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One of the methods used to date the writing of Georg Stiernhielm, one of Sweden's earliest-recognized writers in the modernized form of the language, is by his handwriting. The reason we can do this is because he lost an arm in a bar fight. He went on to be the father of Swedish poetry. Carl Michael Bellman, one of Sweden's most celebrated songwriters, was the founder of the noble Order of Baccus, whose membership requirements were to have lain in the gutter drunk in full view of at least two members of the Order. He spent most of his time drunk, and Gustav III, his patron and King of Sweden, encouraged his behavior. August Strindberg, the Swedish playwright, briefly suffered from insanity in the 1890s. He moved to Paris, became an alchemist, and had a series of religious revelations. The reason for his breakdown is credited to paranoid delusions - he believed his wife was a tribadist, in a relationship with an alcoholic actress. He was also convinced that all of literary culture in Scandinavia was mocking a loss of virility on his part, so he paid a doctor to observe him sleeping with a prostitute. He names both doctor and prostitute (who, he claimed, could speak highly of his abilities) in a letter to Verner von Heidenstam, future Nobel laureate and member of the Royal Academy. He also corresponded with Nietzsche, who signed his letters to Strindberg "Julius Caesar". Henrik Ibsen wrote many of his later plays in his study, which had a portrait of his rival, Strindberg. He claimed that he worked best with that mad glower staring him down, and the portrait, Madness Incipient, featured prominently in his play Hedda Gabler. Georg Brandes, the leader of the Scandinavian Modern Breakthrough, was famed for both his lectures and his numerous, repeated affairs. After breaking it off with Victoria Benedictsson and giving her latest novel a poor review, she killed herself by slitting her throat with a razor in front of a mirror in a hotel. That suicide was the inspiration for the suicide in Strindberg's Miss Julie.
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Nov 5, 2015 03:26
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twoday posted:- The Azores were an outpost of the Carthagian Empire. Do you have a better source than that? Googling just returns a bunch of psuedo-archaeology/ancient aliens sites and I'm not great at reading Portugeuse but looking at APIA's site they seem to be a tiny amateur organization that holds to a lot of fringe theories. To contribute, the earliest recorded workers' strike is found in Egyptian documents recording the progress of the building of the pyramids. The artisans were receiving late and smaller than promised rations and refused to continue work until they were paid in full and the rations started arriving on time. A Fancy 400 lbs has a new favorite as of 03:33 on Nov 5, 2015 |
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Nov 5, 2015 03:29
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cash crab posted:These two made me laugh like crazy, thank you.  Thanks to generations of inbreeding (mostly cousin-cousin and uncle-niece marriages), Charles II of Spain was more inbred than he would have been had his parents simply been brother and sister. When I first heard this I found a copy of his family tree and worked it out. Philip and Joanna of Castile are his greatx5 grandparents, greatx4 grandparents, and greatx3 grandparents, and ALL of his great-grandparents were descended from them. Further his sister Margaret Theresa was just as inbred, but was beautiful and cultured, with at least normal intelligence. She was painted by Velasquez throughout her childhood so that her intended husband Leopold I could see what she looked like. Leopold I was her uncle and cousin. Fortunately their only surviving child married someone other than a relative. A sootikin (or sooterkin) was/is an accumulation of dirt, soot, sweat, dead sloughed-off skin cells, and menstrual and vaginal discharge that would build up in the crotches of women who didn't wear underwear (common before 1800) and then fall out, giving rise to the belief that they were small animals that some women were capable of giving birth to. Martin van Buren was both the only US president who did not have English as his first language (he grew up in an old New York Dutch family) and the only one who was not in some way related to the English royal family. Santa Claus is actually derived from the Dutch Sinterklaas, the feast of Saint Nicholas, a tall, solemn bishop who gave children gifts and treats on December 5. The Dutch brought Sinterklaas with them to New Netherland/New York. In the early 1800s Washington Irving mentioned Sinterklaas in some of his writing, which apparently led to the poem "'Twas the Night Before Christmas" which introduced Santa Claus in his familiar bowl-full-of-jelly form to the United States. Henry Hudson, the first European known to have sailed the Hudson River in 1609 and for whom the Hudson River and Hudson Bay were named, was actually an arctic explorer. He had tried to find the Northeast Passage, a break in the ice north of Russia that would allow quick access to Asia. The only reason he abandoned his attempts to find it and went west was because he found out that there was a large saltwater passage through North America- courtesy of a letter from his friend, Captain John Smith of Virginia.Oh, are we not doing the thing anymore? gently caress.
