Poor Betty White, reduced to idiocy by all those hours hand-slicing bread.
When you use a celebrity's name as metonym for a point in history, it feels like a cheat to be referring to their birthdate when the career they're known for started much later. Technically true, but that's all.
2 would have prevented me from making a cruel joke in 1, so I'm ignoring it.
Both Oxford and Tenochtitlán produced many people who didn't like Spaniards.
The Mammoth thing is kind of nonsense. I think he's talking about the tiny survivor populations of mammoths that lived on Wrangel Island or St. Paul Island. Feels like cheating. Sure there were a few mammoths existing in the world but it's not like there were herds moving down La Brea Ave when the pyramids were being built.
I tell my kid the stegosaurus/T.Rex thing all the time, to the point where my daughter pulled an "everyone KNOWS that ALREADY" the last time we were at the natural history museum.
I think it was mentioned in Jurassic Park.
but it's not like there were herds moving down La Brea Ave when the pyramids were being built
Even then there were traffic jams in LA.
Dinosaur Train is good for teaching kids about how far apart in time different dinosaurs were separated. It's less good for teaching kids about how trains work.
Lake Placid is good for exposing children to Betty White.
Sure, there were only a few mammoths on the one island, but there are only a few pyramids on one narrow stretch over riverbank and nobody ever says they don't count.
My stepdaughter is making me correct 10. Chomper did not appear in the original Land Before Time movie. His first appearance was in the sequel The Land Before Time II: The Great Valley Adventure.
Yes, the find the valley and don't get eaten by the sharp tooths.
Anyway, 6 is wrong.
The Egyptians used the mammoths to carry the stones for the pyramids. When the Hebrews escaped they rode on the mammoths across the Red Sea. But then the mammoths died during the 40 years in the desert, and that's why they are extinct.
The End
*tears up childhood drawings of anachronistic dinosaur battles in disgust*
*tears up childhood drawings of anachronistic Golden Girls scenes in disgust*
"Blanche dates a Stegosaurus"
Can anyone name the last dinosaur to get an Oxford degree?
There are the same number of years between the invention of sound recording and the release of "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" as there are years between SPLHCB and today, but only because 2017 feels like the equivalent of forty years.
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is the midpoint between today and the Russian Revolution. Which, on further thought, feels exactly correct.
Is the temporal distance between today and the day offed posted nearly the same exact post greater or less than the distance between that post and the beginning of the blog? I say greater and also greater than the statute of limitations for reposting. And also that is not a standard I want to start invoking. And also it might not have been Ogged but I know we've had this sort of list before.
Offed, for pete's sake, was not supposed to be thus.
Today is the day in back to the future when it all started in 1985.
Cleopatra went to Oxford, but only halfway.
23.last: We will only be able to correctly calculate the Trump year to regular year after he is out of office.
I like to play this game with nostalgia pix -- e.g. "Dazed and Confused" came out 17 years after the events it depicts -- it's now been 24 years since the film was released. Even more so: "American Graffiti" was filmed only 10 years after the events it depicts, and it's been 44 years since its release.
30: That reminds me of "Singles" and "Reality Bites", which I see as attempts at instant nostalgia. "Period pieces" before the period in question was even over.
30: We are now as far from "1941" as "1941" was from 1941.
We can periodically monitor the age of the blog by noting things its founding is half as old as. This year, it looks to be the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Lawrence of Arabia and Dr. Zhivago movies both closer to the events depicted than to today.
38: see this chart... https://xkcd.com/1491/ Also the Iliad, the Wonder Years and the Big Lebowski.
Oxford University is older than the founding of the Aztec Capitol of Tenochtitlán.
This is actually a really important one to remember. Westerners tend to have the mistaken idea that historical events of this sort only happen in Western countries, and that everywhere else is unchanging. "There are Maori in New Zealand, there have always been Maori in New Zealand"; but in fact the Maori landings are more recent than the Norman Conquest. See also the Zulu in South Africa, who post-date Europeans in North America by several centuries.
Thanks. The one the sticks out for me is Gunsmoke approaching the closer to the time depicted than now line (however, start of series presumably).
The one that sticks out for me is "I Love the 90s" being right next to "Hotel Rwanda" which suggests an unfortunate crossover.
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Has no one noticed the medical discovery of the year: that it's not just masturbation that can make you go blind?
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40 last: Not sure I read you rightly, but the predecessors of the Zulu were in present-day SA by probably the 17th C, no-one's really sure. Ethnogenesis of the Zulu as we know them was early 19th C, but the people were already there.
Africa in particular suffers from everyone thinking it is unchanging from the Garden of Eden days until the colonial era.
