A polished sphere of meteorite.
Author: marcythewerewolf
okay so aaron burr tried to help maria reynolds’ daughter susan to get a good start in life – introduced her to people, found her a place in a girls’ boarding school in boston, etc. but the best part is probably when he is writing to his friend about susan in 1800 and he has to be like ‘okay i know what you’re thinking but seriously i’m not THE FATHER’
[Burr] added, in case Eustis might have questioned Susan’s paternity, that she was not his illegitimate offspring: “she has not the most remote affinity to me.” Still he was, he said, “under a sacred obligation to protect her.”
like….how bad your reputation has to be that this happens
The Rock of Gibraltar
- Gibraltar was a very big choke point during WWII, basically whoever owned it would be who got the use of the Mediterranean.
- WWII tunnels: “These tunnels were excavated during 1939-1944 by the Royal Engineers and a contingent of Canadian Engineers, and are an extension to The Great Siege Tunnels excavated during The Great Siege of 1779-83. The Rock is in fact honeycombed with a 32 mile-long network of tunnels.” [x]
- ~1400 feet high
- Under siege conditions, the mixture of tension, boredom, anger and alcohol meant that discipline had to be strict if order was to be preserved. One of the most common forms of punishment was flogging with a nine tailed whip. A drummer in a regiment, which later became the Lancashire Fusiliers, achieved fame as the most flogged man in the British army. In his first 14 years here he received 30,000 lashes, of which 4,000 were administered in a single year.
- The besieged population lacked fresh vegetables and citrus fruits, important sources of vitamin C. A shortage of this causes scurvy, which turns the flesh black, then cripples and finally kills. To combat this deadly condition, which almost forced the city to surrender during The Great Siege, soldiers and civilians were ordered to grow food wherever possible.
- During the siege, many people on a poor diet were closely confined for long periods in unsanitary conditions.It is hardly surprising that smallpox, yellow fever, influenza, dysentery and scurvy thrived.
- The precipitous Northern face of the Rock is known as the Notch
- Various galleries: The Windsor Gallery, King’s Lines, Queen’s Lines, St. George’s Hall, the Cornwallis Chamber (a large banquet was held here in honor of US President Grant)
- Sergeant Major Ince was granted a plot of land on the Upper Rock, still known today as Ince’s Farm.
- Capacity for 30,000 soldiers during WWII
- during WWII, some soldiers did not see daylight for 3+ months at a time
- Eisenhower: “The eternal darkness of the tunnels was here and there partially pierced by feeble electric bulbs. Damp, cold air in block-long passages was heavy with stagnation and did not noticeably respond to the clattering efforts of electric fans. Through the arched ceilings came a constant drip, drip, drip of surface water that faithfully but drearily ticked off the seconds of the interminable, almost unendurable, wait which always occurs between completion of a military plan and the moment action begins.”
I don’t know who first spelled the name as “Guinevere,” but I’m forever thankful that it’s the form in most common use, because other options include “Guanhumara” “Guennuuar” “Gahunmare” and “Wenneuereia”
thanks to whichever medieval person decided it was time to stop calling the queen by random horse noises
If the story begins with the lack of a child, then hunger becomes central. Food often replaces sex in folktales, and witches with some rule-bound delicacy are the fertility specialists of choice, second only to daring the fairies to give you a baby hedgehog, a snow-child, or an infant the size of your thumb. The trouble starts when a childless queen is given specific instructions– eat the white rose for a boy or the red rose for a girl, but not both. Eat the fair flower and not the bitter, black one. Peel both onions before you eat them. Folklorists would group all of these motifs under the number “T511– conception from eating,” with increasingly specific Dewey-Decimal-style numbers for conception from a flower or a fish, from swallowing a pearl or a peppercorn. Inevitably, the queen fails the interdiction, because she forgets the warning, or because the first thing she eats is so delicious she just can’t help it. Without that failure, there would be no story. Interdiction, violation: a rule is broken and the world is changed.
A light pillar, sometimes known as a ‘crystal beam’, is an atmospheric phenomenon in which a column of light appears to extend vertically above or below a light source. The effect is created by the reflection of light from ice crystals suspended in the atmosphere. The light can come from any source, including the moon, street lamps, buildings, fires, or the Sun (in which case they are called ‘sun pillars’ or ‘solar pillars’).
but-the-library-of-alexandria:
the thing about writing fantasy stories is that language is so based on history that it can be hard to decide how far suspension of disbelief can carry you word-choice wise – what do you call a french braid in a world with no france? can a queen ann neckline be described if there was no queen ann? where do you draw the line? can you use the word platonic if plato never existed? can you name a character chris in a land without christianity? can you even say ‘bungalow’ in a world where there was no indian language for the word to originate from? is there a single word in any language that doesn’t have a story behind it? to be accurate a fantasy story would be written in a fantasy language but who has the time for that
Tolkien had the time apparently
LIsten. Linguistics Georg, who invented over 10,000 conlangs each day, is an outlier and should not have been counted.
A Middleground 