So many notes ppl confused by corn wielding Colima dog wait until you see the dancing figures…..blow your mind. Teach you true love
humankind…what more can I say. I can only aspire to have such deep and rich a human connection with anyone in this life that will be as radiant as a ceramic figural pair of dancing xolos
They’re also at the center of a roundabout
Mexican here, fun fact! While we call them “Dancing dogs”, they’re a young pup and an old dog, and the older one is revealing wisdoms right on the pup’s ear.
You’ll recognize the older dog bc he’s got wrinkles!! It’s a wonderful scene!!
At first Netflix said, come write for us. We’ll save your cancelled shows and write about whatever niche story you want. Our algorithm says people will watch it!
Then a few years later they said, regardless of our promises or contract obligations we are cancelling shows after two seasons without telling anyone. Turns out no matter how loved a show is, we get less subscriptions after the second season.
How many subscriptions did we bring you? Netflix won’t say.
So writers started writing two season shows. Just give us two seasons, Netflix. Like you promised.
Then Netflix said, oops sorry! Turns out your show didn’t premiere at #1 and the views in the first day weren’t what we wanted so we’re cancelling your second season.
What were the numbers? How many people watched our show? Netflix doesn’t say.
Then, they did something extra special. They started taking shows and splitting their first season into two halves. Inside Job was not two seasons. It was one season split in half.
Oops! Sorry! The second half of your first season didn’t do as well as the first half, so now your show is cancelled!
Why? How many people? How much money? These companies are making cash hand over fist and they refuse to tell people the truth: people loved your show. Loved it. But some corpo exec wanted an infinite money making machine. Do you know how long shows are in production for before you watch them? Years. Like, 5+, even 10+ years. And Netflix gives it less than a week before they decide whether you’re getting cancelled.
There is a method of growing rhubarb known as “forcing” where the plant grows in complete darkness and is tended to in candlelight. It grows so quickly during this process that you can hear it grow. [1, 2]
Thanks! I hate it.
What kind of horror movie shit is this?
P l a n t
I didn’t think it was possible to make a torture chamber for plants and yet
Anyways, here’s a soundcloud link of forced rhubarb:
They ran out of ways to torture people so they invented ways to torture plants.
I’m trying to look up the history, since bean said it was the British, and he’s right since it was first done in 1817 in the Chelsea Physic Garden, originally named the Apothecaries Garden in 1673 by the Worshipful Society of Apothecaries for plants for medicinal uses, which rhubarb was used for as well.
As for the why… I think it was just one of those old things of “why not?”.
Specifically, it’s noted that rhubarb thrives in cold, wet weather which, jokey stereotypes aside, is pretty much what the weather is like in Britain for several months of the year. In addition, it’s noted that rhubarb grows especially well in nitrogen rich soil which is also quite handily found in abundance in Britain.
This all brings us to the whole candlelit harvesting thing. At some point, farmers realised that rhubarb’s trademark tartness could be eliminated if the plant was grown in the dark at a certain stage, and that the act of doing this actually made the stalks of the plant taste sweet, negating the need for sugar to be added to dishes containing it.
With this information in hand, farmers quickly developed and subsequently refined the process of growing rhubarb in the dark. For example, it was eventually realised that rhubarb could be “forced” to grow by subjecting an immature plant to frost, which nobody had ever really tried before since frost is normally a death sentence for many plants. However, with rhubarb, this merely, as one rhubarb expert notes, “makes the rhubarb crown break its winter dormancy and stimulate the conversion of starch stored in the rhubarb crown to glucose”.
Normally this glucose is used by the entire plant during growth. However, by putting the rhubarb in total darkness at a certain stage, the leaves of plant will be anaemic and wilted, resulting in all of that delicious glucose being left in the plant’s stalk, hence why rhubarb grown in this manner is so much sweeter than rhubarb grown via more traditional means.
