Just a reminder that the first NASA astronauts were supposed to be women because generally they are smaller, lighter (less weight in the cockpit means less fuel required) and eat less than men and so would be easier to accommodate in space.
Both men and women trained (and many of the female finalists had higher scores than the men), but they were completely excluded from the final selection because of their gender.
13 women underwent final training, all were accomplished pilots with at least 1000 hours flying experience, all passed the necessary tests, all could have been astronauts if only they were afforded the opportunity.
[below, Jerrie Cobb photographed during testing]
They are collectively known as the Mercury 13, there’s a great blog entry about them here and a brilliant PBS documentary too.
Their names are Myrtle Cagle, Jerrie Cobb, Janet Dietrich, Marion Dietrich, Wally Funk, Sarah Gorelick, Jane “Janey” Hart, Jean Hixson, Rhea Hurrle, Gene Nora Stumbough, Irene Leverton, Jerri Sloan and Bernice Steadman. They should be remembered and celebrated for their role in the history of space exploration.
It wasn’t until 2 decades later that Sally Ride became the first woman in space in 1983.
7 of the surviving members of the Mercury 13 are pictured below, 33 years later in 1995.
died before the age of 40 but compensated by living a full and interesting life that did not consist of fruitless guerrilla warfare interrupted by long boring spells in the slammer
literally the sultan’s favorite boyfriend
you think i’m kidding but i’m not fucking kidding
so his dad who was ruler of wallachia (aka southern romania more or less) sent radu and vlad to the ottoman court as political hostages when they were kids and they grew up there along with the future mehmet the fucking conqueror
you know. the dude who conquered constantinople in 1453, brought an end to the eastern roman empire etc etc
that dude
turns out mehmet had a ridiculous crush on radu
so one day mehmet tried to get handsy and radu thought to himself, what should i do in my precarious position as political prisoner from a small-fry principality on the fringes of the empire when the heir to the ottoman throne is putting the moves on me?
I KNOW I’LL STAB HIM IN THE LEG
so he did. he did that
and then he went and climbed a tree and refused to come down until mehmet got patched up and probably limped over all c’mon baby don’t be like that
like i bet stabbing the sultan got you a one-on-one appointment with the royal executioner. except not for radu because he was that much of a badass
meanwhile vlad was probably planning to LISTEN WHO FUCKING CARES
anyway
so radu eventually of his own volition became mehmet the conqueror’s boyfriend and they went on many exciting adventures together
like the siege of constantinople
where was vlad at the time? being kicked out of his own country because his standard approach to politics was ‘devise new and exciting ways to torture and kill people slowly’. despite what certain history books will have you think he was super unpopular with… everyone basically.
radu was highly educated and spoke multiple languages and was all about turkish and persian literature. also possibly converted to islam though sources tend to contradict eachother on that
by the time radu was 22 mehmet gave him a command and started sending him places
like wallachia to overthrow his brother who was being politically inconvenient
SO MUCH GAME OF THRONES-GRADE BACKSTABBY DRAMA HAPPENED YOU HAVE NO IDEA
also radu married a serbian (or possibly albanian) princess named maria despina and had one daughter
died suddenly in his late 30s, which is code for ‘probably poisoned’
and in conclusion: a genuinely interesting historical figure you don’t hear enough about because his brother was a vampire or something
If you know film and/or photography, you probably know the name Muybridge, the man who effectively invented cinema by taking photos in rapid succession of a horse galloping in order to settle a bet. And then went on to film endless movement sequences, mostly walk cycles, of various animals and human subjects (to the enternal gratitude of animators everywhere).
Apparently this is what happened when he got to cats.
Okay friends today we are gonna learn
about the GHOST ARMY, which, disappointingly, was not actually an
army made of ghosts
pictured: the unit patch for the
Ghost Army, which is DOPE AS FUCK
see one of the things that made WWII so
fucking nuts was the totally bizarre level of technology. Like wow we
invented the first real computer and radar but also if you wanted to
see how many troops were hanging out somewhere you had to send a dude
to fly over and take pictures manually??? this left A LOT of room for
shenanigans
so the normal method of dealing with
aerial surveillance was to cover shit with camouflage netting. Say
you’ve got an nice air base that you really don’t want any bombs
dropped on- you literally just cover that with a ludicrous amount of
netting and some fake trees and BAM now it looks like just an empty
field from the air
there’s a building under that weird
lump
that’s cool! That’s
really cool! But not cool enough
At some point
somebody sat down and went “hey wait. What if…what if instead of
disguising buildings and units as fields, we disguise fields as
units”
holy fucking
shit!!!
