i am once again asking you to watch the 2019 shakespeare in the park production of much ado about nothing
oh shit that is glorious
Oh fabulous. I was unaware of it and now I need to find out if there’s a recording I can watch.
YES! The camera work in the clip above made me wonder if it was from a professionally filmed performance and in fact there’s a Great Performances version up on archive.org:
ALL HAIL ARCHIVE.ORG
“The sky is beautiful and I’m flying with my friends.”
“I love you guys,” *Dog Days Are Over by Florence and the Machine starts playing*
david tennant could do sherlock holmes but benendict cumberbatch couldn't do the doctor. also benedict cumberbatch couldn't do sherlock holmes
this is hard proof that tumblr has gotten better because if I had made this post in 2015 I would have gotten several death threats by now
I hope Barbie is so good and successful it makes every executive that’s turned everything bright and fun made for young girls into edgy boring teen dramas for the last ten years spontaneously combust into flames
I really can’t believe I’ve been on this hell site for 8 years
Impart me in your wisdom of ancient times
one time there was a tumblr user with the url “pizza” and she would just comment on any text post about pizza saying “omg that’s me” and then we found out she had an entire tag dedicated to saying the n word
One time somebody paid $750 for the url ‘hi’ and got deleted in less than a year for promoting weight loss scams
A horror blogger had a child slave, and couldn’t figure out why people thought that was a problem. Also, somebody said they kinned Hitler and then pretended they died to get rid of their page.
[Image description Tweet from FeoUltima "Kojima would never name a trans woman character Sirona Ryan, he'd name her something like Hard Mommy and trans women all over would go "changing my name to that" in response."]
"Hard Mommy is the leader of cougar cell. Her specialty is defense, but I guess you've realized that by now. By analyzing the battlefield she is able to quickly deduce perfect formations for infantry deployment and fortifications. She has lead her men against seemingly impossible onslaughts, including Chemical and Biological attacks. Fighting along side her men, she has taken more than a few bullets for them. They respect her like she was their own mother." "So thats why they call her Hard Mommy..." "No, Hard Mommy isn't for that. Its because she's a top."
my gift for @thesupremequeen in the @namurigiftexchange. I hope you like it!
extra (poor namor lmao):
Still remember when a homo- and transphobic acquaintance tried to bring up JKR’s views on trans people in conversation and I shut it down with «oh yeah she’s been saying a lot of dumb shit on Twitter after she finished writing Harry Potter, like when she claimed Dumbledore was gay, just to be politically correct», which made it absolutely impossible for him to admit that he agreed with anything JKR had ever said. Sometimes you just have to weaponise people’s homophobia against their transphobia.
Other ways to stop family members/acquaintances from going on bigoted rants:
The point is that I’ve used all of these in various contexts and they’ve saved a good number of dinner table conversations from derailing into pointless debating. You don’t de-radicalise friends and family members by entering into political discussions they initiate just to stir up shit. You de-radicalise them by shifting the focus away from their shitty opinions and onto the things you have in common and the practical everyday stuff that exists outside their internet echo chambers.
This made me realise that not all people may have been taught persuasive techniques in high school. Most of which are 1 to 1 with logical fallacies. There is a reason why news article rely so heavily on persuasive rhetoric and its because its sincerely effective at changing people's views.
Maybe I'm missing something but what does this actually achieve, you havent stopped them being transphobic nor "shifted their focus onto the things you have in common" you've just agreed with them on the homophobia to try and get them to stop talking. All the bullet points in the follow up make perfect sense but I fail to see how this aligns with putting gay characters on par with transphobia. You may think she was wrong to do so bc it wasnt written in the books but I presume your homophobic uncle thinks that calling a character gay was wrong full stop so like??