trickybiscuits has a new favorite as of 03:34 on Nov 5, 2015 |
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Nov 5, 2015 03:30
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trickybiscuits posted:
 THIS WAS NOT FUN
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Nov 5, 2015 03:36
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cash crab posted:
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Nov 5, 2015 03:51
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trickybiscuits posted:
Obama is related to the English royal family? Fact: Redheaded atomic bombshell Rita Hayworth was born dark-haired and spanish. Fox studios gave her an extreme ethnic makeover with skin bleaching, hair dying and facial hair electrolysis Drunk Nerds has a new favorite as of 04:12 on Nov 5, 2015 |
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Nov 5, 2015 04:07
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Hedningen posted:One of the methods used to date the writing of Georg Stiernhielm, one of Sweden's earliest-recognized writers in the modernized form of the language, is by his handwriting. The reason we can do this is because he lost an arm in a bar fight. He went on to be the father of Swedish poetry. Who loses an arm in a barfight.
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Nov 5, 2015 04:12
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Drunk Nerds posted:Obama is related to the English royal family? He means up to Van Buren, they were.
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Nov 5, 2015 04:13
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Tycho Brahe, famous Danish astronomer, died in the aftermath of rupturing his bladder after drinking too much at a meal (as it would have been impolite for him to get up). He either died from infection or from the huge dose of mercury that he took to treat it. Bonus fun fact: he was an astronomer in the pre-telescope era, and his observations were accurate enough for Johannes Kepler to use when he did the math to discover the three laws of planetary motion. He also had a pet elk, who sadly died when he drank too much beer and fell down the stairs. The same guy who developed CFCs and leaded gasoline got polio as an adult, and strangled himself in his own invented system of pulleys to move his limbs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley,_Jr. Inca nobility in Cuzco would have this huge raging festival each year with a ton of drinking. People described the gutters in the street running with urine for days with as much volume as rainwater. George Washington, when elected president, suggested that Congress didn't need to pay him a salary, but instead would just pay his expenses. Congress said LOL NO because they tried that arrangement when he was commander of the Continental Army and spent a ton of money on frivolous stuff, like a Russian leather saddle worth a full year of a soldier's pay. http://www.plaintruth.com/the_plain_truth/2011/09/george-washingtons-expense-account.html
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Nov 5, 2015 04:13
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President Benjamin Harrison had two opossums as pets. They were named Mr. Protection and Mr. Reciprocity.
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Nov 5, 2015 04:20
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Eggbeater Jesus posted:President Benjamin Harrison had two opossums as pets. They were named Mr. Protection and Mr. Reciprocity. I'm not really sure why, but those are fantastic opossum names. In Victorian era Paris, gay men would advertise themselves to other gay men by wearing a green carnation in their lapels.
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Nov 5, 2015 04:31
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trickybiscuits posted:
The last time any outbreeding had occurred in his family was roughly the year 1550. He was born in 1661. He had an inbreeding coefficient of 0.254. The coefficient for brother-sister matings in the absence of any more outbreeding is .25. The Spanish royal family between 1527 and 1661 had 29.4% of children die before a year and 50% die before ten years, much higher than contemporary Spanish commoners. The Spanish Hapsburgs actually form a statistically valid sample for the correlation between inbreeding and infant mortality. 
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Nov 5, 2015 04:35
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Agnes MacDonald, the wife of Canada's first prime minister, was on a train tour of the Canadian Rockies and thought the view from inside the car wasn't good enough, so she strapped herself onto the engine's cow catcher to get a better view of the mountain scenery.
