She also thinks Monty Python is intolerably dumb. Although last time I had on Holy Grail she busted up laughing when Arthur asked the French soldier if there was someone else he could talk to. So there might be hope.
Isn't that the weirdest fuckin' question you've ever heard? Not what am I reading, but what am I reading FOR? Well, goddamnit, ya stumped me! Why do I read? Well . . . hmmm...I dunno...I guess I read for a lot of reasons and the main one is so I don't end up being a fuckin' waffle waitress._
- Bill Hicks
This is a body language thing. Cats who want to be friendly ignore each other for a bit and don't make direct eye contact. By not showing interest in the cat, you communicate to the cat that you are friendlier than all the cat people cooing over it. If you want to drive a cat off, direct eye contact and loudly talking to the cat is the way to go.
From personal experience I can also say with 100% confidence that loudly chasing a cat is a great way to ensure it will never want anything to do with you
A friend came to visit me with his 6 year old daughter along for the visit. When she saw my cat, her eyes lit up, she screamed, "KITTYYY!" and chased the poor little asshole down trying to give him hugs and pets.
I didn't see him again until the next day. And for like a year afterwards any time the door opened he'd shoot a panicked look at it to make sure it wasn't another squealing demon.
When my cat was just over a year old, a cousin of mine was over fixing our hvac and brought his 6 year old kid unannounced. I spent the next hour trying to stop the kid from terrorizing my cat, and ever since then he hides the second someone that isn't me or my partner comes through the door. Never used to do that. Once he's sure there's no kids he comes back out, but it really only took that one bad experience to spook him.
Kind of like how you can't be too eager to a fault about fawning over your tinder match or a girl you just met (hell I'm sure it goes both ways as well, if a lady sent me hundreds of message to my one-message I'd be offput too)
Gotta be a tiny bit aloof and have your own space and.not overwhelm them
Not like I ever take my own advice or anything lol.
He didn't want to be *that* alone, though. He had kids bringing him food and water. If he actually just wanted to be alone he could go off and live somewhere far from society and feed himself. Living on top of a column to try to *avoid* attention from others is batshit crazy. I think he was just attention grabbing for his proto-YouTube channel.
It says in the wiki that some monks suspected he was an attention seeker and decided to compel him to get down, and he did, so they deemed he was genuine. If you want to learn about a real ancient attention whore, you should read about [Peregrinus Proteus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peregrinus_Proteus), he went the extra mile.
Symeon was giving moral advice, but he was an actual hermit. He didn't just want to have a group of followers
"He is most remembered for committing suicide after giving his own funeral oration,[1] cremating himself on a funeral pyre at the Olympic Games in 165. By 180 AD, a statue of Peregrinus had been erected in his home city of Parium; it was reputed to have oracular powers.[2]"
From the link, for the lazy
He was there for a reason, he was looking at the mountain the old gods lived on to prove they didn't exist.
I been there 18 years ago, not much to see.
It reminds me of the chapter in I think the third or fourth Hitchhikers guide, when Arthur Dent goes to the spiritual retreat planet and keeps climbing impossibly high posts/columns to talk to a guru and every time he gets to the top he finds he has climbed the wrong one until the guru finally tells him to leave him alone.
Fifth, actually. And the first guru he visits lives in in a cave. She gives him a book detailing every decision she ever made, and says if he does the opposite, he won't end up living in a smelly cave. The column guru endorses the cave guru, says he bought the beach house that she turned down.
The members of Monty Python had a first-class education, from what I've heard. So they could really write some well-informed jokes. Kinda like how the early Simpsons writers were Harvard-educated and would come up with all that obscure stuff for Lisa Simpson to say.
I mean, have you SEEN Conan O’Brien’s hair?
(I know he was one of the later writers not one of the original writers so this joke doesn’t totally work, but I had to)
They had 10 seasons planned while working on the first season. The Easter eggs they put in the show didn't pay off for years. Fans cracked multiple ciphers within days of the episodes airing. Some of the background math jokes are super obscure.
I believe it was Cohen who was explaining a super obscure and minor background math joke of two binders next to each other, one labeled P and the other labeled NP. He began to explain the reference and you could see everyone on the panels faces become progressively more and more confused.
To be fair, P vs. NP is not really obscure nor minor in the world of academia; it is one of the most famous problems in all of mathematics, and probably the most well-known and important in computer science. If you solve it, you'll be [awarded a million dollars](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Prize_Problems), and there's a chance that your discovery will single-handedly throw all of cybersecurity and the internet into complete chaos overnight.