Moved by 44, I looked up the Zulus' history and found out about the Mfecane, which I hadn't heard of before but which sounds terrible.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mfecane
48: I just read the same thing. History is bad.
48: The historiography of the Mfecane is a shitshow, massively politicized by all sides with next to no evidence to work with. Suffice to say, it probably wasn't all that apocalyptic.
No one's ever actually found a document signed by Shaka giving orders for it, right?
If you're all taking that headline 1-2m dead from the wiki intro, take a look at the sources. The most recent secondary source is 43 years old.
In case 51 isn't a joke: lots of horrible shit definitely happened, but that's about the limit of our knowledge.
52: The most recent secondary source is 43 years old.
J.D. Omer-Cooper, The Zulu Aftermath: A Nineteenth-Century Revolution in Bantu Africa, Longmans, 1978: ISBN 0-582-64531-X; outstanding example of the traditional view.
Norman Etherington, The Great Treks: The Transformation of Southern Africa, 1815-1854, Longman, 2001: ISBN 0-582-31567-0; refutes accounts of the Mfecane
Carolyn Hamilton, The Mfecane Aftermath: Reconstructive Debates in Southern African History, Indiana University Press, 1995: ISBN 1-86814-252-3
Unless you're writing from the year 2044...
Interesting (my prior knowledge of this issue before clicking on Wikipedia was literally zero). It seems odd that something so purportedly big and close in time and place to recorded history would be so opaque. Weren't there lots of survivors around to have oral histories taken down by the 1870s-1890s? And nearby Europeans in Angola and the Cape writing stuff down?
54: I was referring to the sources for that particular claim in the intro. Notes 2, 3, 4, 5. In which the youngest secondary source is actually 48 years old; and I'd wager that source is in fact tertiary, pushing the youngest back to 1839.
55: There were Europeans closer than that, at what are now Durban and Maputo, plus a handful of travelers in the interior, and at least some oral accounts were taken; AFAIK those are the bases of all the narrative accounts. But all that evidence tells us for sure is that horrible shit happened and people moved long distances. Casualty estimates based on decades-old oral testimony recorded more than 100 years ago are about as conclusive as one would expect.
Seriously just look over the notes in that wiki article. Most of the narrative is being taken from the Cambridge History of Africa, 1977.
You can infer the history of Africa from a single drop of a university press history.
For comparison, take the Thirty Years' War. In the (politicized) 19th century historiography you have these massive figures thrown around, 50-75% of Germany dying. In the 20th century historians start looking, at censuses, tax records, toll records, parish registers, everything. After decades of hard digging they figure maybe 20-30% dead, with massive local variation and huge blank spaces of ignorance. For the Mfecane none of those sources ever even existed.
Was the 1977 Cambridge History of Africa famously wrong about African history?
60: granted. I'm not sure in that case where you are coming from with the "Suffice to say, it probably wasn't all that apocalyptic" thing.
It sounds like "Suffice to say, it was bad but because of the lack of documentation we have no idea whether 1 million is accurate, too high or even too low" would be more correct.
61: I've no idea; just pointing out that wikihistory has to be treated very cautiously. How seriously would you take such an old history in your area of expertise?*
62.2 is fair; but one must add that most of the historians who have ever worked the problem, plus most of their few eyewitnesses, had strong motivations for exaggerating the carnage.
*TBC, this is not my area of expertise.
There's an interesting paper which points out the coincidence with the 1815 Tambora eruption, which is likely to have caused widespread deaths of humans and livestock.
That's why I don't keep my livestock in a volcano.
(looks into crater)
Then whose livestock are these?
Just one more: the intro to a book on Shaka I didn't go on to read was titled "The buttocks problem." The problem was this: what did Shaka's ass look like? Some testimony, given by people who were old enough to have seen him, indicates that his ass was tight, muscular, and athletic, as befitted a great conquering warrior king. Other testimony, just as reliable, indicates that his ass was large, wobbly and very well-fed, as befitted a great conquering warrior king. The accounts are irreconcilable. WRT narrative details in particular, that same problem crops up for just about everything. It isn't certain whether some famous battles ever actually happened, for instance. I expect the Cambridge writers did the best they could, but the best they could is basically folklore, not history.
64 is interesting and plausible.
The ass changed over the course of its life.
69: So one would think; but apparently the witnesses claimed to be describing the ass at much the same age.
67 is great. That was the intro? As in "first of all, we clearly need to address the Gluteal Question".
The accounts are irreconcilable.
It's as though he... got fatter.
Can one ever truly know a historical butt?
Possibly the witnesses had different criteria for what constitutes a great ass. It's not like it's an objective quality like the number of legs he had.
