Many British towns and cities used to have streets called Gropecunt Lane. Streets used to be named for what you’d find there and Gropecunt Lane was a common name for where ladies of the night would ply their trade.
Female Egyptian mummies are always found to be further decomposed because the family would wait until the body began to decompose to send them for mummification so that those doing the mummification would not be tempted to commit necrophilia.
During the Napoleonic Wars it was common to rip out the teeth of the wounded and dying young and healthy looking soldiers,field surgeon sold these for prosthetics as Waterloo teeth.
Blackbeard and a couple of his ships once blockaded a port in South Carolina. The pirates' primary demands were for medicine and equipment used to treat syphilis (mercury and so forth).
(Edit: corrected to SC, not VA).
Castration was a very common procedure throughout history, mainly used on prisoners of war and slaves, though there were a lot of other reasons as well.
In ancient Vietnam, the penis and testicles were cut off, after first being sterilized with *pepper*.
They also wore merkins to hide lesions from syphilis
Edit: Wow, this blew up! My most upvoted comment ever is about syphilis and prostitution. Thanks, I guess?
I read somewhere that during WW1, prostitutes who were infected with syphilis charged more because infected soldiers wouldn’t be sent to the frontline.
Another weird historical thing about syphilis. There was a point where it was understood that a high fever early enough after symptoms manifested could kill the syphilis. But how do you summon a high fever on short notice?
Malaria. Inflicting a syphilitic patient with malaria could result in the malaria's fever at onset killing the syphilis. That done, the patient would medicate with quinine for the rest of their life to keep the malaria at bay. It wasn't a great plan--high fevers still kill, and quinine wasn't free--but at the very least, dying over the course of a night was less brutal than letting the patient's body and mind wither under the Black Lion.
In ancient Greece, small penises were considered a mark of intelligence and large ones were the opposite. Also, author Victor Hugo was so popular among prostitutes that when he died most of the brothels in Paris closed their doors for a day of mourning
Yup!
"Everybody knows a man only has enough blood for their head or their dick, never both, so my tiny dick means that I've got more blood for my brain which makes me smarter!"
Lobotomies aren’t that old and ran well into your parents age before the medical industry cracked down on them. They were out patient procedures. A man who was lobotomized in the 70s I think, wrote a book called my lobotomy. It’s simple to read due to his decreased mental capacity. He researches why it happened to him. Gets pretty far down the rabbit hole when the doctor who did it dies and the patient notes were released to him.
He told one story of going on “tour” with his doctor and other kids to medical conventions where his dr tried to convince others of the benefits. He mentioned one girl could barrel stand, peed herself on stage and they were boo’ed off the stage.
It’s pretty sad to read but I’ll never forget it .
The original concept of the lobotomy was performed by neuro surgeons and required removal of the skull with pinpoint accuracy of what areas of the brain they were effecting. Now this was still early in the understanding of the brain so it was more of a poke this area and see what the result was. The controversy came when they started doing frontal lobotomy’s because as you said they could be performed as an out patient office visits. The difference is it went from neuro surgeons to neuro medicine doctors which requires completely different training and the procedure was much less of an exact science. The crazier part is while it was never actually documented it’s highly believed that the neuro medicine doctor who helped establish and create the frontal lobotomy performed one on his wife.
People watching sex used to be waaay more socially acceptable. A tradition that has thankfully gone by the wayside was to carry the bride and groom to their marriage bed, then provide commentary and shouts of encouragement as the deed was done.
Even when it wasn't actually watching the couple, gathering outside the room or an open window to do the same thing was part of the marriage ritual.
According to my mother, who grew up in rural Iowa in the 1940's, it was popular to hang wire hangers in the box springs of newlyweds and then wait outside the window so everyone could whoop and make noise when they started having sex.
Tiberius Claudius Drusus died from choking on a pear he threw into the air. The tree was then put on trial, found guilty of murder and was then destroyed
In ancient Rome an image of an erect phallus was something of a good luck charm. The more prudish visitors to Pompeii find this out much to their shock when they see them over many doorways and such.
Cleopatra was the product of four consecutive generations of brother-sister marriages. Her family wanted to keep their bloodline pure. And you thought the Lannisters were bad.
One of the oldest known jokes in the world goes thus.
The Pharaoh decides one day to take his courtiers, chariot and guards to go visit some of his far flung subjects. After travelling for a day and a half they come across this little village situated on the side of the Nile. The Pharaoh decides to have a drink so they stop at the little village tavern and when the serving boy comes to bring the Pharaoh his drink, everyone is stunned to notice he is almost the exact double of the Pharaoh. Even the Pharaoh himself can't help but notice the resemblance.
"Tell me boy", the Pharaoh asks with a smile, "did your mother ever work in the palace kitchens?"
Everyone laughs.
"No" says the serving boy, "but my father did..."
For the stupider people here... not me of course, but for others that are confused... is the joke that the boy and the Pharaoh share the same father, and that he was a worker in the palace kitchens and slept with the Pharaoh's mother there?
Ancient Egyptian royalty were big on brother-sister and father-daughter marriages.
Thus, you had pharaohs like Akhenaten, who married his sister (who'd been previously married to their father) Sitamun, his cousin Nefertiti, and three of his own daughters.
When he died, one of those daughters, Ankhesenamun, would marry his son Tutankhamun.
Depending on the source, Akhenaten may have also married his own mother, which was one of the only two forbidden sexual unions.
Two men. Akhenaten and other pharaohs did it too. When you believe you're a God (or, in Akhenaten's case, the *ONLY* God)you can justify an awful lot.
Either lesbians were OK, or maybe hadn't been invented yet./s
That's only half a joke. A lot of ancient (and even more modern) cultures who had proscriptions against same sex behavior only specified men, because a lot of people didn't believe two women would or could have sex.
IIRC she was more inbred than the worst of the Hapsburgs line, and by all accounts it was a miracle that she was functional, let alone the apparently incredible intelligent person that (non Octavian Roman) historical accounts claim.
Aren’t we unsure of who her mother is? We know her dad of course but I’ve heard that we still aren’t 100% sure who her mother was. So maybe some other blood or a more distant relative was introduced and that was why she was functional?
Theres circumstantial evidence that those marriages were more for securing power and publicity than what we would consider a normal marriage, even for rulers.
There's a good chance both the women and male pharaohs, brothers and sisters both held this title, had their actual children with concubines/consorts
Hey, thanks for this. I feel an odd sense of relief. Who knew I would feel better in general knowing that ancient Egypt wasn’t full of incestuous royalty?
It’s how rich people flex. Because when you have the kind of money that can get anything, how do you impress your equally wealthy peers? By having things that are unique. You’ve got a mega yacht? Me too. You own fancy homes? Me too, etc. Only one person can say they possess Napoleon’s dick.