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Nov 5, 2015 04:35
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Eggbeater Jesus posted:President Benjamin Harrison had two opossums as pets. They were named Mr. Protection and Mr. Reciprocity. OTHER NOTABLE PRESIDENTIAL PETS Mark & Satan (dogs), owned by John Adams. Emily Spinach (a snake), owned by Theodore Roosevelt. He also owned a hyena and a small bear (whose name was Johnathan Edwards). Tax Reduction and Budget Bureau (lion cubs), owned by Calvin Coolidge. edit: I can't believe I forgot to mention that Coolidge also owned a pair of raccoons. cash crab has a new favorite as of 04:57 on Nov 5, 2015 |
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Nov 5, 2015 04:48
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canyoneer posted:Tycho Brahe, famous Danish astronomer, died in the aftermath of rupturing his bladder after drinking too much at a meal (as it would have been impolite for him to get up). He either died from infection or from the huge dose of mercury that he took to treat it. Bonus fun fact: he was an astronomer in the pre-telescope era, and his observations were accurate enough for Johannes Kepler to use when he did the math to discover the three laws of planetary motion. He also had a pet elk, who sadly died when he drank too much beer and fell down the stairs. He also lost his nose in a duel over a math formula, making him one of the most badass nerds to ever live. He had it replaced with a golden replica. When the pyramids were built, small populations of mammoths still lived in northern Siberia.
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Nov 5, 2015 05:12
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canyoneer posted:Cleopatra lived closer in time to the moon landings than she did to the building of the pyramids at Giza This is my favorite fact. The Pyramids at Giza were more ancient and unknowable to her than she is to us.
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Nov 5, 2015 07:21
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cash crab posted:OTHER NOTABLE PRESIDENTIAL PETS The best Presidential pet names were Him and Her. EDIT: I stand corrected. The best Presidential pet names were Drunkard, Taster, Tipler, and Tipsy. RC and Moon Pie has a new favorite as of 09:10 on Nov 5, 2015 |
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Nov 5, 2015 09:08
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The elephants rode into the Alps by Hannibal were an extinct species that lived in what used to be the extremely fertile northern Sahara. The European lion went extinct somewhere between the first and second crusade. This is why you see it on really old tincture everywhere from Norway to Persia.
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Nov 5, 2015 09:53
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The Austrian painter Oskar Kokoschka (1886-1980) was for three years in a relationship with the widow of composer Gustav Mahler, Alma. After they separated in 1914, Kokoschka volunteered as a soldier in WWI and got almost killed, but that proved to be not enough to get over her, so he commissioned a sex doll with Alma's face ( ) to be built in 1918. He was disappointed by the result and destroyed it shortly afterwards.When the Vienna state opera was built from 1863-69, public opinion soon turned against the building, calling it a "sunken box" and even "the Königgrätz of architecture" after a horrific defeat of Austrian forces to Prussia in 1866. Even the Emperor was reported to hate it, so architect Eduard van der Nüll succumbed to despair and killed himself, even though his wife was eight months pregnant. The Emperor was reportedly so shocked by the suicide that for the rest of his life he would comment on all matters of art and architecture simply with the stereotypical words "It was very nice, I enjoyed it". Near St Peter's Cathedral in Rome there is a small cemetery which is reserved for German- and Dutch-speaking Catholics who died in Rome. The "Campo Santo dei Teutonici e dei Fiamminghi" (Graveyard of the Germans and the Flemish) belongs to Italy, but is only accessible via Vatican City and is also administered by it. To visit it you have to go to a Swiss Guard and ask for it in German. Sorry, non-German-speaking tourists! 
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Nov 5, 2015 10:29
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Drunk Nerds posted:Obama is related to the English royal family? Yep, or at least related to nobility, if not necessarily the current ruling family. He's something like the N-teenth cousin of Edward I. It's not just every president up to van Buren, it's all of 'em before or since. You'd be hard-pressed to find anyone with English ancestry in the U.S. who isn't related to nobility nowadays, though. Van Buren's quirk is that he was non-Anglo in the days when even the wealthy merchant classes typically wouldn't stray far from home when seeking a spouse.
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Nov 5, 2015 10:58
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Interestingly with Russia having just invaded the Crimea there is a tiny town in the north of England which has already been fighting Russia for the Crimea for over 100 years. When the Crimean war started between the UK and Russia it was declared in the name of Great Britain, Ireland and Berwick upon Tweed (Berwick was disputed between Scotland and England and so was treated separately) However when the peace was signed only Great Britain and Ireland were mentioned, leaving poor little Berwick to continue the war alone.
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Nov 5, 2015 11:42
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Cythereal posted:
It also leaks fuel like a sieve until the metal heats up and expands in flight. Andrew Jackson owned a parrot that was removed from his funeral because it cussed too much.