the British had
used a bunch of fake tanks and like, boxes of provisions stacked up
in tank shape and then covered with a tarp in 1942 during Operation
Bertram and it worked really well, but they didn’t have a special
unit devoted to just clowning on the Germans like that.
so the US military
decides they do want a designated clowning unit and goes out and
recruits a bunch of fucking nerds from all the art schools and makes
them into the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops aka THE
GHOST ARMY, WHY THE FUCK WOULD YOU USE ANY OTHER NAME LIKE SERIOUSLY
the ghost army’s
job was basically to go in, sidle up to a real unit, and then
basically set up a fake version of that unit while the actual unit
sneaked away to go dunk on Nazis where the Nazis weren’t expecting
them
okay time to get
into the really cool part of this story, which is HOW the ghost army
faked being a real unit:
step 1: INFLATABLE
TANKS AND AIRCRAFT OH MY GOD
that’s a big ol balloon!!!
the ghost army had
a stockpile of inflatable tanks, aircraft, artillery, cars, whatever,
that they would set up and then poorly cover with camouflage
netting so from the air it looked like someone had just done a
real shit job of hiding actual materiel. They even had dummy soldiers
that they would set up to make the scene look populated, since the
ghost army itself was about 1,000 dudes regularly imitating units of 30,000 men
what’s really cool
is that visual deception was more than just the inflatable stuff
itself. If the ghost army plopped down a balloon tank, they then also
had to go out with shovels and rakes and shit to make a fake track
that a real tank would have left, because it turns out tanks are
really hard on your landscaping
step 2: “spoof
radio”
the last couple of
days before the real unit moved out, the radio operators of the ghost
army would move in. see, radio transmissions were done in Morse code,
and it turns out every radio operator has a slightly different “fist”
when typing Morse. A “fist” is basically typing style- some
people would take longer to type out certain letters or would have
pauses between groups or anything like. Anybody listening to the
radio transmissions who was skilled enough could tell different radio
operators apart from just their fist
anyway the ghost
army operators would move in and basically listen to all the real
unit’s radio transmissions until they had learned the real operators’
fists. Then they would take over radio traffic, imitating that fist
so it seemed like the real operator had never left. I forgot to make
this section funny because I was too caught up in how rad it is SORRY
step 3: making a
lot of noise
the ghost army had
special trucks fitted with huge fuck off speakers and a whole library
of stock sound effects. Once the real unit left and the fake unit
inflated, the sound trucks would come in, select a combination of
sound effects that matched the unit they were impersonating, and then
played everyone in the 15 mile radius of the speakers their fire mix
tape
step 4: fuckin
partying!!!
see the thing about
impersonating your own units is that other allied units would know
about it and might talk about it where enemy collaborators could
hear. So the ghost army had to fool the Germans but they also had to
fool their own army. Every time they impersonated a new unit,
the ghost soldiers would paint that unit’s insignia on all the fake
materiel, make fake signs with the unit’s name and colors, and sew
the unit’s patches on their own uniforms
once they were
dressed up as soldiers from the impersonated unit, the ghost army
dudes would go into town and mingle with other soldiers from actual
fighting units nearby and hang out in bars while loudly saying things
like “YES HELLO I AM DEFINITELY A REAL SOLDIER FROM THE WHATEVER
DIVISION, ABSOLUTELY FOR REAL STATIONED ON THAT HILL OVER THERE”
so anyway this
bunch of weedy American art nerds staged 20+ battlefield deceptions
between 1944 and the end of the war, sometimes fooling that Germans
so successfully that they actually got shelled
I’mma leave you
with this quote from the book “The Ghost Army of World War II” by
Rick Beyer and Elizabeth Sayles, because it’s a quote from an actual
member of the Ghost Army and that alone makes it funnier than
anything I could ever write:
On another
occasion, two Frenchmen on bicycles somehow got through the security
perimeter. Shilstone managed to halt them, but not before they had
seen more than they should. “What they thought they saw was four
GIs picking up a forty-ton Sherman tank and turning it around. They
looked at me, and they were looking for answers, and I finally said
‘The Americans are very strong.‘”
Legit I know some of you darlings on here are young, but if you ever refer to my 30 year old ass as “baby boomer” again I will not be held responsible for my actions.
So like a baby boomer, but without the financial stability or racism.
Gen X…we’re fucking invisible…
40 and counting!
“The lost generation.”
Y’all think it’s shit not having financial stability at 20, well I’m afraid we got some bad news for you.
Okay, kids, generation lesson, if we’re going to keep using these divisions. Baby Boomers are technically those born between 1946 (after the end of WW2, when the soldiers came home – thus, a “baby boom,” as husbands and wives were reunited after several years apart) and 1964. That makes Baby Boomers between 53-71 in 2017. And there are a variety of theories on where this generation ends – depending on what definition you’re working under, 50-53 year olds could be the beginning of Gen X.
