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The Cunting Death said:
Spock never said "Beam Me Up, Scotty" ever.
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Late reply to myself, but the closest he ever came to saying the line was in the fourth movie: "Scotty, Beam Me Up."
And in the animated series: "Beam US up, Scotty."

The line itself comes from a bumper sticker.
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The first recorded instance of someone giving a facial was in the memoirs of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester.

I find this fascinating, because it was almost certainly a thing done since forever, but this libertine degenerate thought to himself 'I'm gonna write about this.'
 
Flavius Claudius Julianus said:
The first recorded instance of someone giving a facial was in the memoirs of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester.

I find this fascinating, because it was almost certainly a thing done since forever, but this libertine degenerate thought to himself 'I'm gonna write about this.'
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He also died at 33 of a combination of end stage syphilis, gonorrhea, alcoholism, and possibly even more foul diseases.
 
Rather surprising fun fact: in many years, the top export of George Washington's main plantation Mount Vernon was not tobacco nor any other cash crop, but fish.



This is less of a specific fact and more of a point, but I had a misimpression that slaves were taken care of by their masters, and I think a lot of other people probably would.
The way American slavery actually (usually) worked was that a slave would receive a cabin, a single set of clothes a year, and some basic rations, like bags of cornmeal or rice, possibly bacon if they were lucky (but not necessarily), and the offal from animals slaughtered for the White folks (which is where things like chitlins come from). Additionally, slaves tended to be treated to a feast at Christmastime and given liquor, which sometimes was banned otherwise.

This was generally not enough to feed a slave family through the year. They ate very little meat, but would tend to be allowed to keep chickens, and their veggies usually came from their own gardens. Often slaves worked a fairly short work day (by modern standards) for master, like say four hours, but they spent pretty much the rest of the daylight working on their own gardens to produce their basic foodstuffs.

So slaves did receive rations, but it's not really correct to think of their master as feeding them, because the rations were like a bare subsistence diet that the slave supplemented through their own work. Often garden plots and livestock would be handed out as rewards to productive slaves.
 
In 1989, Nick Bougas (AKA: A. Wyatt Mann, of "Le Happy Merchant" fame) directed and produced a documentary by the name of Death Scenes Starring Church of Satan founder, Anton LaVey. It went on to have two sequels.
 
The 1973 Wounded Knee incident, probably well known around here, was a 71 day siege when an army of over 200 American Indian Movement braves seized Pine Ridge Indian Reservation (same site as the Wounded Knee Massacre) and stood off, with exchange of gunfire, against Marshals, FBI, and Oglala Sioux loyalist militia. Four fatalities occurred. The AIM had been set up in Minneapolis as part of the 1970s wave of revolutionary terrorism; that whole corner of the Midwest (Minnesota, Wisconsin, Upper Michigan) has a rather high percentage of Indian population and there were enough discriminated Indian proletarians in the city to sustain such a group.

What is particularly interesting about it is that it can, reasonably, be considered the last battle of the American Indian Wars. The last time army was deployed was in 1918, though even then small rebellions involving local police forces or militia carried on as late as the early 1920s. But I think it is fair to say that, while clearly divided by time and so not literally part of it, the violent shootout between a small army of Indians and agents of the US government during the same year Soylent Green came out, and only 50 years ago, counts as part of the Indian Wars.
 
Ughubughughughughughghlug said:
Rather surprising fun fact: in many years, the top export of George Washington's main plantation Mount Vernon was not tobacco nor any other cash crop, but fish.



This is less of a specific fact and more of a point, but I had a misimpression that slaves were taken care of by their masters, and I think a lot of other people probably would.
The way American slavery actually (usually) worked was that a slave would receive a cabin, a single set of clothes a year, and some basic rations, like bags of cornmeal or rice, possibly bacon if they were lucky (but not necessarily), and the offal from animals slaughtered for the White folks (which is where things like chitlins come from). Additionally, slaves tended to be treated to a feast at Christmastime and given liquor, which sometimes was banned otherwise.

This was generally not enough to feed a slave family through the year. They ate very little meat, but would tend to be allowed to keep chickens, and their veggies usually came from their own gardens. Often slaves worked a fairly short work day (by modern standards) for master, like say four hours, but they spent pretty much the rest of the daylight working on their own gardens to produce their basic foodstuffs.

So slaves did receive rations, but it's not really correct to think of their master as feeding them, because the rations were like a bare subsistence diet that the slave supplemented through their own work. Often garden plots and livestock would be handed out as rewards to productive slaves.
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Do you have a reference for this? I'm not disagreeing. It's just I'd like to learn more about it, and maybe use it in arguments, but I don't want to cite "some guy on the internet said this." So I'd love to learn more.

Fun fact tax:

Hans Rudel was a Stuka pilot responsible for 51 aerial victories and the destruction of 519 tanks, 150 artillery emplacements, 4 armored trains, 70 landing craft, 1 cruiser, and 1 battleship. He was shot down or forced to land 30 times by AA fire, including having to make a forced landing behind Soviet lines, after which he swam a river and made his way back to the German line.

He was wounded five times. On Feb 8 1945 he was wounded in the foot bad enough that they amputated his leg below the knee. He returned to flying combat missions 5 weeks later and destroyed 26 more tanks.

He was an unrepentant Nazi to the end of his life.

He was married three times. It seems his wives all had the same first name: Ursula.
 
