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Krankenstyle posted:Sure but as anyone who's played with matches & gasoline knows, that just dribbles. You need pressure to shoot it somewhere. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkrQia1GlNY
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Jan 27, 2018 11:47
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System Metternich posted:To be fair, Charlemagne made an honest effort learning to read and write in his later years (iirc he even slept with a pen and a clay tablet or somesuch under the pillow), [...] quote:Carolus Magnus kroch ins Bett,
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Feb 5, 2018 21:09
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hackbunny posted:Jesus, it's like a ritual cock fight I thought the commenter was joking when he mentioned the Ministry of Silly Walks. Then... 
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Feb 16, 2018 14:00
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Krankenstyle posted:Oh yes, the plural. I can't say I've heard a lot but I know of them and I respect them. These guys? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MxJLYpwX_XY
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Mar 24, 2018 18:18
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Werong Bustope posted:Bin bombs were a specific tactic of the IRA, so there is a reason for it. Instead of getting rid of the bins, they should have replaced them with these. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NEfffWkN7r4
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Mar 25, 2018 17:17
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The tale of Abu Hasan and the fart.
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Apr 24, 2018 21:03
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Phy posted:One of the first Europeans to write sympathetically about Native American cultures was a conquistador named Cow Head. Like, he was Spanish so he had one of those long multi-name names, but his family name was Cabeza de Vaca. Head of Cow. The story of how his family got that name and were ennobled is pretty cool.
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Jun 4, 2018 19:31
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Chillbro Baggins posted:Still happens, every few months somebody posts a screenshot from one of the sites that shows the tracks of flights in the TFR airpower or AI airplane threads of an airliner test flight or military training flight drawing a dick in the sky across half the US. In the military case, sometimes an SA goon was onboard, iirc. NASA put a dick on loving Mars. e: And, this being El Reg: The Register posted:We note the page allows visitors to "enlarge" the image.
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Jul 13, 2018 19:46
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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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Kassad posted:Sometimes it could be about being sure the food hasn't be adulterated in some way. Like white bread got more popular partly because it meant you couldn't do poo poo like add sawdust to it. They just added plaster, alum or worse. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ieHi4PVMJU0
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Aug 3, 2018 21:35
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drrockso20 posted:Not his fault that Nutmeg was ridiculously popular back then The history of nutmeg itself is also fascinating. For example, the Dutch colony that became New York (and a few other states) was ceded to Britain as part of a treaty that ceded Run in the Banda Islands to the Netherlands, giving them a monopoly on nutmeg.
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Aug 4, 2018 09:49
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Red Bones posted:As is mentioned on the wikipedia page, the Dutch gained that monopoly on Nutmeg by murdering pretty much the entire population of the Banda Islands and then repopulating the islands with slave labourers, because it was more profitable to control the island than to just keep trading with the Bandanese. Yeah, the Dutch were not always the nice people that they are regarded as nowadays. And having had Dutch roommates, I have to say they can still be pretty ...uncivil...
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Aug 4, 2018 12:47
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Krankenstyle posted:Aw boo it seemed that Kriegskuhe (war-cows) were mentioned in 1595 but it turns it's just google misreading Kriegsleut(h)e (war-people). Jamie Jeffers mentioned Ragnar Lodbrok had an encounter with them.
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Aug 6, 2018 21:29
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ChocNitty posted:After the mongols won the Battle of Mohi, they cut off the right ear of every dead soldier, to calculate the death toll. They filled 9 large sacks, basically 9 camel loads.
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Aug 15, 2018 19:29
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wheatpuppy posted:Serious question, what was the perceived benefit of attaching monkeys to the explosives vs. just ... throwing explosives at the British? They really hated monkeys?
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Aug 24, 2018 05:22
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Wheat Loaf posted:The guillotine has never seemed like a terribly practical way of liquidating a large number of people to me. I assume it's still a point of reference today for symbolic reasons. In any event, I assume that if there was a revolution tomorrow, more expeditious and efficient methods would probably be applied. Vasily Blokhin 
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Oct 28, 2018 07:45
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Frog Act posted:[...] being aware of the degree to which you reify or perpetuate social discourses when you report on even ostensibly objective historical narratives. [...] No offense, but I'll stick with Mike Duncan, thanks very much.
