There may or may not be a method to this madness.

gracklesong:

r–g–b:

was looking up 50s fashion for writing reasons and i CANNOT get over the outfits these girls are rocking

- This is bobby soxer fashion that originated in the 1940s, not 50s. Specifically, this 2016 Tumblr post attributes this photo to Life magazine in 1947

- The style was not considered masculine in its time (for commenters remarking on crossdressing laws); pants had been mainstream women’s fashion since the 30s and especially during WWII due to women in factory work. This was an extremely popular style associated with fans of popular music performers like Frank Sinatra. It was a teenage style in particular; the 40s saw the number of girls attending secondary school rise substantially, as did the number of teens with disposable incomes.

It’s fascinating to me that people under 30 are looking at very trendy look today and seeing gender nonconformity. It says more about what we consider “feminine” clothing to be today (Revealing? Low necklines? Translucent? Form-fitting? Curve-enhancing?) than the image itself.

(via technogender-archive-deactivate)

jabberwockypie:

systlin:

systlin:

So I’m reading an article about ancient Mesopotamian recipies being translated from a tablet, which is of course cool as hell, but

Don’t you dare question either me or my love of garlic ever again, sir.

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/mesopotamian-recipes

And you know FULL well that were they rich enough they’d be salting up those meals too, and lets be real garlic+salt is exactly up my culinary alley.

All I’m getting here is that the Mesopotamians understood the appropriate ratio of garlic in their soup

This isn’t even THAT MUCH garlic.

(via acepalindrome)

anexperimentallife:

(via relaxxattack)

shanlonwrites:

i-just-like-commenting:

cricketcat9:

biggest-gaudiest-patronuses:

mediocrity-uwu:

kuttithevangu:

Someone I know not well enough to voice my opinion on the subject said something like why didn’t God make potatoes a low-calorie food so I am here to say: God made them like that because their nutrition density IS what makes them healthy. By God I mean Andean agricultural technicians. Potato is healthy BECAUSE potato holds calories and vitamins. Do not malign potato

For all evolutionary history, life has struggled against calorie deficit… So much energy goes into finding food that there is no time for anything else. Our ancestors selectively bred root vegetables to create the potato, so that we might be the first species whose daily existence doesn’t consist of trying to find the nutrients necessary for survival. One potato can rival the calorie count of many hours of foraging… Eat a potato, and you free up so much time to create and build and connect with your fellow man. Without potato where would you be?? Do not stand on the shoulders of giants and think thyself tall!!

I nearly teared up reading “Andean agricultural technicians” bc fuck yes! these were members of Pre-Inca cultures who lived 7 to 10 thousand years ago, and they were scientists! food scientists and researchers and farmers whose names and language we can never know, who lived an inconceivably long time ago (pre-dating ancient civilizations in Egypt, China, India, Greece, and even some parts of Mesopotamia) and we are separated by millennia of time and history, but still for thousands of years the fruits vegetables of their labor and research have continued to nourish countless human lives, how is that not the most earthly form of a true miracle??? anyway yes potatoes are beautiful, salute their creators.

There are approximately 4000 varieties of potato in Peru. I’ve seen an incredible variety of corn and tomatoes, and root vegetables I’ve never seen before, on the local farmer markets. Yet some expats insist on buying only imported, expensive American brands of canned veggies… 🤷🏼‍♀️ Peruvian potatoes 👇🏼

It is long since time for us to start viewing plant domestication as the bioscience that it is. Because while the Andeans were creating potatoes, the ancient Mesoamericans were turning teosinte into corn:

And then there’s bananas, from Papua New Guinea:

These were not small, random changes, this was real concerted effort over years to turn inedible things into highly edible ones. And I’m convinced the main reason we’re reluctant to call them scientific achievements is, well, a racist one.

Potatoes used to be poisonous!

