i learned that after a man received a heart transplant from a suicide victim, he went on to marry the donor’s widow and then eventually killed himself in the exact same way the donor did (x)
Yep. It also correlates extremely strongly with an increasing decrease of violent crime. One of the symptoms of low level constant lead exposure is increased aggression and volatility.
Me: Did you know that medieval cathedrals weren’t actually supposed to be dark and rundown places with only stained glass as color? They were bright places full of light… the reason they look like that now is because of the centuries of accumulated grime and dust, here look at this restoration of the Cathedral of Chartres in France:
It’s based on actual paint from the times, and when you think about it, it makes a lot more sense, after all a church is supposed to be a bright place of hope. Yet when we think about the middle ages we think about grimy and dark cathedrals. I wonder how much of our conception of history is shaped by our current visions of historical buildings.
My Goth GF: listen, I don’t think this thing between us is working,
Do you ever think about how many of the items now considered priceless artifacts were once commonplace items? The coins we now marvel at from behind the glass at a museum were once tossed around, stepped on, and traded around. The pottery painstakingly pieced back together was somebody’s favorite wine jug. The decorative pin now rusted and bent once held together the shoulder of someone’s chiton. History is simply a trail of ordinary people going about their day, and I think there’s an odd sort of beauty in that.
So, you guys remember good old Ea-Nasir? The copper merchant from ancient Mesopotamia who kept stiffing his customers out of their money and copper, and then kept their complaint letters stored in a room in his house, to be found by archaeologists thousands of years later?
Well, I recently learned something that makes that story even better. Most clay tablets from that time period were made of unfired clay, which means that they degraded over time, getting washed away by weather and such. Some of the fired tablets were fired on purpose, but others were fired accidentally when the building they were stored in were burnt down.
That means that in this case there are three options. (1) The tablets in Ea-Nasir’s house were unfired and just really randomly lucky to survive. (2) Ea-Nasir’s house was burnt down, likely by someone he owed money to. (3) Ea-Nasir not only kept a bunch of complaint letters in his house, but fired them to preserve them.
The socialist fraternal kiss is a special greeting that was used in the USSR and eastern european countries since the October Revolution of 1917. The greeting consists of a hug followed by three kisses on the cheeks. If the people greeting each other were close, it was common for the third kiss to be given on the mouth instead.
The russian custom of greeting people with three kisses on the cheeks precedes the founding of the Soviet Union by centuries, going back to ritual traditions of the Orthodox Church in the beginnings of the Czardom in Russia. The greeting, then, was an allusionto the Holy Trinity. The custom was retaken by the russian worker’s movement at the end of the 19th century, in contrast to the custom imposed by the Czarist regime, where subjects and subordinates had the obligation of kissing the hands of the nobility and aristocracy. By putting the greeters on equal footing, the worker’s greeting became a symbol of equality, fraternity, and solidarity, being incorporated in the etiquette of the bolshevik revolutionaries and being used as an expression of unity amongst the working class.
After the October Revolution, the ritualization of the gesture was consolidated, turning it into a protocol greeting between members of the soviet government—even if the adhesion wasn’t entirely consensual, at first. The symbolic gesture of comradery and socialist solidarity was exported to other countries through the Communist International, becoming especially popular in East Europe. Being more reserved, the socialists of Asian countries adopted a modified version, exchanging the three kisses for three hugs. Cuba, on the other hand, adopted the custom of the three kisses on the cheeks, but did not adopt the kiss on the mouth, due to the amorous implications that a kiss on the mouth had in the western world. The greeting was also adopted by other socialist leaders in the Third World and by autonomy movements aligned with the socialist ideal, such as the Palestine Liberation Organization and the African National Congress.
In the Soviet Union, the intensity of the fraternal greeting served as an indicator of the degree of alignment and commitment between leaders. The omission of the greeting used to mean that the relationships with another country where shaken—a notable example being the absence of hugs, kisses, or even the word “comrade” on diplomatic meetings with the chinese after the Sino-Soviet Split. Leonid
Brezhnev was by far the greatest adept of the fraternal kiss, starring in a series of anecdotes about the habit—including a well-known story in which Fidel Castro, in his visit to the Soviet Union in 1974, disembarked the plane already smoking a cigar, as to prevent any “excessive intimacy” from the soviet leader.
After the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the subsequent “westernization” of the russian culture, the habit was abandoned, although it still persists to this day between older citizens and more isolated populations in Russia.
Joseph Stalin greeting the pilot Vasily Molokov in 1936.
“Our army is an army for the liberation of the workers“. Soviet poster from 1939.
A Czech woman greets a soviet soldier after the liberation of Prague, on May 5th, 1945.
Soldiers of the Red Army kiss each other after the declaration of victory over Nazi Germany, in 1945.
A soviet and romanian rowers kiss each other during a sports competition in 1953.
Swimmer Maria Havrish kissing her rival, Elena Kovalenko, who had just defeated her in a competition in the Spartakiad of The Peoples of The USSR, in 1956.
Leonid Brezhnev and other officers greeting soviet cosmonauts returning from a space mission.
Leonid Brezhnev greeting the USamerican choreographer Annie Hallman, member of a US delegation visiting the Soviet Union in 1973.
Leonid Brezhnev greeting East German leader Erich Honecker during the celebrations of the 30th anniversary of the founding of the German Democratic Republic. Berlin, October 4th, 1979.
Soviet swimmers Alexander Sidorenko and Sergey Fesenko kissing after winning, respectively, the gold and silver medals during the Olympic Games in Moscow, 1980.
Ushangi Davitashvili kisses the bust of Joseph Stalin in
Tbilisi, capital of Georgia, on December of 2012.
“Fraternity“, sculpture by Karel Pokorný made in 1947, representing a Czech soldier kissing a Soviet soldier, in the Air Force Museum of Moscow.
actually IIRC this was the first photo with a specific type of camera or equipment “cos THE progenative shitlord of cat memes was Harry Pointer. And around 1870 he decided that Au Naturelle photos of cats weren’t gonna cut it, and started doing shit like this:
then he realised HE COULD CAPTION THEM
and thus the dignity of the feline was forever destroyed.
The first cat memes.
OG cat memes
Further proof cats invented the internet before humans did. Then took command of the human internet.
ifesbob 