Naturally, once this was discovered, farmers began growing rhubarb in specially constructed “forcing sheds” which were kept in total darkness and kept warm by whatever means they had available. Prior to this, the rhubarb was and still is simply left in a field for around two years to allow the roots to grow while periodically being covered in nitrogen rich fertiliser. In the 18th century, the fertiliser used was mostly manure and something known as shoddy (essentially discarded woolen fibres) sourced from wool manufacturers. Today, however, farmers mostly use manure which in addition to being cheap and plentiful, stops thieves stealing the rhubarb.
oh fuck that soundcloud link. imagine hearing this in the dead of night
some of my favorite soundcloud comments
I recently watched with great interest as my partner energetically dug up and removed an unwanted rhubarb crown, covered the crater with several layers of cardboard, installed a raised bed over it and planted it up with vegetables. For the past few months, every few days, more young, tender rhubarb shoots force their way up amongst beetroot - ripping them out generated more food of better quality than we harvested off the remaining plants. We’ve unwittingly discovered an infinite rhubarb hack. While all the rest of the rhubarb moved out of edibility range by late August, the spite plant is still producing baby-in-springtime quality shoots in reasonable quantities.
Dr Glass pondered upon this, mildly provoked, cut the remaining rhubarb down to the ground and tacked black plastic over them - the reasoning being that if it forces the rhubarb we’ll enjoy it more, and if it kills it entirely, he’ll have more room for gooseberries. It is the rhubarb’s move now. I expect this experimental dance of mutual spite will last many years and generate much in the way of biomass.
Before oven thermometers existed, one way to check the temperature of your oven was to stick your hand inside and recite an Our Father. The length of time before you snatch your hand out was timed by how far you’d gotten in the prayer. The shorter the time, the hotter the oven. So you knew that if you wanted a hot oven to bake bread, you wanted your hand out by “kingdom” (for example) but to slow cook a stew, you might want the oven cool enough to get to “trespasses”.
I would be extremely surprised if medieval people didn’t use prayers while cooking. You don’t want to roast an egg for too long, have it explode, and get hot yolk in your eye. :P
I know that church bells were definitely used as timekeepers.
I wonder if this shows up in other historical areas besides medicine?
I ask because I have a very Italian, very Catholic friend who was once describing how she makes pizzelles. They’re cooked in a specific press, similar to a waffle iron, long enough to get light and crispy but not burnt, and in her own words: “I don’t know the exact time it takes to cook them in seconds, but I usually do either two Hail Mary’s or an Our Father and a Glory Be.”
The length of time it takes to say a paternoster was a typical method of reckoning time in the Middle Ages. It’s likely that whoever wrote this remedy down was thinking of it both as a prayer and a timespan and that whoever read it would have understood it the same way.
So there’s this old German remedy for getting rid of boils. A mix of eggshells, egg whites, and sulfur rubbed into the boil while reciting the incantation and saying five Paternosters. And according to my prof’s friend (a doctor), it’s all very sensible. The eggshells abrade the skin so the sulfur can sink in and fry the boil. The egg white forms a flexible protective barrier. The incantation and prayers are important because you need to rub it in for a certain amount of time.
It’s easy to take the magic words as superstition, but they’re important.
This popped up in “Nanny Ogg’s Cookbook” as well, though there the timing method wasn’t prayer but X verses of “Where Has All The Custard Gone?”
Other timing methods are “a while” (approx. 35 mins) and “a good while” (variable, up to 10 years, which the book suggests is a bit long to let batter rest before making pancakes…)
All absolutely standard, and also varied from region to region. The use of prayer was more common than most, since the Catholic church had a monopoly on… well, pretty much everything. And all the prayers were in Latin, and at a specific cadence, so the effect is similar to watching the second hand on a clock today.
it’s important to note that to the medieval people the prayers were important because of timekeeping AND god. like, i think as modern people we do tend to want it to be “just timekeeping, they weren’t just superstitious idiots, they had a good reasonable scientific reason!” but it’s also important to remember just how culturally steeped in a mystical religion they were, a relationship with christianity entirely unlike the modern relationship found in modern american culture even amongst the most religious people. i have no doubt that in the medieval mind, they were aware of the prayer being the time it took but also if there had BEEN another way to measure that time, the prayer would have been held to be preferable and important in its own right because of the importance of spiritual assistance in worldly things like bread-baking
Definitely, this is a great point! I was talking to somebody in the comments who was saying that medieval medicine was mostly bunkum because it involves spirituality, supposedly meaning it couldn’t also have logical basis behind it. But that’s a really modern way to see it. To the medieval worldview, those things aren’t contradictory. They’re part of each other. Think about how many medieval Christian scientists were monks, nuns, and priests.
