Things you were shockingly old when you learned

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

Terry JOnes tv shows on the Medieval age were pretty good. I think he hgoes into teh problems with the Crusades to good degree.
I've heard taht a lot of teh Xian heroes were mercenaries who spent time fighting for the muslim side too.

I'm enjoying teh Media-Eval podcast looking at media representations of medieval topics. They spent a long time rubbishing the story of the El Cid movie one week . show can be like 2 hours long plus.

That Americans can a) vote in person weeks in advance of election day, and b) have to stand in line for hours on end to do so. Or is this just a modern development?

The former is new and the latter is old

Michael Caine fought in the Korean War

Not a lot of people know that.

That Paul Robeson was a professional football player for a couple of years in the newly formed NFL in the early 20s while attending Columbia Law School. He really could do everything.

He just kept rollin' along

That Americans can a) vote in person weeks in advance of election day, and b) have to stand in line for hours on end to do so. Or is this just a modern development?

The whole system and its variability across states is baffling - presumably down to multiple efforts at 'improvements' alongside an agenda to disenfranchise minority groups.

UK is no exemplar of how to organise shit and I appreciate the geography and scale differences but we seem to muddle through getting tens of millions of people to tick a box in a single day with not too much fuss.
US seems to make it really hard for itself, maybe deliberately.

I'm also surprised they release daily early voting stats by party adfiliation in advance of results which is a big no in most other countries.

its completely deliberate

I do think the idea of spreading an election out over a week or two makes sense, especially in a country as large as the US. Theoretically it might also mean less chance of some bullshit last-minute promise by the incumbent party to sway the floating voters. Anyway, this is probably all for one of the numerous US politics threads instead of here.

Yeah, I know if varies state by state and there are issues with queues, but the principle of allowing early voting is good one, it seems to me, and quite a surprise in a country that often goes out of its way to make it hard to vote.

Not many other countries seem to have taken this positive step, though possibly that's because mail-in voting is better implemented.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_voting

Sally Field was teh tv Gidget. I was just looking up where she started and that seems to be her first big role or at least one of tehm.

I was thinking it was her taht made Can She Bake A Cherry pie back in like 68 and taht's Karen Black.

Also that Gidget started with Sandra Dee as a one off film. I know that Sandra Dee was viewed as sqaeaky clean from having seen Grease I now know she turned up in Frasier years later which I don't think I've come across before.

A quote from Sally Field about public perception turned up inn a webinar I was on a few days ago. Slipped my mind she had been Forest Gump's mum in the film when people couldn't place her.

Flying Nun as well.

I was vaguely aware that the disconnect of Roman month names (September being the ninth month rather than seventh, etc.) had to do with Julius Caesar and Augustus.

But not in the way that I'd been told.

It wasn't so much that July and August were added (nudging the other months out of sequence). Rather, the Roman year began in March, so September was seventh, October was the eighth, etc.

That said, it's also true that there were only 10 months in the Roman calendar.

That was fixed by adding two months, yes - but the months that were added were January and February, NOT July and August. July and August were existing months that got renamed.

good stuff

This is a gold mine:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_common_misconceptions

i never realized that either, and now it makes perfect sense! (sept/oct/nov/dec = 9/10/11/12)

Teri Garr was in 5 Elvis movies:

Fun In Acapulco, 1963
Kissin' Cousins, 1964
Viva Las Vegas, 1964
Roustabout, 1964
Clambake, 1967

a few times every year during october i catch myself writing the date as 8-x-20xx because the oct- prefix momentarily confuses me

xps

what most people don't understand is that january and february were named after jann wenner and diane ferruary

Karl is quite right.

Further, July was named after Miranda July.

August was named after August Busch Jr., who owned the St. Louis Cardinals and the Anheuser-Busch brewery.

it was actually named after Augustus, not sure you realized that

xxxp Teri Garr was also one of the dancers at the TAMI show

lol wait YMP is your contention that the Romans actually used a 10-month calendar for awhile, before realising the seasons didn’t line up? That seems unlikely??

wait until you hear about kalends, ides and nones

Tracer - yes and no. Yes, they started out with a 10-month 304-day calendar and then went to a 355-day calendar.

But they weren't idiots; they knew it would get out of synch. Tgere were two ways of dealing with the problem. For a time, winter days just didn't belong to a month. The days happened, there just wasn't a tidy name for them. Secondly, they could and did add extra days every now and then (intercalation) just as we do in leap years.