If you ever feel sad just remember that when the British invaded india and wanted to get rid of all the snakes so they gave money to people for bringing them a dead cobra and then people started to breed cobras to get money and once the government realised, they dropped the reward so everyone just released their cobras so basically they ended up with way more cobras than they started with.
We were discusing history tonight, and I was thinking about it. I was born in 1979.
I was born 10 years after the moon landing.
I was born a year before the first women graduated from the service academies.
Also I’m old enough to remember when we bought our first VCR, the Challenger disaster, the fall of the Berlin wall and I didn’t get my first CD player or the Internet until my senior year of high school.
And I remember being floored the first time I saw the Internet with pictures.
Firstly, Vikings were not stinky, in fact they were considered a fragrant bouquet of delight compared to their Saxon neighbours. Vikings bathed once a week and fashioned beauty products out of small animal bones, tweezers to pluck out unwanted hair and ear spoons to scoop out gunk from the lug holes of even the most fearsome warrior.
Secondly, Vikings weren’t all that blood thirsty. In fact, their raiding hobby fast moved on to rather more boring interests, such as trading, settling and exploring (YAWN!).
Thirdly, there’s no evidence to suggest that Vikings wore horns on their helmets. After all, why would anyone think it would be a good idea to stick two big easy to grab horns on the side of their head? It would allow a quick thinking opponent to either yank your head in position for a well timed slash of a broadsword or simply pull your helmet over your eyes and provide chortlesome fun for all their friends as you stumble, blindly around the battlefield. In fact, there’s very little evidence to suggest that Viking wore helmets AT ALL. Illustrations from the period show them wearing lousy leather caps or boringly bare headed.
So if Vikings aren’t Stinky, blood thirsty, horned helmet wearing barbarians then doesn’t that make them rather boring? Oh no no dear reader, Vikings did plenty of bizarrely brilliant things. Here’s the Top 3 Weird Facts about Vikings according to Max Virtus.
3. Vikings loved Skiing
Ullr – The Viking god of skiing.
Who doesn’t love Skiing? They answer is not Vikings. They loved it. Their skis were about 2 metres long and made of pine wood. However, Vikings didn’t just ski, they also went ice skating. The skates were made from the foot bones of horses, cows or elks and were strapped to the feet of the Viking as they propelled themselves over the ice with two short sticks.
Are you thinking about a giant bearded Viking warrior involved in a pretty spectacular and surprisingly flexible ice skate dance routine whilst clad in horribly florescent and skin tight lycra? If not, you are now.
2. Wee Dye
Lye Soap ready for application
Vikings considered the ideal hair colour to be blonde. They could also suffer from horrible infestations of lice and knits in their finely combed (yes, they had combs too) hair.
So what better solution than dunking your head in a month old bucket of wee?
Not only would it eliminate any rogue lice if would also lighten the colour of your hair.
However, having to keep month old buckets of wee could clutter up even the longest longhouse. so Lye Soap was developed instead. The key toxic ingredient of yee olde Lye Soap? Wee.
1. Vikings had a Weird Sense of Humour
A Cow
Vikings took their reputations very seriously indeed. An insulted Viking would often respond to the verbal bashing by challenging the bully to a physical bashing instead. Duals would be held (not always resulting in death, sometimes the warrior who managed to disarm the other or draw first blood would be the victor) but what happened to the person who lost? Well, they were given a rather odd challenge. A wild cow would be brought into the hall where the dual had taken place. The cows tail would then be shaved and coated in grease. Then the Viking who had lost the dual would have their feet covered in grease too. Then the cow would be made angry (calling it names or poking it in the eye with a stick should do the trick). Then the loser would have to grip the cow’s tail (can you tell where this is going yet?).
On a given command the Viking would then have to pull the cow’s tail. Which would make the cow go WILD! Bucking and stomping, kicking out with it’s hooves like a cowy whirlwind of death. The poor Viking would simply have to keep hold of it’s tail until it calmed down. If he succeeded then not only could he keep his life he could also keep the cow as well! Bonus!
Secret Bonus Fact: Viking warriors wore eyeliner! It was called kohl and it was a dark coloured powder that kept the harsh light of the sun from damaging sensitive eyeballs.
Minor correction: people used the metatarsal of cows as skates. While this is technically a “foot bone,” cows are ungulates, meaning that they “walk” on the very tips of their toe bones. When looking at a cow leg, this makes the metatarsal used for ice skate material part of the lower leg. On the image below, this would be the bone labeled “25”
Unfortunately I don’t have a photo of one to show you guys, but I can take one when I go to work on Thursday, as we have a bone of this type at the museum at work at.
Benedict Cumberbatch reads Alan Turing’s 1952 Letter to his friend and fellow mathematician, Norman Routledge for The Times (x)
For audio enthusiasts – here (y) is Benedict reading the same letter for Letters Live in Dec 2013.