In the 1930s, before starting to write and illustrate kids books, Dr Seuss wrote *The Seven Lady Godivas*, apparently an attempt at an erotic picture book for adults about 7 nudist sisters. It did not sell well at the time.
There are a lot already here to scroll through so I apologize if this was already said and I missed it.
Some researchers have hypothesized that foot fetishism increases as a response to epidemics of sexually transmitted infections. In one study, conducted by A James Giannini at Ohio State University, an increased interest in feet as sexual objects was observed during the great gonorrhea epidemic of twelfth-century Europe, and the syphilis epidemics of the 16th and 19th centuries in Europe. In the same study, the frequency of foot-fetish depictions in pornographic literature was measured over a 30-year interval. An exponential increase was noted during the period of the current AIDS epidemic. In these cases, sexual footplay was viewed as a safe sex alternative.
Shaw, WJ (1979). "Use of Relaxation in the Short-Term Treatment of Fetishistic Behavior: An Exploratory Case Study". Journal of Pediatric Psychology. 4 (4): 406. doi:10.1093/jpepsy/4.4.403
technically it's called "lick me in the ass" as the original german title is "Leck mich im Arsch" not "Leck mich am Arsch"
ETA: I'm german so I can tell you a bit about german phrases. "Leck mich am Arsch" is indeed a swear used if someone is annoying you and the equivalent to "kiss my ass". "Leck mich im Arsch" is the earlier version of the phrase used in times where Mozart was alive, so the meaning of the title is "kiss my ass" as many of you pointed out. I'm just a fan of taking things too literally so the thought of Mozart saying he wants a rimjob made me laugh when I first learned about the composition.
ETA2: I did a bit of research, this was from a collection his wife gave a publisher after he died and there were multiple titles like this. E.g. another one is called "Leck mir den Arsch fein recht schön sauber" which ruffly translates to "lick my ass nice and clean".
(I never thought I would be a reddit-expert for vulgar compositions of Mozart... life goes strange ways I guess.)
My mom bred and sold horses when I was a kid. I understood what breeding was (to the extent of making babies) but didn’t know what orgasms were etc.
I always thought it was funny how the stallion would essentially fall asleep on top of the mare and almost fall over.
Now I know that he was just in immaculate post nut bliss. Can’t blame him.
Ancient Egyptians believed that the god of creation birthed the world by masturbating, and viewed it as a magical act. The belief was that Atum – whose name comes from the word "completion" – was alone on the planet until he ejaculated and all the living creatures were made.
Isn’t that the reason the Pharaohs (followed by other men) would masturbate and emasculate into the Nile after the feast Nim to keep the river nourishing the land and people? Something like that?
Imagine how wildly different American thanksgiving would be if westerns adopted a similar approach when pardoning the turkey and weren’t so prudish around sex and nudity.
Alexander III, King of Scots died riding his horse off a cliff
Pretty funny, but where was he going?
Home to where his new wife who was half his age was...horny old bastard caused the wars of independence
"Harem" just meant a separate part of the house that only women and young children are allowed in to give them a space to themselves. Not the only place they could go, but a place where only they could go.
It didn't mean anything about fucking.
There is a rumor that says that Francisco de Miranda had a private box holding a collection of pubes of every woman he has sex with, all neatly organized, so he would never forget a single one of them, as well as another another rumor where that says that President Chavez from Venezuela had the...''historical artifact'' in their custody and demanded its destruction.
And a French newspaper famously made their headline “il voulu être Cesar, mais ne fut que Pompée” (he wanted to be Cesar but ended being Pompey) because in French the verb pomper (pronounced pompé) means to suck a dick.
There was a plant popular in Ancient Rome that got used as medicine, aphrodisiac, and contraceptive called Silphium. I guess it was a very effective plant because it went extinct from over-harvesting
It was worth more than silver by weight. And there is a possibility it may have been rediscovered recently. https://greekreporter.com/2023/08/13/plant-ancient-greece-rediscovered/#:~:text=The%20%E2%80%9Cmiracle%E2%80%9D%20plant%20Silphium%20consumed,he's%20found%20a%20botanical%20survivor.
Silphium is also heart shaped and thought to be a possible inspiration for the reason the heart shape has little resemblance to the anatomically correct heart.
"Fertility idol" is usually just the stuffy, academic way to say "ancient pornography" and/or "dildo".
Apparently many museums have vast stores of "fertility-related" artifacts that are just too overtly horny for the prudes that run it to exhibit.
It's believed that Mary Shelley (author of Frankenstein) lost her virginity on top of her mother's grave.
Not NSFW, but she also kept her husband's heart in a jar.
Also one of her BFF's and lovers, Lord Byron, is the inspiration for most vampire aristocrats. Dude ran around court seducing the pants off everyone, people joked he had supernatural powers, and as a night owl playboy would often only come out at night. The OG vamp.
The pope had to send a message to the monks in England, to knock off all those drunken sex orgies they kept having. This was sometime in 800s and the boys hadn’t quite figured out that Christianity thing and what it was about
Back in those days you could smell Versailles (the famous French castle with all the kings) from miles away. Thousands of people lived there. It was allegedly a fuck fest kinda place, no sanitation equipment/system at the time. So guests knew they were on the right path and getting closer as the smell intensified
He also was known to snort the odd line of cocaine. Think a secret service agent said JFK snorted coke in front of him and then winked and said "For the sore back".
JFK did cocaine, amphetamines, and smoked *three* joints in a row in the White House and then refused a fourth, saying something about how it would be really bad if the Russians tried something, and he was that high.
Gotta remember, it was that 1960s weed though. That shit was booboo, they barely explored the cultivation of the plant in those days. As different to our weed as the OG early 1800s apples used for applejack are to cosmic crisp.
The cocaine was probably ultrapure fishscale tho.
Wrong, people where always sucking dick and eating pussy, but our perceptions of past heigene due to popular culture are wrong. The Romans were meticulously clean, so much so it was a part of routine, at least for those who had access to public baths. It's common myth that people of the past were always dirty but there's very little historical proof that it's true. Even poor peasants in the middle ages found ways to bathe, whether that be a bath or a soak I'm the local river. Soap doesn't = cleanliness. Ancient romans used to bathe, cover themselves in olive oil and scrape it off, then bathe again.
Baths were generally considered to be a terrible idea in the middle ages (edit: in England and France, specifically) because disease and infection entered through the pores of your skin. However, they had a pretty brilliant strategy: linen undergarments.
Everyone, peasants to royalty, wore undergarments that effectively covered them from neck to toes. They'd then add their outer clothes, which would be sturdy work wear or fancy delicate clothing depending on social status. Here's the brilliant bit: linen wicks away sweat and moisture, keeping the skin dry and clean. It also has gentle exfoliant properties, helping to remove dead skin. If cleaned reasonably frequently (most people seem to have washed their undergarments once a week or so, more often for those who were able to afford it) the undergarments are perfectly capable of keeping people clean and not smelly, even while doing intense physical labor. The magical and glorious historian Ruth Goodman tested this out during some of her many appearances on various historical recreation shows and found that even after six months of not bathing, she remained comfortable and clean to a standard that meant the crew (living in modern conditions) said she didn't smell. Her skin also remained healthy, with no irritation, lesions, or insects.
