history

So No One Ever Thought it Pertinent to Mention There’s a Biopic of Franz Mesmer Starring Alan Rickman?

~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

diaryofasnowflake:

So it turns out as a movie it is pretty problematic and shitty but a good 25% of it is Alan Rickman wearing swishy cloaks trancing (or something like it) ladies who realllllyyyyyy seem to enjoy it.  But he just keeps whining about healing the world and science and stuff.

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This is for science.

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And medicine.

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Not sexy at all.

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SHE WANTS THE T. (T=trance)

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Goddamn that little handhold in a hypno context can just be the most intimate thing.

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Ugh Hans Gruber Snape Mesmer Rickman stop making me love you.

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Not sexual.  Nope.

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NOTE This character is pretty much moaning at this point.  Because getting your blindness treated is hawt.

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Prettttttty sure I do something like this in trance.

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I guess this could be kinky but she’s already blind.

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Like I said, there’s a lotta dis.

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AW YEAH GET IT GURL AND BY “IT” I MEAN YOUR VISION AND THERFORE AN EYEFUL OF SEXY HYPNOTIST ALAN RICKMAN.

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ALL THE FRENCH ROYAL LADIES WANT THE T.

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Same.

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Wait I think I saw a porno like this once.

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WHAT THE FUCK HE IS MAKING A ROOM FULL OF FRENCH LADIES HAVE AN ORGASM.  THIS MOVIE IS NOT EVEN PRETENDING MESMERISM ISN’T SEXUAL.  WHAT IS GOING ON.  WHY IS THIS MOVIE SHITTY/GREAT?

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YOU TOO ALAN?

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GREATEST.

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MOVIE.

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SCENE.

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EVER.

In conclusion: Thank you, Dr. Mesmer.  You hoped your work would cure suffering and disease, and eventually your legacy resulted in freaks like me getting off on it.  And you got a shitty biopic that was kinda hot in a weird way, even by hypnofetishist standards.  Mazel tov.

Also, Alan Rickman can get it.

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SWAG

You hoped your work would cure suffering and disease, and eventually your legacy resulted in freaks like me getting off on it.

To be fair, this was totally a thing at the time. Consider, for instance, this extended quote regarding the morality of “animal magnetism”. which is basically a bunch of medical commissioners being extremely suspicious of how much resemblance hypnosis bears to sex. I think there might be other choice quotes in that book, too, but that was the easiest one to find.

(The book’s an interesting read, regardless. The late-1700′s conception of hypnosis described in the historical sections is pretty much unrecognisable from a turn-of-the-millennium point of view (my turn-of-the-millennium point of view, anyway), and even the “modern-day” (1890′s) sections are very different.)

Tags:

#anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #(‘Hans Gruber Snape Mesmer Rickman’) #reply via reblog #sexuality and lack thereof #though I actually don’t really find mesmerism hot #for pretty much *exactly* the same reasons that contemporaries *did* find it hot #orgasms are so not my style #too stimulating #not restful enough #I suppose this probably counts as #nsfw #oh and also #long post

{{next post in sequence}}

þ!

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

maire-annatari:

eggypeggy:

A feature of English which I think is stupid,

If we’re carrying on with this game,

Is how we abolished the thorn and replaced it,

With two letters that meant the same.

The þ was a letter, amazing, astounding,

Perfect in every respect,

Representing the ‘th’ sound and shortening words,

The one thing it didn’t expect;

One day T and H went and burgled its meaning,

And then, thanks to the printing press,

Its symbol mutated and morphed into Y,

Which is pointless, I must confess.

Þoughtlessly, the þ was forgotten,

Þreatened as the language evolved,

Þankful for þose who knew of old English,

A topic where it was involved.

It only survived in Modern Icelandic,

In English it’s treated with scorn,

And as barely anyone knows it exists,

Please try to remember the thorn.

ð!

Saving the thorn from obscurity
Is surely a laudable aim
But if this letter deserves our praise
The eth should receive the same.

The scribes of the Anglo-Saxons
interchanged the eth and thorn
until the first one fell from use
and the second was left forlorn,

But for the modern Icelander
their roles are more defined
and could improve our English texts
if we were so inclined.

The thorn (Þ, þ) denotes a voiceless dental fricative
as in the English ‘think’ or ‘thresh’ but not the ‘th’ in ‘hither,’
whereas the eth (Ð, ð) is a voiced dental fricative
perfect for ‘this’ and ‘that’ and most especially for ‘thither.’

So I propose ðey boþ be used 
in the Icelandic manner;
ðen students won’t be loaþ to learn
our spelling and our grammar.

To þink we’ve never fixed ðis mess
is really quite astounding.
One letter cluster for two sounds?
Ðat’s damnably confounding!

