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Disappointing History
February 5, 2019 at 6:34 pm
Has there ever been a really mad cool bit of history that was always presented to you as a fact, then you were let down when you discovered it wasn't so?
For me, it was berserkers. Great, huge, hairy mindless Vikings, so caught up with battle-lust they couldn't tell friend from foe!! Feeling no pain, swording about like a windmill in a whirlwind, flattening enemies by the dozens - HACK, SLASH, CRUNCH, STABBITY-STAB!! You know - howling, raging, roaring, shield-biting berserkers!!
No such animal. *sigh*
Boru
'A man is accepted into a church for what he believes. He is turned out for what he knows.' - Mark Twain
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RE: Disappointing History
February 5, 2019 at 7:41 pm
(This post was last modified: February 5, 2019 at 7:42 pm by Gawdzilla Sama.)
I think I've said elsewhere that when I was in high school a neighbor told me that FDR had rigged the whole Pearl Harbor raid and the Pacific War?
The movie version of "winning the west" was certainly a load of bullshit that I wasn't aware of until I dug into it.
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RE: Disappointing History
February 7, 2019 at 5:07 pm
Finding out that George Washington actually did tell lies.
--
Dr H
"So, I became an anarchist, and all I got was this lousy T-shirt."
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RE: Disappointing History
February 7, 2019 at 6:33 pm
The predictive failures of the pythias at delphi. You kind of assume that to have been such an influential oracle you would at least have to be good at guessing...?
Not so much.
When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for a battle to commence then KPLOW, I hit em with the illness of my quill, Im endowed..with certain unalienable skills....
-ERB
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RE: Disappointing History
February 7, 2019 at 8:47 pm
(This post was last modified: February 7, 2019 at 8:49 pm by Brian37.)
When I was a kid, my dad had a friend who not only taught at the same high school, his fellow teacher owned a movie theater. Everyso often my mom and I got free tickets to see movies.
So one day she takes me to a nature documentary. I see a fawn being born from a mother deer. Problem is it was a profile shot, so I thought that the fawn was coming out of it's ass.
So the following Monday, on the school bus, I proudly proclaimed my "knowledge" of where babies come from, and the older kids on the bus laughed their asses off. It took the female bus driver, pulling me aside to correct me.
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RE: Disappointing History
February 7, 2019 at 10:06 pm
Well, I think one of the most disappointing things I learned about history was that the classic plague doctor costume was actually barely used:
I was extremely dissppointed to read Gregory Porter's history of the Great Plague of 1666 and finding the reality of that particular outbreak was a lot less fascinating than Fredrik Knudsen made it out to be. Their plague doctors didn't even have beaks!
I was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world is mad.
![[Image: 161109-WlllQ6UaSpqY.png]](https://images.weserv.nl/?url=mbmfiles.com%2FNov2016%2F161109-WlllQ6UaSpqY.png)
Trump 2017: We're all nihilists now.