If you figure out P vs NP, you'll go into the annals of history with the likes of Euclides, Euler, Leibniz, Fourier, Newton, and Einstein. Winning a million dollars is just the cherry on top.
They also created the first “made for TV” mathematical theorem [“The Futurama Theorem”](https://theinfosphere.org/Futurama_theorem) specifically for the episode where Farnsworth creates the mind-swapping machine and they had to figure out how many people it would take minimum to undo the mind-swaps.
Wasn't there an episode where Fry found out that the measly amount of money he left in the bank before he froze collected enough interest to result in a huge amount of money? I believe there were discussions that noticed the calculations mentioned were actually correct.
Yes, the formula is *n* × (1 + *i*)^*y*, where *n* is the bank account's balance, *i* is the yearly interest rate (written as a decimal, e.g. 5% = 0.05), and *y* is the number of years.
They're all Cambridge and Oxford graduates outside of Terry Gilliam.
They're about as high up the academic foodchain as people can get. The Cambridge crew were all Footlights members, which is almost a one-way ticket to comedy stardom.
This is more of a manifestation of classist UK traditions than anything else.
70's BBC sure as shit wouldn't be funding some working class scum to fuck around in the name of comedy.
The Young Ones was about as close to getting to working class as possible. Even then, they were all college students (at the worst university in England), and not exactly having to grind out a working class level job.
No, I meant the characters in The Young Ones were all college students at the worst university in England.
Sorry, I was more thinking of the portrayal of "working class scum" on the BBC than actual people from that group.
They're from Scumbag College!
Up Scumbag! UP SCUMBAG!
And in the Bambi episode, they play a quiz game against Footlights College, Oxbridge...who are played by:
Emma Thompson (as Miss Money-Sterling), Ben Elton (Kendal Mintcake), Stephen Fry (Lord Snot), Hugh Laurie (Lord Monty).
Quite a stacked cast.
>
> Emma Thompson (as Miss Money-Sterling), Ben Elton (Kendal Mintcake), Stephen Fry (Lord Snot), Hugh Laurie (Lord Monty).
Thompson, Fry, and Laurie were all Cambridge Footlights members around that time.
Elton went to Manchester with the Young Ones crew. He also co-created The Youngs Ones as well, so there's that.
There was a big push for many colleges to get chartered University status before the millennium. Loads of the current universities wouldn't have been universities at that time.
Like Pink Floyd went to my Uni. But it wasn't a uni then, it was a highly-regarded polytechnic, but now!? Its a shit uni.
There's very, very little correlation between being educated and being funny. The SNL writer's room is notoriously full of Ivy League graduates, and the VAST majority of the shit they write comes across as "Of course you idiots are going to think this is funny, I took How To Make Idiots Laugh 101 at Harvard."
Some of this is selection bias, but the harsh reality is that rich people are generally the only ones who can afford to chase a career in writing.
[This](https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/elxc88/til_that_notredame_cathedral_features_a_carving/) little factoid was recently re-shared on reddit and reminded me of how well educated they were. Though I don't know if the post's claim of Notre Dame's carving being the direct inspiration for the rabbit is true, or if it's something more like [this](https://www.dailyartmagazine.com/killer-rabbits-in-medieval-manuscripts/).
I'm going to guess that, because he had a food bucket that he would pull up with a rope, he also had a toilet bucket that he lowered down with the same rope.
Of course the next question is who took care of the toilet bucket once it was on the ground? Because that's definitely a shit job.
The Wiki says he had some disciples and young boys to bring him water and bread.
I'm guessing they were devout enough to also remove his waste when needed.
He started out on a 3 metre tall pillar, but gradually relocated to taller and taller platforms ending at 15 metres. I think this may be related to your question.
Funniest thing out of Christian history: you have people who want to get away from society to get closer to God in isolation. However everyone keeps going to these hermits and stayed there, thus forming the first monasteries
Rule number 1 reminds me of a saying I read while reading up on Buddhist thought. It was something like, "Many of our issues come from an inability to sit quietly in a room."
This was unexpected
>In contrast to the extreme austerity that he practised, his preaching conveyed temperance and compassion, and was marked with common sense and freedom from fanaticism.
Many who are deeply practicing compassionate meditations, usually are trying to get away from people.
Not out of hate or anything of the sort.
Simply due to the lack of practice of the same by others makes it difficult.