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Oct 30, 2018 19:36
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Say Nothing posted:...A man, a plan, a canal, Panama... A man, a plan, a canoe, pasta, heros, rajahs, a coloratura, maps, snipe, percale, macaroni, a gag, a banana bag, a tan, a tag, a banana bag again (or a camel), a crepe, pins, Spam, a rut, a Rolo, cash, a jar, sore hats, a peon, a canal – Panama!
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Nov 18, 2018 11:58
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Der Kyhe posted:I also read somewhere that there usually was a sort of a non-spoken agreement that both will purposefully miss, to that the parties can say that the duel happened but both participants were guaranteed to escape the ordeal alive. The ones who tried to actually hit were considered assholes. That's called deloping, and was not a universal practice. Some codes duello even explicitly forbade it, e.g., because it it was considered dangerous to the bystanders (dueling pistols being notoriously inaccurate).
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May 18, 2019 09:28
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ToxicFrog posted:The Gera was sunk by the detonation of two small bombs fore and aft, breaching the hull in both places. McCance -- the leader of the contractors -- planned to re-float her in straightforward fashion: patch both holes, pump the ship full of air and float her into drydock. And for the patches, he opted to use concrete. You can build ships out of concrete. There's an old one beached at Aptos (near Santa Cruz), CA.
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Jun 8, 2019 21:42
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Alhazred posted:Piercing the heart with a long needle with a flag at the end, which would wave if the heart were still beating. "Yup, he's dead now."
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Jun 9, 2019 17:34
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Elyv posted:complaining at people selling you things is as old as the written word and probably older I absolutely love the "take it or leave it" bit, lovely merchants have not changed at all in the last 3770 years.
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Jun 11, 2019 17:36
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chitoryu12 posted:The phonetic understanding is basically a big shrug. There’s no recording of what vowels were used and the writers often took shortcuts, so we’ve had to guess at the actual sound of the language. Coptic started as transliterating Egyptian into Greek and there are still disagreements to this day over properly interpreting it. Yup, that's how you get Akhnaten/Echnaton, Nefertiti/Nofretete etc.
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Jun 16, 2019 08:31
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christmas boots posted:Goodbye, wondrous femininity! That's not exactly what "cunne superbe vale" means...
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Jul 26, 2019 05:29
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Why is this thread turning all chatti?
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Jul 26, 2019 17:01
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ToxicSlurpee posted:One of my favorite little pottery facts was that the ancient Egyptians actually had pottery that could cool water down even in the middle of the summer in the harshest summer sun. Normally you don't want your pottery to be porous so you glaze it and fire it as hot as you can. In Egypt they had deliberately underfired pots that weren't glazed. They'd fill them with water but leave them out in the sun as the pots would then sweat. The water would evaporate slowly and take heat with it which let them have cooler water than what you got out of most water available sources.
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Aug 12, 2019 22:07
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System Metternich posted:Traditional women‘s clothing in Bavaria doesn’t really lend itself well to quickly doing your business. I was told that until like the 60s and 70s you could sometimes see old ladies in my hometown who still wore that getup as their everyday attire just stopping whatever they were doing, standing still for a while and then going on, leaving a pee puddle behind Try 1980s. I personally witnessed it on the Marienplatz in Munich. (Though that may have been a homeless person.)
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Aug 26, 2019 05:57
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canyoneer posted:Ever wondered how you poop on a sailing ship? Not on the poop deck, that's for sure (that comes from French word for the stern of the ship, la poupe) Now consider that on a big warship, a few hundred people would do this every day*. And that such a ship might be becalmed for several weeks in the tropics. * Except for those suffering from constipation and other intestinal disorders, which were quite a few, due to their diet. Disclaimer: This all comes from Patrick O'Brien's fiction.
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Sep 14, 2019 18:56
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Byzantine posted:Big Bad John, surely. Why am I suddenly imagining a balalaika playing a Country tune? e: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hm3YolGRkuY Zopotantor has a new favorite as of 21:32 on Nov 12, 2019 |
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Nov 12, 2019 21:25
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ToxicSlurpee posted:It also took a very long time for tax evasion to be a thing or for sensical tax codes to even exist. People, being people, would notice that you paid grain taxes only on specific things. Like you'd pay a certain chunk of your grain only when it was baked into bread. The solution? Turn it into things that are not bread but still provide calories like, say, beer. Beer got taxed? Lol we mostly eat gruel now gently caress you. They tax all the wheat grains? It's barley o'clock, fuckers. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GnRNWyf1Rtw
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Nov 15, 2019 22:32
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Krankenstyle posted:cf above re halvtreds my friend I think I already posted this, so just a short quote. quote:And two Weys of wool make a sack, And 12 sacks make a last. But a last of herrings contains 10 thousand, and each Thousand contains 10 hundred, and each hundred contains 120.
