Everyone’s all “ohhh 2026 bring back physical media” until I start talking illuminated manuscripts and then suddenly we’re not on the same page anymore
In the late spring of 1193, Richard I composed a song. It was a ballad of melancholy and abandonment, of frustration and homesickness. The haunting melody accompanied lyrics written in Occitan. It is known, after its first line, as ‘Ja nus hons pris’. It is a song that would survive more than eight centuries.
The lyrics of the two most famous verses are:
Ja nus hons pris ne dira sa raison
adroitement, se dolantement non;
Mes par confort puet il fere chancon.
Moult ai amis, mes povre sont li don;
honte en avront, se por ma reancon
sui ces deus yvers pris.
Ce sevent bien mi homme et mi baron,
Englois, Normant, Poitevin et Gascon,
que je n’avoie si povre compaignon,
cui je laissasse por avoir en prixon.
Je nei di pas por nule retracon,
mes encor suit ge pris.
———
No man imprisoned tells his story
rightfully, as if he were not sorrowful;
but for comfort he can write a song.
I have many friends, but poor are their gifts;
shame on them, if for my ransom
I must be two winters imprisoned.
It is well known by my men and my barons,
English, Norman, Poitevin and Gascon,
that I do not have the poorest companion
whom I would leave to remain in prison.
I don’t say this for their reproach,
but still, I am imprisoned
Dan Jones, ‘The Plantagenets: The Warrior Kings and Queens Who Made England’
You should be able to adopt adults for inheritance purposes like in Ancient Rome. Yeah this is Cathy the 23 year old and she’s my daughter now. She has my last name. When I die she inherits the tire shop.
Cathy will bring glory and dignitas to this America’s Tire franchise location just as I and my father did before her.
i knew a surgeon and he once told me “nobodys insides look like how the textbooks say they will. you never know what you’re going to find in there once you open them up” and that was easily the most ominous thing anyone’s ever said to me
when i was taking my first year anatomy lab, we’d occasionally find a cadaver where things would branch off or attach in the wrong order, and when we’d ask our prof about it, he’d just shrug and say “they must not have read the book”
When my friend was in med school one of the cadavers donated for them to autopsy didn’t have a belly button, just smooth skin.
In the past 10 years of teaching in an anatomy lab, I have seen:
- A donor with a scrotum the size of my head. When we opened it up, we discovered it was a MASSIVE inguinal hernia and a good 1.5 ft of intestine were trapped down there.
- A donor with situs inversus totalis, whose organs were a mirror image of what we normally see (ie their heart pointed right and their liver was on the left, just for starters)
- A donor whose right common carotid artery branched off the aorta waaay over on the left hand side of the body and crossed alllll the way back across the thorax to get where it needed to be.
- A donor with 4 lobes for their right lung (should only be 3). We named the 4th lobe the Lisa Loeb, but all of the students were too young to appreciate our sparkling wit.
- A shocking variety of penile and breast implants. Y'all would not believe the number of different ways science has come up to counteract gravity.
- A couple of cases of ectopic kidneys, where a kidney didn’t rise to its typical position just deep to the lowest ribs and instead stayed in the pelvis.
There is probably some other stuff that I am forgetting. Take home point is: the human body is weird and wonderful and you should learn more about yours!
….duuude.
Spleens Georg
14???????
My contribution: client co pinched nerve in L side of neck. I asked about health hx; she said, “I’ve got some extra ribs on that side.”
me: “some?” (!!!!!??!?!??!???)
Some was 2, but that’s crazy enough.
Yeah, I don’t discover the anatomical weirdness but I’ve had clients come in with extra ribs, missing ribs, extra vertebra, accessory muscles (that’s when you have duplicates - sometimes fine, sometimes not), bones connected where they shouldn’t be (spoiler: if your lumbar spine is connected to your hip, it Causes Problems), all sorts of stuff. Bodies are weird!
