dat-soldier:

did-you-kno:

Source

back the fuck up

hannigraham:

Here’s a list of weird/strange articles on wikipedia in no particular order for you to read and just add more useless knowledge in your puny human brain. General murder/death trigger warning for most.

Bloody Mary || Kennedy curse || Taman Shud Case || La Voisin || Greyfriars Bobby || Pripyat || Albert Fish || Mary Toft || Tarrare || The Cure for Insomnia || Roanoke Colony || John Murray Spear || Arecibo message || Nuckelavee || Phaistos Disc || Tanganyika laughter epidemic || Mad Gasser of Mattoon || Murder of Junko Furuta || Peoples Temple || Ed Gein || Stargate Project || Jackalope || Numbers station || UVB-76 || Bélmez Faces || Donner Party || Adam || Mariana UFO incident || Valentich disappearance || Cleveland Torso Murderer || Trepanning || Dyatlov Pass incident || Grey goo || Overtoun House || The Garden of Earthly Delights || Wilhelm Reich || Starchild skull || Original Night Stalker || Owlman || Ararat anomaly || British big cats || Jack the Ripper || Clapham Wood Mystery || Pope Lick Monster || Shadow person || Out-of-place artifact || Black Dahlia || Jersey Devil || Crawfordsville monster || Koro || Philadelphia Experiment || Glasgow smile || Roswell UFO incident || David Parker Ray || D. B. Cooper || Total Information Awareness || Goatman || Grey alien || Joachim Kroll || Peter Kürten || Gilles de Rais || Alien abduction || Joseph Vacher || Mothman || Polywater || Catacombe dei Cappuccini || Villisca Axe Murders || Grace Sherwood || Loveland frog || The Hermitage || Jatinga || Sankebetsu brown bear incident || Mongolian death worm || Devil’s Footprints || The Sick Child || H. H. Holmes || Dysaesthesia aethiopica || Bloody Benders || Lamia || Black Paintings || The Monster with 21 Faces || Shirime || Lina Medina || Exploding head syndrome || Quantum suicide and immortality || Mokele-mbembe || Spontaneous human combustion || Dulce Base || Chandre Oram || Oscar || Men in Black || Vladimir Demikhov || The Great Red Dragon Paintings || Bloop || Retroactive continuity || Elizabeth Báthory || Delphine LaLaurie || Silverpilen || Polybius || Guided rat || Robert J. White || Chelyabinsk meteor || Armin Meiwes || Big Crunch || Belchen Tunnel || Moberly–Jourdain incident || Boy Scout Lane || Princes in the Tower || Rosenheim Poltergeist || Peter Stumpp || Bermuda Triangle || Bachelor’s Grove Cemetery || Hill of Crosses || Self-immolation || Lycaon || Burke and Hare murders || Pykrete || Kate Morgan || List of unusual deaths || Sawney Bean || Rogue elephant of Aberdare Forest || Yoshio Kodaira || Incorruptibility || Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus || Toynbee tiles || Rat king || Sailing stones || Thalidomide || Jersey Shore shark attacks of 1916 || Tunguska event || Head transplant || List of cryptids || Borley Rectory || Sedlec Ossuary || Alien hand syndrome || Capgras delusion || Mellified man || Atuk || Monster of Glamis || Spring-heeled Jack || Allagash Abductions || Aokigahara || Raymond Robinson (Green Man) || Premature burial || Brain transplant || Nightmarchers || Decompression illness || Midgetville || Zombie || Mercy Brown vampire incident || Necromancy || Lamkin || Harry K. Daghlian, Jr. || Icelandic Phallological Museum || Neisseria meningitidis || Unit 731 || Bunny Man || Bubbly Creek || Malleus Maleficarum || Moll Dyer || Original Spanish Kitchen || Charles Bonnet syndrome || Voynich manuscript || Black Annis || True name || Dorothy Talbye trial || Black dog || Wandering Jew || Sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway || Yara-ma-yha-who || Rod Ferrell || The Juniper Tree

ghirahim:

canisantiquus:

mumbling-mice:

metallikato:

Fun fact: whenever marble displays yellow/brown-colored stains like those above, it’s the result of the marble absorbing oils. 

From human hands.

Meaning that over the centuries, people have been grabbing this statue’s boobs. 

Oh.