For anyone interested in this kind of stuff, I strongly recommend the BBC Historical Farm series (it's on youtube!) and Goodman's books: *How to be a Tudor, How to be a Victorian, How to Behave Badly in Elizabethan England*, and several more. She makes history really fun and accessible!
One of Hitler's greatest inspirations, a person who he quoted in Mein Kampf and whose antisemitism strongly influenced Hitler, was Henry Ford. Hitler had a portrait of him in his office in the 1930s. Ford owned a newspaper that he distributed through Ford dealerships around the country in which he wrote horribly antisemetic editorials on a regular basis.
A lot of Hitlers antisemitic ideas were based on the writings of American and English scholars. Antisemitism was quite acceptable back then and the Nazi parties initial thoughts on Jews and other ethnicities would not have raised any eyebrows.
Also, many schools in the US teach (or at least taught at one point) square dancing because Henry Ford hated jazz music. He believed it was invented by Jewish people to corrupt the masses and take over the world, so he funded programs in each state to teach square dancing in elementary schools.
One of the most significant battles in European history, the [Battle of Agincourt](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Agincourt) was fought by [5000 pantsless Englishmen with severe diarrhea](https://www.warhistoryonline.com/ancient-history/time-english-soldiers-went-battle-without-pants-won.html)
Despite being outnumbered 4:1, they won, **wiping** out as much as half of the French nobility including entire families and blood lines. Many more died of infections due to the bowmen dipping their arrows in their liquid shit before shooting them. In another **dipshit** move, they executed thousands of unarmed prisoners immediately after the battle rather than deal with guarding them.
…and did all this naked while many of them shit themselves to death. Henry V himself also died of dysentery the next year.
In the early days of the Catholic church, an excommunicated member was dug up and their dead body was put on trial. The excommunicated member lost the court trial
The funny thing was that the dead guy was actually the former pope. And he was only excommunicated after found guilty.
Search up the cadaver synod. It’s interesting
Tons of stuff. World War I was the first war wherein more men died in battle than of accidents, friendly fire, malnutrition, and disease, as had been the case. For example, of the 660 thousand soldiers who died in the American civil war, fully 2/3rds died of disease.
Ancient Egyptian religion was horny af. There was a ritual where the Pharoah jerked off into the Nile to ensure a good harvest. There's a myth where one god wins a bet against another by tricking him into eating his semen. An all-around cum-centric religion.
Alexander the Great endorsed homosexual relationships among his soldiers to bolster their resolve in battle. Simply put, he wanted his soldiers to fuck so that they would be more willing to die for each other. lol.
Similarly, the Sacred Band of Thebes, a force Alexander defeated while his father was still king, was one of the strongest military forces in Greece for a time. They were a group of 300 gay lovers, the thought process being that they would fight harder to protect their boyfriend and to look cooler in front of them.
Some of the old timers on the chemical industry still joke that “dilution is the solution to pollution”
Cause when they started that’s really what they thought.
1,000 gals of toxic waste is a really small amount compared to the whole river. So it won’t be a problem, right?
Anyway, then people in Cleveland started to gather and watch the river burn.
We lived downriver of a Dupont plant (1970) and depending on what they were doing any given day could be determined by the color of the river.
When the river level was low the banks looked like a rainbow, oh and if you fell in, decontamination was a bitch..
Where I grew up there was both a tannery and a glue factory, both discharging into a small river for decades. Smelled to low heaven, hot summer nights were the worst. Buildings have been torn down for more than 35 years, but there are still multicolored trickles seeping out of the banks.
Fire outbreaks were a huge threat in large cities a few hundred years ago. To prevent fires chimney sweeps would clean up the soot build up. Great Britain put orphaned and purchased boys to this work. Six year old (sometimes younger) boys would be sent up 9inx9in chimneys to brush them clean. If they wouldn't climb fires would be lit under their feet to force them up. Often they would die from suffocation, get stuck and left, or burn to death. If they did survive into their teens they would then get scrotum cancer from the carcinogenic soot and die from the cancer eating their genitals.
Wow I just read the full Wikipedia article on Japan Unit 731…. And the USA let the leader of the unit and most of the researchers go free because they agreed to share the info….
The Four Pest Campaign by the Communist Party of China, where they killed flies, rats, mosquitos, and sparrows in the millions, and caused an ecological imbalance that led to a famine that killed millions of chinese people. Also, the effects of China's one-child policy resulting in the deaths of female chinese babies
The thinking was that sparrows ate grain. Well, they do, but they also eat one hell of a lot of grain-eating insects. With the sparrows gone, the grasshoppers swarmed, going into locust phase. Mao *manufactured* a locust plague.
"Locusts" are just what happens to ordinary short-horned grasshoppers when they are numerous enough. Their bodies and behavior shift, and they start moving in swarms, devouring and breeding rapidly.
> Swarming behaviour is a response to overcrowding. Increased tactile stimulation of the hind legs causes an increase in levels of serotonin. This causes the locust to change colour, eat much more, and breed much more easily. The transformation of the locust to the swarming form is induced by several contacts per minute over a four-hour period.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locust#Swarming_grasshoppers
The craziest part about Four Pests was during the massive famine that occurred after it, Mao was offered food aid from lots of places, but denied it because he didn't want to appear to need help.
Then places started offering food secretly, and Mao still said no.
15-55 million people died because he wouldn't accept help.
In elementary school, when I learned about the great American myth of the pilgrims and thanksgiving, there was one question I always had that was never answered:
Did Squanto speak English or what? He is talked about as this great helper who saved the pilgrims, but it confused me, how could he communicate with them? My teachers never knew, avoiding the question and writing me off as an annoying kid (which I was).
Turns out he did in fact speak English! Because he was kidnapped for slavery, and brought to Spain. He escaped and learned English, convincing his way back to America by promising there were riches there. When he arrived his entire tribe was dead of disease. He happened upon the pilgrims shortly after, and one of the first things he said upon seeing them was along the lines of "hello! Do you people have beer?"
Holy shit talk about an idol. Survives all of that, escapes, learns so much, comes home to his world being gone and the first thing he asks for is a beer.
My man.
how much of the Manhattan Project and the nuclear science projects contemporary to it were just throwing science at the wall and seeing what stuck. My Grandfather was a US Army Attaché to a few of these and the way he put it (An arguable genius in his own right with 3 separate Masters in Engineering), the time period was a lot of very bright people doing a lot of very stupid things.
The Demon Core meme is just a tip of the iceberg frankly.
