms from entering it. At least that’s the doctors theories. My husband jokes that maybe his sperms were just that determined!

Doctors in the hospital were wanting to do case studies on my twins until the brother was gone then they lost interest.

I don’t know the entire pregnancy was handled in a way that made me feel like the doctors were more interested in studying my children and myself than actually helping us. The loss of my son still makes me sad. Some days I’m okay and some days I wonder what life would be like if he were still here.

I try really hard not to think of it.

I love this French one. It's a colourized snowball fight from 1897. So fun and carefree.

voynich manuscript

I have seen the Foundling Hospital token books - they are utterly heartbreaking.

On the Foundling Hospital, many of the children were renamed, often using the names of famous worthies (including trustees and supporters of the Foundling Hospital) as it was thought to be auspicious. This practice was halted as it led to rumours that famous men were using the Hospital to cover up their own illegitimate childrne (not sure why they would use their own names!)

A longer term misapprension is people descended from the renamed childrn eroneously thinking they were descended from someone famous.

🙂

It’s like riding the circle line on the tube.

Also ancient history - how on earth did the Egyptians build those bloody pyramids with nothing but wooden cranes and man power. Mind blown

The fact there's things in our home which could potentially be poisoning us without our knowledge as we haven't got the equipment to test for it. I'm the series Hidden killers in the home by Suzanne Lipscomb, she describes how in the Victorian era. They used arsenic wallpaper that slowly poisoned everyone! And even up until the 1970's children's experiment games would blow
Children up etc. I reckon mobile phones are poisoning us with radiation but they can't detect it as such. Really good watch I recommend it!

Love love loveeee those videos on YouTube of restored Victorian/Edwardian footage showing people going about their day to day business

Early plastic surgery in the wake of WWI.

Lots of disfigured soldiers who basically agreed to be human guinea pigs. The early ones had awful procedures like having a skin flap from their arm grafted onto their heads so the arm had to be strapped to the head while it took.

It also makes you think of the mental and emotional toll of war, beyond shell shock etc - going through the war was bad enough, but to be left with half a face and problems eating etc must have been unthinkably bad.

www.nam.ac.uk/explore/birth-plastic-surgery

Exactly the same here. I think about how the hell we figured out bread regularly.
Same goes for metal. At what point did we figure out to pull lumps of ore out of the ground, extract, and then superheat to make pointy stuff.