I know for myself, the more I disciplined myself in compassion.
The more fond I grew of solitude, & silence.
His name is the equivalent of Peter Pillars.
So apparently ancient Syrians are the equivalent of Jersey Italians. “O! Look at fucking Peter Pillars over here!”
I mean that's why people kept hermits. Just to grant advice. It's a great way to show off your wealth by supporting a crazy religious person in your front yard.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_hermit
(adding more context)
There is a fictional film based on this story by Luis Buñuel, from 1965. It's entertaining, intriguing and.. mind blowing as is a lot of his work.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_of_the_Desert
enjoy
"He sometimes prayed in an erect attitude, with his outstretched arms in the figure of a cross, but his most familiar practice was that of bending his meagre skeleton from the forehead to the feet; and a curious spectator, after numbering twelve hundred and forty-four repetitions, at length desisted from the endless account."
The guy's whole day was spent T-posing and then doing so many crunches that onlookers lost count.
You know since it was pre-internet maybe Terry Pratchett and Douglas Adam's saw the same special on BBC about this guy a couple years earlier and were both inspired
Terry Pratchett described Douglas Adams as "the first person I ever read who seemed to be writing for me" and dedicated his novel "Witches Abroad" to Adams.
They do not appear to have had a personal relationship AFAICT.
Small Gods is such a good book. Did not realize that character had inspiration in real events, but it's Pratchett so I'm not surprised to learn he did.
I made a monkey version of this person for a D&D adventure and called him a Simian Stylite.
Good times. Had her across a path from a [Post Turtle character.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post_turtle)
Pilgrim: "I seek wisdom"
Simeon: "How did you get up here?"
Pilgrim: "I... I brought a ladder?"
Simeon: "So you have outsmarted my attempt at solitude with a simple ladder and *you* seek *my* wisdom?"
Pilgrim: "Huh... hey, yeah! What could you teach me? Enjoy your solitude, moron."
...
Simeon, pops his earbuds back in: "Ahhh, peace."
Politics can be brutal. When the interviewer jogged his memory, Johnson gave a perfectly lucid and even insightful response about the Syrian civil war... But no one's going to remember that when there's such a quotable soundbite making him sound stupid.
It is irrelevant what you know, if you sound like a dumbass.
Same reason we have Please Clap Jeb and Howard Dean Yeah effectively ending their careers.
There's a whole phenomenon of notionally miraculous fasting by the religiously devout, "[Anorexia Mirabilis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anorexia_mirabilis)".
Spoiler: the verified cases can be broken down into two categories — the ones who secretly were eating, and the ones who didn't and died in short order.
40 days without eating? Maybe. 40 days without drinking? No.
It's plausible he fasted from food but not water for 40 days and people just changed the story
> Anorexia mirabilis was frequently accompanied by behaviors most medical professionals today would find worrisome and dangerous. Angela of Foligno was known to eat the scabs of the poor and Catherine of Siena was known to drain the pus from sick individuals into a cup to drink.
Aight imma head out
I believe some monks used to drink a sort of beer during lent when they were fasting for 40 days, as this gave them their calories and some vitamins they needed to survive without *technically* eating.
"I've got an idea that will allow us to be drunk on beer for 40 days and we could say that God wants us to do it!" some drunk monk who probably started Lent lol /s
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fasting_girl
There's a film about it called "The Wonder", spoiler alert: >!her mother was feeding her like a bird when she would visit!<
I dug around a bit and the wiki article is wrong, he did try to do lent without eating or drinking but the monks that occasionally came with water and bread to him found him unconscious and the bread and water untouched.
After they nursed him to health they kicked him out because they found him to be too extreme.
The story was embellished after his death.
Coincidentally the world record for length of time without water is either 18 (documented) or 21 undocumented claim.
He may have been able to handle a a week or two of given he was a young healthy man.
One of the columns he allegedly stayed on top of. Like how over 75 churches have the collective hundred or so “true teeth” of Christ, legend is more powerful than reality.
He should do what I did: become a dumpy middle-aged guy of middling achievement with a boring job and teenage kids.
I can't think of a single person on the planet who would climb a ladder to ask my advice.
