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.

Fab thread thanks!

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

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

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?

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.

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!

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

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.

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.

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.

We had 2 in the garden. We called them Russell & Sheryl.😂

There's 3 series of a reality show on Netflix called Blown Away. One of the judges is from Corning. Some weird and wacky creations! I learned a lot about glass blowing from watching it and what an interesting mix of science and art it is.

A really interesting book about the pre-war period in Germany is Erik Larsen's "Into the Garden of Beasts". Fascinating.

I'm no legal expert but the old Bailey records suggest that if a woman gave birth alone and the baby died then she was presumed to have killed it and sentenced to hang. Is this right, and if so is it the only time the onus is on the accused to prove their innocence rather than the other way around? Does anyone know?

I don't know about the women giving birth alone aspect. However if you are sued for libel or slander you have to prove your innocence, rather than the plaintiff prove your guilt. And there's only one defence - that what you said or wrote was actually provably true.

Wow those pictures.

I'm quite fascinated by teeth. And how those before us centuries ago coped. They had wooden dentures and false teeth.
My dentist who is in his early 40s, is a seventh generation dentist, his dentist ancestors go back to the 1800s. Quite incredible. If he ever has time, (rarely) we do chat a bit, and he fills me in whilst giving me a filling! . The first dentist in his family in the 1800s was a barber and a dentist in the same shop!

*wooden dentures AS false teeth I meant to say.

@Fluffymule Thank you so much for the link, so interesting.

@ifIwerenotanandroid - fascinating and shocking at the same time. I listened to Olga Lengyel and i read her book after, she was born and lived in my birth country, I've never heard of her until I found this collection. I think i started listening in 2020 and, with few breaks, I'm still listening now and then.

Someone mentioned about where ideas come from to invent something.

So I'm a potter and I get how someone would have been dabbled with a bit of mud, realised it's mouldable, that it hardened off and became stronger if it was left near a fire. I can see how over time that could happen. However there's a technique called Obvara that simply blows my mine. It involves removing your pot from a red hot kiln (think raku for those of you who watch the Great Pottery Throwdown) and rather than just leaving it to cool, you plunge the pot into a bucket of what is basically batter mix - that's water, flour, sugar and yeast. The results are amazing as the flour is burnt on to the pot so it looks like a glaze. Who came up with that idea and probably more importantly why and how did they ?

Loving this thread - have taken lots of suggestions for podcasts and books. Thanks to everyone whose contributed !

better go and do some work now........

Foods that ought to be inedible - things like tapioca which are poisonous in their raw state but if you smash them up and run water through for several days you end up with an edible foodstuff. Who worked this out and how many people kept eating the plant in various stages of its raw state to find out it is eventually edible? I can understand things that get more palatable over time, but some of these things are just poisonous.

I was just getting excited about going to the Corning Museum of Glass...only to discover it's in the States...

What a sad sight those cases and their contents are. Did they take the cases with them and then no be allowed to have the contents? It’s like they were maybe packed for them by family and close ones but once in the asylum they never saw the items again. So very sad.

Sorry, I suspected that was going to happen.

It's supported by Corning Glass, the largest producer of glass products in the US. They invented Pyrex, along with many other products. And I think you have CorningWear baking dishes in the UK. They're made at the main plant in Corning, New York.

Sorry about that. It's in New York. Tourists come up from NYC by the busload to see it. It's also close to the Baseball Hall of Fame, so you get a twofer.

I'm obsessed with early, silent era, Hollywood.

One of the most fascinating stories of the time is the scandal attached to Fatty Arbuckle, he was accused of murder!

For anyone interested I wrote a blogpost about it: taintedhollywood.blogspot.com/ It's the only one I ever wrote, I have never found the time since 😂

Oooo!