Things that are utterly bloody fascinating

@PurpleWisteria1
I absorbed the cells of my non identical twin*

Was your twin identical though?
So fascinating- I have identical twins and is mad knowing that if my newly fertilised egg had split literally 4 days later my twins would have been conjoined.
Also fascinating to know they don’t really know why identical twins occur. Why does the egg split? What causes that? An enzyme released in the mother they think but why is it released? How would you prevent it (or encourage it?) they just don’t know.

There’s a book called ‘Stiff’ which talks about all the different things that a dead body can be used for. Made me think that a burial is a bit of a waste!
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.

Children who have past life memories. Google the little boy from Bara and the boy who was a WW 2 fighter pilot. There is a scientist, in Canada I think, who is doing research into this phenomenon. Fascinating but also makes the hairs stand up on the back of your neck.

So many rabbit holes... so little time 😵‍💫

Following

I honestly had no idea or gave any thought to the lyrics until I listened to the podcast. So maybe the parents didn't either.

Same as when I tried to send a song about being 16 to my friends daughter, and realised they were all songs about letchy men waiting for girls to become legal. Ew ew ew.

So far, all three topics on the podcast have been really interesting, and I'd really recommend subscribing.

Bare with me. I'm autistic so this may affect my view.

I can't get my head around the fact (most of the time if you're the opposite sex) you have to have sex if you want a baby.

Some people that don't want children, just the sex can have their life changed dramatically (religious reasons / found out too late / anti abortion).

Some people just want the baby.

If you have issues with conceiving you basically have to discuss your sex like with a doctor, your parents, work.

I honestly can't explain it and I don't know why I feel so uneasy about this.

Also that in lots of cases a man, sometimes a stranger inserts his penis into you. I mean you can't get any more intimate than that.

I just find it mental.

Ant and bee colonies- the efficiency, the organisation. Mind blowing stuff.

Emotions/feelings… they’re made from nothing physical and yet they power us throughout our existence. I mean, you could split hairs and say tears are physical but tears are the physical response to emotions, not the emotions themselves.

Same with our ego/consciousness; an invisible entity stored inside a meat puppet. What becomes of it when our physical selves expire?

Airplanes. Just bonkers! Brilliant and bonkers. Although that fascination quickly dies down when the aircraft is Ryanair.

Re paternoster lifts - we had one in the arts tower at Leicester uni when I was a student there in the early 70s.

@cassiatwenty yes! I can reread her biography several times a year, what a life and time to have lived in, she's so fascinating!

OMG! I heard that song on the radio yesterday and it was the first time I’d actually ‘heard’ the lyrics. I never realised how creepy/disgusting it was. I once met a woman called Sharona. Thought it was pretty cringe to be named after the song (I’ve always hated it incidentally). Now I’m wondering why the hell her parents would have named her after this!

I love the stuff about the history of language. I remember as a child being told that an apron was originally a napron and I think that triggered my interest.

My obsession is to trace my way through the descendants of Queen Victoria (in fact the descendants of any royal house). I am not interested in the well known branches who make it to the throne, I want to know what happened to the descendants of all of the younger siblings.

Queen Victoria's daughters, granddaughters and great grandaughters are fascinating, and many of them had difficult and tragic lives. Once I go down the Wiki rabbit hole I am lost for hours.

My (current) rabbithole is nothing so lofty or intellectual or historical as most of the other subjects mentioned above.

It's Brad Mondo on Youtube where he provides advice on how to cut/colour your own hair, along with hair basics, and watches videos of people who have attempted to recreate his efforts.

I find the processes mesmerising, and he's very camp, catty and witty which enhances it for me.

If you need to chill for 15mins, you could do worse than whack on a Brad Mondo video. 😛

Recently listened to a BBC Sounds podcast about Typhoid Mary and realised I didn’t know the story at all.

Very fascinating to hear it now in the context of the recent pandemic as she was the first identified asymptomatic carrier of an infectious illness. She was imprisoned/isolated as a matter of ‘public safety’ and whilst they ran tests on her. Ultimately she was released, partly as a realisation there must be tons of asymptomatic people and they couldn’t all be locked up. Sounds familiar…!

I’m so sorry about your losses and thank you for sharing your story. May I ask how it was discovered and if doctors are quite fascinated by it? I can imagine it will be challenging to explain to some doctors who might be unaware.

I saw this condition referenced as a storyline in a TV show recently and it was discovered as a daughter had a blood type making it apparently impossible she was her mother’s daughter. They discovered her mother was a chimera and so the daughter was born from the aunt’s egg, in theory. I wondered at the time how accurate the storyline was and how rare a condition it might be!

@Kate0902900908 .I genuinely have never heard of this condition. Am so sorry it is effecting your fertility. Was your Mother aware that she had a twin pregnancy ?

My rabbit hole of choice is the tesseract. It’s a 4d cube. There are some really interesting podcasts out there on how many dimensions there probably are and how big the universe is, if you just search ‘tesseract.’

So many things!
I obsess over something for a period of time, then move on.
Longer lasting fascinations have been the history of counter- culture and protest, and mountaineers and Everest,

The first week after your period you are slightly more flexible because your estrogen is high. The week before your period you will feel more stiff because estrogen is low. Dancers and performers particularly take note of this.

Or maybe I’m the only person who hasn’t noticed this because it was only recently that I became regularly physically active because I’m lazy. 😂 Either way it’s fascinating to me at the very least. 😆

Wow! That's incredible. How interesting. I'm sorry to hear about losing babies. Now they know why, can they "fix" it?

Can you recommend a good link?

Is this the guy who does, "How to read French without knowing French?"

If it isn't him then put the "how to... " in to YouTube

Also get the book "The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language" by David Chrystal.