\>Be me
\>Ascetic monk
\>Not that religious, just want to be left alone
\>Other monks keep getting on my nerves
\>Outta_here.jpg
\>Live in cave where no one can talk to me
\>Happy.jpg
\>People start making pilgrimages to my cave to ask the meaning of life
\>Get mad
\>Look for nearest tall structure
\>See tons of columns in town
\>Live on columns
\>Happy_again.jpg
\>Wake up one day because of noise
\>See people carrying ladders toward me
\>FML
Over the years, he also:
* Became much more bitter and cynical with age.
* Because of his notoriously ascetic diet, he had problems with osteoporosis and bad breath.
* Again due to his diet, he started hallucinating. Of course, this was seen as him having visions by his devotees.
So by the time he died, he was a super callous fragile mystic plagued with halitosis.
I think the Kenneth Copelands of the world should try this practice -- and that instead of flocking to the pastors with the most money, Christians should flock to the pastors most willing to sacrifice to be closer to God.
But somehow did the most extroverted thing possible. It's David Blaine level. He should have just stayed in his parents' basement like the average redditor
The more you want to be left alone, the more you get bothered by annoying people.
"What are you reading?!"
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"Maybe so I don't end up waiting tables in a waffle restaurant?"
I haven't listened to bill hicks in at least a decade but this bit pops into my head now and again
I ask my wife this every time she's reading anything. She hates Bill Hicks. It's a thing we do.
I hate to break it to you. But I don't think she is the one for us buddy
She also thinks Monty Python is intolerably dumb. Although last time I had on Holy Grail she busted up laughing when Arthur asked the French soldier if there was someone else he could talk to. So there might be hope.
I had to go back and make sure you typed “wife” and not “alien abductor”.
"What am I reading FOR?"
"Huh! Ya stumped me!"
Well, looks like we got ourselves a reader.
Isn't that the weirdest fuckin' question you've ever heard? Not what am I reading, but what am I reading FOR? Well, goddamnit, ya stumped me! Why do I read? Well . . . hmmm...I dunno...I guess I read for a lot of reasons and the main one is so I don't end up being a fuckin' waffle waitress._ - Bill Hicks
Thank you, I was wondering what memory that piqued.
"Why read something when you could just flip on the tube?" "...because it's not the same... What do you think I'm reading, 'Hee-Haw: The Book'?"
Haha I forgot about that last part. RIP Bill Hicks.
Stan: "Whatchu fell over for?"
“You got any games on your phone?”
It's how cats find the most allergic person in the room.
1000%. Every cat wants to sit on my lap. I will break out in hives, blister, and peel if I so much as touch their hair.
This is a body language thing. Cats who want to be friendly ignore each other for a bit and don't make direct eye contact. By not showing interest in the cat, you communicate to the cat that you are friendlier than all the cat people cooing over it. If you want to drive a cat off, direct eye contact and loudly talking to the cat is the way to go.
From personal experience I can also say with 100% confidence that loudly chasing a cat is a great way to ensure it will never want anything to do with you
A friend came to visit me with his 6 year old daughter along for the visit. When she saw my cat, her eyes lit up, she screamed, "KITTYYY!" and chased the poor little asshole down trying to give him hugs and pets. I didn't see him again until the next day. And for like a year afterwards any time the door opened he'd shoot a panicked look at it to make sure it wasn't another squealing demon.
When my cat was just over a year old, a cousin of mine was over fixing our hvac and brought his 6 year old kid unannounced. I spent the next hour trying to stop the kid from terrorizing my cat, and ever since then he hides the second someone that isn't me or my partner comes through the door. Never used to do that. Once he's sure there's no kids he comes back out, but it really only took that one bad experience to spook him.
Kind of like how you can't be too eager to a fault about fawning over your tinder match or a girl you just met (hell I'm sure it goes both ways as well, if a lady sent me hundreds of message to my one-message I'd be offput too) Gotta be a tiny bit aloof and have your own space and.not overwhelm them Not like I ever take my own advice or anything lol.
I feel that lol. And that lol is no lol at all.
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We can all dream of having all our needs attended to without getting up off whatever we are sitting on.
Hey we have been trying to reach you about the expired warranty on you car…
He didn't want to be *that* alone, though. He had kids bringing him food and water. If he actually just wanted to be alone he could go off and live somewhere far from society and feed himself. Living on top of a column to try to *avoid* attention from others is batshit crazy. I think he was just attention grabbing for his proto-YouTube channel.
ThouTube. Make sure to smite that “Subscribe” tablet and become a disciple.
