guys i am fucking crying i got an old copy of pilgrims progress from a used booksale and i just opened it and there’s a handwritten dedication to a girl from her grandfather from christmas 1888 and she put a little fucking drawing in the back and im sitting on my bed losing my fucking mind over a hundred years ago a grandpa gave this book to “miss maggie” and she loved it and it’s lasted a century and im holding it right now
i showed the book to my mom when she came home from a trip and she reminded me that in little women (1868) each of the march sisters got a copy of pilgrim’s progress under their pillow for christmas there is a high, high, HIGH chance that this little girl was a huge fan of little women and talked to her grandfather about it and he got her a classic book just like her 1880s blorbos i am flailing on the ground humanity is so special
This is a really poignant illustration of the seductive nature of glorifying war but that is a LOOK and she is SERVING it
I’ve seen Death depicted as a card dealer or other sort of gambler, a guy in a suit, a farmer, a robed apparition, and any other number of things, but this? This has to be the best Death I’ve seen yet. An old seductress saying “hey kid, don’t you wanna die in a trench for a government that doesn’t give a fuck about you, just like your dear old dad?” This goes hard as fuck.
the word for brain here is cerebrum, and it’s been literally split in two
I’ve seen wordplay like this before in Latin, but with compound words that are clearly made up of separate parts
but “cere” is not a word and neither is “brum”
you could translate it something like
“he split his br apart ain with a rock”
and it’s only slightly less unreadable than that due to freer word order
needless to say something I’d expect more from a modern experimental poem than an ancient epic
okay not a Latinist but a Latinist’s wife as well as Egyptologist-writer with an undying love for wordplay, but can I suggest the following translation:
“he split his br in two ain with a rock”
this for the additional vocalised puns where when you say it out loud, ‘br in’ sounds like “brain” and ‘two ain’ sounds like “twain”.
One of my favorite little facts about history is that the Mexican peso was functionally the everyday unit of currency in China in the 19th and early 20th century. Silver was one of the few western commodities that Chinese merchants were willing to trade in at rates that made shipping it to China (an expensive, arduous process) profitable; this trade became so voluminous by the 19th century that large everyday transactions even far away from port cities were conducted in pesos, in large part because Mexico’s large domestic silver supply and existing transpacific trade links meant that the currency was stable (a known quantity to merchants in a time and place where relatively pure silver coins were otherwise uncommon) and readily available for use in trade
Zhang Zongchang, the bandit general of the warlord era, could call himself (or at least be called) “Old Eighty-Six” because of the peso – everyone knew or had a vague sense at least how tall a stack of 86 pesos would be, and that this was an impressive length for a guy’s dick
“Stranger, what I say is short. Stand and read over it. This is the hardly beautiful tomb of a beautiful woman. Her parents called her Claudia. She loved her husband with all her heart. She had two sons, one of whom she leaves on earth, the other she placed under it. With pleasant conversing but respectable gait she cared for her home and made wool. I have spoken. Move along.”
One of my favourite bits of media history trivia is that back in the Elizabethan period, people used to publish unauthorised copies of plays by sending someone who was good with shorthand to discretely write down all of the play’s dialogue while they watched it, then reconstructing the play by combining those notes with audience interviews to recover the stage directions; in some cases, these unauthorised copies are the only record of a given play that survives to the present day. It’s one of my favourites for two reasons:
It demonstrates that piracy has always lay at the heart of media preservation; and
Imagine being the 1603 equivalent of the guy with the cell phone camera in the movie theatre, furtively scribbling down notes in a little book and hoping Shakespeare himself doesn’t catch you.
Hey, I know Gen-Z likes to joke about 9/11 but some of us were alive for it and it was legit traumatizing so just FYI if you post any jokes about it tomorrow I’m blocking you. I know no one cares and frankly it’s kind of gross that I feel like saying this might be inviting controversy or whatever, but you’re not an edgelord for making fun of dead people you’re just disturbing.
No, the racist attacks on Muslim Americans were absolutely not even remotely OK. And yes, the government and military responses were disproportionate and very much about greed and oil. I know because I spent the entire war protesting and educating people about why it needed to end and getting people to vote in every election and standing up for Muslim people. I also walked past the crater left by the twin towers regularly for years and the fliers on the fence in little plastic protector sheets of people looking for loved ones who were still missing.
Civilians died. Regular people who happened to be on vacation, or had a work meeting, or their bagel and donut cart spot was on that corner, or they were on the janitorial crew, or their office just happened to be there, or they were a firefighter who ran to the scene and never made it out. Making jokes about 9/11 won’t change how many civilians died in Afghanistan and Iraq and Guantanamo. And their deaths also don’t justify making fun of the civilians who died in the towers and on the planes. It also doesn’t justify the cost that rescue workers still pay to this day because of the damage to their lungs that they can’t get help for because they don’t have healthcare and the Republicans struck down the bill to allot funding for them until it was too late for a lot of them. Some of us saw saw the 9/11 attacks in real time. Our lives stopped completely along with the rest of the country. Some us watched for days on TV while nothing else was on as firemen and rescue workers and desperate civilians were out there in the rubble with literal buckets trying to dig survivors out.
So yeah, I don’t like what I’ve seen the last few years from people who didn’t live through it and have made it a joke and if I see you posting callous, soulless jokes on Sept. 11th I’m blocking you and hope you take a look at your choices as a human being.
Seconding this.
My family was affected by 9/11. We were lucky no one died, but my mom had to walk from ground zero all the way up town until she could find a cab to take her out of the city. She is still traumatized from seeing the planes crash and the buildings fall, and the aftermath was…not great for our family.
I understand people want to make jokes etc. But this blog won’t support it, and I’m not going to get involved in the discussions about it.
I will say that everything that came after the attacks: the US response and the horrible wars waged and lives lost were awful and inexcusable. But the attacks of 9/11 themselves…I don’t feel like looking at it or having that conversation.
This is one of those things that’s alwaysbaffled me.
Also, god, can you think of a worse way to die than burning/suffocating to death and then spending the rest of eternity knowing your corrupt government made you into a meaningless symbol so they could bomb families and children?
Hey. Why isn’t the moon landing a national holiday in the US. Isn’t that fucked up? Does anyone else think that’s absurd?
It was a huge milestone of scientific and technological advancement. (Plus, at the time, politically significant). Humanity went to space! We set foot on a celestial body that was not earth for the first time in human history! That’s a big deal! I’ve never thought about it before but now that I have, it’s ridiculous to me that that’s not part of our everyday lives and the public consciousness anymore. Why don’t we have a public holiday and a family barbecue about it. Why have I never seen the original broadcast of the moon landing? It should be all over the news every year!
It’s July 20th. That’s the day of the moon landing. Next year is going to be the 54th anniversary. I’m ordering astronaut shaped cookie cutters on Etsy and I’m going to have a goddamn potluck. You’re all invited.
Hey. Hey. Tumblr. Ides of March ppl. We can do this
It’s also the date Hitler was nearly murdered in 1944, so you know, even more reason to celebrate.
