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The Illiad is basically just one chapter in the middle of the Trojan War and most everything else we know about it is inference from other sources and quite possibly fan fiction meant to bridge it and the Odyssey. I think the Theban Plays were something similar. Basically they were their own version of comic book adaptations; based on a wide base of material and perfectly willing to take liberties to tell a better (or easier to stage) story.
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Jul 23, 2018 06:32
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Lincoln punched Andrew Jackson so hard that Jackson flew forward through time and space and ended up as Joe Jackson, patriarch of the Jackson 5.
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Jul 23, 2018 06:47
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Khazar-khum posted:Lincoln punched Andrew Jackson so hard that Jackson flew forward through time and space and ended up as Joe Jackson, patriarch of the Jackson 5. Still a huge rear end in a top hat. Also, now dead.
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Jul 23, 2018 07:30
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Carbon dioxide posted:Top hats purely exist to compensate for shortness. Sir
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Jul 23, 2018 12:20
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You know the rule. Post the pics.
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Jul 23, 2018 12:55
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Milo and POTUS posted:Still a huge rear end in a top hat. Also, now dead. Sums up a lot of historical figures.
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Jul 23, 2018 13:12
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Alhazred posted:Sums up a lot of historical figures. thankfully
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Jul 23, 2018 13:15
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im definitely gonna throw a party with my friends when kissinger kicks the bucket
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Jul 23, 2018 13:16
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I'm not, because he got to live a long life in the lap of luxury surrounded by sycophants instead of facing any sort of justice.
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Jul 23, 2018 13:20
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Krankenstyle posted:ww1 was a weird mishmash of adorable sweetness (the above, the christmas truce) and horrible massacres (all wars are obviously horrible, but the industrial revolution really did some to streamline the horror). WWI is just supremely hosed up in so many ways. It boggles my mind that a century on, Verdun looks hosed to hell and back underneath a blanket of golf-course-green grass and trees. 
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Jul 23, 2018 17:25
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Sometimes I wonder what American attitudes towards interventionism and war would be like if we were still digging up 100-year-old ordinance every year. That Wikipedia article has some pretty terrifying statistics, like, France collects 900 tons of unexploded ordinance every year, out of the estimated 1 ton per square meter of the western front, fired in World War 1. (And see also the Zone Rouge, a.k.a. "red zone")
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Jul 23, 2018 17:41
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In Germany they find unexploded ordinance from WW2 at least once a week, more than 70 years after the war. The only time this ever really makes more than local news is when the number of people that have to be evacuated is unusually large. Back in 2016 they found a 1,300 kg (iirc) bomb a couple of days before Christmas in Augsburg which led to a good 10% of the population (more than 25,000 people) having to spend Christmas outside of their homes worrying that a 78 year old bomb might blast their house to hell in the meantime. I’m pretty sure that this sort of stuff is one of the main reasons why Germans are to this day pretty set against military interventions abroad.
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Jul 24, 2018 19:12
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System Metternich posted:I’m pretty sure that this sort of stuff is one of the main reasons why Germans are to this day pretty set against military interventions abroad. There may be a correlation here…
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Jul 25, 2018 00:08
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steinrokkan posted:I'm not, because he got to live a long life in the lap of luxury surrounded by sycophants instead of facing any sort of justice. I'm going to have an angry, bittersweet drink alone and say what I said when Falwell died. The damage is done, but good riddance nonetheless.
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Jul 25, 2018 00:27
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Nth Doctor posted:WWI is just supremely hosed up in so many ways. It boggles my mind that a century on, Verdun looks hosed to hell and back underneath a blanket of golf-course-green grass and trees. 
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Jul 25, 2018 00:30
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Living in a multi-polar world can make everything go pear shaped.
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Jul 25, 2018 02:05
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:Sometimes I wonder what American attitudes towards interventionism and war would be like if we were still digging up 100-year-old ordinance every year. It's estimated that it is ca. 50 000 mines in the norwegian coastline.
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Jul 25, 2018 10:13
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I assume it was the case for all bombers during WWII, but I know German ones would go on bombing runs to cities in the UK and then any unused ordinance would get dropped over the English countryside to reduce weight and save fuel for the return flight. I'm from England and they were still finding bombs around my hometown sometimes in the 2000s.
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Jul 25, 2018 12:12
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System Metternich posted:In Germany they find unexploded ordinance from WW2 at least once a week, more than 70 years after the war. The only time this ever really makes more than local news is when the number of people that have to be evacuated is unusually large. Back in 2016 they found a 1,300 kg (iirc) bomb a couple of days before Christmas in Augsburg which led to a good 10% of the population (more than 25,000 people) having to spend Christmas outside of their homes worrying that a 78 year old bomb might blast their house to hell in the meantime. I’m pretty sure that this sort of stuff is one of the main reasons why Germans are to this day pretty set against military interventions abroad. Berlin's got a lot of these because of the local geography (as well as historical administrative importance). Like the bedrock lies under a bunch of mud or something which would slow bombs down at which point they'd bounce off the bedrock, nose upwards. Or something like that, someone's brought it up a bunch of times in the milhist thread
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Jul 25, 2018 13:09
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How likely is it that a bomb would detonate after 70 years in mud?