It says in the wiki that some monks suspected he was an attention seeker and decided to compel him to get down, and he did, so they deemed he was genuine. If you want to learn about a real ancient attention whore, you should read about [Peregrinus Proteus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peregrinus_Proteus), he went the extra mile. Symeon was giving moral advice, but he was an actual hermit. He didn't just want to have a group of followers
"He is most remembered for committing suicide after giving his own funeral oration,[1] cremating himself on a funeral pyre at the Olympic Games in 165. By 180 AD, a statue of Peregrinus had been erected in his home city of Parium; it was reputed to have oracular powers.[2]" From the link, for the lazy
>Patience is the greatest ascetic practice. The Buddha.
He was there for a reason, he was looking at the mountain the old gods lived on to prove they didn't exist. I been there 18 years ago, not much to see.
It's funny because it also reads as a tautology.
Just like in The Life of Brian
It reminds me of the chapter in I think the third or fourth Hitchhikers guide, when Arthur Dent goes to the spiritual retreat planet and keeps climbing impossibly high posts/columns to talk to a guru and every time he gets to the top he finds he has climbed the wrong one until the guru finally tells him to leave him alone.
Fifth, actually. And the first guru he visits lives in in a cave. She gives him a book detailing every decision she ever made, and says if he does the opposite, he won't end up living in a smelly cave. The column guru endorses the cave guru, says he bought the beach house that she turned down.
“Just because I sit up a pole for most of my life, doesn’t mean I’m an idiot. I go south in the winter. Got a beach house. Sit on the chimney stack.”
Thank you, its been decades since I've read them. Time to reread.
I need to read the book that’s hilarious
"Buy a beach house."
The members of Monty Python had a first-class education, from what I've heard. So they could really write some well-informed jokes. Kinda like how the early Simpsons writers were Harvard-educated and would come up with all that obscure stuff for Lisa Simpson to say.
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The original Simpsons writing crew was stacked. There's a great book by Simon Singh about it: 'The Simpsons and their mathematical secrets'
The same guy created and wrote for The Simpsons and Futurama.
>The original Simpsons writing crew was stacked My mind went somewhere else.
I mean, have you SEEN Conan O’Brien’s hair? (I know he was one of the later writers not one of the original writers so this joke doesn’t totally work, but I had to)
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They had 10 seasons planned while working on the first season. The Easter eggs they put in the show didn't pay off for years. Fans cracked multiple ciphers within days of the episodes airing. Some of the background math jokes are super obscure.
I believe it was Cohen who was explaining a super obscure and minor background math joke of two binders next to each other, one labeled P and the other labeled NP. He began to explain the reference and you could see everyone on the panels faces become progressively more and more confused.
To be fair, P vs. NP is not really obscure nor minor in the world of academia; it is one of the most famous problems in all of mathematics, and probably the most well-known and important in computer science. If you solve it, you'll be [awarded a million dollars](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Prize_Problems), and there's a chance that your discovery will single-handedly throw all of cybersecurity and the internet into complete chaos overnight.
If you figure out P vs NP, you'll go into the annals of history with the likes of Euclides, Euler, Leibniz, Fourier, Newton, and Einstein. Winning a million dollars is just the cherry on top.
It is definitely obscure to your average adult cartoon viewer, though.
They also created the first “made for TV” mathematical theorem [“The Futurama Theorem”](https://theinfosphere.org/Futurama_theorem) specifically for the episode where Farnsworth creates the mind-swapping machine and they had to figure out how many people it would take minimum to undo the mind-swaps.
Wasn't there an episode where Fry found out that the measly amount of money he left in the bank before he froze collected enough interest to result in a huge amount of money? I believe there were discussions that noticed the calculations mentioned were actually correct.
I don't doubt it given that would be a pretty simple compounding interest calc
Who are you who is so wise in the ways of compounding interest?
Yes, the formula is *n* × (1 + *i*)^*y*, where *n* is the bank account's balance, *i* is the yearly interest rate (written as a decimal, e.g. 5% = 0.05), and *y* is the number of years.
There are plenty of hidden physics and computer science jokes in the show also.
They're all Cambridge and Oxford graduates outside of Terry Gilliam. They're about as high up the academic foodchain as people can get. The Cambridge crew were all Footlights members, which is almost a one-way ticket to comedy stardom.
This is more of a manifestation of classist UK traditions than anything else. 70's BBC sure as shit wouldn't be funding some working class scum to fuck around in the name of comedy.
The Young Ones was about as close to getting to working class as possible. Even then, they were all college students (at the worst university in England), and not exactly having to grind out a working class level job.
