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.

It's threads like this that make Mumsnet worthwhile!

for me, I find paternoster lifts fascinating but at same time they give me the creeps! 😨

I find fascinating:

Abandoned buildings or amusement parks

numbers stations

anything linked to the cold war era

anything linked to period from 1950s to 1980s

I also love the Georgian and Recency periods historically

I’ve read all her books. The detail is superb imo. The Island is probably my favourite. I find The Sunrise upsetting due to family history but it was good for me to read.

JKR?

Someone should compile a collection of these utterlies and publish…
Makes some fascinating reading.

Agree that this is fascinating.

Rabbit hole I'm about to go down.

The 2 recordings are entirely different. The sound and tone are different. To think the price attached to castrating a male to produce the recording in the first clip.

this is absolutely fascinating.

Thanks for sharing.

This was a previous thread about rabbit holes if anyone is interested !
www.mumsnet.com/talk/_chat/4592597-ive-made-a-listinternet-rabbit-holes

Agree re the AIDS epidemic. Fascinating scientifically and socially. I read The River by Edward Hooper after watching 'Its a Sin' in 2021 and it just about blew my mind. The stuff about how it probably made it to Europe and then America via good old colonialism and the fall of the Belgian Congo is genuinely fascinating. And even just the HIV/AIDS Wikipedia page will send you down a thousand rabbit holes. Terrifying disease, but what's more amazing than it is the fact that modern science has all-but cured it (as long as you get it in a place where you can get and afford the drugs, of course).

I went on holiday with my parents in my early teens and we ended up in Friesland.

The speakers are proud of their language. Those in the southern bits of the Netherlands claim it is a dialect.

@lifeturnsonadime You are most welcome, I bought me dad the encyclopedia and then he enjoyed that so much I got him the book about the OP Shakespeare, my dad is mid 80s and has discovered an interest in linguistics.

On the subject of languages I'm a BSL user, and BSL users have 'accents' and use different signs depending on where they are from, but the BBC made a decision when it first put out programmes in BSL that once a sign was used then the same sign would be used by others.

The first Deaf presenters were Scottish so the signs used on TV are often Scottish signs.

@FlyingCapybara40

Just in case you missed my link at the beginning of this thread...
www.28dayslater.co.uk/
This site is amazing.

Urban explorers risk their lives in some cases, and certainly dodge those trying to stop them... but this forum linked above brings to us the most gobsmacking pictures of some of the empty buildings in this country... left derelict. Cinemas, theatres, power stations, asylums and hospitals.

Thank you :)
No, never been to Spitalfields. If you're looking at factory images with a lot of concrete pillars and symmetry, it's the old Terrys chocolate factory in York. Or if its a set with purple tinged lighting then its a rubber factory in Scotland.

Number stations are really interesting and actually still exist.

Effiebreast · Today 10:32

Number stations are really interesting and actually still exist.

Oh, they're a new one for me!

Oh I read a book that featured the number stations and a missing child... cannot for the life of me remember what it was.

I wasn't impressed with the first voice TBH, but I can remember reading (yonks ago) that his wasn't the best of voices to begin with and most castrati were much better.

As they grow, the changes in anatomy (even though they are unaffected by testosterone) still means that voice quality alters, and like other male singers, they don't always retain good voice.

I daresay that the quality of the recording doesn't help either, though.

I have just received my used copy of the "Seven Daughters of Eve". That my weekend sorted!

@sashh I knew that BSL had accents and different regional signs as a school I used to work in had a unit. I didn't know a lot on TV were originally Scottish, though.

Languages generally, I find really fascinating. We did the Great Vowel Shift for A Level as part of the history of English. How some latinate languages have a lot of vocabulary in common, but then diverge with others.

That deep sea link up thread was brilliant.

I know this won’t be to everyone’s liking but as a BBC Sounds addict I have been v intrigued by the I’m Not A Monster series. The first series is how an American woman ended up in ISIS with her husband and the second is the Shamima Begum story. I know that’s a sensitive topic but I’ve found it ‘fascinating’ in terms of trying to understand what was going on in her life/head/motivations and I’ve found the journalistic reporting to be v interesting, in contrast to just reading media headlines with no context. Well worth a listen, definitely the first series too.

@KrasiTime I suspect we have family from a similar culture/country and generation. It is hugely upsetting and still such a sore point for the people of Cyprus who have pretty much been shut down every time they've tried to ask for justice/solutions. And it's so haunting to visit. I was expecting Famagusta to be a little village or something - it's bloody enormous.

Agree anything to do with Cold War/Russia is fascinating.

Also WW2 - when ordinary people were suddenly in the position of being spies/code-breakers and the like. William Boyd's 'Restless' got me started on that - but Kate Atkinson's 'Life after Life' and 'A God in Ruins' and 'Transcription' also focus on 'normal people' who find themselves doing extraordinary things in the war.

I am especially fascinated by the women who were recruited as Codebreakers in WW2 - as most men were off fighting. There is a book Code Girls - by Liza Mundy - which is all about American women engaged as Cryptographers. Absolutely brilliant.

I've been listening to these, too and I agree with you. Very interesting re: the psychology of these women.

@Biilie82 I can lucid dream sometimes, but there seems to be no pattern to when it happens. In the dream, it’s usually something like, 'Oh, I'm dreaming. I can eat all the desserts on this buffet!' Wish I could tell my dream self to do something more exciting, like flying around.

@Daftasabroom The nightmares sound awful! I hope you get some pleasant lucid dreams at least sometimes.

A while back, I read a book about lucid dreaming. It was mostly rubbish (apparently, I’m supposed to shout, 'I want to hear my feeling tone!'), but there was one part that was just fascinating. It was talking about how when you’re lucid dreaming you could have your dream self look back and forth quickly just with the eyes (moving them from side to side) and that if you did so, someone watching you sleep would see that movement under your eyelids and know you were lucid dreaming at that moment. So, in theory, the dream version of you could be communicating with an awake human. Blows my mind!

I’m late 50’s. I remember my parents holiday flat on the beach with my toys that were left behind & my grandmother’s home in the village. Never seen again. Heartbreaking really. Relatives stories of them fleeing & then coming to stay with us in the U.K. till safe to return.

I identify people from their dental records, weekly at the moment, this reconstruction is always at our conferences. They used to do it with clay but now it's all digital. Amazing.

Mrs Morton did you ever talk at the royal college in Glasgow?