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I Wish I Was
Dec 11, 2006

I saw this at the bookshop and thought of you.
One of my favorites is the molasses flood in Boston.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_Molasses_Disaster

Can you imagine molasses moving through a major city at 35 MPH? Enough molasses to kill 21 people? I can't even conceive of what that much molasses would look like. That's crazy, and if I hadn't seen it sourced in multiple reputable histories of Boston I'd never have believed it. I haven't used the expression "slow as molasses" in years because of reading about that.

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I Wish I Was
Dec 11, 2006

I saw this at the bookshop and thought of you.
I don't know how much basis there is for the whole "bombing is indiscriminate and inaccurate" thing. I was in Germany a few years ago and a lot of the towns I visited had aerial maps of the area after allied bombings, and it was remarkable how the businesses and houses would be bombed but the churches (and often schools) were almost always left perfectly intact. That seems like at least the ability to avoid targets, if not specifically the ability to hit certain things on purpose.

I Wish I Was
Dec 11, 2006

I saw this at the bookshop and thought of you.
Thanks for the replies about the churches left standing. Stronger structures + dedicated protection seems like a reasonable explanation. I don't read German very well, so the explanations posted with the photos in the various towns weren't exactly crystal clear to me.

This is actually the very picture I had in mind when I made my first post:

I Wish I Was
Dec 11, 2006

I saw this at the bookshop and thought of you.
Awesome post, Starmaker.

I Wish I Was
Dec 11, 2006

I saw this at the bookshop and thought of you.

withak posted:

Flower names are pretty good for girls IMO.

Petunia is an old lady name.

Of course, my kid's name is Margaret, so I don't have a lot of room to talk.

I Wish I Was
Dec 11, 2006

I saw this at the bookshop and thought of you.

FreudianSlippers posted:

Insane Icelander :words:


The sagas themselves are also pretty cool and I might write something about them and the era in which they were written if I'm not too lazy.

This is exactly the sort of thing I expected in a "wait, what?" thread - things that make me pause and wonder how the gently caress something like that happened. Thanks for this!

And yes, please; I'd love an expansion on the sagas. I love mythology, especially epic heroism, and I'm less familiar with extreme northern stuff than I'd like to be.

I Wish I Was
Dec 11, 2006

I saw this at the bookshop and thought of you.

Brokyn posted:

God, even Nixon looks like he's wearing a rubber Nixon mask in that photo.

That was my exact thought on seeing that photo. What an unfortunate head on that man.

I Wish I Was
Dec 11, 2006

I saw this at the bookshop and thought of you.
This year we had a metric ton of peeps as well as some rice krispie treats and fruit by the foot that we initially used to make peep sushi, but there was a lot left over and my daughter and niece, 11 and 15, went nuts with them depicting horrible historical scenes. I thought you guys might appreciate them, since several of these dioramas depict incidents mentioned in this thread.

The deaths of the Romanov family (Alexi is the really really bloody one, due to the hemophilia):


The battle of Stalingrad (I have no idea why this one is so huge compared to the others):
http://i.imgur.com/89acq.jpg

Russia vs Germany in WWII:


The battle of the Alamo:


Van Gogh presenting his ear to his favorite prostitute:


Simo Hayha, the baddest fellow ever to shoot a rifle:


(USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)

I Wish I Was
Dec 11, 2006

I saw this at the bookshop and thought of you.
Thank you so much for sharing that, Velvet. My grandmother is 92 and I love hearing her stories about living through most of the 20th century, and this story was really interesting!


Drunkboxer posted:

(poss. apocryphal)

I'm glad I'm not the only person in the world who immediately thinks of the Simpsons song when they hear the name William Henry Harrison.

I Wish I Was
Dec 11, 2006

I saw this at the bookshop and thought of you.
I spent fifteen years as a technical writer, and I want to punch the person who came up with automatic indexing in book-writing programs like Framemaker. Human indexing is a skill, like you said, and it's a shame that in the last ten years or so most companies that even bother to still do documentation don't want to pay a person to make a good index when you can just click a button and have the computer do it for you in ten minutes, no matter how much that generated index sucks. It's one of the reasons I left the industry.

That's really interesting about the origin of the index - it makes complete sense that it would have started from people making their own notes about where to find certain topics.