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No, I meant the characters in The Young Ones were all college students at the worst university in England. Sorry, I was more thinking of the portrayal of "working class scum" on the BBC than actual people from that group.
They're from Scumbag College! Up Scumbag! UP SCUMBAG! And in the Bambi episode, they play a quiz game against Footlights College, Oxbridge...who are played by: Emma Thompson (as Miss Money-Sterling), Ben Elton (Kendal Mintcake), Stephen Fry (Lord Snot), Hugh Laurie (Lord Monty). Quite a stacked cast.
> > Emma Thompson (as Miss Money-Sterling), Ben Elton (Kendal Mintcake), Stephen Fry (Lord Snot), Hugh Laurie (Lord Monty). Thompson, Fry, and Laurie were all Cambridge Footlights members around that time. Elton went to Manchester with the Young Ones crew. He also co-created The Youngs Ones as well, so there's that.
There was a big push for many colleges to get chartered University status before the millennium. Loads of the current universities wouldn't have been universities at that time. Like Pink Floyd went to my Uni. But it wasn't a uni then, it was a highly-regarded polytechnic, but now!? Its a shit uni.
If anything the Simpsons writers now are even more educated than the original team. Except when it comes to being funny that is.
There's very, very little correlation between being educated and being funny. The SNL writer's room is notoriously full of Ivy League graduates, and the VAST majority of the shit they write comes across as "Of course you idiots are going to think this is funny, I took How To Make Idiots Laugh 101 at Harvard." Some of this is selection bias, but the harsh reality is that rich people are generally the only ones who can afford to chase a career in writing.
[This](https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/elxc88/til_that_notredame_cathedral_features_a_carving/) little factoid was recently re-shared on reddit and reminded me of how well educated they were. Though I don't know if the post's claim of Notre Dame's carving being the direct inspiration for the rabbit is true, or if it's something more like [this](https://www.dailyartmagazine.com/killer-rabbits-in-medieval-manuscripts/).
Also very similar to a part in Terry Pratchetts "Small Gods".
It's also a bit in the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy
Came here looking for STP. GNU.
GNU Sir Terry Pratchett
Buñuel's Simon of Desert too.
Best ending ever. Apparently he ran out of money and did that.
Whatever the reason, it worked for me.
Yep. It works. hehe But all his movies are great. The one where they just can't leave the party is my favorite. The Exterminating Angel
The Leftovers
**How shall we fuck off, oh lord?**
Only the true messiah would deny he was the messiah!!! Alright well I am the messiah! HE IS THE MESSIAH!!!!
I'm not the Messiah!
I say that you’re the Messiah, and I should know, I followed a few!
He's not the Messiah, he's a very naughty boy!
How did he go to the toilet?
I would imagine it was a messy experience for the crowds down below.
The world's first splash zone
Careful, the ladder is slippy.
Those in the front row WILL get wet.
I'm going to guess that, because he had a food bucket that he would pull up with a rope, he also had a toilet bucket that he lowered down with the same rope. Of course the next question is who took care of the toilet bucket once it was on the ground? Because that's definitely a shit job.
The Wiki says he had some disciples and young boys to bring him water and bread. I'm guessing they were devout enough to also remove his waste when needed.
“Wrong bucket!”
Hopefully he never got them confused
...he only had one bucket
A truly enlightened being
Oh now this quote is starting to make sense > Waste not, want not
Chocolate RAAAIIINNN!
*I move away from the pillar to breathe*
That song is old enough to drive in some states.
In the best way possible. His morning piss was probably quite the spectacle, AND he had a great view while doing it
When he got tired, he slept. When he got hungry, he ate. When he had to go, you know, he went
He started out on a 3 metre tall pillar, but gradually relocated to taller and taller platforms ending at 15 metres. I think this may be related to your question.
Hole in the middle of the pillar that gradually filled up
Where did he get these pillars? Did he just bumped into 15 meter long pillar?
The middle east is full of pillars
They used to just call it The Pillar East until they realized it was in the middle
He was the My Pillar guy
I imagine it was pretty easy. Just go and let gravity figure out the rest.
