Things that are utterly bloody fascinating

Placemarking to read later - I just love these threads

Who was Shakespeare?
How did one man, with a grammar school education. write so many profound and varied things and why are there so few records of him?

Thanks so much :)

@Needmorelego Have you seen this website? Loads of strange streetview here https://neal.fun/wonders-of-street-view/

GobbieMaggie Ooh yes me too! Adore London (also my childhood home) Esp British Museum (Swear I could live there!) Also just the Tube alone, so fascinating and such a work of Art of sorts .Blood Sweat and Tears by many navvies and labourers gone unseen largely. Bridges ,Buildings ,Rivers and parks its got the whole lot

The suffragettes ( a term coined by the Daily Mail ) were terrorists who conducted a bombing and arson campaign with targets ranging from St Paul's Cathedral and the Bank of England in London to theatres and churches in Ireland. This violence, which included several attempted assassinations, culminated in June 1914 with an explosion in Westminster Abbey.

Conveniently for some, Suffragette bombers have been airbrushed from history, leaving us with a distorted view of the struggle for female suffrage, with real evidence that their militant activities actually delayed, rather than hastened, the granting of the parliamentary vote to British women.

@TallulahBetty I had a very quick Google. I think this is the one he has but several similar books popped up.

For those on page 1 discussing periods - here is a youtube video of Abby Cox trying out a traditional period apron

Most of you will probably think I am "seriously mistaken

That's one way of putting it.

I think this too.

Bloody hell. Now there's 2 of them.

Why people believe utter nonsense like this. That's fascinating in its own way I guess.

Great thread though.

@TallulahBetty I'm not sure what it's called but I will try to find out.

What book is this please?

I love a good comparing of old maps to new maps too.
I also like Tube maps.
My Dad has an atlas which is like a road atlas but for the whole train network of the UK. Want to know where that little bit of track that goes off a main line but no trains ever go down goes..... I could probably find out 🤣

I read that women once they were married had on average I think it said, six periods during their lifetime. And periods started much later than now. So periods were much less common that now between later puberty, lots of pregnancies, breastfeeding and malnourishment.

Like PP I warmly recommend the hidden life of trees and searching for the mother tree.
It's so fascinating. They say, like we are made up of millions of bacteria in many ways woodlands are like one big organism. There's also some beautiful analogies for life in there as trees are safer from weather and animals if they're together. So it's in their interests to support each other. Also they release resins to deter predators which warns other trees down wind of the danger and allows them to release their own.

Ooh ooh Crown shyness is worth a look at too, if you like trees. It's the gaps in the canopy where trees stop growing out next to each other and create little paths of sunlight through the canopy.

I love trees!

Not so much a rabbit hole but still fascinating, I love time comparisons, like Cleopatra lived closer in time to us than the building of the pyramids. Also Oxford Uni predates the Mayans.

I think T-rex lived closer to us than to stegosaurus too, but I may have for that backwards.

I have been there and it is amazing. I truly believe that Newgrange, Stonehenge, the Great Pyramids in Egypt, and probably those in Central and South America as well, were all calculated and designed by extra terrestrial aliens - even if they did get humans to actually build them. I came to that conclusion about the Egyptian Pyramids when I was a child, long before I knew that other people also thought that that was a possibility.

Most of you will probably think I am "seriously mistaken", but it is the only conclusion that makes complete sense to me. I also think that if the parting of the seas in the Bible did happen, and if Manna from Heaven also happened, that that was due to an alien star ship, and it's crew. None of which negates there being a God, there are still far more questions than there are answers

I think this too.

Tube maps fascinate me. London, New York, Liverpool any underground railway system. Can't even explain why.

The start of the AIDS epidemic, in particular 'patient zero' and the theories of how it passed from ape to man. Harrowing, but fascinating.

Yes I listened to this the other day. It sounds like some women did just have to let it flow. Apparently in the factories there used to be hay on the floor so at the end of the working day any blood and mess was just swept up.
I’m sure those with more money or time did have rags etc to use though.

I also don’t think women were as regular, especially if they were malnourished etc but I can’t remember where I read that or heard it.

That is an amazing book

The Fibonacci sequence - it's everywhere!

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.)

Same here. I spend far too long poring over old maps to see what's changed.

Have you looked at the map collection of the National Library of Scotland? You could lose yourself for hours there. The early London maps are useful for researching where to mud lark.

If you have one rare disease you are way more likely to have a second one as well. Not sure why though.

Lost rivers amazing! Also all the closed and abandoned underground stations!

Pregnancy is mind blowing! Because you're born with all your eggs, this actually means that your eggs were once inside your mother when you were a fetus in her womb. That means your mother carried the egg cells which may one day be fertilized and grow into her own grandchild!

I love comparing old maps to modern ones - seeing how a place has changed over the years, which field boundaries, roads, paths and tracks still show up in modern street plans, and which place names persist. Oh, and the lost rivers of London - fascinating!