More from the notes
This made me remember that I had a friend in high school who had one thumb that was like half an inch shorter than the other. Not sure how that happened.
even the things you never think about are a spectrum
So, you know how certain Christian missionaries are trained to act in a very obnoxious way, so that most people they preach to will reject them outright, so they feel like the world hates them for being Christian and they can only be friends with fellow Christians? You know that thing?
I think as activists, we sometimes need to stop and ask ourselves whether we’re acting like those missionaries. I think this type of behavior is a little more ingrained into our society than some of us realize, and some of us have internalized it without realizing what it’s actually meant to do.
OP I know that this is probably a different direction than you were going, but genuinely this advice would do so so much to help people not fall into secular political cults.
A lot of high control groups use this tactic to isolate their members. It’s absolutely not just evangelizing Christians. New age wellness cults often encourage their members to make outlandish and offensive accusations regarding the mental and physical health of other people or their children, because they know that the backlash their members receive will reinforce the idea that the “mainstream” simply has no room for people who like crystals and essential oils. White supremacist cults will seed the vocabulary of new recruits with Nazi dog whistles that fly over those recruits heads, specifically so that they will get clocked as possible neo-Nazis and shunned by anyone who might offer them another perspective and help them to get out before it’s too late. And a lot of left-leaning political cults strongly encourage members to share their views in the most inflammatory ways possible, and then say “you see? everyone outside of this small circle is evil and cannot be relied on” when, inevitably, that produces bad results.
Sometimes I think that activists fall into these patterns completely accidentally, either because they were raised in culturally Christian evangelical environments and never unpacked it, or else because they just aren’t any good at approaching things in a non-inflammatory way and no one’s shown them how.
…But sometimes, these structures emerge in activist circles because those circles are legitimately becoming high control groups.
I think some things to watch out for especially in this regard are:
Are you being directed to behave in an extremely hostile and alienating way? (even if it’s by someone who you trust!)
Does the group you are in immediately shut down any conversation about the effectiveness of an antagonistic strategy? In particular, do they shut that conversation down using in-group stock phrases?
Is experiencing harsh rejection seen as something of a rite of passage?
Do you receive more validation from the group you are in after you have been rejected by someone outside the group than at any other time?
Have you ever been concerned that the antagonistic strategy you are using hurt someone you cared about, only to be quickly advised by members of the group that that person was toxic and that you should actually completely cut them out of your life?
These to me are all pretty significant red flags about the group in question, whatever the specific thing that brings people together there is. If you start noticing them in a group that you are a part of, be that an in-person activist circle or a Discord server or anything in between, take a step back and seriously consider the possibility that the good thing that you joined is turning into something different, and possibly dangerous.
In the words of Jonestown survivor Deborah Layton, “Nobody joins a cult. You join a self-help group, a religious movement, a political organization. They change so gradually, by the time you realize you’re entrapped – and almost everybody does – you can’t figure a safe way back out.”
Previous poll remade because I forgot a whole century the first time, this is what I get for doing this on mobile LOL
Think of the oldest song that you know by heart — can sing the melody and any words it has from memory, without looking it up.
Search the name of it in Wikipedia, looking for when it was first documented with both the melody and (if applicable) lyrics you know, together.
When is it ACTUALLY from? (If it’s way newer than you think, you can’t switch to an older song. Answer based on this one you initially THOUGHT was the oldest.)
I am a music historian with a PhD and the point of this poll is that the vast majority of people don’t actually know much music from pre-1500s or so, and most music that people think is ancient or medieval is actually far more recent.
There are no options before the first millennium CE because the Epitaph of Seikilos is the oldest complete work of music found anywhere in the world, and it’s around 2000 years old. If you think you know something older than that, either only the text was written down (e.g. Biblical, Vedic and Greco-Roman hymns) or it only exists in fragments (e.g. the Hurrian hymns and Orestes stasimon). Which is to say, it does not count for this.
If it fits into a few of these potential time frames, pick the one that’s considered the most likely. If historians genuinely have no fucking clue, THEN you can go back and try with another really old song.
Boost this one please! Now that I’ve finally got it right and the spread actually makes some sense, I’d like to see what happens when more people take it :)