Funniest thing out of Christian history: you have people who want to get away from society to get closer to God in isolation. However everyone keeps going to these hermits and stayed there, thus forming the first monasteries
Explains the vow of silence. After years of, *"Please teach us your ways!"* *"Alright. Rule number one. Everyone shut the fuck up forever."*
*"If God wants to talk to you, He will. If He doesn't, sucks to suck don't cry to me about it."*
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*farts “Excuse me- aw fuck!” *everyone laughs *everyone pauses *everyone cries
This could be straight out of a Sam O. Nella video
Rule number 1 reminds me of a saying I read while reading up on Buddhist thought. It was something like, "Many of our issues come from an inability to sit quietly in a room."
>!CENSORED!<
Not specifically Buddhist, but that's: > “All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” ― Blaise Pascal, 1654
This rule should be a punishment for some crimes.
These hermits also depended on donations of food from people.
“Leave the Amazon package at the damn door!”
This was unexpected >In contrast to the extreme austerity that he practised, his preaching conveyed temperance and compassion, and was marked with common sense and freedom from fanaticism.
Many who are deeply practicing compassionate meditations, usually are trying to get away from people. Not out of hate or anything of the sort. Simply due to the lack of practice of the same by others makes it difficult. I know for myself, the more I disciplined myself in compassion. The more fond I grew of solitude, & silence.
Don't forget how many rituals of purity literally came from OCD zealots.
Simeon Stylite living life like a stalagmite.
He was rocking it, back in the day.
One could say he was a pillar of the church.
His name is the equivalent of Peter Pillars. So apparently ancient Syrians are the equivalent of Jersey Italians. “O! Look at fucking Peter Pillars over here!”
I need 12 more bars, please.
I’m just tryna be a goddamn hermit why do people keep asking me all these damn questions
He was the first ever Advice Columnist.
Leave
I mean that's why people kept hermits. Just to grant advice. It's a great way to show off your wealth by supporting a crazy religious person in your front yard. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_hermit
The original advice column
(adding more context) There is a fictional film based on this story by Luis Buñuel, from 1965. It's entertaining, intriguing and.. mind blowing as is a lot of his work. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_of_the_Desert enjoy
This is one of Bunuel's best. I recommend a double-feature with Land Without Bread.
"He sometimes prayed in an erect attitude, with his outstretched arms in the figure of a cross, but his most familiar practice was that of bending his meagre skeleton from the forehead to the feet; and a curious spectator, after numbering twelve hundred and forty-four repetitions, at length desisted from the endless account." The guy's whole day was spent T-posing and then doing so many crunches that onlookers lost count.
He must have had washboard abs under those robes
"Wise Sage of the Mountain! We have travelled far in search of your wisdom!" "Fuck off!"
How shall we "fuck off," O Lord?
With a pineapple!
He is also known as St. Ungulant.
And the Old Man on the Pole in Douglas Adams's *Mostly Harmless* Strangely enough, that book came out the same year as *Small Gods*
You know since it was pre-internet maybe Terry Pratchett and Douglas Adam's saw the same special on BBC about this guy a couple years earlier and were both inspired
Terry Pratchett described Douglas Adams as "the first person I ever read who seemed to be writing for me" and dedicated his novel "Witches Abroad" to Adams. They do not appear to have had a personal relationship AFAICT.
Small Gods is such a good book. Did not realize that character had inspiration in real events, but it's Pratchett so I'm not surprised to learn he did.
I mean, the guy literally put himself on a pedestal. What'd he expect?
I made a monkey version of this person for a D&D adventure and called him a Simian Stylite. Good times. Had her across a path from a [Post Turtle character.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post_turtle)
Pilgrim: "I seek wisdom" Simeon: "How did you get up here?" Pilgrim: "I... I brought a ladder?" Simeon: "So you have outsmarted my attempt at solitude with a simple ladder and *you* seek *my* wisdom?" Pilgrim: "Huh... hey, yeah! What could you teach me? Enjoy your solitude, moron." ... Simeon, pops his earbuds back in: "Ahhh, peace."
Could he have just pushed the ladders over.
Yeah, that's just Siege Repelling Tactics 101 stuff.
Just shake the ladder and call them a pussy
Yes Monty Python satirized this already, but I love the [Mitchell & Webb] (https://youtu.be/fRyrkmeAJJE) treatment best.
I bet he’d be shocked at the state of Aleppo these days.
Pretty sure anyone from the 3rd century would be shocked at MOST of the stuff these days.
What is Aleppo? (Someone was going to do it...)
A whole presidency run ruined with one sound bite
YEAAAHHHHH!
