Things you were shockingly old when you learned

I have heard there were contemporary groups to the early Scouts that did have nudity as a central policy. Popular in Germany and other mainland European places, combining the idea of back to nature and doing it in the buff etc etc

I made a leather wallet and learned how to use a compass

naked

I have heard there were contemporary groups to the early Scouts that did have nudity as a central policy. Popular in Germany and other mainland European places, combining the idea of back to nature and doing it in the buff etc etc

There's some discussion of this in Jon Savage's excellent book Teenage.

and some time around the 1920s a raft of diseased men realized they could combine mormonism with boy scouting and get child sexual abuse squared!!

I definitely read Teenage a couple of decades back. Think I got it cheap possibly from FOPP. Think I have come across that elsewhere too. Possibly in Nell Irvin Painters book a few months ago.
But I have read a lot over the last few decades so don't always immediately remember exactly where a specific thing came from. Think I came across that in at least one documentary too.

Silk. Silk. I had a conversation in work on Sunday while I was doing overtime. Because Porsche has released a new "Dakar Edition" 911 and you can never been too rich or too thin. I learned two things. I'll tell you. Technically I learned three things, but the third thing - Porsche sells a leather luggage set for £4,110 - isn't interesting. I'll tell you the two interesting things.

The first thing I learned is that silk is made by boiling silk larvae. I didn't know that. I had always assumed that silk was harvested in the same way spiderwebs are harvested, e.g. by gathering it from trees. Or by pulling it out of the silk spider. To be honest I had no idea whatsoever how silk was harvested. No fucking idea. I've never thought about silk in any great depth. I've never had a reason to. That's the great thing about interacting with other people. They come up with unpredictable things.

Why was there a conversation about silk? Apparently silk pillowcases are good for the complexion, but the person with whom I had the conversation isn't keen on the idea of killing little baby silk spiders. So there's a thing called Peace Silk. It's harvested after the larvae has gone off somewhere. It's really expensive. A Peace Silk pillowcase is £89:
https://ethicalkind.com/products/organic-peace-silk-pillowcase

I was tempted to point out that her complexion is already fine - much better than mine - but who knows. There are different standards. I was also tempted to say "but you don't have a problem with boiling people to death" but two wrongs don't make a right, so I kept quiet.

And then it struck me. It struck me. I had heard about silk farming! The Human League's "Being Boiled" is all about it! Sericulture is silk farming! The song is about boiling silk larvae. That's what it's about! The lyrics draw a parallel between the baby silk spiders and human babies. That's what the song is about! The whole song. That's what it was about! I had always assumed that "sericulture" was a bit like traditional loom weaving, that it was really unsafe, and the song was about low-paid workers being boiled to death to make clothes.

But no. "Being Boiled" is about boiling silk larvae. One of a handful of top ten pop singles to be about boiling silk larvae.

I mean, it might not be interesting to you. But suddenly I could feel pieces moving together in my mind. Little pieces of knowledge fitting together. Forming part of a huge wall of knowledge. There is so much I don't know.

A standout lyric from the extremely underrated* Rodgers and Hammerstein Cinderella:

I'm a young Norwegian princess or a milkmaid
I'm the greatest prima donna in Milan
I'm an heiress who has always had her silk made
By her own flock of silkworms in Japan

* = Internal rhyme, kickass lyrics, so much awesome. The tv version starring Lesley Ann Warren has homely production values, but absolutely slays all gloppy Disney shit.

I will defend this opinion to my death, thxbye

But suddenly I could feel pieces moving together in my mind. Little pieces of knowledge fitting together. Forming part of a huge wall of knowledge.

Sounds like there are spiders inside your head!

lol i read the first part of AP's post going "BEING BOILED," man! but yupa

One point to clarify is that the silkworms are larvae of the silk moth, and have nothing to do with spiders. Spider silk is called that because it resembles the thread these caterpillars make their cocoons from. Of course because it comes out of the caterpillar it's one continuous thread for the whole cocoon, and being a protein polymer it's extremely tough.

I read this a while ago and think about it often. It came up in a conversation with a paramedic yesterday and was reminded I meant to post it here. As ever, I may have found out about it on here somewhere, so forgive me if this is old news.

In a 2011 paper on the medical effects of scurvy, author Jason C. Anthony offers a remarkable detail about human bodies and the long-term presence of wounds.

“Without vitamin C,” Anthony writes, “we cannot produce collagen, an essential component of bones, cartilage, tendons and other connective tissues. Collagen binds our wounds, but that binding is replaced continually throughout our lives. Thus in advanced scurvy”—reached when the body has gone too long without vitamin C—“old wounds long thought healed will magically, painfully reappear.”

In a sense, there is no such thing as healing. From paper cuts to surgical scars, our bodies are catalogues of wounds: imperfectly locked doors quietly waiting, sooner or later, to spring back open.

(This is part of a wider conversation about the slow death of Twitter, but back in the early, now miraculous-seeming days of blogs, RSS and Google Reader, BLDG blog (where I first read about this) was one of the wonders of the world.)

That is amazing - I had no idea.

Yesterday I learned that surgically removed tonsils can grow back! Unfortunately learned because mine did and I ended up in urgent care with a peritonsillar abscess aka quinsy.

My mum had both tonsils and adenoids grow back. I might have lizard genes.

Hope you're doing okay now, Jaq.

Note to self: Eat more oranges.

Thanks Emily, much improved today! I mentioned lizard tails to the doc and got a thoughtful look in return

jack rabbits are technically hares

Greg Ginn and Raymond Pettibon are actually brothers! How did I never know this?

