Things that are utterly bloody fascinating

[ElizabethBest]

Let's hear it please - I love a good wikipedia rabbit hole. I'll start - The Willard Suitcases. Over 400 suitcases of possessions were found in an attic at the Willard Insane Asylum belong to patients who had died whilst inpatients so never left. The New York State Museum started a project to document the cases and their contents, and you can learn all about it and see the cases on their website.

Op - that is truly fascinating! I live social history. I would love to see those suitcases and their contents in an exhibition. It's really very humbling when you see what a person is remembered by- their cleaning brushes, a letter, some pretty shoes. Makes me look round my own home wondering what would be in my suitcase? And what would some future person make of its contents.
I don't have anything else to share but Thankyou so much for sharing this.

I love looking at videos / photos of abandoned homes. I especially like the really old ones or weirdly the 90s where they look lived in. It bakes you wonder why they just left home and never returned.

I'm going to click that link.
Interesting post.

The EU's effect on Blackpool's beaches – before and after pictures
www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/oct/13/the-eus-effect-on-blackpools-beaches-before-and-after-pictures

Creatures from folklore

Wow that’s amazing op!

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.

That is fascinating @ElizabethBest but also really poignant and rather sad at the same time. Those poor people, it makes you wonder why they were there, incarcerated all that time, and what happened with their families.

@FriedEggChocolate that's so interesting! I knew about the Foundling Hospital's links with Handel, and about the pebble lottery, but I'd never heard about this!

@notprincehamlet god, the stupidity actually hurts. "what did the Romans ever do for us?" part 2.

This programme - I appreciate that not everybody likes fungus!

www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b041m6fh

Oh the suitcases and the fabrics, just fascinating.

Painted lady butterflies ( probably other types too) migrate UK to Africa every year, not only do they know how to get there but they do it over several generations, like a relay race.

Then they do it again the other way in the summer.

Bonkers.

The English language and how it changes over time. There's a guy on YouTube called Simon Roper who discusses these things and I find it fascinating. My favourite is when the same thing is read out but changed to fit different eras or places in the UK.

Halfeatentoast

Halfeatentoast

Oh, that's sounds interesting, I'll have to look him up.

I think so! Some of it gets very detailed and a bit over my head, but most are easy to follow and he also gives some good links to others who do other interesting work on the same subject.

Yes there’s a similar channel on YouTube by RobWords. Fascinating stuff on the source of English words

I love photos of abandoned buildings/theme parks too.
I like finding them on Google Earth.
I also like finding out about weird buildings and finding them on Google Earth too.
For example I discovered there's a KFC in America that looks like this...

@Onemorewaferthinmint thanks! I'll definitely check that out!

Another thing I love is those videos comparing the size of objects - stars so big that they would make the planet jupiter a) look like a billiard ball and b) raise its temperature by thousands of degrees

The Turin Shroud.

This book about France is fascinating:

www.wob.com/en-gb/books/graham-robb/discovery-of-france/9780330427609?cq_src=google_ads&cq_cmp=19553274428&cq_con=&cq_med=pla&cq_plac=&cq_net=x&gclid=CjwKCAiAu5agBhBzEiwAdiR5tGxS3cm8LOCfVB7Atz4wk1uG2vjV6vyjxGbp8H31zAxT6t2bZzq_FRoCKlsQAvD_BwE#GOR001254204

What we know as France is really quite a recent thing and the varieties of customs and languages are super interesting. France even had a sort of 'lower caste' of people, the Cagots, www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/the-last-untouchable-in-europe-878705.html - their terrible treatment lasted for around a millenium but the reason for the pariah status is now a mystery.

This the kind of thing that sends me down holes

The suffragettes. It's a much longer, bigger, more complicated and exciting story than most people seem to think. I cannot get enough of the subject: lectures, newsreels, photographs, books, websites, individual biographies. If I have a spare hour to fill I sometimes just log on to the newspaper archives and read contemporary news stories about their activities.

A side benefit to this is that, when recently a Mastermind contender chose the suffragettes as her specialist subject, she scored 9 out of the 11 questions asked of her, whilst I got all 11 correct.

I am at a complete loss to understand why a TV series has not been made depicting the whole story. All they've ever been given is one six-part, low-budget series made in 1974 and all but forgotten.

These women deserve better than that!

The story of the song "My Sharona" by The Knack. Total ick factor that the singer as a grown man was lusting after a 17 year old girl. That Sharona is still around today and never got a penny, and how much the remaining songwriter makes a year from that song....

pca.st/episode/975a6d5d-fc99-48af-a5bc-dae074792400

There’s a fantastic geography game that I love where you get dropped on the earth in google earth and have to guess where you are from the landscape/ buildings.
its called Geoguessr