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Nov 5, 2015 12:14
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A Fancy 400 lbs posted:Do you have a better source than that? Googling just returns a bunch of psuedo-archaeology/ancient aliens sites and I'm not great at reading Portugeuse but looking at APIA's site they seem to be a tiny amateur organization that holds to a lot of fringe theories. Yeah, not really, sadly. I was in the Azores recently and was amazed by all the stone work and started looking into the history of the island. There are some scattered medieval bits of evidence that point to knowledge of the islands before the Portuguese arrived. Apparently that archaeologist linked in the first article is getting some funding from the Azorean government to do some digs, but it will likely be a few years before we see any results of that.
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Nov 5, 2015 12:41
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Let's talk about Winston Churchill. In 1915 he was First Lord of the Admiralty, the politician in charge of the Royal Navy, and the Gallipoli campaign was one of his many Good Ideas*. Just one of the thousands of junior officers who served on Gallipoli was one Second Lieutenant Clement Attlee, who survived a number of bouts of dysentry to be the second-last Briton to evacuate Suvla Bay at the end of the year. Attlee survived the rest of the war and went into politics himself. By 1935 he was Leader of the Labour Party, by 1940 he was serving in another War Cabinet (prime minister: W. Churchill), and two months after VE Day he replaced Churchill as Prime Minister, having won a landslide election. Speaking of Gallipoli, did you know that there were as many French Empire casualties (slightly more dead, slightly fewer wounded) during the campaign as there were Australians? They were mostly colonial troops from Africa. Back to Churchill: after the Gallipoli campaign failed miserably he was gradually shut out of government. He subsequently resigned, re-joined the Army, and after a little string-pulling he went to the Western Front as a battalion commander. In about four months at the front in early 1916, he personally led over 30 trench raids. *Other such Good Ideas from his time at the Admiralty include dealing with a pesky German cruiser by literally setting a river on fire (trialled but never put into action, sadly), and breaking the deadlock of trench warfare with giant trench-smashing steamrollers; when the Army wasn't interested in this concept he paid for a committee to discreetly begin development, paid for effectively out of the Admiralty's petty cash, and so the development of the world's first tank was begun by the Navy, designing in secret a new weapon for the Army, that the Army had already said they didn't want.
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Nov 5, 2015 13:38
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PlantHead posted:Interestingly with Russia having just invaded the Crimea there is a tiny town in the north of England which has already been fighting Russia for the Crimea for over 100 years. Sorry to shoot you down mate: The real story is still pretty  thoughWikipedia posted:There is an apocryphal story that Berwick is (or recently was) technically at war with Russia.[53] The story tells that since Berwick had changed hands several times, it was traditionally regarded as a special, separate entity, and some proclamations referred to "England, Scotland and the town of Berwick-upon-Tweed". One such was the declaration of the Crimean War against Russia in 1853, which Queen Victoria supposedly signed as "Victoria, Queen of Great Britain, Ireland, Berwick-upon-Tweed and all British Dominions". When the Treaty of Paris was signed to conclude the war, "Berwick-upon-Tweed" was left out. This meant that, supposedly, one of Britain's smallest towns was officially at war with one of the world's largest powers – and the conflict extended by the lack of a peace treaty for over a century.[54]
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Nov 5, 2015 16:41
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cash crab posted:OTHER NOTABLE PRESIDENTIAL PETS I think it goes to show just how different religion was viewed by America's founding fathers that one of them could be president and have a dog named Satan and that was apparently cool. Although the idea of Obama getting a dog named Satan is fun just for the sheer frothing insanity it would inspire from the religious right
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Nov 5, 2015 17:16
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Trin Tragula posted:
During the Second Boer War, he was working as a war correspondent for a British paper, and was accompanying a British unit on a train when it was ambushed by the Boers, and he was taken prisoner and held at a POW camp in Pretoria. He escaped after about a month by the simple expedient of prying up a floorboard, hiding under the floor, and making a run for it when the guards left to go searching the streets for him. He covered the 300 miles to Mozambique in 9 days, and then decided to join a South African calvary unit.
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Nov 5, 2015 17:41
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Frostwerks posted:Who loses an arm in a barfight. To be fair, this bar fight involved swords.
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Nov 5, 2015 18:02
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Hedningen posted:To be fair, this bar fight involved swords. What kind of D&D rear end bar let's people open carry swords all willy nilly
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Nov 5, 2015 18:16
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Mozart kept a fart diary.
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Nov 5, 2015 18:21
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Aesop Poprock posted:What kind of D&D rear end bar let's people open carry swords all willy nilly Any pub or Inn before the 19th century.