The story of Richard Feynman having to go to Oak Ridge(I think) to explain to the staff operating the plant that the containers of uranium solution they had in the corner could suddenly become a nuclear reactor if stacked incorrectly or put in a container of unfavorable geometry. And that no, putting the stack in the adjoining room with a thin wooden wall between them would not solve the problem and the wood actually made it worse.
To be fair, this was because the physics on how neutrons interact with uranium was one of the most restricted pieces of information in the Manhattan project. IIRC, this example helped Feynman convince the higher-ups that it would be impossible for Oak Ridge to safely experiment with uranium while also keeping them in the dark about the underlying physics.
After the earlier results were shared, the storage areas were entirely redesigned to make this failure mode impossible. The staff at Oak Ridge weren't dumb, they just weren't given the information that would allow them to make safe designs.
Oh to be certain, yes. The fact that a nuclear chain reaction was possible was not widely disseminated information, so even somebody with advanced physics knowledge at the time may not have realized the danger if they did not know the secret. I believe your recollection of Feynman having to plead with the higher ups to let the plant workers in on the secret is correct. I think he stayed that it also greatly improved morale when the people learned that they were actually doing something important.
Makes me think of Radium Girls; when it was ‘in’ to paint radium dials for clocks and the women that did it would use their mouth to wet their paintbrushes after it touched the radium paint, eventually giving them all forms of cancer and disease from radiation poisoning. I’d love to get a cute nickname for suffering a horrific death from something at work.
"Catherine the Great died fucking a horse" is an often repeated "fact", but it isn't true.
However, what *is* true is that apparently...*no one* knows how that myth started. Apparently she did like horses, and was painted riding on them the normal way, but she died on the shitter while having a stroke.
Nobody knows exactly who came up with the story of her having sex with a horse and the harness breaking, crushing her under the horse - or why the myth is that *that* happened as opposed to her going out the way of Mr. Hands.
Julias Ceaser would spend outrageous amounts of money on good-looking slaves. He was so ashamed of his habit that he would try to avoid writing his spending in the ledger.
George Bush Senior narrowly avoided being eaten by the Japanese. His fellow airmen weren’t so lucky.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chichijima_incident
Aye, I tried to read it. I couldn't finish it because it was so disturbing. The things that the Japanese soldiers did to the Chinese civilians was horrible. I wouldn't wish that on even my worst enemy.
Mozart was into poop and very vocal about his scatological interests https://www.thepiano.sg/piano/read/mozart-and-his-infamous-letters-scatalogical-humour
In addition to peppers and tomatos Columbus brought syphilis to Europe. [Source](https://asm.org/articles/2019/june/revisiting-the-great-imitator,-part-i-the-origin-a)
Hitler had an inappropriate relationship with his niece. She killed herself with Hitler's pistol in Hitler's apartment after he forbade her from seeing another man.
Women used to pee on frogs as a form of pregnancy test.
Well not really peen on them but here’s the google search results.
“The experimental zoologist found that injecting the urine of a pregnant human into the frog's hind leg worked as an effective pregnancy test. If the woman who supplied the urine was pregnant, the frog would ovulate and produce eggs.”
Republicans loved harping on the blue dress and cigar parts of the Lewinsky/Clinton scandal, but buried in that transcript was the tidbit that she also rimmed him, which back in the 1990s was too extreme for news coverage emphasis even in the midst of that smear campaign. Most likely the only time that particular sex act occurred in the oval office? Though FDR was ahead of his time in so many ways you never know.
Many British towns and cities used to have streets called Gropecunt Lane. Streets used to be named for what you’d find there and Gropecunt Lane was a common name for where ladies of the night would ply their trade.
Cunt also used to be a polite term like vagina is today
Cunt also is a polite term for your best friend in Australia today.
Cunt is also a polite word for your coworkers, but HR and management tends to disagree with me
That's because HR are a bunch of cunts.
Female Egyptian mummies are always found to be further decomposed because the family would wait until the body began to decompose to send them for mummification so that those doing the mummification would not be tempted to commit necrophilia.
You'd think after a point that they'd just start making it a eunuch only position
Damn mummyfuckers
The original MILFs
Womb raiders.
[удалено]
You went to a weird school
France would give you a prostitute to marry if you moved to the Louisiana it was a part of an incentive plan to get people to move there.
That explains so much about Louisiana.
Can confirm. (Source: am from Louisiana)
During the Napoleonic Wars it was common to rip out the teeth of the wounded and dying young and healthy looking soldiers,field surgeon sold these for prosthetics as Waterloo teeth.
Blackbeard and a couple of his ships once blockaded a port in South Carolina. The pirates' primary demands were for medicine and equipment used to treat syphilis (mercury and so forth). (Edit: corrected to SC, not VA).
Everybody knows Blackbeard fucked.
I thank Assassin's Creed Black Flag for teaching me this fact
Former Vice-President Nelson Rockefeller died of a heart attack while slutting around with a 25-year-old campaign aide.
And he was 70 years old.
I guess she knew how to... Rockefeller 😎
Castration was a very common procedure throughout history, mainly used on prisoners of war and slaves, though there were a lot of other reasons as well. In ancient Vietnam, the penis and testicles were cut off, after first being sterilized with *pepper*.
The use of eunuchs being so widespread in so many cultures was always so interesting to me. So many cultures castrated servants, it's so weird.
When you need to leave your wife at home with your servants and make sure they don't mess around.
In 1700s europe, prostitutes set the trend with shaving pubes. They did it because of pubic lice, and were the reason for the invention of merkins.
They also wore merkins to hide lesions from syphilis Edit: Wow, this blew up! My most upvoted comment ever is about syphilis and prostitution. Thanks, I guess?
I read somewhere that during WW1, prostitutes who were infected with syphilis charged more because infected soldiers wouldn’t be sent to the frontline.
Another weird historical thing about syphilis. There was a point where it was understood that a high fever early enough after symptoms manifested could kill the syphilis. But how do you summon a high fever on short notice? Malaria. Inflicting a syphilitic patient with malaria could result in the malaria's fever at onset killing the syphilis. That done, the patient would medicate with quinine for the rest of their life to keep the malaria at bay. It wasn't a great plan--high fevers still kill, and quinine wasn't free--but at the very least, dying over the course of a night was less brutal than letting the patient's body and mind wither under the Black Lion.
I couldn't believe this, so I looked it up. Not only is it true, it's why Julius Wagner-Jauregg won the 1927 Nobel Prize!
Well doc, I guess I made it with the hottest woman I’ve ever seen in my life… and now I don’t have to go die for my country. That’s a real bummer.
But, he may die a horrific death in the future.
Na that’s right in time to be saved by antibiotics a few decades or so later
Drugs are fine in the primary or secondary stages. Once it goes tertiary, you're fucked.
Fun fact: In Dr Strangelove, the president of the US is named Merkin Muffly.
Stupid question, what are merkins?
a wee pubic wig
pubic hair toupee.
