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.

The Capuchin Crypt in Rome. The monks had to move and took the bodies of the deceased monks with them. The skeletons were not kept as individuals but used piecemeal to make decorative scenes in the chapels. Gruesome, weird, even weirder for being in a still active religious setting and as ever the church makes money from it.

@LuckyDipForTheEuro I don't know if that is necessarily less weighty. Those things can function a bit like cults. And anything about cults is interesting.

I find spontaneous combustion fascinating

There's a very funny 'chase scene' in David Lodge's novel Changing Places, where one of the professors goes round the top of the paternoster, and, expecting to be flipped upside down, does a headstand to prepare.

I am still boggling at the idea of there being an Edinburgh UNDERNEATH modern day Edinburgh...

Brilliant threat, Op

Thread even!

Musically, that's a cracking song, it really is. If you listen closely to the lyrics though, they bear your story out " I always get it up for the touch of the younger kind"!

The castrati! What they sounded like or might've sounded like en masse. I saw a programme where they tried to recreate what they would've sounded like in a cathedral using some technology.

I think there are just a couple of recordings left, of this bloke

Supposedly this guy naturally never had his voice break so he's the same, with a choirboy's voice but a bloke's lungs/chest to back it up.

But imagine the life of a castrato, or the parents choosing it for their child. Wow.

Supposedly, as they didn't have functioning bits they put a lot of effort into pleasing a woman (if she liked that kind of thing.)

There's a Youtuber I follow that does this kind of thing, but not in London. He's called Martin Zero and he goes underground around the Manchester area. Underground rivers, stormwater tunnels, mines, and also looks at the changes industrialisation brought to the area.

You and @SlayB both might find that interesting.

Sharona makes a feature of it, mentioning it as part of her advertising herself as an estate agent.

Still really icky tho 'Touch of a younger kind' ewwww

Is it this idea? It's fascinating!

toppandigital.com/translation-blog/physics-topography-explains-language-diversity/

@Almahart @DailyMaui have you read the mass observation book edited by Simon Garfield, 'Our Hidden Lives'? It’s a selection of diaries kept by ordinary people from 1945 to '48 for the wartime Mass Observation project (which is still running, by the way). It’s a fascinating read and such an insight into the immediate post-war period.

Re. suffragettes…..I remember watching that TV series, 'Shoulder to Shoulder' as a child, and it appears to be on DVD if this link is correct.

One final recommendation from me for anyone like @Tiddlywinkly who enjoys looking at old maps - do you know about Layers of London?

Nuclear fission spontaneously happened about 20 million years ago to some rocks in Africa and when they realised enough was missing to make several bombs 🤯 I just find it mental to think about so much stuff happening before humans (or dinosaurs) even existed

www.scientificamerican.com/article/ancient-nuclear-reactor/

I don’t know if that counts are irrefutable evidence.

I'm not trying to convince anyone. It's for us all to find what interests us.

I'm with you on this! I keep reading stuff and I'm fairly confident some of it is going in. One of my favourite experts is Don Lincoln who contributes to the FermiLab channel on YouTube. I think it was him who said that in the world of the ultra-small, energy doesn't have to be conserved, as long as the amount of time the energy isn't being conserved is very short.

It's all mind-blowing stuff.

@noodlezoodle google Mary queens close in Edinburgh to read about it.
Its only under the royal mile (not the whole of Edinburgh ! ). where they built on top of streets and some houses.
They also took the top floors of buildings and used the lower floors as foundations for newer buildings. The poor ended up living below the new city.
When you go on the tours you walk down the open closes and alleys and end up underground.
Princess street gardens is a large grass covered area under Edinburgh castle but it actually used to be a loch. It was drained at some point in the past.
Edinburgh also has a underground railway tunnel which was abandoned. It was used during the war as a mass airraid shelter.

As I understood it they are more like vaults, which were used as storerooms that became unusable through damp and then taken over by the poor and destitute as housing.

It's Mary King's Close and it's an amazing guided tour. There are still empty shops and streets under there.

Bloody great thread op.

There are some lovely wildlife webcams here - brown bears in Alaska:

explore.org/livecams/brown-bears/river-watch-brown-bear-salmon-cams

I believe it was aliens too, possibly giants. The part of the bible that says ‘I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from heaven…’ I’ve always believed this is talking about a spaceship. I know that sounds crackers.

I recently came across details of a derelict house that my family had lived in. As I looked into it, it became clear that my grandparents (in the 1930s) were the last people to live there so I was looking at bits of their decor. There was also a
YouTube ghost hunt filmed there - which was a hilarious contrast to my father’s rose-tinted memories…

Placemarking to read later!

Great thread, OP.

I'm absolutely fascinated by the Industrial Revolution. Social and economic history. Life for people who were 'in service.'