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Jul 25, 2018 13:15
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Solice Kirsk posted:How likely is it that a bomb would detonate after 70 years in mud? More likely as time goes on. TNT based explosives get more dangerous as they age since they sweat out nitro glycerin.
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Jul 25, 2018 13:18
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Solice Kirsk posted:How likely is it that a bomb would detonate after 70 years in mud? There may be trouble in finding volunteers to check.
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Jul 25, 2018 13:28
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We should send them a bill for keeping our expensive ordinance all these years if we still could have used them. 
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Jul 25, 2018 13:29
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Proteus Jones posted:More likely as time goes on. TNT based explosives get more dangerous as they age since they sweat out nitro glycerin. Not only that, but they also have anti-tampering devices which means that they like to go off if the dismantling crew does not know exactly what to do.
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Jul 25, 2018 13:33
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Der Kyhe posted:Not only that, but they also have anti-tampering devices which means that they like to go off if the dismantling crew does not know exactly what to do. You’re right. I was just thinking about how old mining sites have been found with crates of old TNT sticks that are basically sitting in a pool of nitro. I didn’t think about Evil Engineering add ons.
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Jul 25, 2018 13:36
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Milo and POTUS posted:Berlin's got a lot of these because of the local geography (as well as historical administrative importance). Like the bedrock lies under a bunch of mud or something which would slow bombs down at which point they'd bounce off the bedrock, nose upwards. Or something like that, someone's brought it up a bunch of times in the milhist thread Yeah, that's exactly it. Many bombs of the time used timed fuses instead of impact fuses, to make certain they penetrated deeply into buildings before exploding (or to go off during later rescue efforts). These fuses were pretty simple: A vial of some mild acid would sit above some fragile material and slowly eat through it, releasing a firing pin once the material is weakened enough. However, by bouncing and coming to rest upside-down, these fuses were often completely neutralised, since the only thing that actually brought the acid into contact with the material was gravity. Perestroika has a new favorite as of 18:28 on Jul 25, 2018 |
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Jul 25, 2018 13:38
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Proteus Jones posted:More likely as time goes on. TNT based explosives get more dangerous as they age since they sweat out nitro glycerin. There's a sunken ammunition ship off the coast where I live. The Richard Montgomery. Iirc there's still 1.4k tonnes of explosives on board Angrymog has a new favorite as of 16:05 on Jul 28, 2018 |
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Jul 25, 2018 14:54
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I'm guessing the bombs with clockwork timers were the fancy expensive ones?
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Jul 25, 2018 14:58
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Clockworks don't handle hard impacts very well
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Jul 25, 2018 15:55
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Alhazred posted:It's estimated that it is ca. 50 000 mines in the norwegian coastline. The entire norwegian coastline was fortified to hell and back by the germans, there are old bunkers and trenchworks everywhere, its pretty rad. The mines and old bombs they dig up every other week less so. The army's ordinance disposal team goes out hundreds of times every year.
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Jul 25, 2018 16:11
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Proteus Jones posted:You’re right. I was just thinking about how old mining sites have been found with crates of old TNT sticks that are basically sitting in a pool of nitro. I didn’t think about Evil Engineering add ons. Erm, isn't it dynamite that will leak nitroglycerin? I think TNT is quite stable, the issue with old bombs is usually that the triggers could go off because (as mentioned above) they were basically a piece of metal being corroded, and they have been sitting around for a long time in an environment where metal corrodes.
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Jul 25, 2018 16:57
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Proteus Jones posted:You’re right. I was just thinking about how old mining sites have been found with crates of old TNT sticks that are basically sitting in a pool of nitro. I didn’t think about Evil Engineering add ons. That's dynamite that sweats nitroglycerin, but TNT does have a similar phenomenon.
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Jul 25, 2018 17:05
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chitoryu12 posted:That's dynamite that sweats nitroglycerin, but TNT does have a similar phenomenon. As a crosspost with the PYF Dangerous Chemistry thread, allow me to introduce y'all to Hexanitrohexaazaisowurtzitane. Derek Lowe, author of the above article posted:Hexanitrohexaazaisowurtzitane, or CL-20, was developed as a highly energetic, compact, and efficient explosive. What makes it unusual is not that it blows up – go find me a small hexa-N-nitro compound that doesn’t – but that it doesn’t actually blow up immediately, early, and often. No, making things that go off when someone down the hall curses at the coffee machine, that’s no problem. Making something like this that can actually be handled and stored is a real accomplishment.