What you achieve is a family dinner/work lunch conversation that’s not a transphobic rant, how is it so hard for people to understand that this isn’t intended as the Solution To All Bigotry Ever, it’s just a handful of tips to make bigots feel a wee bit silly about their bigotry so they’ll stop wasting your time by trying to drag you into a debate in a situation where you’re just minding your own fucking business
TLOU AU idea
Tess, Joel & Ellie make it to Bill & Frank’s and decide to stay in the house next door and Tess and Joel raise Ellie and she gets to hang out all the time with her gay apocalypse uncles. Bill teaches her how to shoot guns and cook and survive off the land. He often shares his favorite government conspiracies with her even though Joel keeps asking him not to. Frank teaches her how to paint and plant a garden. They have family dinner every Friday and it’s Ellie’s favorite because Tess let’s her have a small cup of Uncle Bill’s wine. Joel doesn’t totally approve but Tess convinced him she’s been through enough shit to be trusted with a few grown up experiences.
This is your periodic reminder that the story of Jesus flipping over tables in the Temple is inherently antisemitic and holding it up as a great example of “fighting capitalism” or some such in the modern day is also antisemitic because those people in the Temple were doing what they were instructed to do in the Torah (in Deuteronomy) to help make the Temple more accessible to those who lived far away. The story frames the fulfillment of this commandment from Gd as Jews being greedy, opportunistic, schemers and I’m so tired of people talking about it like it’s a good thing.
Goyim please reblog, and if you interact with this post please just be respectful.
I was never afraid before you showed up.
THE LAST OF US (1.03) → LONG, LONG TIME
Just give me one more good day.
Take me to the boutique, where I’ll pick outfits for us. You’ll wear what I ask…and we’ll get married.
This episode fucking RUINED ME 😭😭😭😭
Fun little thing about medieval medicine.
So there’s this old German remedy for getting rid of boils. A mix of eggshells, egg whites, and sulfur rubbed into the boil while reciting the incantation and saying five Paternosters. And according to my prof’s friend (a doctor), it’s all very sensible. The eggshells abrade the skin so the sulfur can sink in and fry the boil. The egg white forms a flexible protective barrier. The incantation and prayers are important because you need to rub it in for a certain amount of time.
It’s easy to take the magic words as superstition, but they’re important.
The length of time it takes to say a paternoster was a typical method of reckoning time in the Middle Ages. It’s likely that whoever wrote this remedy down was thinking of it both as a prayer and a timespan and that whoever read it would have understood it the same way.
I wonder if this shows up in other historical areas besides medicine?
I ask because I have a very Italian, very Catholic friend who was once describing how she makes pizzelles. They’re cooked in a specific press, similar to a waffle iron, long enough to get light and crispy but not burnt, and in her own words: “I don’t know the exact time it takes to cook them in seconds, but I usually do either two Hail Mary’s or an Our Father and a Glory Be.”
I would be extremely surprised if medieval people didn’t use prayers while cooking. You don’t want to roast an egg for too long, have it explode, and get hot yolk in your eye. :P
I know that church bells were definitely used as timekeepers.
Before oven thermometers existed, one way to check the temperature of your oven was to stick your hand inside and recite an Our Father. The length of time before you snatch your hand out was timed by how far you’d gotten in the prayer. The shorter the time, the hotter the oven. So you knew that if you wanted a hot oven to bake bread, you wanted your hand out by “kingdom” (for example) but to slow cook a stew, you might want the oven cool enough to get to “trespasses”.
This popped up in “Nanny Ogg’s Cookbook” as well, though there the timing method wasn’t prayer but X verses of “Where Has All The Custard Gone?”