Tags:

#language #poetry #yes this #I have to refer to the phoneme I can’t perceive as ‘theta’ #because English-speakers are more likely to know that letter than to know our own thorn #(and they don’t even always understand me then) #such a shame #(the following category tag was added retroactively:) #fun wif forn fronting

New Tech Could Reveal Secrets in 2,000-Year-Old Scrolls

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

archaeologicalnews:

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Hundreds of ancient papyrus scrolls that were buried nearly 2,000 years ago after the eruption of Mount Vesuvius could finally be read, thanks to a new technique.

The X-ray-based method can be used to decipher the charred, damaged texts that were found in the ancient town of Herculaneum without having to unroll them, which could damage them beyond repair, scientists say.

One problem with previous attempts to use X-rays to read the scrolls was that the ancient writers used a carbon-based material from smoke in their ink, said study co-author Vito Mocella, a physicist at the National Research Council in Naples, Italy.

“The papyri have been burnt, so there is not a huge difference between the paper and the ink,” Mocella told Live Science. That made it impossible to decipher the words written in the documents. Read more.

Tags:

#history #awesome

Image ~ ~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

{{previous post in sequence}}

brin-bellway:

justice-turtle:

girljanitor:

ameliated:

bad-dominicana:

skepticamongthefaithful:

kemetically-afrolatino:

source 1; source 2; source 3; source 4; source 5

WELP.

Stop what you are doing.

Read those.

Right now.

I’ll wait.

If you don’t want to read, I’ll explain the key bullet points, but please read them afterwords:

This is not “we didn’t protect him enough.”

This is not “the government screwed up some random detail or accidentally let his killer loose.”

The 111th Military Intelligence had a team taking pictures of his balcony during the assassination.

They brought in a Special Forces 8-Man Sniper Team from the 20th.

Memphis Police withdrew their regular protection detail from him.

A jury of 12 people, six black and six white, found the United States Government guilty of conspiracy to commit murder.

YOUR GOVERNMENT. MY GOVERNMENT. THE GOVERNMENT OF, BY, AND FOR THE PEOPLE, SHOT AND KILLED DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING. And the media never reported the case.

MLK was ASSASSINATED. By a government YOU PAY FOR.

I hate those posts where someone tries to pressure you into reblogging. I almost never ask you to reblog.

This shit is important.

Reblog this. I don’t care what kind of blog you have. I don’t care what you normally talk about.

Reblog this.

holy shit

Not fucking surprised. I knew that the FBI was conducting a dedicated smear campaign against him and that anyone lobbying for Black civil rights was officially considered a communist sympathizer, therefore a threat to national security. MLK had just led / been part of the biggest civil rights march in history (where he gave his “I Have a Dream” speech); it makes a lot of sense that the government of the day would decide he was a threat to be “neutralized in any way possible”, as the line goes.

And it makes a lot of sense that the mainstream media wouldn’t report it when the government was found guilty. Does the mainstream media report anything prejudicial to the government as a whole? They do not. They report plenty of stuff prejudicial to individual politicians, and they print a fair number of op-ed pieces saying whatever their target audience thinks about current wars etc, but something huge like this? Something that would  upset the “official” view of The Great And Awesome Progress Of Civil Rights As A Government-Supported Thing From The Emancipation Proclamation To The Present Via Martin Luther King To The First Black President? NOT ON YOUR TINTYPE.

Personally, my bullshit alarm started ringing at “enemies of freedom”. Also, Source 1 is Wikipedia, whose own sources don’t make the trial look very legit from what I can tell, and Source 3 and Source 5 are both from conspiracy-theorist sites.

Bringing this back because I saw a similar post going around today.

Tags:

#Martin Luther King Jr. #conspiracy theories

Image ~ ~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

wine-loving-vagabond:

A loaf of bread made in the first century AD, which was discovered at Pompeii, preserved for centuries in the volcanic ashes of Mount Vesuvius. The markings visible on the top are made from a Roman bread stamp, which bakeries were required to use in order to mark the source of the loaves, and to prevent fraud. (via Ridiculously Interesting)

 

dduane:

(sigh) I’ve seen these before, but this one’s particularly beautiful.

 

hungrylikethewolfie:

I feel like I’m supposed to be marveling over the fact that this is a loaf of bread that’s been preserved for thousands of years, and don’t get me wrong, that’s hella cool.  But honestly, I’m mostly struck by the unexpected news that “bread fraud” was apparently once a serious concern.

 

ironychan:

Bread Fraud was a huge thing,  Bread was provided to the Roman people by the government – bakers were given grain to make the free bread, but some of them stole the government grain to use in other baked goods and would add various substitutes, like sawdust or even worse things, to the bread instead.  So if people complained that their free bread was not proper bread, the stamp told them exactly whose bakery they ought to burn down.