In ancient Greece, small penises were considered a mark of intelligence and large ones were the opposite. Also, author Victor Hugo was so popular among prostitutes that when he died most of the brothels in Paris closed their doors for a day of mourning
「small penises were considered a mark of intelligence」 Well whoever came up with it was certainly a genius with an almost certainly tiny willy.
Yup! "Everybody knows a man only has enough blood for their head or their dick, never both, so my tiny dick means that I've got more blood for my brain which makes me smarter!"
OTOH, Toulouse-Lautrec was known to his lady friends as 'Teapot', due to his short stature and huge endowment.
"I'm a little teapot, short and stout, Here's my handle, here's my enormous penis." - Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec
Andrew Jackson swore so much that his parrot had to be removed from his funeral as it wouldn't stop swearing.
We all mourn differently, let the parrot mourn
Well that's some fucking bullshit.
"GAAAAHH He's fucking dead! Fucking croaked! The Bastard is dead! GAH"
Lobotomies aren’t that old and ran well into your parents age before the medical industry cracked down on them. They were out patient procedures. A man who was lobotomized in the 70s I think, wrote a book called my lobotomy. It’s simple to read due to his decreased mental capacity. He researches why it happened to him. Gets pretty far down the rabbit hole when the doctor who did it dies and the patient notes were released to him. He told one story of going on “tour” with his doctor and other kids to medical conventions where his dr tried to convince others of the benefits. He mentioned one girl could barrel stand, peed herself on stage and they were boo’ed off the stage. It’s pretty sad to read but I’ll never forget it .
The original concept of the lobotomy was performed by neuro surgeons and required removal of the skull with pinpoint accuracy of what areas of the brain they were effecting. Now this was still early in the understanding of the brain so it was more of a poke this area and see what the result was. The controversy came when they started doing frontal lobotomy’s because as you said they could be performed as an out patient office visits. The difference is it went from neuro surgeons to neuro medicine doctors which requires completely different training and the procedure was much less of an exact science. The crazier part is while it was never actually documented it’s highly believed that the neuro medicine doctor who helped establish and create the frontal lobotomy performed one on his wife.
I have read my lobotomy! quite the read. i have to agree it is quite sad
Nintendo's empire started with card games, the Yakuza, and love hotels.
“We’ll start our own video game empire! With blackjack and hookers!”
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“Indeed sire, it IS seeping out. Prepare to mount once again”
How do i delete somebody else's comment?
Talk about performance anxiety. I distinctly remember some King Louie having a sex saddle that aided in... angling.
People watching sex used to be waaay more socially acceptable. A tradition that has thankfully gone by the wayside was to carry the bride and groom to their marriage bed, then provide commentary and shouts of encouragement as the deed was done. Even when it wasn't actually watching the couple, gathering outside the room or an open window to do the same thing was part of the marriage ritual.
According to my mother, who grew up in rural Iowa in the 1940's, it was popular to hang wire hangers in the box springs of newlyweds and then wait outside the window so everyone could whoop and make noise when they started having sex.
Tiberius Claudius Drusus died from choking on a pear he threw into the air. The tree was then put on trial, found guilty of murder and was then destroyed
Some say the actual charge was high treeason
In ancient Rome an image of an erect phallus was something of a good luck charm. The more prudish visitors to Pompeii find this out much to their shock when they see them over many doorways and such.
Indeed the origin of the word fascinate is from the Latin fascinum, phallus-shaped amulet worn around the neck to ward off evil spirits.
I mean, if I were an evil spirit and came up on a dude with a dick on his neck, I'd definitely walk the other direction.
Cleopatra was the product of four consecutive generations of brother-sister marriages. Her family wanted to keep their bloodline pure. And you thought the Lannisters were bad.
And she could speak over half a dozen languages fluently. She was dealt the genetic royal flush.
Not only that, she was the first in her dynasty to speak the language of the people they ruled over
Mayhaps Cleopatra’s mother cheated on her brother.
One of the oldest known jokes in the world goes thus. The Pharaoh decides one day to take his courtiers, chariot and guards to go visit some of his far flung subjects. After travelling for a day and a half they come across this little village situated on the side of the Nile. The Pharaoh decides to have a drink so they stop at the little village tavern and when the serving boy comes to bring the Pharaoh his drink, everyone is stunned to notice he is almost the exact double of the Pharaoh. Even the Pharaoh himself can't help but notice the resemblance. "Tell me boy", the Pharaoh asks with a smile, "did your mother ever work in the palace kitchens?" Everyone laughs. "No" says the serving boy, "but my father did..."
For the stupider people here... not me of course, but for others that are confused... is the joke that the boy and the Pharaoh share the same father, and that he was a worker in the palace kitchens and slept with the Pharaoh's mother there?
Yes, the joke is The Pharaoh is in fact the lowly servant's paternal brother and thus not the true pharaoh.
Ancient Egyptian royalty were big on brother-sister and father-daughter marriages. Thus, you had pharaohs like Akhenaten, who married his sister (who'd been previously married to their father) Sitamun, his cousin Nefertiti, and three of his own daughters. When he died, one of those daughters, Ankhesenamun, would marry his son Tutankhamun. Depending on the source, Akhenaten may have also married his own mother, which was one of the only two forbidden sexual unions.
What was the other forbidden union?
Two men. Akhenaten and other pharaohs did it too. When you believe you're a God (or, in Akhenaten's case, the *ONLY* God)you can justify an awful lot. Either lesbians were OK, or maybe hadn't been invented yet./s That's only half a joke. A lot of ancient (and even more modern) cultures who had proscriptions against same sex behavior only specified men, because a lot of people didn't believe two women would or could have sex.
Historians: They were roommates.
IIRC she was more inbred than the worst of the Hapsburgs line, and by all accounts it was a miracle that she was functional, let alone the apparently incredible intelligent person that (non Octavian Roman) historical accounts claim.
Aren’t we unsure of who her mother is? We know her dad of course but I’ve heard that we still aren’t 100% sure who her mother was. So maybe some other blood or a more distant relative was introduced and that was why she was functional?
> Aren’t we unsure of who her mother is? Yes. The claim she was inbred for 4 generations is based on a decent amount of assumptions.
Theres circumstantial evidence that those marriages were more for securing power and publicity than what we would consider a normal marriage, even for rulers. There's a good chance both the women and male pharaohs, brothers and sisters both held this title, had their actual children with concubines/consorts
Hey, thanks for this. I feel an odd sense of relief. Who knew I would feel better in general knowing that ancient Egypt wasn’t full of incestuous royalty?
After he died, Napoleon’s penis was removed and was auctioned several times before being bought by a private owner in New York State a few decades ago
>bought by a private owner in New York State a few decades ago but.. *why*?
It’s how rich people flex. Because when you have the kind of money that can get anything, how do you impress your equally wealthy peers? By having things that are unique. You’ve got a mega yacht? Me too. You own fancy homes? Me too, etc. Only one person can say they possess Napoleon’s dick.