I believe in the excellent 1980s TV miniseries "Shaka Zulu," until today my main source of information about Shaka Zulu, Shaka had a nice firm butt.
If we develop a butt-assessment scale, the unit of measurement is the Franken.
I SCORN THE PUNY SEMITIC FRANKEN SCALE.
71.1: The point was to illustrate the scantiness of the evidence.
Little known fact: it was the buttock problem that caused the breakdown of the bicameral mind.
On thanksgiving in New Mexico, the The indigenous Hispanics commemorate their first meal with the Anglo invaders. The indigenous Navajo commemorate their first meal with the Spanish invaders. The indigenous Hopi commemorate their first meal with the Navajo invaders.
Apologies to Teo, who can back a few more invasions.
***ACTUAL SEX GROTTO***
Turns out to be considerably less fun than previously assumed.
http://www.plymouthherald.co.uk/news/plymouth-news/how-sordid-sex-dungeon-torture-818487
Where I live it's Mexicans -- South Asians -- South Carolina African Americans -- Philadelphia Italians -- English -- Swedes -- Lenni Lenape
I'm going to wikipedia. Going to learn some African history. Just kidding, I'm white!
83: I had great difficulty working out which way 83 was supposed to run, mainly because I didn't know who Lenni Lenape was and thought it might be either a Native American tribe (in which case right to left) or some sort of whimsical band (in which case left to right).
My outside bet was that Lenni Lenape was a Bundesliga midfielder in the late 1970s.
My wife showed me an ad a black guy put up offering to be your date for Thanksgiving with your racist white Trump-supporting family, for money. It came with a sliding scale depending on how obnoxious you wanted him to be. I think having him bitch endlessly about Bud Light costs $15.
There's good wine today. I'm waiting for one o'clock when it's legal to start.
The big ponderosa behind my house was more than a sapling when Salish families gathered berries along the creek below. Still a sapling, probably, when that group of Hudson's Bay Company trappers (including at least one Hawaiian) was waylayed by Blackfeet a couple of drainages to the west.
87 is great. I'd totally do that if I were back in NY.
89.last That's a story I'd like to here more of.
The cliche I have just worked into something I am writing dates back to 1719
94 -- Especially if Barry did it with a man as his date
An excerpt from our local paper:
Neil MacArthur was a Hudson Bay company factor who afterward went into trading for himself on the old emigrant road. He was in charge of one of the old Hudson Bay "brigades" which had been an expedition from the post to an Indian camp down near where Frenchtown is. He had had a successful trading season and was returning to the post over the old trail. One of his men was a Kanaka, named Koriaka, and this man rode the bell mare at the head of the line. In the canyon, as the "brigade" was returning to the post, it was waylaid by a war party of Blackfeet in the little gulch where the Marent trestle is built. The ambush was not a success, as the Blackfeet did not wait for the main body of the "brigade," but shot Koriaka as he came into sight on the trail. The following line at once fell back, rallied and drove back the hostiles. There was no other life lost than that of the poor Kanaka and the canyon was given his name. The old Indian name seems to have been entirely lost; whatever it was, it was superseded by the name "Koriaka 's canyon" . . .
Here's a map: https://www.roadonmap.com/us/where-is/Coriacan_Defile-Missoula_MT,gap
If you switch the map to satellite, and blow it up enough, you can see the shadows of the trestle, where the ambush took place. Down near the bottom of the canyon.
This is the "post" to which they were returning: http://fortwiki.com/Fort_Connah
My wife showed me an ad a black guy put up offering to be your date for Thanksgiving with your racist white Trump-supporting family, for money. It came with a sliding scale depending on how obnoxious you wanted him to be. I think having him bitch endlessly about Bud Light costs $15.
Clearly he hasn't watched Get Out.
I really enjoyed the short story where Galileo went to teach at Harvard.
Hey, here's a good fact in the vein of the OP: a ship built by the German Imperial Navy in 1913 for use in German East Africa, and which saw battle against the British, is currently in service as a passenger ferry on the same Lake Tanganikya.
We couldn't have been on every lake.
ISTR that Bogie actually sank that one and it was subsequently raised.
Wikipedia says you're right, basically.
The first naval engagement of WWI took place on a lake in Africa, but a different lake, Malawi. (Link is quite a long PDF, but amusing.)
Neil MacArthur was the pseudonym Colin Blunstone took when re-recording "She's Not There"
Vikings arrived in Greenland before the descendants of the Inuit who live there today.
Vikings arrived in Greenland before the descendants of the Inuit who live there today.
Well, yes. I'd estimate that there were Vikings in Greenland about a thousand years before the arrival of any of the descendants of the Inuit who live there today.