imagine we make contact with an alien species that’s like, vastly technologically superior, they could fucking kill us in a single shot if they really wanted to
and this species has never eaten salad before. and we show them salad and they eat it and they’re like holy living fuck this is tasty. and suddenly they’re offering us huge houses with all kind of advanced technological shit and incredible medical care and all the amenities and everything, with the only condition that we keep making salad for them.
and like, salad isn’t even hard to make. grab some plants, dump em in a bowl. it doesn’t have to be fancy salad, they’ll fall all over themselves for the most mediocre salad in the world. we can make so much salad that we’re practically drowning in it, even if we eat some of the salad ourselves. and in exchange we’re protected from danger, we have great living conditions, it’s basically paradise compared to life on earth
imagine
now realize that this is what bees have done to us
In 1943, a team of ingenious Italian doctors invented a deadly, contagious virus called Syndrome K to protect Jews from annihilation. On October 16 of that year, as Nazis closed in to liquidate Rome’s Jewish ghetto, many runaways hid in the 450-year-old Fatebenefratelli Hospital. There, anti-Fascist doctors including Adriano Ossicini, Vittorio Sacerdoti and Giovanni Borromeo created a gruesome, imaginary disease.
The doctors instructed “patients” to cough very loudly and told Nazis that the disease was extremely dangerous, disfiguring and molto contagioso. Soldiers were so alarmed by the list of symptoms and incessant coughing that they left without inspecting the patients. It’s estimated that a few dozen lives were saved by this brilliant scheme.
The doctors were later honored for their heroic actions, and Fatebenefratelli Hospital was declared a “House of Life” by the International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation.
One of my favorite things about history is how little bits of it are preserved through traditions and mythology and we don’t even notice it. Like how we still say “’Tis the season” at Christmastime. Who says ‘tis anymore? No one, it’s dead except in this tiny phrase. I had a friend once tell me that she noticed the only group of people who could consistently identify a spinning wheel were girls between the ages of 4 and 7. Why? Sleeping Beauty. There are little linguistic quirks that have been around for centuries, bits of slang we use that people 400 years ago would recognize, but unless you showed someone a 400 year old dictionary, they’d never believe it. Whispers of the past are always there.
precisely! There’s far more of them than you’d realize. A pothole is from when potters used to harvest clay from the side of the road. Pot. Hole.
Your phone goes boinkey bleep but we still call it ringing, from when phones had actual bells on the outside of actual boxes.
Have you ever had to explain to a Gen Z why we “roll down” a car’s window?
Lowercase and uppercase are from typesetting, storing lead letters into boxes or cases for print.
The daily grind is from when a day’s use of grain was ground for bread.
“Fire!” as the command to shoot, in English, only picked up with gunpowder, as you’d light or fire the guns. To fire is to set fire to something. Prior to that, the command for a bunch of archers isn’t and has never been Fire, it’s Loose. Notice this little anachronism in most medievaloid films.
This is that weird abstract millennial humour that we all laugh at and older generations squint at shouting “I don’t understand the joke!! I think I’ve missed something!!”
definitely click through to the “read more”, i laughed so much!
You can walk in a straight line from Madrid to Shanghai without hitting a major body of water using Earth’s curvature.
Egg hatching route.
For everyone who says “that’s not a straight line it’s a curved line” please remember that the Earth is round, not flat. Here’s the line, as rendered with Google Earth:
As you can see, the line is straight!
I would walk 500 miles, and I would walk 500 more, but I wouldn’t swim a single mile
Steel Phoenix Studios 