Gross. Although I can’t help thinking of bongo drums.

it’s actually mostly women who touch the breasts! i’d hardly say it’s #bad people like your tag alludes… many of them cannot conceive children, and touching the breasts of a statue is a custom that is believed to grant fertility, along with other things. it is not a sexual act, it is almost a form of prayer or worship, especially in statues of saints.

i suck at IDing statues, so i can’t name this one specifically, but there are many other statues with wear and beliefs centered around them. the statue of a knight, guidarello guidarelli, is often kissed on the lips under the belief that it will allow a woman to be lucky in love or find a husband that year. there’s a statue of juliet where touching her right breast will give someone good luck in their love life, as well. 

one of the most famous statues for this is the statue at victor noir’s grave:

i mean, the dude’s dead and shot but people rub his dick and kiss his lips for good sex lives, it’s not exactly for the statue itself being sexy or hot or irresistible. it’s just a custom/tradition found in a few cultures.

nevver:

1920

foreverrhapsody:

leseanthomas:

Mind-blowing oil paintings by Austrian/Jewish painter, LUDWIG DEUTSCH, LEON GEROME & RUDOLF ERNST in the late 1800s:

 The subject, “The Palace Guard” were depictions of North African medieval Muslims, THE MOORS, who settled in & ruled Northern Africa and invaded and conquered many parts of what we would now consider “Southern Europe (Spain, Portugal, France & Southern Italy-ala Sicily)” for nearly 800 years, from as early as the 7th to the 15th century. Their profound, cultural legacy, influence & what they left behind( Such as the great monuments, the Alhambra and the Mezquita) is evident on modern day spanish architecture, art, music and traditions. All but ignored now largely by both Arab and European world history, The Moors played a significant role during the shaping of prehistory in their early settlement.

H

ermefinedining:

This map should be included in every history book.

cellarspider:

twinkletwinkleyoulittlefuck:

purrsianstuck:

During the Bubonic Plague, doctors wore these bird-like masks to avoid becoming sick. They would fill the beaks with spices and rose petals, so they wouldn’t have to smell the rotting bodies. 

A theory during the Bubonic Plague was that the plague was caused by evil spirits. To scare the spirits away, the masks were intentionally designed to be creepy. 

Mission fucking accomplished

Okay so I love this but it doesn’t cover the half of why the design is awesome and actually borders on making sense.

It wasn’t just that they didn’t want to smell the infected and dead, they thought it was crucial to protecting themselves. They had no way of knowing about what actually caused the plague, and so one of the other theories was that the smell of the infected all by itself was evil and could transmit the plague. So not only would they fill their masks with aromatic herbs and flowers, they would also burn fires in public areas, so that the smell of the smoke would “clear the air”. This all related to the miasma theory of contagion, which was one of the major theories out there until the 19th century. And it makes sense, in a way. Plague victims smelled awful, and there’s a general correlation between horrible septic smells and getting horribly sick if you’re around what causes them for too long.

You can see now that we’ve got two different theories as to what caused the plague that were worked into the design. That’s because the whole thing was an attempt by the doctors to cover as many bases as they could think of, and we’re still not done.

The glass eyepieces. They were either darkened or red, not something you generally want to have to contend with when examining patients. But the plague might be spread by eye contact via the evil eye, so best to ward that off too.

The illustration shows a doctor holding a stick. This was an examination tool, that helped the doctors keep some distance between themselves and the infected. They already had gloves on, but the extra level of separation was apparently deemed necessary. You could even take a pulse with it. Or keep people the fuck away from you, which was apparently a documented use.

Finally, the robe. It’s not just to look fancy, the cloth was waxed, as were all of the rest of their clothes. What’s one of the properties of wax? Water-based fluids aren’t absorbed by it. This was the closest you could get to a sterile, fully protecting garment back then. Because at least one person along the line was smart enough to think “Gee, I’d really rather not have the stuff coming out of those weeping sores anywhere on my person”.

So between all of these there’s a real sense that a lot of real thought was put into making sure the doctors were protected, even if they couldn’t exactly be sure from what. They worked with what information they had. And frankly, it’s a great design given what was available! You limit exposure to aspirated liquids, limit exposure to contaminated liquids already present, you limit contact with the infected. You also don’t give fleas any really good place to hop onto. That’s actually useful.

Beyond that, there were contracts the doctors would sign before they even got near a patient. They were to be under quarantine themselves, they wouldn’t treat patients without a custodian monitoring them and helping when something had to be physically contacted, and they would not treat non-plague patients for the duration. There was an actual system in place by the time the plague doctors really became a thing to make sure they didn’t infect anyone either.

These guys were the product of the scientific process at work, and the scientific process made a bitchin’ proto-hazmat suit. And containment protocols!

unhistorical:

February 19, 1942: Franklin D. Roosevelt issues Executive Order 9066. 

The order provided for the designation of military areas (to be decided by the Secretary of War and commanders of the U.S. armed forces) from which “any or all persons” could be relocated. No specific ethnic groups or sections of the nation were singled out in the text of the order, but it stated that these new powers would serve as “protection against espionage and against sabotage”. In practice, it resulted in the internment of 120,000 Japanese-Americans, nearly two-thirds of whom were American-born citizens; smaller numbers of German- and Italian-Americans were interned as well, but no ethnic group was targeted by the government to the extent that the Japanese were. 