 

dancingspirals:

Bread stamps continued to be used at least until the Medieval period in Europe. Any commercially sold bread had to be stamped with an official seal to identify the baker to show that it complied with all rules and regulations about size, price, and quality. This way, rotten or undersized loaves could be traced back to the baker. Bakers could be pilloried, sent down the streets in a hurdle cart with the offending loaf tied around their neck, fined, or forbidden to engage in baking commercially ever again in that city. There are records of a baker in London being sent on a hurdle cart because he used an iron rod to increase the weight of his loaves, and another who wrapped rotten dough with fresh who was pilloried. Any baker hurdled three times had to move to a new city if they wanted to continue baking.

If you have made bread, you are probably familiar with a molding board. It’s a flat board used to shape the bread. Clever fraudsters came up with a molding board that had a little hole drilled into it that wasn’t easily noticed. A customer would buy his dough by weight, and then the baker would force some of that dough through the hole, so they could sell and underweight loaf and use the stolen dough to bake new loafs to sell. Molding boards ended up being banned in London after nine different bakers were caught doing this. There were also instances of grain sellers withholding grain to create an artificial scarcity drive up the price of that, and things like bread.

Bread, being one of the main things that literally everyone ate in many parts of the world, ended up with a plethora of rules and regulations. Bakers were probably no more likely to commit fraud than anyone else, but there were so many of them, that we ended up with lots and lots of rules and records of people being shifty.

Check out Fabulous Feasts: Medieval Cookery and Ceremony by Madeleine Pelner Cosman for a whole chapter on food laws as they existed in about 1400. Plus the color plates are fantastic.

 

drtanner:

Holy shit. 

Bread is serious fucking business.

 

lordhayati:

Man the bread fandom don’t put up with shit at all.

Tags:

#food #history #the more you know

Image ~ ~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

theworldofchinese:

The Greatest Pirate Who Ever Lived

BY: 

In 1801, a pirate named Zheng Yi was busy raiding Canton. Aside from the prerequisite plundering and rum-drinking, he had given his men one specific order: to break into a local brothel and bring him the prostitute Zheng Yi Sao (郑一嫂), or “Zheng Yi’s wife”.

One might expect a sinister fate to have awaited Zheng Yi Sao upon her deliverance to the pirate captain (rape, swiftly followed by murder, being the most obvious). In actuality, Zheng Yi’s intentions were considerably more gentlemanly.

He intended to marry her. And recognizing that her current future prospects were rather limited, Zheng Yi Sao accepted.

But Zheng Yi Sao didn’t intend on spending the rest of her days as some plunder-hungry pirate’s eye candy. She wanted to become a pirate as well, and she did – one of the greatest pirates to have ever lived.

Read more

 

bankuei:

That first part doesn’t do justice, here read this:

Right from the get-go, Zheng Yi Sao displayed a staggering degree of cunning. She happily accepted Zheng Yi’s proposal, but only on the condition that he share his wealth and power with her, equally. Then, while her new husband went about his pirate duties – further plunder and rum-drinking, presumably – she focused on the business side of things. The result was that in six years, she had engineered an alliance between Zheng Yi and his former pirate rivals, amassed a force of some 1500 ships (called the Red Flag Fleet) and created a swashbuckling empire that extended all the way from Korea to Malaysia.

Zheng Yi certainly knew how to pick ‘em.

Unfortunately, Zheng Yi was killed in 1807 after a misunderstanding with a typhoon. Unfortunate for him, but extremely fortunate for Zheng Yi Sao. Refusing to step aside like a good, diligent widow, Zheng Yi Sao took charge of the Red Flag Fleet, convinced her late husband’s First Mate to support her and swiftly set about making herself the most respected and/or feared individual in all the East.

If films/books/video games have taught us anything, it’s that pirates were a rowdy bunch at the best of times, and their attitudes towards women were…less than progressive. Zheng Yi Sao, of course, was having none of that and quickly established a new pirate code to keep her peg-legged men in line. Anyone who looted a town that had already paid tribute had their head cut off and was dumped in the ocean. Anyone caught, or even suspected, of stealing from the treasury had their head cut off and was dumped in the ocean. Anyone who raped a female prisoner had their head cut off and was dumped in the ocean (there’s a pattern there somewhere).

Needless to say, Zheng Yi Sao was not messing around. Not all her laws were quite so decapitation-happy, though. Ugly female prisoners were to be set free, and when a crewmember purchased one of the prettier captives, he had no choice but to marry her.

But if he was unfaithful…head cut off, dumped in the ocean.

After just one year leading her pirate hegemony, Zheng Yi Sao had formed one of the largest navies on the planet, with some 17,000 men under her command. Extorted tributes from merchants across the Chinese seas and from the coastal towns between Macau and Canton swelled her treasury to staggering levels, and her power was so great that she became the de facto government of the region. No longer was she merely a pirate; she was an entire political entity.

 

awisher-aliar:

So this is awesome.

 

andi-sz:

Is there a historical fiction novel about this? I want to read a historical fiction novel about this.

Tags:

#history