Gen X is between 36-50 this year, give or take a couple of years. We’re a smaller generation, defined mostly by coming of age between 1980-ish and the early to mid 90s – after cable TV, but before the internet, the “latchkey kid” generation.
The oldest Millennials are 35-ish this year. So a 30 year old is most definitely not a Boomer, by any stretch of the imagination. (There’s a school of thought that puts the older members of this age range in their own small generation, “Generation Y,” but most have just decided to define Millennials as people born between approximately 1982-2004.)
So there. Know your generations, so you’re sure you’re hating on the right people, y’all.
The best/worst part of being Gen X at the moment* is that the gutting of unions and the social safety net means the Boomers are failing to retire while the Millennials are coming up and we’re basically in one hell of an awkward mid-career pinch while our bodies are starting to fall apart and our children are growing up.
(Gen X has been hit extra-hard at critical life points by recessions.)
(Also, I swear when I was a younger Gen Xer the cutoff was more like 1977.)
*Previous best/worsts include hitting puberty in the early days of the AIDS epidemic, growing up at the end of the Cold War while our media was producing story after story about nuclear annihilation, the aforementioned critical moments recessions, and thinking acid-washed denim was a great idea.
Gen X is defined as starting in 1961 when “the pill” came into being, and ends in 1991. When it was named, this was the range. Therefore, Gen Xers are between 35 (turning 36 this year) and 56.
Our experience is that Recession is the norm, world politics is constant upheaval, that the government will NEVER care about us, that the only way to survive was to work multiple jobs, and that our turn will never come.
And make NO mistake – we ARE angry. we DO NOT like anything about this.
We took the tools that our progenitors left us with and turned the internet into a real-time conversation worldwide that happens between people instead of governments or news agencies. We took the idea of escapism and pushed it to 11 (MMOs began in the 80s with MUDDs, kids). We very subtly subverted the paradigm of “this is how we do things because this is how we have always done things” to make things more efficient for everyone. AND WE DID ALL OF THESE THINGS WHILE BEING TOLD WE WERE LAZY AND UNMOTIVATED AND WOULD NEVER MAKE A MARK ON HISTORY.
Baby Boomers are not only still fucking shit up for us, they are still blaming us for them doing so.
We are angry, tired, and fed up with being ignored and disregarded.
I’m in Gen Y, or Old Millennials (born in 1982, literally the first year of it), and I favor the viewpoint that our micro-generation is unlike both Gen X that came before us and the Millennials that came after us. We’re the transition kids. Our older siblings – literally, sometimes, figuratively for others – are Gen X. We grew up with them telling us to trust no one, but to fight for what we believe in. We grew up with Gen X feeding us angry punk pop and the knowledge that adults will never, ever have our best interests at heart. (It’s why even though I’m turning 35 this summer I still can’t see myself as an “adult” and I don’t view a lot of people older than me as “adults”. They’re still in this weird… wombly stage of older angry sibling. Adults are corporate. Adults are white-haired men who make anti-union laws and anti-choice legislation. Adults are 80s/90s movie villains.)
Gen X gave me a healthy dose of cynicism but not hopelessness. They gave me a knife and said “Defend yourself if you have to. The adults won’t do it for you.”
So we took the “us against the world” Gen X lessons, and then…transitioned into this weird world of being connected all the time. The internet happened when we were pre-teens. Some of us brokered our very first romantic relationships over instant messaging. (What? Yeah, I did it.) We suddenly developed very real, very deep emotional connections with people in wildly different time zones and cultures. We had “best friends” whose legal names were a complete mystery to us. And we trusted each other, but we still remember a world before we were capable of this kind of connection. We still remember the insular nature of life before the internet. We remember when we couldn’t obtain news for ourselves, and we still don’t trust adults who try to tell us what’s “really” going on.
Life in the transition generation is kinda weird. This constant liminal space. Nothing ever feels very real. Nothing is ever certain. But damn I love my Gen X mentors and I hope I’m passing on the knowledge of “protect yourself, defend yourself, fight for what you believe in” to the kids younger than me. We’re all in this together.
1984 and I love this. This captures so much off what it’s like to be in your 30s right now.
Isn’t something similar to this what caused the Watergate scandal?
Yep. 4.5 minutes of erased tape caught Woodward and Bernstein’s attention.
Kiddos, @sailorzeo is exactly on point. If you haven’t learned about Richard Nixon and the Watergate Hotel in school (or even if you have–God knows my school mentioned it but hardly explained it), here are some things you’ll want to look up.
