![thestoutorialist:
spacewatching:
Melba Roy heads the group of NASA mathematicians, known as “computers,” who track the Echo satellites. Roy’s computations help produce the orbital element timetables by which millions can view the satellite from Earth as it passes overhead.
[In the days when computers wore skirts - ed]
I have a collage on my wall with this image in it](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m7ovb2mT3Z1rsjtoco1_500.jpg)
one time @courtyardhound and I had a musical history blog that stopped after the first entry because neither of us could clear enough time from our schedule to do good recordings, but the second entry was going to be on Molotov and Ribbentrop, a Producers-style musical duet
it was
hilarious.
It still gets stuck in my head. I’d be embarrassed about that but let’s be real, if you’d written a song with the lyrics best of friends and best of luck/until you Nazis try and fuck us you would do the same thing.
Anyway, the point is, Molotov cocktails are called that as the funniest piece of black humor ever to turn into a noun. The USSR was cluster-bombing Finland and Molotov, the Commissar for Foreign Affairs, was claiming internationally that they were merely dropping rations. The Finns promptly dubbed cluster bombs “Molotov bread baskets” and when the resistance began to use homemade incendiaries in ex-bottles of vodka, someone really funny suggested that they were “a drink to go with the food”, i.e., Molotov cocktails.
![Mary Frith or Moll Cutpurse (c. 1584 – July 26, 1659) was a notorious pickpocket and fence of the English underworld…
Mary Frith, Wikipedia
“See here the PRESIDESS o’th’ pilfering Trade, Mercuryes second, Venus’s only Maid, Doublet and breeches in a un’form dress, The Female Hummurist [?] a Kickshaw messe Here’s no attraction that your fancy greets, But if her FEATURES please not[,] read her FEATS.”
The most complete account of her life available is from Charles Whibley’s “A Book of Scoundrels.” I would describe it as “probably lies”, but also fabulous.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lyqjrsZJlG1qdfzjzo1_r1_500.jpg)
![ashelisms:
archiemcphee:
Here’s an awesome little piece of history:
Archaeologists in the Burnt City have discovered what appears to be an ancient prosthetic eye. What makes this discovery exceptionally awesome is the striking description of how the owner and her false eye would have appeared while she was still alive and blinking:
[The eye] has a hemispherical form and a diameter of just over 2.5 cm (1 inch). It consists of very light material, probably bitumen paste. The surface of the artificial eye is covered with a thin layer of gold, engraved with a central circle (representing the iris) and gold lines patterned like sun rays. The female remains found with the artificial eye was 1.82 m tall (6 feet), much taller than ordinary women of her time. On both sides of the eye are drilled tiny holes, through which a golden thread could hold the eyeball in place. Since microscopic research has shown that the eye socket showed clear imprints of the golden thread, the eyeball must have been worn during her lifetime. The woman’s skeleton has been dated to between 2900 and 2800 BCE.
So she was an extraordinarily tall woman walking around wearing an engraved golden eye patterned with rays like a tiny sun. What an awesome sight that must have been.
[via TYWKIWDBI]
BOSS CAVEWOMAN.
This is absolutely awesome, but just for the record, 2900 =/= cavemen; the Burnt City, as its name suggests, was a serious conurbation. A brief observation of this list might clear it up! Invention of phonemic writing, invention of the 365-day year, dynasties established in Vietnam, Egypt and China have not even noticed that it is supposed to be the dawn of human history because they’ve been too busy existing for a couple thousand years (Egypt) or five hundred years (China).](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lutwf7hL811qzfsnio1_500.jpg)