*INHUMAN SCREECHING*
M Y T I M E H A S C O M E
You guys don’t understand how excited it made me to read this post, I literally wrote my master’s thesis on this exact topic.
STORY TIME
Sometime in the 10th century in Anglo-Saxon England (for context, this is before the Norman Conquest and near-ish to the reign of Alfred the Great), a dude named Bald asked another dude name Cild to write a book. Not just any book. A leechbook, which was essentially the medieval version of WebMD for practicing doctors. BUT NOT JUST A LEECHBOOK. This leechbook was gonna be the damn Lamborghini of leechbooks. This thing was going to be split into two parts, the first dealing with external medicine and the second dealing with internal medicine—something that was unheard of at the time. It was going to be organized (head to toe, like all the good leechbooks were). It was gonna be nice (leather and vellum). It was gonna use all the best ideas (from all over the known world). And the whole thing was going to be written in Anglo-Saxon. Now, a few medical books had been compiled in Anglo-Saxon before, but none like this. This one was going to be EPIC. And it was—and still is.
Bald’s Leechbook (also goes by the more boring but more informative MS Royal 12 D XVIII over in the British Library) contains a lot of medical remedies. A lot of them rely on things like prayers and chants and odd charms, like one for a headache, which recommends plucking the eyes off a living crab, letting the crab back into the water, and wearing the eyes about your neck in a little sack until you feel better. However, it’s worth pointing out that the really wild remedies, the stuff that makes absolutely no freakin’ sense, is most often recommended to treat ailments that are hard to treat even today—migraines, toothaches, cancer. These things are really painful or deadly and, without modern medicine, almost impossible to treat. So are you going to make up some nonsense to make your client at least feel like they’re doing something, and hey, if it sort of works, it works? Of course you are. You want to help people. Even if it sounds crazy, what else are you going to do? You have to try something, and the people who are suffering are willing to try anything.
But there’s also things that make complete sense. To echo concepts that have been mentioned by commentators above, there is a recipe that calls for the recitation of the paternoster while boiling a honey-based salve meant to treat carbuncle. The book instructs the physician to bring it to a boil, and sing the paternoster three times, and remove it from the fire, and sing nine paternosters, and to repeat this process two more times. A century ago, historians read the use of the paternoster as a magical incantation, but today, most agree that in lieu of a stopwatch, the paternoster is just meant to make sure you don’t burn the honey.
BUT THAT ISN’T NEAR THE COOLEST THING.
Now, this book was compiled by a master physician (we don’t know if it was Cild himself or if Cild was the scribe for an unnamed author) who was compiling recipes that had been written down for some time, and had, as many things do, gone through various permutations over the years. Many came from Greece or the western Mediterranean, and had been adapted for local English horticulture and herbs. Some came from around what is now Germany, and some ideas came from farther away in the Middle East (King Alfred was a sickly king; some scholars believe that he had his physicians seek out cures from all over the world in an attempt to treat himself). But there is one recipe that has only ever been identified in England. Not only has this recipe only ever been identified in England, it’s only ever been identified in this one manuscript. When translated into modern English, it reads as follows:
Work an eyesalve for a wen [stye], take cropleek and garlic, of both equal quantities, pound them well together, take wine and bullocks gall, of both equal quantities, mix with the leek, put this then into a brazen vessel, let it stand nine days in the brass vessel, wring out through a cloth and clear it well, put it into a horn, and about night time, apply it with a feather to the eye; the best leechdom.
For those who don’t know and/or are lucky enough to have never had one, a “wen” or a stye is a bacterial infection that manifests like a boil or a cyst that on the eyelid. They hurt something awful, and can cause larger infections of the eye. They are usually caused by Staphylococcus aureus.