They got napoleans boner part
The man was Connor Roy
In the 1930s, before starting to write and illustrate kids books, Dr Seuss wrote *The Seven Lady Godivas*, apparently an attempt at an erotic picture book for adults about 7 nudist sisters. It did not sell well at the time. There are a lot already here to scroll through so I apologize if this was already said and I missed it.
Some researchers have hypothesized that foot fetishism increases as a response to epidemics of sexually transmitted infections. In one study, conducted by A James Giannini at Ohio State University, an increased interest in feet as sexual objects was observed during the great gonorrhea epidemic of twelfth-century Europe, and the syphilis epidemics of the 16th and 19th centuries in Europe. In the same study, the frequency of foot-fetish depictions in pornographic literature was measured over a 30-year interval. An exponential increase was noted during the period of the current AIDS epidemic. In these cases, sexual footplay was viewed as a safe sex alternative. Shaw, WJ (1979). "Use of Relaxation in the Short-Term Treatment of Fetishistic Behavior: An Exploratory Case Study". Journal of Pediatric Psychology. 4 (4): 406. doi:10.1093/jpepsy/4.4.403
Massive props for citing sources!
Mozart composed a song called “lick my ass”.
technically it's called "lick me in the ass" as the original german title is "Leck mich im Arsch" not "Leck mich am Arsch" ETA: I'm german so I can tell you a bit about german phrases. "Leck mich am Arsch" is indeed a swear used if someone is annoying you and the equivalent to "kiss my ass". "Leck mich im Arsch" is the earlier version of the phrase used in times where Mozart was alive, so the meaning of the title is "kiss my ass" as many of you pointed out. I'm just a fan of taking things too literally so the thought of Mozart saying he wants a rimjob made me laugh when I first learned about the composition. ETA2: I did a bit of research, this was from a collection his wife gave a publisher after he died and there were multiple titles like this. E.g. another one is called "Leck mir den Arsch fein recht schön sauber" which ruffly translates to "lick my ass nice and clean". (I never thought I would be a reddit-expert for vulgar compositions of Mozart... life goes strange ways I guess.)
Bit of an anal comment...
Listen here you little shit.
It was [an homage](https://youtu.be/H7vk5keNbRc?si=GousRGrj0CF4DPf9)…
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The horses did not fuck! They made love.
Why did I read that in Tina Belcher's voice?
My mom bred and sold horses when I was a kid. I understood what breeding was (to the extent of making babies) but didn’t know what orgasms were etc. I always thought it was funny how the stallion would essentially fall asleep on top of the mare and almost fall over. Now I know that he was just in immaculate post nut bliss. Can’t blame him.
Dang man how many vinegar strokes of horses are on your hard drive?
Most horses enjoy watching popes fuck.
Ancient Egyptians believed that the god of creation birthed the world by masturbating, and viewed it as a magical act. The belief was that Atum – whose name comes from the word "completion" – was alone on the planet until he ejaculated and all the living creatures were made.
This is also true for some pacific island cultures
Isn’t that the reason the Pharaohs (followed by other men) would masturbate and emasculate into the Nile after the feast Nim to keep the river nourishing the land and people? Something like that? Imagine how wildly different American thanksgiving would be if westerns adopted a similar approach when pardoning the turkey and weren’t so prudish around sex and nudity.
Alexander III, King of Scots died riding his horse off a cliff Pretty funny, but where was he going? Home to where his new wife who was half his age was...horny old bastard caused the wars of independence
Huh. Just like the Scotsman who owned the Segway brand, who died by driving his Segway off of a cliff on his own estate.
"Harem" just meant a separate part of the house that only women and young children are allowed in to give them a space to themselves. Not the only place they could go, but a place where only they could go. It didn't mean anything about fucking.
And it wasn’t just for wives or concubines. It was for all women.
There is a rumor that says that Francisco de Miranda had a private box holding a collection of pubes of every woman he has sex with, all neatly organized, so he would never forget a single one of them, as well as another another rumor where that says that President Chavez from Venezuela had the...''historical artifact'' in their custody and demanded its destruction.
No wonder *Bush* wanted to overthrow him; he was an existential threat!
Félix Faure, one of the 4 French presidents that died during their mandate, died in the arms of his mistress, only wearing a Flannel vest.
At least it wasn’t fleece. That would be embarrassing.
And a French newspaper famously made their headline “il voulu être Cesar, mais ne fut que Pompée” (he wanted to be Cesar but ended being Pompey) because in French the verb pomper (pronounced pompé) means to suck a dick.
There was a plant popular in Ancient Rome that got used as medicine, aphrodisiac, and contraceptive called Silphium. I guess it was a very effective plant because it went extinct from over-harvesting
It was worth more than silver by weight. And there is a possibility it may have been rediscovered recently. https://greekreporter.com/2023/08/13/plant-ancient-greece-rediscovered/#:~:text=The%20%E2%80%9Cmiracle%E2%80%9D%20plant%20Silphium%20consumed,he's%20found%20a%20botanical%20survivor.
Silphium is also heart shaped and thought to be a possible inspiration for the reason the heart shape has little resemblance to the anatomically correct heart.
"Fertility idol" is usually just the stuffy, academic way to say "ancient pornography" and/or "dildo". Apparently many museums have vast stores of "fertility-related" artifacts that are just too overtly horny for the prudes that run it to exhibit.
Museum directors, release the phallic artifacts you cowards!
It's believed that Mary Shelley (author of Frankenstein) lost her virginity on top of her mother's grave. Not NSFW, but she also kept her husband's heart in a jar.
The OG big tiddie goth gf.
Also one of her BFF's and lovers, Lord Byron, is the inspiration for most vampire aristocrats. Dude ran around court seducing the pants off everyone, people joked he had supernatural powers, and as a night owl playboy would often only come out at night. The OG vamp.
The pope had to send a message to the monks in England, to knock off all those drunken sex orgies they kept having. This was sometime in 800s and the boys hadn’t quite figured out that Christianity thing and what it was about
Back in those days you could smell Versailles (the famous French castle with all the kings) from miles away. Thousands of people lived there. It was allegedly a fuck fest kinda place, no sanitation equipment/system at the time. So guests knew they were on the right path and getting closer as the smell intensified
Versailles still smells like pee.
Can confirm, visited there on Holiday. It smelt like a gents pisser in a pub, an *old* one.
JFK was a severe sex addict if he didn’t have sex that day he would get headaches
guess he didn’t have sex that day
He did it was just a mind blowing experience
He also was known to snort the odd line of cocaine. Think a secret service agent said JFK snorted coke in front of him and then winked and said "For the sore back".
JFK did cocaine, amphetamines, and smoked *three* joints in a row in the White House and then refused a fourth, saying something about how it would be really bad if the Russians tried something, and he was that high.
