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Interrupting COVID talk to post about a reference lost on me. In the book Dark Reflections, Arnold and Judy are getting married - but first Arnold has to stop into a clinic to “get his Wasserman test done”. Turns out before 1980 you were required to get a swab jammed up your dong to check for syphilis before you could get married. Maybe this isn’t lost on some people since Montana was still doing blood tests for women in 2019, but I didn’t know about it.
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Apr 30, 2020 13:04
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| # ¿ Apr 25, 2024 12:50 |
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Ah yeah you’re right, I went back and checked - he gets a full test done while he’s there but the required one is just blood. It still struck me as really odd and archaic. And they lied about the reason? So weird.
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Apr 30, 2020 13:52
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In the intro to “Tellers of Tales”, Maugham writes “A culture is meagre that cannot get fun out of push pin as well as out of poetry.” Apparently this is paraphrasing Bentham, but what is push pin? Wikipedia provides this amusingly opaque description while noting that it “may be confusing or unclear to readers”:quote:Push-pin was an English child's game played from the 16th until the 19th centuries In push-pin each player sets one pin (needle) on a table and then tries to push his pin across his opponent's pin. The game is played by two or more players. But what were the rules? Was it literally just pushing the needles across the table? No one seems to know for sure because there are conflicting descriptions and references to it from various times (maybe it was played on a hat? Or the needles were aimed at object? Or it was like jacks?). So this was common enough in past centuries that every child played it and it was an easily referenced useless pastime but now nobody would know wtf this was. Prism Mirror Lens fucked around with this message at 09:42 on May 15, 2020 |
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May 15, 2020 09:36
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