I think Pettibon was a nickname not a surname. But I think the fact is in most of the books that give any history to the band.

Pettibon adopted his new surname, from the nickname petit bon (good little one) given to him by his father.[9]

point being that it is not a separate family name which it would suggest. I wasn't sure if it was more than a pen or possibly pencil (it being that of an artist not a writer) name. But since it was the name he traded under for decades he may have legally adopted it.

the scurvy thing is central to the bad conclusion to the scott of the antarctic story

(as a soldier decades earlier oates had suffered a horrific gunshot wound in his leg, which healed but left him with a limp: except on the march to and back from the pole it very much unhealed again, slowing everyone down) (the expedition was highly scientific but a few years too early to make use of the discovery of vitamins, esp.vit c)

They didn't listen, even after Damo Suzuki warned them.

The Lindsay Cooper who's credited with string bass on Tubular Bells is a different person than the Lindsay Cooper who plays woodwinds on Hergest Ridge and was a member of Henry Cow.

Really? There is a filmed version of Tubular Bells done for the BBC using members of Henry Cow among others as backing band/ensemble so I assumed it would be her. Though maybe she doesn't join until later.
She is on the 2nd Comus lp too from what I remember.

Yes, the bassist Lindsay Cooper was a man.

that lindsay cooper and the OTHER robert calvert both play on this which caused me no little confusion initially

went to visit some silkmaker cousins when i was small & got to see the worms in the basement, all spread out on long, rimmed tables layered with mulberry leaves. we stood there quietly and listened to the tiny munching sounds of all those silkworms.

this was in italy a few years after chernobyl. none of the silk was any good because it came out of the worms in blobs rather than threads.

spider silk! stronger than steel!! it's a bit too tricky to farm spiders, tho, due to their carnivorous and cannibalistic nature <3 somebody-or-other went to the trouble once and they even devised a device to milk their silk, like a tiny stocks for spiders to hold them in place while a squeezy thing exerted "gentle" pressure on their abdomens. :/

a beautiful shawl of spider silk:
https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/47880dd8b72246a147f58a2435e0cda4604d75ba/0_139_4256_2554/master/4256.jpg?width=1200&height=900&quality=85&auto=format&fit=crop&s=39f0a4e67050d2f2b043573dd14c5ed3

gotta shout out banana silk here -- lustrous, robust, and (afaik) no spiders are squeezed nor larvae boiled to produce it. i suppose the process of stripping off that outer layer of banana palm bark for its fibers could disrupt the lives of various beings that make their homes there, but at least it's just incidental destruction?

i must confess a weakness for 𝓈𝑒𝒶 𝓈𝒾𝓁𝓀 here, despite never having met any in person. first of all, that name! mermaids' ball gowns can be made from nothing else, right? "sea silk". just brilliant. (also called byssus, but that looks too much like bussy for me to take it seriously as a textile name) it's made from the hairy stuff that a mussel attaches itself to rocks with. you treat it with lemon juice and it turns golden. it can be woven into a fabric so fine that a pair of sea silk gloves can fit inside a walnut shell, allegedly. sleek sea silk. marvelous.

well anyway in keeping with the topic of the thread, i only learned a few years ago that rayon is made from wood.

cool post cat!

thanks matttkkkk!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File%3ARecycle001.svg

The 3 arrows in the original recycling symbol are not identical--2 arrows fold over and 1 folds under, making it a moebius strip.

But recycling isn't an eternal loop though is it? There's some dimensions of loss.
Plus doesn't everything just get sent to Indonesia to destroy their environment, or is that just plastics.

or does the moebius element just highlight a fundamental physical flaw, that it doesn't quite work in this universe

I never realised until now that the question in the old “what’s brown and sticky” children’s gag is supposed to make you think it’s a poo.

I mean it’s so OBVIOUS NOW

but still

Just learnt that Ray Milland was Welsh.

!

I recently learned how to say his hometown in Welsh: Castell-nedd.

Man

Ha, wrong thread

man: also welsh

Really? Always thought it was Manx.

https://i.discogs.com/80Tg2M2Rfo0qpOc6kpXp9ifjYK1-PgJU_X9SehlQ3vs/rs:fit/g:sm/q:90/h:600/w:600/czM6Ly9kaXNjb2dz/LWRhdGFiYXNlLWlt/YWdlcy9SLTMzMDgx/NDgtMTUzOTIwMzY5/Ny0yNjU0LmpwZWc.jpeg

I was today years old when I learned that Slade covered Moby Grape’s “Omaha”:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9LEA_kTO214

Lissen Ma Frenz

!

With this and the Move doing "Hey Grandma", it seems like Moby Grape an impression in the West Midlands at least! Imagining "Nayyyykid If Oi Want Tow" in my head.

*made an impression*

would rather make an impression than impact anything

https://i.discogs.com/vgg5oL-oJtp308OCjZAKhMcfRFD-WdDgJ1F6C3WlF-s/rs:fit/g:sm/q:90/h:598/w:600/czM6Ly9kaXNjb2dz/LWRhdGFiYXNlLWlt/YWdlcy9SLTQzNTk3/MjctMTM2Mjc3NjM5/OS01OTg3LmpwZWc.jpeg

i spent a good amount of time as a young person thinking that "thoroughfare" referred to food. i think i was likely in college, learning about haussmann and the boulevards, when i finally figured out my mistake. not sure that i ever encountered the above cover art, but it was definitely via bud powell's recording of the same tune on a blue note reissue CD that i encountered the word for the first time