Things you were shockingly old when you learned

Simon!

Sorry, there should be no shame here.

But... calcium!

I sort of vaguely knew that but never knew any of the details until I just read about it now.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aF7V2dSvxpo

Sorry, wrong thread!

xp Pretty much every depiction of a skeleton ever nudges towards the wrong belief there, it must be said.

That when, in the Middle Ages, if people gave instructions involving 'say two paternosters' or 'say three hail marys' (often used in preparations, e.g. cooking and folk remedies) - this wasn't so much ~superstitious nonsense~ as it was a measure of time? Much like 'wash your hands for the length it takes to sing Happy Birthday twice'?

Prior to the invention of wristwatches and eggtimers and reliable measures of short-term time, the most reliable indication of how long something took was 'X repetitions of prayers everyone knew'.

I've never heard of that practice before, but it sounds really cool.

Yes, I read one of the oldest written recipes (for ravioli) and it said to boil them for the time it takes to say two paternosters.

"I'm going to take a nap. Say the rosary four times and then come wake me up."

one rosary = 10 winks

see the first few pages of e.p. thompson's "time, work-discipline, and industrial capitalism"

Envisioning mediaeval townsquare sitcom theatre where a cooking gag is based on the fact that in the next fief over, where the recipe is from, the custom is to append a full kyrie eleison to each paternoster, but the cook doesn't know this! so the archbishop's egg is hilariously underdone.

Alfred Crosby's The Measure of Reality discusses this, iirc

I thought the confession directive was the prayer on its own however many times its repeated.
Is it accompanied with a task you're supposed to do or are you supposed to be like meditating on the lord your saviour while youi';re doing it. Or is it that this clears you up to repent as in rethink your actions. Like hearing teh problem with starting meditation etc is taht other thoughts rush in to fill the attempted empty space you're creating and if you're repeating the hail marys or whatever you willl be confronted with the guilt over the sin you are trying to assuage.
Or is there something else you're supposed to have triggered?

I have heard taht prior to private confession becoming prefvalent practise the process was that people would announce their confession in a public space so that it wasn't a private process. I think repentance was supposed to be the focus, but this leaves whatever confession was made in public knowledge.
I think th eidea was supposed to be taht the village was so tightly bound that once you'd confessed others would forgive you but I can see resentment coming in.

That's what I remember from doing a module on medieval era in history when i was at university.
Can definitely see the advantage of it being a private practise after a while. If you can believe in the trustworthiness of teh priestyou're confessing to and medieval epistemology would have them being one of the pillars of that society.

loling at koogs and anatol merklich above, A+

I don’t really know if I was meant to learn this ever but this:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p08tw9p

freaks me out so fucking much. I knew probability was a late-ish arrival. But surely the house had a sharper concept of “odds” in gambling prior to like the 17th century, or whatever this says. It HAD to have! This can’t be the whole story on gambling, eh?

now annuities, ha maybe, it likely took a while for government/insurance to get the nerds in I’d expect. But not gamblers.

I’m getting a 404 at that link?

I learned to day that oxen are not a separate species, but steer that have been trained for yolks

wait until you find out about yokes

hmm.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w3ct0pxy

Oxen are grown steer.even if they weren't trained for yokes,they'd still be oxen when they got to a certain age.

I only found out oxen were castrated male cattle when I heard a story of how one of my great-grandfather was the guy in his village who did the castrating and that he'd bbq the testicles or criadillas

this old nutter called Ben I often bump into says when they castrate ram lambs they put some very very tight wire around their nuts and leave it like that till they just drop off. That is something I neither learned nor refused to believe tbh!

I think this is how my old ancestor did the job also iirc

afaik farmers had generally switched to rubber bands by the mid-80s but maybe England is different

oof!

was reading about the Thugee earlier, the other people committed to ritualistic robbery and murder in India who weren't the British Empire.

I just noticed that the image on the cover of Black Sabbath’s Paranoia is a guy holding up a sword and not some abstract blur of unidentifiable shapes

yeah i think they changed the lp title from War Pigs at the last moment, which that would still have been a bit of an underwhelming image for. THough maybe takes some power from the music its related to.
Wonder how naff it would look in full focus.

Thanks for that link, hunt3r. I'm really having trouble believing that too, re gambling, which afaik has been around since the dawn of time!
re annuities, idk, maybe people were dying all the time at any age from dropsy or whatever so patterns were less obvious. even now one's life expectancy at 60 is greater than at 14 or thereabouts!

Yeah you're in the %age that has made it to that age so the odds are recalibrated innit.

Yeah farmers do that rubber band thing with the tails too. I remember helping to catch some lambs for docking when i was a kid. I felt sorry for them.

as a child living on a small farm I had to help my dad castrate a bull calf - being an ex rugby player he was able to tackle and hold, leaving me with a stretching tool and a thick rubber ring about a half inch across. Having slipped it around the scrotum I released the tool; the flat GURK noise made by the calf is a sound I can still hear 37 years later.

rubber band thing turns up in Fight Club doesn't it?
THough intended for humans

I have a vivid and horrible memory of stumbling across a documentary that showed an Aussie sheep farmer castrating sheep with his teeth.

i read about that in isolation shepherd - slit the ballsack with a knife and suck the gonads out.

From memory this guy was just straight up biting them off.

i knew ledge had moved out of london but...

yeah urban life got to me, needed some time in the highlands sucking sheep gonads.

Getting away from bollocks for the moment, Van Halen thread tells me that David Lee Roth also worked part-time as an emergency medical technician in New York alongside his rock god role. Never knew that.

That Lil Wayne says "lovely lady lumps" in Lollipop.

Roth's EMT period was in the '00s, when the rock god work had dried up for a while.

Once during that period I saw him people-watching sitting outside The Coffee Shop on Union Square and I was one of the people.

Are y'all aware of his late-period rebirth as a guy who draws innumerable pictures of frogs to post on Twitter?

ok, maybe not innumerable. It seems like it might just be a covid lockdown thing.

read that as "frogbs" for a sec

I'd had a vague sense of the Crusades as immoral and unjustifiable but am only just now coming to learn that they were also mostly a pointless series of self-owning clusterfucks and that like half the time it was just Christians savaging other Christians.

Michael Caine fought in the Korean War.

No way