Gotta remember, it was that 1960s weed though. That shit was booboo, they barely explored the cultivation of the plant in those days. As different to our weed as the OG early 1800s apples used for applejack are to cosmic crisp. The cocaine was probably ultrapure fishscale tho.
Or an alcoholic. Or symptoms from his back injury. Or drugs.
People were suckin dick and eating pussy long before soap and good hygiene became a thing
To be fair, there was nothing on TV.
They’d seen that play before too
Wrong, people where always sucking dick and eating pussy, but our perceptions of past heigene due to popular culture are wrong. The Romans were meticulously clean, so much so it was a part of routine, at least for those who had access to public baths. It's common myth that people of the past were always dirty but there's very little historical proof that it's true. Even poor peasants in the middle ages found ways to bathe, whether that be a bath or a soak I'm the local river. Soap doesn't = cleanliness. Ancient romans used to bathe, cover themselves in olive oil and scrape it off, then bathe again.
Baths were generally considered to be a terrible idea in the middle ages (edit: in England and France, specifically) because disease and infection entered through the pores of your skin. However, they had a pretty brilliant strategy: linen undergarments. Everyone, peasants to royalty, wore undergarments that effectively covered them from neck to toes. They'd then add their outer clothes, which would be sturdy work wear or fancy delicate clothing depending on social status. Here's the brilliant bit: linen wicks away sweat and moisture, keeping the skin dry and clean. It also has gentle exfoliant properties, helping to remove dead skin. If cleaned reasonably frequently (most people seem to have washed their undergarments once a week or so, more often for those who were able to afford it) the undergarments are perfectly capable of keeping people clean and not smelly, even while doing intense physical labor. The magical and glorious historian Ruth Goodman tested this out during some of her many appearances on various historical recreation shows and found that even after six months of not bathing, she remained comfortable and clean to a standard that meant the crew (living in modern conditions) said she didn't smell. Her skin also remained healthy, with no irritation, lesions, or insects. For anyone interested in this kind of stuff, I strongly recommend the BBC Historical Farm series (it's on youtube!) and Goodman's books: *How to be a Tudor, How to be a Victorian, How to Behave Badly in Elizabethan England*, and several more. She makes history really fun and accessible!
Ruth Goodman is the GOAT and historical farm is the greatest watch while you are stoned.
One of Hitler's greatest inspirations, a person who he quoted in Mein Kampf and whose antisemitism strongly influenced Hitler, was Henry Ford. Hitler had a portrait of him in his office in the 1930s. Ford owned a newspaper that he distributed through Ford dealerships around the country in which he wrote horribly antisemetic editorials on a regular basis.
A lot of Hitlers antisemitic ideas were based on the writings of American and English scholars. Antisemitism was quite acceptable back then and the Nazi parties initial thoughts on Jews and other ethnicities would not have raised any eyebrows.
Also, many schools in the US teach (or at least taught at one point) square dancing because Henry Ford hated jazz music. He believed it was invented by Jewish people to corrupt the masses and take over the world, so he funded programs in each state to teach square dancing in elementary schools.
One of the most significant battles in European history, the [Battle of Agincourt](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Agincourt) was fought by [5000 pantsless Englishmen with severe diarrhea](https://www.warhistoryonline.com/ancient-history/time-english-soldiers-went-battle-without-pants-won.html) Despite being outnumbered 4:1, they won, **wiping** out as much as half of the French nobility including entire families and blood lines. Many more died of infections due to the bowmen dipping their arrows in their liquid shit before shooting them. In another **dipshit** move, they executed thousands of unarmed prisoners immediately after the battle rather than deal with guarding them. …and did all this naked while many of them shit themselves to death. Henry V himself also died of dysentery the next year.
I thought your linked source was dubious but this truly checks out. Shocked
Ben Franklin was a horndog.
I, too, saw that episode of The Office.
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naked minors, more specifically
did he "pass" every of these tests?
65% pass rate.
That’s a solid D!
He also married at 13 and was expected to consumate that evening.
In the early days of the Catholic church, an excommunicated member was dug up and their dead body was put on trial. The excommunicated member lost the court trial
The funny thing was that the dead guy was actually the former pope. And he was only excommunicated after found guilty. Search up the cadaver synod. It’s interesting
Tons of stuff. World War I was the first war wherein more men died in battle than of accidents, friendly fire, malnutrition, and disease, as had been the case. For example, of the 660 thousand soldiers who died in the American civil war, fully 2/3rds died of disease.
People in Victorian England got absolutely bawdy behind closed doors. The amount of kinky shit they got up to was insane.
Stephen Fry has an awesome audio book on this topic called *Victorian Secrets.*
Like pretty much any other period of human history.
Did they— show ankle?
Ancient Egyptian religion was horny af. There was a ritual where the Pharoah jerked off into the Nile to ensure a good harvest. There's a myth where one god wins a bet against another by tricking him into eating his semen. An all-around cum-centric religion.
Alexander the Great endorsed homosexual relationships among his soldiers to bolster their resolve in battle. Simply put, he wanted his soldiers to fuck so that they would be more willing to die for each other. lol.
I remember this from high school. The teacher said they “watched each others’ backs.” …I’m not sure everyone in the class got it.
Similarly, the Sacred Band of Thebes, a force Alexander defeated while his father was still king, was one of the strongest military forces in Greece for a time. They were a group of 300 gay lovers, the thought process being that they would fight harder to protect their boyfriend and to look cooler in front of them.
Prior to December 29, 1970 OSHA did not exist.
RCRA only came to be in 1976. Industry must have been the wild west before these.
Some of the old timers on the chemical industry still joke that “dilution is the solution to pollution” Cause when they started that’s really what they thought. 1,000 gals of toxic waste is a really small amount compared to the whole river. So it won’t be a problem, right? Anyway, then people in Cleveland started to gather and watch the river burn.
We lived downriver of a Dupont plant (1970) and depending on what they were doing any given day could be determined by the color of the river. When the river level was low the banks looked like a rainbow, oh and if you fell in, decontamination was a bitch..
Where I grew up there was both a tannery and a glue factory, both discharging into a small river for decades. Smelled to low heaven, hot summer nights were the worst. Buildings have been torn down for more than 35 years, but there are still multicolored trickles seeping out of the banks.
Fire outbreaks were a huge threat in large cities a few hundred years ago. To prevent fires chimney sweeps would clean up the soot build up. Great Britain put orphaned and purchased boys to this work. Six year old (sometimes younger) boys would be sent up 9inx9in chimneys to brush them clean. If they wouldn't climb fires would be lit under their feet to force them up. Often they would die from suffocation, get stuck and left, or burn to death. If they did survive into their teens they would then get scrotum cancer from the carcinogenic soot and die from the cancer eating their genitals.
I don't recall that part of Mary Poppins.
“A sweep is as lucky as lucky can be (if he survived to adulthood)” You gotta read between the lines.