I Wish I Was
Dec 11, 2006

I saw this at the bookshop and thought of you.
That is amazing and exactly the kind of stuff I was hoping to see in this thread! Amazing the little bits of defiance against the Nazis that were such small things in retrospect but became large things due to the consequences of doing them.

I Wish I Was
Dec 11, 2006

I saw this at the bookshop and thought of you.

Mr Havafap posted:

And yet if you add all the Commonwealth casualties you're still almost 300k short of the French: 1.4 million dead (population just shy of 40 millions). That's roughly 1 out of every 10 male of age.
This is why you'll find a monument or a commemorative plaque in every, single French village.

You're not kidding. I have ancestors from Alsace, and while we were there checking out the area every single town had a war memorial.

The town of Matzenheim, which currently has a population of just over 1,000 people:


(I'm descended from the Bapst family, which is why we took a photo of this particular one.)

I Wish I Was
Dec 11, 2006

I saw this at the bookshop and thought of you.

Mr Havafap posted:

Actually I was talking of the first world war, but your picture is interesting since Alsace and Lorraine had a peculiar fate during WWII: they weren't occupied by the Wehrmacht, they were actually annected by, and considered an integral part of the Reich (1940-44), its habitants declared being of German citizenship, and young men drafted into the German Army where many perished on the Eastern front*.

Now, the regions have a history of passing between French and German hands and your picture illustrates that as the names are all French while the surnames are all German!.
It'd be interesting to know how they died, the earlier dates suggest the Battle of France while the later ones suggest the Eastern Front, but could of course be any other front, or execution for resisting or during forced labour (STO or "Service de Travail Obligatoire", basically filling in for German men fighting, which could mean doing farmwork for some recently widowed Gretchen but it could just as easily be slaving away in a munitions factory)

And the plaque says "Victimes de .." rather than "Morts au Combat" which to me suggests mixed fates.

*The Malgré-Nous
On that front you'd also find other French soldiers, volunteers in the SS division Charlemagne.
The reason they joined was to fight communism.
And to round things off there was the Normandie-Niemen squadron fighting for the Allies on the Soviet side, also made up of Free French volunteers.

Ah; the sentiment applies there, too - I'm pretty sure there was an identical WWI plaque right next to that one but we didn't photograph it because there were no Bapsts. The Bapsts who came to America all considered themselves German. And Andreas was a really popular given name in my family so seeing the Andre wasn't surprising at all. I think this is the only Germaine/Hermann I've heard of though.

Our trip to Matzenheim was fun because we couldn't find the town hall, which is where the Familiebuchen are often kept if the church doesn't have them. We stopped at the library, and because of the region most of the folks speak French and German. I speak English and a little German, so we had to carry on every conversation using what was essentially a second language for both of us, which actually made it kind of easier because there were no crazy idioms or other complicating factors to make translating harder. We found the town hall and repeated the pidgin German and got what we were after.

I think "Victims" may be used in the WWII plaque because I don't think they were all soldiers - notice that some of the deaths were of kids, the one being only 11. I'm guessing the earlier ones were soldiers, being in their early 20s, and the later were victims of general war incidents?

echopapa posted:

I wonder if the French simply changed the first names to the French versions in an act of nationalism when they put up the memorial. Most of those names have German equivalents (Germain = Hermann, Louis = Ludwig, Oscar = Oskar, etc.)

That makes sense, too, especially for the time it seems likely that they would have had German given names.

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I Wish I Was
Dec 11, 2006

I saw this at the bookshop and thought of you.

SeanBeansShako posted:

Victoria and Albert had a really weird sub dom fetish behind the scenes and didn't use protection.

Seriously, Victoria was known as the "grandmother of Europe" because she had like twenty kids and married them all off to various royalty in other countries. So by the time you got to the generation of WWI, almost all the reigning monarchs were her grandkids, hence George, Wilhelm, and Nicholas being cousins and looking almost exactly alike. This also caused the hemophilia in the royal families of Europe because of the inbreeding that took place in the generations immediately following Victoria - hemophilia is a very recessive thing, so only a fair amount of inbreeding can produce it.

Alternately, it's not hemophilia but lycanthropy, but that requires Doctor Who to be fact and not fiction.

OK, a quick look at Wikipedia shows that it was nine kids and not twenty, but they ended up with 42 grandkids spread all over Europe including Wilhelm, George, and Nicholas.