They contain alkaloid toxins. They still do, in smaller amounts! They are produced when potatoes are exposed to the sun, to protect the tuber from being eaten. That’s why you shouldn’t eat green potatoes. It’s also proof that 18th century French peasants weren’t simply being silly or superstitious when they refused to eat potatoes: potatoes did at one point contain toxins, just like other nightshades! They were making a logical assumption. It was wrong, but it was logical!

I’m not sure if this research is still “up to date” since I did it close to ten years ago now, but the belief was that ancient Incans saw alpaca and other animals licking clay while eating toxic tubers. The animals were fine. So the people followed their lead.

Turns out, certain kinds of clay are really good at absorbing certain plant toxins (specifically negative charge toxins). So the clay rendered the proto-potatoes edible and non-deadly! It is believed that by observing and following their lead, ancient Incans gained access to a valuable crop. To this day, there is a traditional potato dish that involves dipping potato in a sauce made of chaco clay, water, and salt. This dish is likely thousands of years old, and may be why we are able to eat potatoes today. (Oh - one of the two alkaloid toxins produced by potatoes is called chaconine!)

Over time, ancient farmers bred less toxic potatoes, until we arrived at the current starchy miracle food we all know and love!

And the reason potatoes in places like Europe and North America seem to lack such beautiful diversity, as seen in the photo above, is because potatoes are often grown from “seed potatoes” rather than from seed. This means that most potatoes you eat are actually clones propagated from a plant possibly hundreds of years old. It also means there is very little to no genetic diversity in a field of potatoes.

And that’s why the potato blight that swept Ireland in the 1840s was so devastating. The potatoes had no genetic diversity to help resist. And then the English swept in and used that to starve the Irish and that’s why my Nanny’s ancestors moved to Canada, and here I am, talking about potatoes again.

(via nudityandnerdery)

findingfeather:

Historian’s curse: seeing someone on your reading lists take a “it turns out that the past wasn’t as rigidly and universally eugenicist/racist/sexist/homophobic/whatever as certain parts of society would like to paint it, and that people navigated complex webs of emotion, empathy, necessity, brutality, violence and toxic cultural beliefs in complex ways that should be engaged with to get a nuanced picture of the past” … 

 … and goes to “so mediaeval women weren’t brutally discriminated against and marginalized!” or “so race/ethnic prejudice and hatred didn’t EXIST in the Roman Empire!” or “same-sex behaviours were definitely not suppressed at any point before, like, the Victorians!” or “people in the past DEFINITELY always loved and cared for and were kind to their disabled kids most of the time!” 

And the biggest thing is that not only will correcting it make you an annoying pedant, not only will you then be accused of being [whatever-ist], not only will you be the obnoxious one here, but also finding, digging out and citing all the sources will depress the shit out of you, probably trigger the shit out of you, and basically nobody wins. 

(via taibhsearachd)

theroguefeminist:

lgbt-tiktoks:

love live disco

Caption: [ (Stitch with @/oldbruhh): What’s a music opinion that genuinely pisses you off? I shall commence the-

The idea that disco was some frivolous, soulless music genre… when instead it was like this time of unprecedented power that people of color and queer people had over the music industry. And that it simply “fell out of fashion” instead of being pushed out of the industry by people who hated the fact that people of color and gay people were kind of like having sway in the industry.

Honestly I really blame the Disco Demolition Night of 1979. This was an event hosted by the Chicago White Socks and uh 97.9 WLUP in Chicago. It was organized specifically by this dude Steve Dahl. He was an anti disco shock jock dj for the radio station. And Mr. Dahl’s plan was basically that you would get 50% off your ticket to the baseball game if you brought a disco record to destroy at half time.

Here he is next to a dumpster with a bunch of the records. Over fifty thousand people showed to this event and it quickly got out of hand. And the Chicago police had to show up in riot gear to break up the event. This is a great article that speaks to the racism and homophobia of the event if you want to check it out.]