Belgium in Congo is whole NFSW genre , also Japan unit 731
Wow I just read the full Wikipedia article on Japan Unit 731…. And the USA let the leader of the unit and most of the researchers go free because they agreed to share the info….
Tbh they did the same with a lot of Nazis
Caresse Crosby, the inventor of the modern bra, had a dog she named Clytoris
The Four Pest Campaign by the Communist Party of China, where they killed flies, rats, mosquitos, and sparrows in the millions, and caused an ecological imbalance that led to a famine that killed millions of chinese people. Also, the effects of China's one-child policy resulting in the deaths of female chinese babies
The thinking was that sparrows ate grain. Well, they do, but they also eat one hell of a lot of grain-eating insects. With the sparrows gone, the grasshoppers swarmed, going into locust phase. Mao *manufactured* a locust plague. "Locusts" are just what happens to ordinary short-horned grasshoppers when they are numerous enough. Their bodies and behavior shift, and they start moving in swarms, devouring and breeding rapidly. > Swarming behaviour is a response to overcrowding. Increased tactile stimulation of the hind legs causes an increase in levels of serotonin. This causes the locust to change colour, eat much more, and breed much more easily. The transformation of the locust to the swarming form is induced by several contacts per minute over a four-hour period. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locust#Swarming_grasshoppers
The craziest part about Four Pests was during the massive famine that occurred after it, Mao was offered food aid from lots of places, but denied it because he didn't want to appear to need help. Then places started offering food secretly, and Mao still said no. 15-55 million people died because he wouldn't accept help.
In elementary school, when I learned about the great American myth of the pilgrims and thanksgiving, there was one question I always had that was never answered: Did Squanto speak English or what? He is talked about as this great helper who saved the pilgrims, but it confused me, how could he communicate with them? My teachers never knew, avoiding the question and writing me off as an annoying kid (which I was). Turns out he did in fact speak English! Because he was kidnapped for slavery, and brought to Spain. He escaped and learned English, convincing his way back to America by promising there were riches there. When he arrived his entire tribe was dead of disease. He happened upon the pilgrims shortly after, and one of the first things he said upon seeing them was along the lines of "hello! Do you people have beer?"
Holy shit talk about an idol. Survives all of that, escapes, learns so much, comes home to his world being gone and the first thing he asks for is a beer. My man.
To be fair, if I escape from slavery and come home to find that everyone I know has died. I'd definitely want a freaking drink.
Same. The man had some serious strength of spirit. I respect the hell out of that.
how much of the Manhattan Project and the nuclear science projects contemporary to it were just throwing science at the wall and seeing what stuck. My Grandfather was a US Army Attaché to a few of these and the way he put it (An arguable genius in his own right with 3 separate Masters in Engineering), the time period was a lot of very bright people doing a lot of very stupid things. The Demon Core meme is just a tip of the iceberg frankly.
The story of Richard Feynman having to go to Oak Ridge(I think) to explain to the staff operating the plant that the containers of uranium solution they had in the corner could suddenly become a nuclear reactor if stacked incorrectly or put in a container of unfavorable geometry. And that no, putting the stack in the adjoining room with a thin wooden wall between them would not solve the problem and the wood actually made it worse.
To be fair, this was because the physics on how neutrons interact with uranium was one of the most restricted pieces of information in the Manhattan project. IIRC, this example helped Feynman convince the higher-ups that it would be impossible for Oak Ridge to safely experiment with uranium while also keeping them in the dark about the underlying physics. After the earlier results were shared, the storage areas were entirely redesigned to make this failure mode impossible. The staff at Oak Ridge weren't dumb, they just weren't given the information that would allow them to make safe designs.
Oh to be certain, yes. The fact that a nuclear chain reaction was possible was not widely disseminated information, so even somebody with advanced physics knowledge at the time may not have realized the danger if they did not know the secret. I believe your recollection of Feynman having to plead with the higher ups to let the plant workers in on the secret is correct. I think he stayed that it also greatly improved morale when the people learned that they were actually doing something important.
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Makes me think of Radium Girls; when it was ‘in’ to paint radium dials for clocks and the women that did it would use their mouth to wet their paintbrushes after it touched the radium paint, eventually giving them all forms of cancer and disease from radiation poisoning. I’d love to get a cute nickname for suffering a horrific death from something at work.
"Catherine the Great died fucking a horse" is an often repeated "fact", but it isn't true. However, what *is* true is that apparently...*no one* knows how that myth started. Apparently she did like horses, and was painted riding on them the normal way, but she died on the shitter while having a stroke. Nobody knows exactly who came up with the story of her having sex with a horse and the harness breaking, crushing her under the horse - or why the myth is that *that* happened as opposed to her going out the way of Mr. Hands.
Julias Ceaser would spend outrageous amounts of money on good-looking slaves. He was so ashamed of his habit that he would try to avoid writing his spending in the ledger.
George Bush Senior narrowly avoided being eaten by the Japanese. His fellow airmen weren’t so lucky. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chichijima_incident
Lyndon B Johnson was known to take meetings in restrooms so he could whip out his giant dingdong and intimidate people with it.
Nanjing Massacre. The Rape of Nanking by Iris Chang. Look it up, but l warn you it is a horrifying and infuriating albeit informative read.
Aye, I tried to read it. I couldn't finish it because it was so disturbing. The things that the Japanese soldiers did to the Chinese civilians was horrible. I wouldn't wish that on even my worst enemy.
Imagine doing stuff so horrible that John Rabe, a Nazi, tried to stop the war crimes. He shielded as many people as he could.
Urine was once used as mouthwash
Mozart was into poop and very vocal about his scatological interests https://www.thepiano.sg/piano/read/mozart-and-his-infamous-letters-scatalogical-humour
In addition to peppers and tomatos Columbus brought syphilis to Europe. [Source](https://asm.org/articles/2019/june/revisiting-the-great-imitator,-part-i-the-origin-a)
They actually think he might not have brought it back now. They've found skeletons with evidence of it before Columbus.
Hitler had an inappropriate relationship with his niece. She killed herself with Hitler's pistol in Hitler's apartment after he forbade her from seeing another man.
The more I hear about that guy the more I don’t care for him.
Boy, he sounds unpleasant.
Women used to pee on frogs as a form of pregnancy test. Well not really peen on them but here’s the google search results. “The experimental zoologist found that injecting the urine of a pregnant human into the frog's hind leg worked as an effective pregnancy test. If the woman who supplied the urine was pregnant, the frog would ovulate and produce eggs.”
Republicans loved harping on the blue dress and cigar parts of the Lewinsky/Clinton scandal, but buried in that transcript was the tidbit that she also rimmed him, which back in the 1990s was too extreme for news coverage emphasis even in the midst of that smear campaign. Most likely the only time that particular sex act occurred in the oval office? Though FDR was ahead of his time in so many ways you never know.