LateNightMuffin said:
Do you have a reference for this? I'm not disagreeing. It's just I'd like to learn more about it, and maybe use it in arguments, but I don't want to cite "some guy on the internet said this." So I'd love to learn more.
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Most of what I know I don't remember a specific source for, but the work system is something I specifically saw at McLeod Plantation in Charleston. The rations stuff comes up often in reading about the history of Southern food and in interviews with slaves, so possibly I might have seen some of it in The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture Volume 7: Foodways or My Folks Don't Want Me To Talk About Slavery. I don't recall ever reading a book specifically on typical plantation life. The Battle for Christmas' chapter on the Old South has an extended description of slave Christmas. Come to think of it, I recall it saying that masters often gave out the rations at Christmastime so they could present basic necessities like they were gifts.

Different plantations had different systems, too, what I described was just the most general case.
 
Ughubughughughughughghlug said:
Most of what I know I don't remember a specific source for, but the work system is something I specifically saw at McLeod Plantation in Charleston. The rations stuff comes up often in reading about the history of Southern food and in interviews with slaves, so possibly I might have seen some of it in The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture Volume 7: Foodways or My Folks Don't Want Me To Talk About Slavery. I don't recall ever reading a book specifically on typical plantation life. The Battle for Christmas' chapter on the Old South has an extended description of slave Christmas. Come to think of it, I recall it saying that masters often gave out the rations at Christmastime so they could present basic necessities like they were gifts.

Different plantations had different systems, too, what I described was just the most general case.
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thank you!!!!
 
Back at an old job at bed bath and beyond. A coworker tried to establish comrodery by asking “tell me something I don’t know” people would tell her weird facts. My turn. Autism kicked in. “The famale spotted hyaena has a 7inch long clitoris.

She never asked for fun facts again.
 
Soviets not only used penal battalions (prisoner soldiers) as infantry cannon fodder, but also as pilots. I learned this because I was playing Ace Combat 7, thought "this is retarded, nobody would use prisoners as pilots of expensive aircraft," and then looked it up to check.

In reference to an earlier post about trail trees, I once saw this tree that had fallen but was laying on its side, and the roots hadn't totally ripped out of the ground when it fell. That motherfucker just kept growing, its branches coming to reach up above the trunk, the tree still living perfectly fine laying on its back.
 
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Let's talk about the Pyramids. Specifically, how they were constructed:
Afrophiles and schizos alike absolutely love to regurgitate two very common and related claims:
  1. They were super precisely constructed
  2. We have no idea how they were built
On the first point: No. Well, the engineers involved sure did a hell of a lot better than I could do. They had immaculate attention to detail. But each pyramid has its flaws. Most famously: the central pyramid had a little twist at the top because the edges didn't allign just right. It's not that these guys were morons: they just didn't have the technology to make something as perfect as is often claimed. It was quite the daunting task.

The second claim is more interesting: The problem isn't that we don't know how they could possibly have built it. Theories abound. The problem is that there's so many "maybe's," each with their own set of problems, that it's hard to tell which was actually used. Even if the most optimal solution were found, we don't necessarily know the most optimal route was taken.
Most favored these days tends to be the "internal ramp" theory popularized by one Jean Pierre Houdin. Basically a spiral ramp was constructed, as is typical for the "stepped" pyramids that have been built forever, but instead of just building on the inside edge of the ramp, they built on both sides.
Scans done on the pyramids have revealed what may be parts of this internal ramp (remember all those articles a few years ago about the "secret room" hidden deep in one of the pyramids? Yeah, it was probably part of that). Houdin has spent years refining this hypothesis after he initially unveiled it, utilizing what is currently known about their structure to address potential problems, and it stands as the most practical and evidence-fitting solution to date.
 
Also on pyramids, we for a long time thought that the little holes on the outsides of pyramids were air shafts. Not so. Instead, it was eventually discovered that at the right times of year/night, they perfectly align with constellations, serving as a sort of window from the Pharaoh to the heavens.

The mission in Top Gun: Maverick was based on a real thing, Operation Babylon/Opera. The Israelis wanted to knock out Saddam's nuclear program, but needed to get into Iraq undetected to do it. They flew, just a hundred feet above the ground, from Israel to Iraq over Saudi desert to avoid radar, then hit it at extreme high speed with dumb bombs.
 
Ughubughughughughughghlug said:
it was eventually discovered that at the right times of year/night, they perfectly align with constellations, serving as a sort of window from the Pharaoh to the heavens.
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Archeo-astronomy can be a bit... weird sometimes. And not in a good way. There's an (in)famous case regarding the site of Pumapunku where such a researcher inflated the age of the site by over 10 thousand years based on the presumtion that the alignment of the solstices must have matched certain stones placed at the site with a high degree of accuracy when they were built.
I'm not saying you're wrong in this particular matter. But archeo-astronomers are pretty notorious for adhering to the Law of the Instrument: "when all you have is a hammer..."
 
I noticed this just a few hours ago looking at airports throughout the country on Google Earth. At Quincy Regional Airport in Illinois, there are two Mig-29's and a L-39 trainer are parked on the tarmac. There is also a ROK Hawk jet-trainer in some pictures.
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Ughubughughughughughghlug said:
Also on pyramids, we for a long time thought that the little holes on the outsides of pyramids were air shafts. Not so. Instead, it was eventually discovered that at the right times of year/night, they perfectly align with constellations, serving as a sort of window from the Pharaoh to the heavens.

The mission in Top Gun: Maverick was based on a real thing, Operation Babylon/Opera. The Israelis wanted to knock out Saddam's nuclear program, but needed to get into Iraq undetected to do it. They flew, just a hundred feet above the ground, from Israel to Iraq over Saudi desert to avoid radar, then hit it at extreme high speed with dumb bombs.
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I'm not sure that theory is correct. The Earth's axial drift makes constellation alignment imperfect at best.
Also, the pyramids were covered with a white limestone facia - which would have covered the holes. This white limestone was scavenged eons ago...

I think the holes were used to secure the facia to the stone structure.
 
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