With me? Okay. Fast-forward to 1988. A former biologist turned historian called M.L. Cameron decides to take a look at this old medical leechbook to see what he can see. He takes a good look and says “Lads I do believe these Anglo-Saxon leeches weren’t nearly so daft as we thought they were” (he did not and probably would never actually say that, I’m paraphrasing). Cameron was particularly interested in the recipe above. As a scientist, he knew a few things:
Garlic and cropleek (leek or onion, or another related plant) have been known to have antibacterial qualities for centuries.
Wine (alcohol) also has antibacterial qualities.
Bullocks gall (literally bile taken from a bull) is known to have detergent properties, and has long been used as an additive to soap for particularly tough stains.
A brazen vessel, or a vessel made of brass, contains a good amount of copper in it. And that copper, when left to sit around for, I don’t know, about nine days, would have plenty of time to react with the acids in the onion and garlic and the tartarates in the wine to create copper salts.
Coppers salts, as it happens, are cytotoxic, meaning they kill everything: tissue and bacteria.
What an interesting find.
Fast-forward again to 2015. A paper is published by a team from the University of Nottingham, who’ve been working on an ‘Ancientbiotics’ project to investigate ancient medical remedies and see if they actually work. They’ve turned their sights to the Anglo-Saxons, and are, as was Cameron, particularly interested in this recipe for an eye salve. Without boring you with the finer details of the experiment and its various trials (read it yourself!) I will spoil the ending by telling you that they discovered a few things:
This recipe, which was over 1,000 years old when they tested it, worked.
It worked well.
It worked extremely well.
So well, in fact, that (in a lab setting) they even got it to kill Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or as it’s more commonly known, MRSA. MRSA is a modern superbug that has built up a resistance to the antibiotic Methicillin. And this goddamn Anglo-Saxon witches’ brew freakin murdered it.
Now, as an advocate for modern medicine and sound scientific method, I’m not about to say that we should go throwing this salve on everything in 2019, because it is, if anything, just a starting point for modern scientists. This salve is still incredibly crude by modern standards and comes with a lot of potential problems. But as a historian… it works, you guys, it really works.
Medieval physicians were not idiots. They believed in magic, they believed in all things supernatural, they believed in all those things that are ‘unreasonable’ or unpopular today, and they practiced them too. But they also interacted with the real world with brains and intellects as sharp if not sharper than yours and mine. They were smart, they studied, they talked to each other in Latin and Greek and Arabic and Anglo Saxon. They made old recipes better and came up with brand new ones. They tried dumb stuff and they tried smart stuff. They didn’t have access to even the smallest fraction of the information we have at our fingertips today, and yet they created things like this.
To this day, no one knows who created the eyesalve recipe. And no one truly understands why this is the only copy of it. If it worked so well, why isn’t it plastered to the headings of every medical textbook from Alfred to Victoria? Speaking personally, I would argue that it has to do with language. Not so long after Bald’s Leechbook was written, the French invaded England and took over. Latin and French became the language of the court, and while Anglo-Saxon lived on throughout the country, and certainly lay doctors would have used Anglo-Saxon books daily, the language of formal English medical education was Latin. Oxford and Cambridge were late to the medical ed game after Salerno, Bologna, Paris, and Montpellier, and naturally fell in step with continental schools as a result, using Latin almost exclusively, and sometimes Greek or Arabic.
Point being, by the time medical licenses and medical college degrees are a thing in England, not only does almost no one of university-eligible class speak Anglo-Saxon anymore, no one has use for those Old English texts, because they don’t get you your degree, and you can’t make a living as a doctor without a degree and doctor’s license. And no one’s going to translate an old Anglo Saxon text into Latin when Avicenna’s newest old hit, now in Latin, is fresh off the boat from France.
All that to say: Never write something off because it’s old. 1,000 years is a long time ago, but human ingenuity and intelligence are hardly modern inventions. The science of the world hasn’t changed; only our tools and our perspective.
Telepathic aliens enjoy that humans will “play music” for hours at a time. When it’s too mentally quiet on deck, they just announce the catchiest song titles they know and the humans will start thinking about it automatically.
The humans hate this so, so much.