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Jul 25, 2018 17:16
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Anyone who hasn't should watch "Danger, UXB". It's all on YouTube for free and follows a British bomb disposal team through WW2. Good primer on why UXOs are loving terrifying. Lots of info on anti-tamper booby trap fuses that were installed to kill bomb disposal crews specifically later in the war. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mrCR8pQFINM Spoiler: A lot of characters you get to like get blown up.  E: Found a better playlist. -Zydeco- has a new favorite as of 04:12 on Jul 26, 2018 |
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Jul 25, 2018 17:22
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-Zydeco- posted:Anyone who hasn't should watch "Danger, UXB". It's all on YouTube for free and follows a British bomb disposal team through WW2. Good primer on why UXOs are loving terrifying. Lots of info on anti-tamper booby trap fuses that were installed to kill bomb disposal crews specifically later in the war. Seconding this recommendation. Really good drama about the life of a bomb disposal crew, lots of amazing technical details about the evolution of fuses and anti-tamper devices and the crazy methods for dealing with them, and it does a great job of showing what life was like in Britain before, during, and after the blitz.
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Jul 25, 2018 18:37
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Angrymog posted:There's a sunken ammunition ship off the coast where I live. The Richard Montgomery. Iirc there's still 14k tonnes of explosives on board Oh hey, Warren Ellis did a small essay about this (and his hometown in general) recently http://spiritsofplace.com/files/Compendium-of-Tides.pdf
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Jul 25, 2018 23:26
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Nyyen posted:Seconding this recommendation. Really good drama about the life of a bomb disposal crew, lots of amazing technical details about the evolution of fuses and anti-tamper devices and the crazy methods for dealing with them, and it does a great job of showing what life was like in Britain before, during, and after the blitz. It's one of John Hawkesworth's series. Hawkesworth, a producer/creator, was involved in some really good period dramas during the 1970s: Danger UXB, Duchess of Duke Street and Upstairs, Downstairs. He also did By the Sword Divided in the 1980s, but I haven't seen any of it. Upstairs, Downstairs has an insanely good season about World War I.
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Jul 26, 2018 02:42
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:(And see also the Zone Rouge, a.k.a. "red zone") Wikipedia posted:Some areas remain off limits (for example two small pieces of land close to Ypres and Woëvre) where 99% of all plants still die, as arsenic can constitute up to 17% of some soil samples Jesus Christ
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Jul 26, 2018 22:29
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Nth Doctor posted:WWI is just supremely hosed up in so many ways. It boggles my mind that a century on, Verdun looks hosed to hell and back underneath a blanket of golf-course-green grass and trees. I actually went to Verdun on vacation in June; I've had a fascination with World War One ever since I was in middle school. I'm an amateur photographer, but here's some of the photos with descriptions.  This is the entrance to the 'Trench of the Bayonets.' There was a myth that several French soldiers died at their posts with bayonets still fixed, so they built this big memorial. They actually got buried by an artillery barrage and then were reburied by Germans. The story is completely false, but I imagine it would cost far too much and be too divisive to do much about the memorial at this point.  The monument itself.  The grave of one of the unknown soldiers within the trench. Fort Vaux was the smallest of the forts. Its guns had been knocked out, its water supply cut, its galleries full of wounded soldiers who had tried to escape the numbing bombardment. It was commanded by Major Sylvain Raynal, an old soldier who walked with a cane. He and his men, half mad with thirst, defended the fort for seven days against attack, fighting hand to hand in its pitch-black galleries against flamethrowers and machine guns, tearing down its walls from within to build emplacements. Even Vaux's last pigeon, Valiant, gassed and wounded, proved itself; it carried a message to Fort Souville, next in the chain of fortresses, and received a citation. Major Raynal, at the seventh day, judged that his men had done their duty. French honor had been saved, and the suffering was enough. They laid down arms and surrendered the fort, and the Germans lined up to shake Raynal's hand. He spent the rest of the war in a German prison camp.    The crown jewel of the fortress chain, Fort Douaumont had had its guns stripped in 1915 and its regiment downsized by order of General Joffre, who saw fortresses as outmoded. The French would pay for this dearly - Douaumont was captured by less than thirty Germans, who snuck in and captured the skeleton crew of the fort without firing a shot. Their pride wounded, the French counter-attacked again and again, bombarding their own fort and spending up to 100,000 lives to take back Douaumont.  The walls of Fort Douaumont.  Inside Fort Douaumont, stored artillery exploded while in German possession, killing many soldiers and burying them beneath a cave-in. This is their memorial.  