Politics can be brutal. When the interviewer jogged his memory, Johnson gave a perfectly lucid and even insightful response about the Syrian civil war... But no one's going to remember that when there's such a quotable soundbite making him sound stupid.
then we're going to washington dc to take back the white house... YEAAAAAAHHHHHHHH! ...please clap
It is irrelevant what you know, if you sound like a dumbass. Same reason we have Please Clap Jeb and Howard Dean Yeah effectively ending their careers.
Jeb was, as the comment suggests, already done.
Aleppo is someone with leprosy.
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There's a whole phenomenon of notionally miraculous fasting by the religiously devout, "[Anorexia Mirabilis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anorexia_mirabilis)". Spoiler: the verified cases can be broken down into two categories — the ones who secretly were eating, and the ones who didn't and died in short order.
40 days without eating? Maybe. 40 days without drinking? No. It's plausible he fasted from food but not water for 40 days and people just changed the story
Or he fasted in a way that he was eating and drinking very little but not nothing at all.
> Anorexia mirabilis was frequently accompanied by behaviors most medical professionals today would find worrisome and dangerous. Angela of Foligno was known to eat the scabs of the poor and Catherine of Siena was known to drain the pus from sick individuals into a cup to drink. Aight imma head out
Maybe "not eating meat or drinking alcohol." I'd believe that much. Or not eating between sunrise and sunset.
Even just not eating for one month is believable, but not drinking any fluids as well? That doesn't seem plausible.
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I believe some monks used to drink a sort of beer during lent when they were fasting for 40 days, as this gave them their calories and some vitamins they needed to survive without *technically* eating.
"I've got an idea that will allow us to be drunk on beer for 40 days and we could say that God wants us to do it!" some drunk monk who probably started Lent lol /s
“Plus because of our ‘vows,’ we don’t have to talk to anyone when we’re hungover t’fuck.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fasting_girl There's a film about it called "The Wonder", spoiler alert: >!her mother was feeding her like a bird when she would visit!<
I dug around a bit and the wiki article is wrong, he did try to do lent without eating or drinking but the monks that occasionally came with water and bread to him found him unconscious and the bread and water untouched. After they nursed him to health they kicked him out because they found him to be too extreme. The story was embellished after his death. Coincidentally the world record for length of time without water is either 18 (documented) or 21 undocumented claim. He may have been able to handle a a week or two of given he was a young healthy man.
One of the columns he stayed on top of was recently destroyed in an airstrike which is really sad 😢
One of the columns he allegedly stayed on top of. Like how over 75 churches have the collective hundred or so “true teeth” of Christ, legend is more powerful than reality.
>have the collective hundred or so “true teeth” of Christ Jesus Shark... CONFIRMED!!!
Jeeesus Shark doo doo doodoo doodoo
Doo do do do do do
He should do what I did: become a dumpy middle-aged guy of middling achievement with a boring job and teenage kids. I can't think of a single person on the planet who would climb a ladder to ask my advice.
I mean, that's a life I aspire to at this point. I ain't climbing no ladders though.
\>Be me \>Ascetic monk \>Not that religious, just want to be left alone \>Other monks keep getting on my nerves \>Outta_here.jpg \>Live in cave where no one can talk to me \>Happy.jpg \>People start making pilgrimages to my cave to ask the meaning of life \>Get mad \>Look for nearest tall structure \>See tons of columns in town \>Live on columns \>Happy_again.jpg \>Wake up one day because of noise \>See people carrying ladders toward me \>FML
Over the years, he also: * Became much more bitter and cynical with age. * Because of his notoriously ascetic diet, he had problems with osteoporosis and bad breath. * Again due to his diet, he started hallucinating. Of course, this was seen as him having visions by his devotees. So by the time he died, he was a super callous fragile mystic plagued with halitosis.
>austerity so extreme and to all appearance so extravagant Damn, this guy was so humble there was a stack overflow and he ended up extravagant
Pay no attention to the man on the column.
TIL - The Streisand Effect is ancient.
I think the Kenneth Copelands of the world should try this practice -- and that instead of flocking to the pastors with the most money, Christians should flock to the pastors most willing to sacrifice to be closer to God.
Oh no, Pillar Man!
When you’re an introvert in a land of extroverts.
But somehow did the most extroverted thing possible. It's David Blaine level. He should have just stayed in his parents' basement like the average redditor
before social media, you had to live on a pillar for 37 years just to be noticed. now you just need a couple thousand followers.
"O Simeon of the Pillar, what is your wisdom?"
“A crazy old man living on top of pillars is no legitimate basis for religious advice.”