Other timing methods are “a while” (approx. 35 mins) and “a good while” (variable, up to 10 years, which the book suggests is a bit long to let batter rest before making pancakes…)
All absolutely standard, and also varied from region to region. The use of prayer was more common than most, since the Catholic church had a monopoly on… well, pretty much everything. And all the prayers were in Latin, and at a specific cadence, so the effect is similar to watching the second hand on a clock today.
it’s important to note that to the medieval people the prayers were important because of timekeeping AND god. like, i think as modern people we do tend to want it to be “just timekeeping, they weren’t just superstitious idiots, they had a good reasonable scientific reason!” but it’s also important to remember just how culturally steeped in a mystical religion they were, a relationship with christianity entirely unlike the modern relationship found in modern american culture even amongst the most religious people. i have no doubt that in the medieval mind, they were aware of the prayer being the time it took but also if there had BEEN another way to measure that time, the prayer would have been held to be preferable and important in its own right because of the importance of spiritual assistance in worldly things like bread-baking
Definitely, this is a great point! I was talking to somebody in the comments who was saying that medieval medicine was mostly bunkum because it involves spirituality, supposedly meaning it couldn’t also have logical basis behind it. But that’s a really modern way to see it. To the medieval worldview, those things aren’t contradictory. They’re part of each other. Think about how many medieval Christian scientists were monks, nuns, and priests.
You guys don’t understand how excited it made me to read this post, I literally wrote my master’s thesis on this exact topic.
Sometime in the 10th century in Anglo-Saxon England (for context, this is before the Norman Conquest and near-ish to the reign of Alfred the Great), a dude named Bald asked another dude name Cild to write a book. Not just any book. A leechbook, which was essentially the medieval version of WebMD for practicing doctors. BUT NOT JUST A LEECHBOOK. This leechbook was gonna be the damn Lamborghini of leechbooks. This thing was going to be split into two parts, the first dealing with external medicine and the second dealing with internal medicine—something that was unheard of at the time. It was going to be organized (head to toe, like all the good leechbooks were). It was gonna be nice (leather and vellum). It was gonna use all the best ideas (from all over the known world). And the whole thing was going to be written in Anglo-Saxon. Now, a few medical books had been compiled in Anglo-Saxon before, but none like this. This one was going to be EPIC. And it was—and still is.
Bald’s Leechbook (also goes by the more boring but more informative MS Royal 12 D XVIII over in the British Library) contains a lot of medical remedies. A lot of them rely on things like prayers and chants and odd charms, like one for a headache, which recommends plucking the eyes off a living crab, letting the crab back into the water, and wearing the eyes about your neck in a little sack until you feel better. However, it’s worth pointing out that the really wild remedies, the stuff that makes absolutely no freakin’ sense, is most often recommended to treat ailments that are hard to treat even today—migraines, toothaches, cancer. These things are really painful or deadly and, without modern medicine, almost impossible to treat. So are you going to make up some nonsense to make your client at least feel like they’re doing something, and hey, if it sort of works, it works? Of course you are. You want to help people. Even if it sounds crazy, what else are you going to do? You have to try something, and the people who are suffering are willing to try anything.
But there’s also things that make complete sense. To echo concepts that have been mentioned by commentators above, there is a recipe that calls for the recitation of the paternoster while boiling a honey-based salve meant to treat carbuncle. The book instructs the physician to bring it to a boil, and sing the paternoster three times, and remove it from the fire, and sing nine paternosters, and to repeat this process two more times. A century ago, historians read the use of the paternoster as a magical incantation, but today, most agree that in lieu of a stopwatch, the paternoster is just meant to make sure you don’t burn the honey.
BUT THAT ISN’T NEAR THE COOLEST THING.
Now, this book was compiled by a master physician (we don’t know if it was Cild himself or if Cild was the scribe for an unnamed author) who was compiling recipes that had been written down for some time, and had, as many things do, gone through various permutations over the years. Many came from Greece or the western Mediterranean, and had been adapted for local English horticulture and herbs. Some came from around what is now Germany, and some ideas came from farther away in the Middle East (King Alfred was a sickly king; some scholars believe that he had his physicians seek out cures from all over the world in an attempt to treat himself). But there is one recipe that has only ever been identified in England. Not only has this recipe only ever been identified in England, it’s only ever been identified in this one manuscript. When translated into modern English, it reads as follows:
Work an eyesalve for a wen [stye], take cropleek and garlic, of both equal quantities, pound them well together, take wine and bullocks gall, of both equal quantities, mix with the leek, put this then into a brazen vessel, let it stand nine days in the brass vessel, wring out through a cloth and clear it well, put it into a horn, and about night time, apply it with a feather to the eye; the best leechdom.