Barbed wire against the sky. The heights of the Meuse did not only host forts, artillery, and soldiers. There were villages, too. Nine of them, which the battle killed - in official registers they are recorded as having 'died for France,' as a soldier might. Among them was Fleury. Having exchanged hands sixteen times over the course of the battle, it was decided not to rebuild it. Yet Fleury still exists. Its roads have been relaid. The vacant shellholes where once houses and buildings stood have been carefully marked with those who lived there once: grocer, streetmender, priest, school. And to one side, as in all French villages, their war memorial: their sons and husbands and brothers who went away and did not return. As if a village, its traditions, its people, its soil tilled for centuries, was not loss enough.    After ten months, and three hundred thousand dead, the battle ended. German troops had to be shipped east to face Russia's Brusilov offensive. The French held the forts and Verdun, the Germans the woods of Alsace-Lorraine. There was a great gaping wound torn into the Meuse forests and hills, the wind carried blood and death, but other than that - tactically, strategically - nothing had changed. Verdun now is a vast forest, dotted with innumerable memorials, rotting concrete shelters and bunkers, the wooden frames of rifles, and remnant trenches.      There is an ossuary. It is shaped like an artillery shell, and at the top of its tower there is a bell named The Voice of the Dead. Beneath its floor, through its windows, there are 130,000 unknown soldiers' bones: Germans, Algerians, Senegalese, French, Vietnamese. The bones dog your steps. The silence is absolute. The steel ossuary doors still open when the French Forest Service returns from the deep thickets of Verdun bearing earth-stained bones. Every step of the battlefield, you must remember, is a graveyard.   The largest French graveyard from the Great War. The Ossuary stands just behind. Where Fleury's railway station once stood, there is a museum. It is a terrible and awe-inspiring place in the ordinariness of its contents. It holds uniforms of Prussians, Zouaves, chasseurs. ID tags snapped in half. The skin of a gassed man. The trunk of a dead man, carefully wrapped and delivered back to his widow.  The panorama that depicts what the battlefield looked like; it's a replacement for one the museum used to have which was designed by veterans of the battle. They swapped it out when they redesigned the museum.  Tucked in a back part of the museum, you may find this chest. It is terribly small and terribly sad. The placard reads, Louis Pergaud, author of 'The War of the Buttons,' was a young writer, aged just 32 at the start of war. Like millions of Frenchmen, he left his profession and his home to fight in the trenches in Meuse, to the south of Verdun. With his men, he alternated between periods on the front line and short periods of rest in the rear, often under shellfire. Life was hard but regular parcels from his wife, Delphine, made it more bearable. He placed the contents of his parcels with his few personal effects in his army trunk. On 8 April 1915, Louis Pergaud did not make it back to the trenches. His army trunk was closed and returned to his wife. In 2008, it was donated to the Memorial Museum. These are the last reminders of a man who disappeared in the fighting in Meuse. Louis Pergaud's body was never found.  French gas shell.  The entrance to Fort Souville, tucked far into the woods, where I had as close to a paranormal experience as I've ever had.  Someone's grand uncle died in the fighting at Fort Souville, and their family still remembers the loss. The whole experience was incredible, truly awe-inspiring. It reminded me of the only poem that I think might be a better war poem than Owen or Sassoon's. 'On the Death of a Soldier' by James Graham Make no mistake: he is dead. He does not sleep. There is no whisper in his brain. There is nothing in his chemistry that can say, "I am cold." No part of him is alive now, either here or in a place of angels. He will decay. The world has ended. The cosmos has collapsed into a singularity. Traffic is passing on the road, a blackbird sings, a frog leaps somewhere, tourists are visiting the Taj Mahal, but the world has ended. If God would send his Minister of State, to give us the co-ordinates of heaven, if we could send a party of detached observers on a preview tour (sales pitch and brochures will not do); if then His Excellency would put a human soul on public view, explain and demonstrate the method of its separation from the corpse, and its means of transportation to eternity, then we would know for sure: would know a man whose entrails had been scattered on the earth would be restored and counseled, and be happy. Then making garbage of young men would not be a kinder act, but there would be recompense. The years they never knew, the loves they never gave, would matter less. It would matter less that they could not be engineers, or doctors, or play golf, or father laughing babies. To put it differently: until God's envoy makes his case, and answers all our questions, do not kill. Work against death. Watch over life. Assume there is no other. Pinball has a new favorite as of 15:47 on Jul 27, 2018 |
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Jul 26, 2018 22:50
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Fantastic photos, thanks for sharing. The French inscription in the first photo actually said they were buried by a barrage, but maybe the monument itself is still named after the bayonet story? Also Fort Souville looks like it could be the location where they did the "Bear Jew" scene from Inglorious Basterds e: also that poem is incredible, definitely in the Owen-Sassoon league, wow Carthag Tuek has a new favorite as of 23:10 on Jul 26, 2018 |
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Jul 26, 2018 23:00
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