Things you were shockingly old when you learned

Jamie, Jack, Jimbeaux

What's weird - from what I just read on the internet - is that James originally comes from an early French corruption of the Greek to 'Gemmes'. And yet French ultimately plumped for Jacques, which is much closer to Jacob!

yup during some history week or reading or whatever i got all confused about the term "jacobean" to describe that period and so found out. the james shit is crazy.

Let's not forget the Jacobites either!

that's the first thing I thought of when people started talking about that Jacobin thing, why is there a magazine about Bonnie Prince Charlie and the glorious '45?!?

The Jacobites have got all the best tunes too.

I always thought jacobites were just mini cream crackers?

I was talking to my 7 year old about the possibility of watching Goonies together and she was asking questions about it. I said there were a couple of guys named Chunk and Sloth.

“Let me guess, Chunk is chunky and Sloth is slow?”

“No… well, actually…”

I always assumed Sloth was a random, absurd name.

The yawning silence around NickB's (frankly appalling) joke is filling me with pathos.

hahaha i dont even know what possessed me to write that but pathos away my friend

Hahahaha. Game knows game, as the kids say.

that the bo diddley beat is just son clave

!

I knew that, but it only recently occurred to me that as James is Iago in Spanish, Santiago = Saint James
― Zelda Zonk, Thursday, November 3, 2022 9:48 PM (two weeks ago) bookmarkflaglink

Last night I realized that José is Joseph and that Salvador is Savior (making San Salvador = Saint-Sauveur for example).

gulag is a russian acronym for a special police division. well, i knew it was russian tbf

Glavnoye Upravleniye LAGerey

I thought Diego was the Spanish "James."

the brazilian guitarist baden powell, full name baden powell de aquino, was named after robert baden-powell (founder of the boy scouts / scout movement). his dad was a scouting enthusiast.

Ha!
Always wondered why he had such an un-Brazilian sounding name...

I thought Diego was the Spanish "James."

AFAIK, Diego is a variation of Jacob.

San Diego, Santiago

My mother has told me on several occasions that we used to meet Lady Baden Powell when I was very small. So I assume she must have lived in teh same neighborhood.
I was also a cub scout in my late childhood.

But he was a bit dodge himself I hear. I think there was a Behind the Bastards on him and others in the scouting scene.

But he was a bit dodge himself I hear. I think there was a Behind the Bastards on him and others in the scouting scene.

Anyone who creates a whole organization in order to surround themselves with preadolescent boys is 100% suspect. Preadolescent boys are vile both singly and especially in groups.

My city - the nation's capital - has a Boy Scout Monument. It has pride of place on the Ellipse adjacent to the White House, near the National Christmas Tree.

The statue is a thrilling testament to the joys of scouting.

Let me know if you see anything a little weird about it.

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Vi9kW-T8LDY/TuFeI6yiImI/AAAAAAAAFO4/SvaIgRt9vjs/s1600/DSC00034.JPG

very normal stuff

hint: THE NAKED GUY

From Wikipedia:

A panel on the base is inscribed with the Scout Oath:

On my honor I
Will do my best
To do my duty
To God & my
Country and to obey the
Scout law to
Help other people
At all times
To keep myself
Physically strong
Mentally awake
And morally
Straight

So yeah, very normal

i like how the skinny-dipping party was so quickly broken up that the absolutely shredded giant man has not had time to put on his clothes so he has them wadded up under his arm

quick, let us flee this place, no, no nothing's wrong son, but i think they're gaining on us

meanwhile the boyscout is in full uniform

when i grow up, i'm gonna be naked, just like dad

I think the scout is leading the skinnydippers to JAIL where they belong

I have heard there were contemporary groups to the early Scouts that did have nudity as a central policy. Popular in Germany and other mainland European places, combining the idea of back to nature and doing it in the buff etc etc

I made a leather wallet and learned how to use a compass

naked

I have heard there were contemporary groups to the early Scouts that did have nudity as a central policy. Popular in Germany and other mainland European places, combining the idea of back to nature and doing it in the buff etc etc

There's some discussion of this in Jon Savage's excellent book Teenage.

and some time around the 1920s a raft of diseased men realized they could combine mormonism with boy scouting and get child sexual abuse squared!!

I definitely read Teenage a couple of decades back. Think I got it cheap possibly from FOPP. Think I have come across that elsewhere too. Possibly in Nell Irvin Painters book a few months ago.
But I have read a lot over the last few decades so don't always immediately remember exactly where a specific thing came from. Think I came across that in at least one documentary too.