Full Transcript of the letter:
My dear Norman,
I don’t think I really do know much about jobs, except the one I had during the war, and that certainly did not involve any travelling. I think they do take on conscripts. It certainly involved a good deal of hard thinking, but whether you’d be interested I don’t know. Philip Hall was in the same racket and on the whole, I should say, he didn’t care for it. However I am not at present in a state in which I am able to concentrate well, for reasons explained in the next paragraph.
I’ve now got myself into the kind of trouble that I have always considered to be quite a possibility for me, though I have usually rated it at about 10:1 against. I shall shortly be pleading guilty to a charge of sexual offences with a young man. The story of how it all came to be found out is a long and fascinating one, which I shall have to make into a short story one day, but haven’t the time to tell you now. No doubt I shall emerge from it all a different man, but quite who I’ve not found out.
Glad you enjoyed broadcast. Jefferson certainly was rather disappointing though. I’m afraid that the following syllogism may be used by some in the future.
Turing believes machines think Turing lies with men Therefore machines do not think
Lesbian mothers raising children in lesbian-headed households also had to worry about ex-husbands using their lesbianism to take custody of the children. In 1958, Vera Martin met and fell in love with Kay, a Japanese American woman who had come to the United States at the end of the Second World War after marrying an African American serviceman. Kay had two children, and Martin had a son and daughter. The families got along well and would spend time together on the weekends. R., Vera Martin’s teenage daughter, babysat for the other children when Kay and Martin wanted to go out together. Both women feared that the authorities or their ex-husbands would take custody of their children if they found out they were in a lesbian relationship. “We knew that we had to be careful,” Vera Martin remembers, “and keep the knowledge that we had kids very quiet … very quiet.” Kay worked as a prostitute to support her family, and the two women lived in fear that someone would report them to authorities, possibly even one of the other women with whom Kay worked, in order to remove competition. They also feared that their ex-husbands would simply take their children away directly if they found out they were lesbians. Martin was an African American woman and Kay was Japanese American, and as two lesbian mothers of color, they felt particularly threatened by the courts.
Lesbian mothers who had left previous heterosexual marriages during this era lived in constant fear of discovery and exposure. One night in 1959, when Vera Martin and Kay were at the If Club, a lesbian bar in Los Angeles, a heterosexually identified man who knew Martin’s ex-husband walked up, said hello to her, and left. Terrified, Martin turned to Kay and said, “That’s someone that knew me when my husband and I were together, and they are still in touch.” Kay understood the danger immediately and said, “I think we better get out of here.” Vera Martin thought the man would use the pay phone and that her ex- husband would show up at the club or later at one of their houses. She and Kay lived in terror afterwards and did not go out in public “for a long time.” When the two of them eventually went to a dance together, they asked two men to accompany them as cover.
As parents, lesbians and gay men had no legal protections or recognition of their co-parent relationships in the 1950s and 1960s. As it would in later decades, this jeopardized their ability to maintain communication with their partner’s children. After Kay died suddenly in the winter of 1959, Vera Martin wanted very badly to take Kay’s children into her home and raise them with her own, as Kay had told her children’s caretaker she wanted before she died. However, Kay’s ex-husband, who lived across the country and had been brutally abusive to Kay, came into town with his new wife and took the children. “Oh, I wanted those kids so bad. … I was crazy about them and they were crazy about me,” Martin recalled, but she had no chance of competing for custody of the two children against an intact heterosexual nuclear family. In the era before gay and lesbian liberation movements there was no chance of legal recognition for lesbian households with children. Martin despaired when Kay’s ex-husband held an auction to sell all of Kay’s belongings. She came up with one hundred dollars to buy Kay’s address book, a potentially dangerous item in the hands of her ex-husband. In 1963, Vera Martin then married a gay man and “slammed the closet door shut behind her,” because she heard rumors that her own ex-husband suspected that she was a lesbian, and she was afraid he might try to use that to obtain custody of T., her son and youngest child.
Daniel Winunwe Rivers, Radical Relations: Lesbian Mothers, Gay Fathers, and Their Children in the United States since World War II (2013), Ch. 1. (via captainnipple)
This is one of the best essays I have ever read on this topic – a topic I usually see dredged up by assholes trying to either derail discussions or argue slavery was not about race -_-
Theroot.com in general is just a first class site for awesome history essays. I have yet to read anything not well researched or well cited.
70 years ago during WWII, an unknown soldier captured 31 rolls of film throughout his journey in the service. Thanks to Levi Bettweiser, a collector and restorer of old and historical film, this collection of photos has been discovered and restored. Giving us raw footage from World War II the world has never seen before. […] While it still remains unclear who captured these photos, plenty of information has flooded in about the different locations seen in the footage. Bettweiser says, “It’s interesting to us that many of the images are taken outside of whatever respective scene being shot.