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Nov 16, 2019 19:18
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Tashilicious posted:Isnt that a koku? IIRC there are hard/soft consonant shifts in Japanese, it might be the same word. (I don't actually know Japanese.)
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Nov 18, 2019 06:28
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ToxicSlurpee posted:Incidentally, that's why English is such a loving mess. It's a Germanic language that also has influence from the Celtic and Nordic languages but also from Latin. Basically everybody was conquering the Isles repeatedly throughout history. Then it was left to its own devices when the English nobility decided to speak French because lol gently caress that dirty peasant speak. A few centuries later this weird mish mash of languages then decided that it wanted to be a Romance language like all the cool kid languages the other empires used so they tried to smush that square peg into the round hole. James Nicoll posted:The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.
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Dec 1, 2019 19:06
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System Metternich posted:The father of an ex of mine served in the GDR people’s army at the same time my dad served in the western Bundeswehr (both as part of their obligatory military service), and they both told me that at least on a conscript level the two German armies of the mid-80s were basically a never-ending boozefest with no one even remotely capable of performing large-scale warfare against the class enemy. I know, merely anecdotes, but it at least shows that even in the GDR not everybody was overly keen on invading the capitalist neighbour I feel cheated. I did my Bundeswehr service in 84/85  and there was no booze.
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Dec 23, 2019 14:01
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Kassad posted:Luckily for us, after Brexit there will always be the UK. Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia.
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Dec 23, 2019 14:02
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Kevin DuBrow posted:Sir Joseph William Bazalgette could be considered one of London’s greatest heroes. Whereas previous attempts to modernize the sewer system were stymied by its enormous cost, political support for a project to alleviate this issue was at its peak, and it was the perfect time for an ambitious civil engineer to step forward and seize the opportunity. As chief engineer of the Metropolitan Board of Works, he oversaw the construction of over a thousand miles of underground sewers over a decade that... still dumped waste into the Thames. But it was diverted downstream and away from the city, were it could flow into the sea! Before then, waste was dumped into above-ground sewers that were originally designed for storm run-off that drained into the sluggish Thames and lingered in the city. If you can find a copy of Colin McLaren's novel Rattus Rex (it seems to be out of print, except for the German translation), I'd highly recommend it. It is set against the backdrop of Bazalgette's project, with the protagonists having to explore both the new and ancient sewers while investigating a strange series of murders. quote:Much of the tunnels are still in use. Bazalgate displayed a foresight that astounds me as someone who has examined the current state of American infrastructure politics. From the UK’s Institution of Civil Engineers: Yeah, but he didn’t foresee wet wipes and fatbergs.
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Feb 19, 2020 10:59
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drrockso20 posted:Honestly considering how heavy duty those things look to be, odds are decent that at least once some poor schmuck had their skull turned concave with one of those  Kevin Vickers
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Mar 24, 2020 18:02
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Kassad posted:Yup, it says: Kaşık = spoon. Bir kaşık yok. Zopotantor has a new favorite as of 19:02 on Mar 24, 2020 |
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Mar 24, 2020 19:00
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System Metternich posted:During the 70s and 80s, the GCP (German Communist Party) - a strict Marxist-Leninist group in West clandestinely led by East German intelligence - was active even in the most unlikely spots, one of those being the village of Reichertshofen in south -eastern Bavaria, i.e. one of the most conservative and Catholic places in the entire country. In the early 70s, they even convinced many local farmers to take part in a tour to East German farming collectives so that they could see first-hand how socialism was the better alternative. Unsurprisingly, it didn't really work out - at the state parliament election in 1974, the party got only ten votes in Reichertsheim, two of those coming from elderly ladies who afterwards proudly stated that they had voted for the "German Catholic Party" I heard this as the old lady saying they voted for the "communion" party.
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Apr 21, 2020 16:26
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System Metternich posted:Yeah, that's not a case of Stalin ordering his own younger self to be hidden but Krushchev trying to erase all memories of his predecessor. Stalin died in 1953 and not in 1958, btw
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Apr 23, 2020 18:06
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