Disco Demolition: the night they tried to crush black music

When a DJ called on listeners to destroy disco records in a Chicago stadium, things turned nasty – and 40 years on, the ugly attitudes behin

the Guardian

When I first heard about this subject online I was a bit skeptical at first that music fans who disliked disco were motivated primarily by prejudice, since music taste can be shaped by a lot of things. But one day my uncle brought it up to me completely unprompted. This was a few years ago, shortly before he died. In older age, my uncle was a huge audiophile who collected all these classics on vinyl and he was a young adult during the 70s, the height of disco. I remember him talking about how he was ashamed of his behavior when he was younger. He basically said that white straight dudes like him hated disco because they were being homophobic and that they saw it as music that “f*gs listened to” and he now regretted holding that prejudice in his past. It was interesting hearing from someone who actually lived through the time period and in hindsight could see the bigotry that clouded his judgment back then. Most boomers who hated disco and deny their prejudice are probably being a lot less honest than my uncle was.

(via mallowbees)

thewritersspotblog:

(via crimsonautumn)

derryderrydown:

crystalmaster333:

On the off-chance that people don’t know this…

This style of bridge dates from the days when barges were towed by horses. When the towpath switched to the opposite side of the canal, the horse would, obviously, clippy-clop over a bridge and happily plod off again. Now, the automatic way to do this would be like this:

However, note that rope (black line) between the horse (brown blob) and the barge (red blob). If you cross the bridge the automatic way, it all goes a bit….

However, if you cross the bridge like THIS

it all works out fine!

Now, sure, you could trust people to remember how to cross a bridge. But there are a lot of numpties out there, and people were working extremely long days and were extremely tired. Also, the canals were BUSY. One boat getting snarled up was the equivalent of the Ever Given.

So, instead, the canal companies built Numpty-Proof Bridges.

They also had the benefit that the horse could be left to plod along on its own, rather than needing human guidance. (I have no idea how this worked. My horse would have her nose buried in the grass and wouldn’t go anywhere, if I left her to it.)

(via madtumbleson)

keuhkopussirotta:

The ancient greeks really had graves for dogs. And they carved stuff on the stone like “carrying you here, I now feel as much grief as I felt joy when I carried you home” and “you never barked without reason, but now you are silent”. The human urge to tell a story spans centuries and millennia, and the loss of a really good dog makes you want to tell people - even people centuries in the future, who will never know your name - that there once was a dog who was a very good girl, but now she no longer is and you aren’t sure what to do with all this sorrow.

(via duckduckngoose)

sophiamcdougall:

OK how have I not heard of this artist?

ALT

Sofonisba Anguissola! Her talent for painting was supported by her aristocratic family, and she was highly trained except for the part where she still wasn’t allowed to see models with their clothes off because Girl, but she was coveted as a portraitist.

ALT

Those are her sisters! The eldest has just beaten her younger sister at chess, and the latter looks stunned, while their baby sister thinks it’s hilarious. And the winning girl is looking smugly at us/ the portraitist, i.e her big sister.

And also she painted this woman.

ALT

(Great hat!) Ana de Mendoza, who probably lost an eye FENCING but it was widely agreed it made her no less hot and she supposedly fucked the king.

Imagine what they talked about…?!

But I’m not going to lie, I’m pretty stuck on the part when a dashing younger ship’s captain fell in love with Sofonisba at first sight WHEN SHE WAS FIFTY.

(This was her second husband, she first married at 40 but he died ‘mysteriously).

She kept painting until her 90s, when she was painted by Van Dyck, who wrote he’d learned more from her than all his other teachers!

ALT

Meanwhile the ship’s captain, Orazio, proceeded to adore her forever, until she died at 93. And seven years later on what would have been her 100th birthday, he placed the following inscription on her tomb:

“To Sofonisba, my wife, who is recorded among the illustrious women of the world, outstanding in portraying the images of man. Orazio Lomellino, in sorrow for the loss of his great love, in 1632, dedicated this little tribute to such a great woman.”

!!!

(via knitmeapony)