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.

I've been going off MN lately - trolls, nasty bitching, HQ not adequately responding to people's genuine concerns about commercialisation etc but this thread has reminded me of the wonderfully diverse and interesting women who contribute. I've now got a list of irresistible rabbit holes to dive into as well as the ones I already inhabit, one of which is the brain. I have always been fascinated by its workings and love Oliver Sach's books, like The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat. The result of a brain injury or a tumour can be as specific as not being able to use nouns.

My partner has vascular dementia and I have been studying this dreadful disease to try and get a grip of it and to help him, but I read somewhere that if the brain was less complicated we wouldn't be clever enough to understand it.

Thanks OP, what a brilliant thread.

@Needmorelego oh god, I went down a whole rabbit hole of abandoned buildings in California and New Mexico a few monthsback! Fascinating.

I've just spent a while reading these (and found two of mine on there - does that make me doubly rare😂? ) have you seen deadly disease top trumps? You definitely should write that book 😁

That whole Assume Nothing series is amazing for the strange stories they've unearthed out of Ulster, worth looking at The Secret of St Brides and Did the Right man Hang? as well.

When I was first pregnant I suddenly felt v weird telling people. Like announcing “I’ve been having sex”. I know everyone does have sex but yeah. It made me feel weird especially with my parents and work people.

I always wonder this - I mean who sat there and thought "if I crush these seedy things, I get a white powder and I can mix it with water and put some of this fungusy type thing in it, it'll rise and then bung it in the fire and it'll be alright to eat" 🤷🏻‍♀️🤷🏻‍♀️🤷🏻‍♀️ Puzzles me nearly everyday.

I get this! … and the fact that just having sex can change your whole life - and create a whole new life - somehow this still blows my mind!

Other topic but genetic genealogy - solving old crimes and unearthing history by using bone dating, dna analysis etc.

I find the Kola Borehole( Russia) story fascinating. It was like the space race but a race to dig the deepest hole ever made. Germany was also digging one in competition! The story around it is really interesting. They call it Hells Gate.

I'm not convinced by all of that article about historical free bleeding. The mill stuff is very interesting, but the first couple of examples are 'people assuming what other people do' rather than proper primary sources. And in the Mexican one the hasty wiping up of blood suggests it is not accepted normal practice.

Abby Cox did an interesting video on historical menstrual solutions, including trying out the menstrual apron: (FWR regulars may need to grit their teeth to get through the disclaimer, but stick with it). And some of the later solutions are briefly mentioned in Bernadette Banner's piece on women's pants and peeing:

I love comparing old maps to modern ones - seeing how a place has changed over the years, which field boundaries, roads, paths and tracks still show up in modern street plans, and which place names persist. Oh, and the lost rivers of London - fascinating!

Pregnancy is mind blowing! Because you're born with all your eggs, this actually means that your eggs were once inside your mother when you were a fetus in her womb. That means your mother carried the egg cells which may one day be fertilized and grow into her own grandchild!

Lost rivers amazing! Also all the closed and abandoned underground stations!

If you have one rare disease you are way more likely to have a second one as well. Not sure why though.

Same here. I spend far too long poring over old maps to see what's changed.

Have you looked at the map collection of the National Library of Scotland? You could lose yourself for hours there. The early London maps are useful for researching where to mud lark.

For the devepment of complex foodstuffs, it is much easier to understand if you stop thinking about it as a single invention. It's not a case of 1 day munching on grass seeds, and the next day inventing the baguette.

First you eat the seeds.

Then you pick more seeds than you need for that day and find that they get drier but stay edible. So you can pick and dry grain to use through the winter.

But it's a bit hard by the time you're getting to the end of your stock, so you try soaking it in water to make it eater to eat, and maybe bashing it up a bit so it absorbs the water better.

Then one day you get carried away chatting while bashing the grains and they are ground to powder. Which is really difficult to eat, but you don't have enough food to waste so you mix it with water to make it edible. And probably stir in some herbs, or strongly flavoured seeds to make it taste nicer.

One day, sitting by the fire eating your paste, you drop a bit on a hot stone. Can't waste food so you peel it off and eat it, and it tastes much nicer than the uncooked paste.

Then you make a big batch, to cook over a few days, and it goes a bit bubbly because wild yeast has got into it. You have invented bread. (Or beer, if you were making a fruit bread and put too much water in the mix so it's too runny to cook.)

The Fibonacci sequence - it's everywhere!

That is an amazing book

Yes I listened to this the other day. It sounds like some women did just have to let it flow. Apparently in the factories there used to be hay on the floor so at the end of the working day any blood and mess was just swept up.
I’m sure those with more money or time did have rags etc to use though.

I also don’t think women were as regular, especially if they were malnourished etc but I can’t remember where I read that or heard it.

Tube maps fascinate me. London, New York, Liverpool any underground railway system. Can't even explain why.

The start of the AIDS epidemic, in particular 'patient zero' and the theories of how it passed from ape to man. Harrowing, but fascinating.

I have been there and it is amazing. I truly believe that Newgrange, Stonehenge, the Great Pyramids in Egypt, and probably those in Central and South America as well, were all calculated and designed by extra terrestrial aliens - even if they did get humans to actually build them. I came to that conclusion about the Egyptian Pyramids when I was a child, long before I knew that other people also thought that that was a possibility.

Most of you will probably think I am "seriously mistaken", but it is the only conclusion that makes complete sense to me. I also think that if the parting of the seas in the Bible did happen, and if Manna from Heaven also happened, that that was due to an alien star ship, and it's crew. None of which negates there being a God, there are still far more questions than there are answers

I think this too.

Like PP I warmly recommend the hidden life of trees and searching for the mother tree.
It's so fascinating. They say, like we are made up of millions of bacteria in many ways woodlands are like one big organism. There's also some beautiful analogies for life in there as trees are safer from weather and animals if they're together. So it's in their interests to support each other. Also they release resins to deter predators which warns other trees down wind of the danger and allows them to release their own.

Ooh ooh Crown shyness is worth a look at too, if you like trees. It's the gaps in the canopy where trees stop growing out next to each other and create little paths of sunlight through the canopy.

I love trees!

Not so much a rabbit hole but still fascinating, I love time comparisons, like Cleopatra lived closer in time to us than the building of the pyramids. Also Oxford Uni predates the Mayans.

I think T-rex lived closer to us than to stegosaurus too, but I may have for that backwards.

I read that women once they were married had on average I think it said, six periods during their lifetime. And periods started much later than now. So periods were much less common that now between later puberty, lots of pregnancies, breastfeeding and malnourishment.

I love a good comparing of old maps to new maps too.
I also like Tube maps.
My Dad has an atlas which is like a road atlas but for the whole train network of the UK. Want to know where that little bit of track that goes off a main line but no trains ever go down goes..... I could probably find out 🤣

What book is this please?

@TallulahBetty I'm not sure what it's called but I will try to find out.