Movie: All The President’s Men
Bob Woodward
Carl Bernstein
Watergate tapes
Deep Throat (USE CAUTION I strongly suggest using a search term like “deep throat watergate” or “deep throat presidential leak” and if your parents have a web tracker on your computer, tell them you’re researching Watergate BEFORE you look this up)
If your parents or your grandparents were around for Nixon’s presidency, you may wish to talk to them, too.
i hate writing historical fic because every five sentences you’re googling random shit like “when did billiards become popular in america” & i’ll have you know it was the 1820s
fun fact my pals the word ‘okay’ or ‘O.K.’ (the abbreviation for the old timey spelling of ‘all correct’) was popularized in 1840 by Van Buren’s US presidential election slogan and seeing it in historical fiction before then feels like a little glitch in the matrix, but seeing it in an Old Timey Fantasy setting sends me down the rabbit hole of how a fantasy world language would be brutal to translate, and language in general is a trip, and nothing means anything, probably
I just want to add a correction: O.K. was not an abbreviation for an “old-timey” spelling of “all correct”; it is in fact an abbreviation for an INTENTIONAL MISSPELLING of “all correct.” There was a short-lived period in the 1800s where it became amusing and trendy to flagrantly misspell conversational phrases and then abbreviate them, and “O.K.” is the only one to survive to the present day.
O.K. is an ancient MEME.
OL KORECK!
You telling me like 100 years from now, words like “birb”, “smol”, and “bode” are gonna be actual words?
Well they kinda already are. You say or type them, others know what you mean. That’s what words and language do. Of course we have to make new ones, because we keep finding new concepts. Even if it’s ‘that thing is small but differently small than a normal small.’ Like two different shades of blue.
I love oll korrect for exactly this reason. So much of our language us just what a bunch of cool kids for two years in the 18th century thought was funny
Colophon: a statement at the end of a book containing the scribe or owner’s name, date of completion, or bitching about how hard it is to write a book in the dark ages
Oh, my hand
The parchment is very hairy
Thank God it will soon be dark
St. Patrick of Armagh, deliver me from writing
Now I’ve written the whole thing; for Christ’s sake give me a drink
Oh d fuckin abbot
Massive hangover
Whoever translated these Gospels did a very poor job
Cursed be the pesty cat that urinated over this book during the night
If someone else would like such a handsome book, come and look me up in Paris, across from the Notre Dame cathedral
I shall remember, O Christ, that I am writing of Thee, because I am wrecked today
Do not reproach me concerning the letters, the ink is bad and the parchment scanty and the day is dark
11 golden letters, 8 shilling each; 700 letters with double shafts, 7 shilling for each hundred; and 35 quires of text, each 16 leaves, at 3 shilling each. For such an amount I won’t write again
Here ends the second part of the title work of Brother Thomas Aquinas of the Dominican Order; very long, very verbose; and very tedious for the scribe; thank God, thank God, and again thank God
If anyone take away this book, let him die the death, let him be fried in a pan; let the falling sickness and fever seize him; let him be broken on the wheel, and hanged. Amen
“Imagine if people had been going ‘don’t fight hate with hate’ back when Hitler was around.”
Fam…let me tell you bout Poland.
Let me tell you about how the entire rest of Europe sat ack and watched the invasion of Poland because they thought it would be “improper” to send military aid. How they were unwilling to enforce the treaties that Germany was breaking, because that would make them “just as bad.” They sat back and wrote strongly worded letters while fascists grew in power because they didn’t want to dirty their hands. They thought reasonable discussion and politics would be enough to stop a fascist dictator from rising to power.
Spoiler alert: it wasn’t enough.
Even earlier: let me tell you about Czechoslovakia. Let me tell you how the rest of Europe thought that if they just let Hitler take the Sudetenland, he would stop, and peace could be preserved. Let me tell you about how, not long after the Sudetenland became legally German, Germany invaded the rest of the Czech half and the remains of Slovakia were descended upon by other nations. Let me tell you how no one did anything to help Czechoslovakia, even though they were being invaded by a fascist foreign power. Let me tell you that Hitler did not stop with Czechoslovakia.
Ninety-year-old Freddie Oversteegen was one of the few women that were active in the Dutch resistance during WWII – along with her sister Truus and the famous Hannie Schaft, who was killed just before the end of the war. When Freddie was 14 years old, a gentleman visited her family home to ask her mother if she would allow her daughters to join the resistance – no one would suspect two young girls of being resistance fighters, he argued.
And he was right. The Oversteegen sisters would flirt with Nazi collaborators under false pretences and then lead them into the woods, where instead of a make-out session, the men would be greeted with a bullet.
Steel Phoenix Studios 