Virtually every Japanese-American living on the West Coast was interned, while a small fraction of those living in Hawaii - just over a thousand - suffered the same fate. The justification for the executive order was practical; it was believed that many Japanese, Issei and Sansei alike, could not possibly remain loyal to the United States if it went to war with Japan. It was outwardly practical (the Ni’ihau Incident seemed to prove American suspicions), and it was deeply rooted in racial prejudice. Many white farmers were glad to see their Japanese competition uprooted and displaced; several newspapers printed opinion pieces that supported wholeheartedly the internment based on their own personal feelings toward the Japanese; the American public (including even Theodore Geisel/Dr. Seuss) generally supported the move; and the Supreme Court, the ultimate defender and interpreter of the U.S. Constitution, upheld the constitutionality of the executive order in Korematsu v. U.S. (also see: Hirabayashi v. U.S.).  Camps were run by the Wartime Civil Control Administration and the War Relocation Authority; the largest of these by population were Tule Lake and Poston, but the most well-known today is Manzanar.

Some Japanese-Americans escaped internment by volunteering to serve in the U.S. Army, and many of them served in the famous 442nd Infantry Regiment, a unit that fought in Europe after 1944. Ironically, while many of its members’ families remained interned at home based on widespread racism and suspicions of disloyalty, this all-Japanese unit eventually became the most decorated infantry regiment in the history of the U.S. Army: twenty-one of its members were awarded the Medal of Honor. 

Executive Order 9066 was eventually rescinded in 1976, and surviving Japanese internees received payments and apologies from the U.S. government in the 1990s. But money paid four decades later could not compensate for the time lost in the camps; the businesses, homes, farms, and other property sold last-minute at ridiculously low prices by their owners or vandalized and destroyed in their absence; and the humiliation and disillusionment at having been denounced by their own countrymen and rounded up by their own government. 

Images compiled by The Atlantic

my-place-of-recovery:

Mirrors in the Queen’s bedroom at Versailles

War Kitties in Hammocks

_{Carriers and other vessels got infested with rodents. So cats were not just moral boosters (which they very much were) they were also working members of the crew. Some have even been immortalized for surviving multiple attacks on their ships, etc. Military dogs have been recognized for the important roles they’ve played but I think cats kinda get lost in the shuffle of military animals sometimes.}

collectivehistory:

London readers continue to browse at a bombed-out library, WWII. 

blackcrowcalling:

fuckyeahmodernflapper:

“Mogas” (Modern gals), the japanese flappers.

Modern girls (モダンガール modan gaaru) were Japanese women who followed Westernized fashions and lifestyles in the 1920s. These moga were Japan’s equivalent of America’s flappers, India’s kallege ladki, Germany’s neue Frauen, France’s garçonnes, or China’s modeng xiaojie. 

 By viewing her through a Japanese vs Western lens, the nationalist press could use the modern girl archetype to blame such failings as frivolity, sexual promiscuity, and selfishness on foreign influence. The period was characterized by the emergence of working class young women with access to money and consumer goods. Using aristocratic culture as their standard of Japaneseness, the critics of the modern girl condemned her working class traits as “unnatural” for Japanese. Modern girls were depicted as living in the cities, being financially and emotionally independent, choosing their own suitors, and apathetic towards politics.

 The woman’s magazine was a novelty at this time and the modern girl was the model consumer, someone more often found in advertisements for cosmetics and fashion than in real life. The all-female Takarazuka Revue, established in 1914, and the novel Naomi (Tanizaki, 1924) are outstanding examples of modern girl culture.

oh my god this is everything i ever wanted

odditiesoflife:

Poveglia Island - Haunted, Abandoned and Terrifying

A quarantine station, a dumping place for plague victims, and a mental hospital, the tiny island of Poveglia in the Venice Lagoon of Italy has served many sad and disturbing purposes over the years. Today it stands abandoned, a crumbling collection of deserted buildings and weeds. Legends and rumors about Poveglia run rampant. The island’s past reads like a horror story and the horror continues as Poveglia is said to be very haunted.

During the black plague, so many people were burned and buried there that the soil is supposedly 50% human ash. Local fisherman avoid the island in fear of catching bones rather than fish. The psychiatrist who ran the mental hospital tortured and  butchered his patients and then went mad, throwing himself from the island’s bell tower, only to survive the fall and be strangled by a “ghostly mist" that emerged from the ground.

The last known use of the island was a home for the indigent elderly and was abandoned in 1968. The island has been empty ever since. Twenty years ago, work crews hastily erected scaffolding all along the main buildings’ frontage — not to fix them up but merely to delay their falling down.

The island’s first use was as a lazaretto, a quarantine island for maritime travelers opened in 1403, the first institution of its kind. Panicked officials shipped anyone displaying symptoms of plague, be they commoners or nobility, off to the lazarettos. Doctors wore long-nosed masks stuffed with herbs in an attempt to filter sickness from the air they breathed.

During the worst outbreaks, the island was quickly overrun with the dead and dying who were hastily shoveled into grave pits, and when those were full, burned. There are estimated to be many such grave pits on Poveglia, though their locations are unknown unless unearthed during construction, like the one pictured above. Local lore holds that the part of the island traditionally used for growing food holds most of the bodies.

source

ninety:

(via vintage everyday: London Underground, 1940)