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Nov 5, 2015 18:23
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Side Effects posted:Mozart kept a fart diary. Accordion Man has a new favorite as of 18:29 on Nov 5, 2015 |
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Nov 5, 2015 18:25
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Peanut President posted:
Actually, up to and including Obama, all presidents are related and descended from the same 12th century English King except Van Buren: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2183858/All-presidents-bar-directly-descended-medieval-English-king.html trickybiscuits posted:
I have to admit, I almost lost my bagel at this one. Now I need to purchase this book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dictionary_of_Disgusting_Facts PopRocks has a new favorite as of 18:34 on Nov 5, 2015 |
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Nov 5, 2015 18:26
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The colourful fabrics from (West-) Africa were originally brought to Africa by returning Ghanese soldiers who fought in the Dutch East-Indies Army in the late 19th/early 20th century. They used to be slaves who got their freedom bought in exchange for a few years service in the East-Indies. The Dutch brought them over because they had just lost Belgium and were facing huge manpower shortages. The Ghanese soldiers were paid as much as the Europeans and even got shoes, in contrary to the Ambonese or Javanse that served in the army, who got paid less and weren't allowed to wear shoes.
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Nov 5, 2015 18:31
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The Iron Chancellor, Otto von Bismark, once challenged a member of the German government to a duel. His opponent chose sausages as the weapon.
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Nov 5, 2015 18:53
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Samovar posted:The Iron Chancellor, Otto von Bismark, once challenged a member of the German government to a duel. His opponent chose sausages as the weapon. So, who won?
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Nov 5, 2015 19:00
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Samovar posted:The Iron Chancellor, Otto von Bismark, once challenged a member of the German government to a duel. His opponent chose sausages as the weapon. Sadly, this is probably untrue  While his opponent Rudolf Virchow (the famous doctor, who at the time was also sitting in the Prussian Diet for the liberal Progress Party which he had co-founded) was indeed challenged to a duel by him, it appears that he simply declined the duel and offered an apology instead.However, Bismarck once entered a real duel with Georg von Vincke, another old rival of his in the Prussian parliament! Vincke had alluded to an anecdote in which Bismarck as the Prussian representative in the German Federal Convention had started smoking in the plenary chamber to one-up the Austrian representative, who as president of the convention had been the only one allowed to smoke before then. Bismarck was highly annoyed by that indiscretion and openly doubted Vincke's education, upon Vincke challenged him to a duel by pistol. They met the following day and shot at each other, but both missed (probably deliberately?), and so the whole affair was ended amicably. Duels between politicians even happened after World War II. In 1967, two French parliamentarians fought a duel with swords (the winner even drew blood), and in 1971, the interior minister of Uruguay challenged the former minister of industry to a pistol duel after the latter had called him a coward. All four shots (each of the opponents was allowed to shoot twice) missed, however.
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Nov 5, 2015 19:49
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Molentik posted:The colourful fabrics from (West-) Africa were originally brought to Africa by returning Ghanese soldiers who fought in the Dutch East-Indies Army in the late 19th/early 20th century. They used to be slaves who got their freedom bought in exchange for a few years service in the East-Indies. The Dutch brought them over because they had just lost Belgium and were facing huge manpower shortages. The Ghanese soldiers were paid as much as the Europeans and even got shoes, in contrary to the Ambonese or Javanse that served in the army, who got paid less and weren't allowed to wear shoes. People from Ghana are referred to as Ghanaian.
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Nov 5, 2015 20:33
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There is a large mountain range in NZ called the Ureweras. The name means 'Burnt Penis' which commemorates a Maori Chieftain sleeping too close to the fire one night. The SR-71 was one of the first aircraft to be designed with stealth features, but it had one of the largest IR (Heat-seeker) signatures of any aircraft.
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Nov 5, 2015 21:00
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Jaguars! posted:
Good news is that missile avoidance was as simple as "step on the gas, because the missile will run out of fuel before it catches up" The "wild wild west" era as depicted in films only lasted like, 20 years. The "golden age of piracy" was about 10 years in an interwar period in the early 18th century. Old timey sailors had a tradition of wearing one or more gold earrings, so if their drowned bloated corpse washed ashore someone could take the earring as payment for a proper burial (that's why Morgan Freeman wears one. He's a big time sailor)
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Nov 5, 2015 22:01
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