Zorf: Human Steve, can you please play that song I like, the one with all the females
Steve: what
Zorf: A little bit of Monica in my life
Steve:
Steve: mother fu–
Get ready for ten years of nothing but the Piña Colada song.
The history of the Disney company is so fucking fascinating and complicated that I could spend the rest of my life studying it.
I hate the company. I love the media. I want it to burn. I was profoundly shaped as a person by some of the art its workers have produced. It’s evil. It’s beautiful. It’s an eldritch horrorterror personified as a charismatic mouse. It’s a nightmarish example of capitalist hell. It destroys as much as it creates. It’s a flaming trainwreck. I can’t look away.
It’s the goddamn Elephant’s Foot of media studies.
It’s honestly fits perfectly with who Walt ultimately was. A brilliantly intelligent manipulator terrified of the inevitability of loss yet incapable of costing himself as he lashed out at his friends and workers over basic workers rights, driven to obsession over a theoretical town where he was basically a pleasant Uncle dictator who could determine the lives of his citizens right down to what appliances they use.
I thought crocs were so dumb, they simply tried to eat anything that caught their eye. Now they’re learning?
What’s next?!?
Nah Crocodilians (the group containing all 23 extant species of crocodile, aligator, caiman etc) are actually really smart, they’re just a PAIN IN THE ASS to study in the wild because they’re stealthy, don’t eat or move that often relative to mammals, and are largely nocturnal. That said, we’ve found evidence of:
Coordinated Group Hunting across many species of crocodilian- AKA, hunting like a pack of wolves.
Advanced Parental Care- we knew for a long time that American alligators and Gharials built nests and mothers kept their young close, but GPS tracking has shown that the father(s) also typically stuck around and brought mom kills, but the young stay inside the territory of their parents for 3-5 years, until they reach sexual maturity.
Nile crocodiles dig enormous and surprisingly complex burrows up to 40 feet deep that they share with other crocodiles- parents and children, but also adult siblings and Unrelated “Friends”- crocs that are frequently seen close together outside as well, but do not appear to be mates. many of these burrows are decades, if not centuries old, are actively maintained, and passed down through generations.
Amazon Caiman (a type of alligator) recognize individual humans (possibly by voice), and alter their behavior around them based on past interactions. Some of them become quite playful with humans they’ve had positive interactions with in the past, and others hold “grudges” against specific humans for decades.
All Crocodilians engage in all major types of play behavior- Locomotor play (engaging in a behavior because it brings positive stimulation), playing with toys (Sticks, leaves, carcass, and in one paper, a floating squeaky toy that had gotten into the Bayou) and social play (Playing with other individuals). Several species, but notable Caiman and Alligators also Play with animals outside their species- young caiman have been observed playing with Amazon Giant River Otters, and Alligators playing with sharks and dolphings off the US Gulf coast. Play behavior is associated with a high degree of intelligence in animals.
Male Saltwater crocodiles in Australia employ a variety of complex mating strategies, including offering courtship gifts (tailored to the preferences of individual females), sucking up to larger males to get better introductions to females (A Long-Term strategy that pays dividends- while the beta males don’t typically mate the first two or three years they try it, the ones that stick with the strategy mate with more females as they age), and doing “Off years” where they pass on the fighting and displaying and just nap and get fat instead- another strategy that pays off long-term: Big Males that engage in Off-Years mated more in On years, and lived longer overall, for a larger lifetime genetic impact.
Many zoos have had success in training captive crocodilians to do “tricks”- mostly pose behaviors that let keepers examine, vaccinate or medically treat the animal with minimal stress on all sides. But they’re also apparently good at “Sit up” and “Roll over”.
And as far as “Trying to eat anything that caught their eye”- pretty much all carnivores, but especially crocodilians, make pretty complex calculations on whether or not to pursue something as prey based on, but not limited to: How hungry they are, what the future prospects for food are based on the weather/season/behavior of their prey/how many other carnivores are competing with them, the likelihood of injury (either in the process of hunting, or from the prey itself), and whether the effort expended is going to be worth the reward (based on projected strategies, how full eating something like that made them last time, and if they’re going to suffer weird consequences for it).
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2:47am
December 7, 2022
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