For those who don’t know and/or are lucky enough to have never had one, a “wen” or a stye is a bacterial infection that manifests like a boil or a cyst that on the eyelid. They hurt something awful, and can cause larger infections of the eye. They are usually caused by Staphylococcus aureus.
With me? Okay. Fast-forward to 1988. A former biologist turned historian called M.L. Cameron decides to take a look at this old medical leechbook to see what he can see. He takes a good look and says “Lads I do believe these Anglo-Saxon leeches weren’t nearly so daft as we thought they were” (he did not and probably would never actually say that, I’m paraphrasing). Cameron was particularly interested in the recipe above. As a scientist, he knew a few things:
What an interesting find.
Fast-forward again to 2015. A paper is published by a team from the University of Nottingham, who’ve been working on an ‘Ancientbiotics’ project to investigate ancient medical remedies and see if they actually work. They’ve turned their sights to the Anglo-Saxons, and are, as was Cameron, particularly interested in this recipe for an eye salve. Without boring you with the finer details of the experiment and its various trials (read it yourself!) I will spoil the ending by telling you that they discovered a few things:
Now, as an advocate for modern medicine and sound scientific method, I’m not about to say that we should go throwing this salve on everything in 2019, because it is, if anything, just a starting point for modern scientists. This salve is still incredibly crude by modern standards and comes with a lot of potential problems. But as a historian… it works, you guys, it really works.
Medieval physicians were not idiots. They believed in magic, they believed in all things supernatural, they believed in all those things that are ‘unreasonable’ or unpopular today, and they practiced them too. But they also interacted with the real world with brains and intellects as sharp if not sharper than yours and mine. They were smart, they studied, they talked to each other in Latin and Greek and Arabic and Anglo Saxon. They made old recipes better and came up with brand new ones. They tried dumb stuff and they tried smart stuff. They didn’t have access to even the smallest fraction of the information we have at our fingertips today, and yet they created things like this.
To this day, no one knows who created the eyesalve recipe. And no one truly understands why this is the only copy of it. If it worked so well, why isn’t it plastered to the headings of every medical textbook from Alfred to Victoria? Speaking personally, I would argue that it has to do with language. Not so long after Bald’s Leechbook was written, the French invaded England and took over. Latin and French became the language of the court, and while Anglo-Saxon lived on throughout the country, and certainly lay doctors would have used Anglo-Saxon books daily, the language of formal English medical education was Latin. Oxford and Cambridge were late to the medical ed game after Salerno, Bologna, Paris, and Montpellier, and naturally fell in step with continental schools as a result, using Latin almost exclusively, and sometimes Greek or Arabic.
Point being, by the time medical licenses and medical college degrees are a thing in England, not only does almost no one of university-eligible class speak Anglo-Saxon anymore, no one has use for those Old English texts, because they don’t get you your degree, and you can’t make a living as a doctor without a degree and doctor’s license. And no one’s going to translate an old Anglo Saxon text into Latin when Avicenna’s newest old hit, now in Latin, is fresh off the boat from France.
All that to say: Never write something off because it’s old. 1,000 years is a long time ago, but human ingenuity and intelligence are hardly modern inventions. The science of the world hasn’t changed; only our tools and our perspective.
Thanks for coming to my TED talk
Further reading:
Hey remember the start of the pandemic when everyone was getting Really Damn Good at hand washing? Remember what a million English-language videos told us to do to make sure we were washing our hands for the proper minimum amount of time?
Sing “Happy birthday.”
Just something else to chew on.
This is my shit