Silk. Silk. I had a conversation in work on Sunday while I was doing overtime. Because Porsche has released a new "Dakar Edition" 911 and you can never been too rich or too thin. I learned two things. I'll tell you. Technically I learned three things, but the third thing - Porsche sells a leather luggage set for £4,110 - isn't interesting. I'll tell you the two interesting things.

The first thing I learned is that silk is made by boiling silk larvae. I didn't know that. I had always assumed that silk was harvested in the same way spiderwebs are harvested, e.g. by gathering it from trees. Or by pulling it out of the silk spider. To be honest I had no idea whatsoever how silk was harvested. No fucking idea. I've never thought about silk in any great depth. I've never had a reason to. That's the great thing about interacting with other people. They come up with unpredictable things.

Why was there a conversation about silk? Apparently silk pillowcases are good for the complexion, but the person with whom I had the conversation isn't keen on the idea of killing little baby silk spiders. So there's a thing called Peace Silk. It's harvested after the larvae has gone off somewhere. It's really expensive. A Peace Silk pillowcase is £89:
https://ethicalkind.com/products/organic-peace-silk-pillowcase

I was tempted to point out that her complexion is already fine - much better than mine - but who knows. There are different standards. I was also tempted to say "but you don't have a problem with boiling people to death" but two wrongs don't make a right, so I kept quiet.

And then it struck me. It struck me. I had heard about silk farming! The Human League's "Being Boiled" is all about it! Sericulture is silk farming! The song is about boiling silk larvae. That's what it's about! The lyrics draw a parallel between the baby silk spiders and human babies. That's what the song is about! The whole song. That's what it was about! I had always assumed that "sericulture" was a bit like traditional loom weaving, that it was really unsafe, and the song was about low-paid workers being boiled to death to make clothes.

But no. "Being Boiled" is about boiling silk larvae. One of a handful of top ten pop singles to be about boiling silk larvae.

I mean, it might not be interesting to you. But suddenly I could feel pieces moving together in my mind. Little pieces of knowledge fitting together. Forming part of a huge wall of knowledge. There is so much I don't know.

A standout lyric from the extremely underrated* Rodgers and Hammerstein Cinderella:

I'm a young Norwegian princess or a milkmaid
I'm the greatest prima donna in Milan
I'm an heiress who has always had her silk made
By her own flock of silkworms in Japan

* = Internal rhyme, kickass lyrics, so much awesome. The tv version starring Lesley Ann Warren has homely production values, but absolutely slays all gloppy Disney shit.

I will defend this opinion to my death, thxbye

But suddenly I could feel pieces moving together in my mind. Little pieces of knowledge fitting together. Forming part of a huge wall of knowledge.

Sounds like there are spiders inside your head!

lol i read the first part of AP's post going "BEING BOILED," man! but yupa

One point to clarify is that the silkworms are larvae of the silk moth, and have nothing to do with spiders. Spider silk is called that because it resembles the thread these caterpillars make their cocoons from. Of course because it comes out of the caterpillar it's one continuous thread for the whole cocoon, and being a protein polymer it's extremely tough.

I read this a while ago and think about it often. It came up in a conversation with a paramedic yesterday and was reminded I meant to post it here. As ever, I may have found out about it on here somewhere, so forgive me if this is old news.

In a 2011 paper on the medical effects of scurvy, author Jason C. Anthony offers a remarkable detail about human bodies and the long-term presence of wounds.

“Without vitamin C,” Anthony writes, “we cannot produce collagen, an essential component of bones, cartilage, tendons and other connective tissues. Collagen binds our wounds, but that binding is replaced continually throughout our lives. Thus in advanced scurvy”—reached when the body has gone too long without vitamin C—“old wounds long thought healed will magically, painfully reappear.”

In a sense, there is no such thing as healing. From paper cuts to surgical scars, our bodies are catalogues of wounds: imperfectly locked doors quietly waiting, sooner or later, to spring back open.

(This is part of a wider conversation about the slow death of Twitter, but back in the early, now miraculous-seeming days of blogs, RSS and Google Reader, BLDG blog (where I first read about this) was one of the wonders of the world.)

That is amazing - I had no idea.

Yesterday I learned that surgically removed tonsils can grow back! Unfortunately learned because mine did and I ended up in urgent care with a peritonsillar abscess aka quinsy.

My mum had both tonsils and adenoids grow back. I might have lizard genes.

Hope you're doing okay now, Jaq.

Note to self: Eat more oranges.

Thanks Emily, much improved today! I mentioned lizard tails to the doc and got a thoughtful look in return

jack rabbits are technically hares

Greg Ginn and Raymond Pettibon are actually brothers! How did I never know this?

I think Pettibon was a nickname not a surname. But I think the fact is in most of the books that give any history to the band.

Pettibon adopted his new surname, from the nickname petit bon (good little one) given to him by his father.[9]