I have that soundtrack and film. Anger’s interesting; he used colored filters and lights to create atmosphere better than most. His use of color always reminded me of the old Sinbad films, but the content got right to the heart of the weird stuff that you felt was always lurking behind some of the imagery in the…

I remember those, and I remember you from actually going to the Dakotas when I was a kid and visiting some of those places, but we didn’t make it to Pine Ridge. My dad, trying to give us that authentic experience, once drove off-road and up to a bison herd so he could get a better photo. The bison surrounded the car…

They might be both. No one knows who commissioned them; the person who ordered and paid for them did it under an assumed name (an version of Rosicrucian, R.C. Christian), and the one person he worked with promised to take his identity to the grave.

That’s right — who’d have thought Nietzsche, of all people, could feel that much compassion for an animal?

Two podcasts you might want to check out:

So many, so many. One of the crazier ones might be James Shelby Downard’s King Kill/33, where the assassination of JFK was a Masonic re-enactment of an ancient ritual where the leader was slaughtered for the growth of the land. It’s a study in over-reading coincidences, blended with something like Jessie L. Weston.

#FACT

Heh. I don’t know if this is still the case, but when I was in Ireland, they had to ban stag and hen parties from Temple Bar in Dublin. They were doing what one guy I worked with called “assholing the place,” getting so drunk and doing so much damage that the pubs were losing more money than they were taking in from…

I was wondering about that — the stretch of land from the Dakotas down to New Mexico must have plenty of reservations. Made me wonder if fast food places just hadn’t infiltrated there (which might not be a bad thing).

Yeah, that low alcohol content keeps popping up in this thread. Personally I’d rather drink that low-alcohol beer than the rice-infused, over-carbonated swill that emerged in the 1980’s.

I’ll just assume you didn’t read Crime & Punishment, and/or don’t recognize that Dostoevsky was entertaining similar ideas through Raskolnikov, even though Nietzsche and Dostoevsky came down on different sides of the morality issue. Because anyone who doesn’t recognize that should be barred from commenting due to…

Yeah, different times. And England’s maintained a good boxing tradition that we didn’t in the U.S. (as far as I know, there was still boxing in schools until relatively recently). I tried looking up 19th century life expectancy stats for the two countries but could only find global averages. (Granted, I only looked…

Would I be right in saying that our discovery of brewing was a major cornerstone of allowing us to create larger, sustainable societies? Not only by giving us access to cleaner, safer water but allowing us to break social barriers through (for want of a better term) drunken bonding?

It is! It is two words! I’ve taught college freshman for years, and they still have difficulty with that.

I know one problem they did have — especially in Rome — were wine cups made with lead. That’s not great for your mental or physical health.

And didn’t ancient Egyptian laborers get paid, at least in part, in beer? It was an excellent way to preserve grain/bread before the era or refrigeration.

Nope, not talking out of your arse — the beer wasn’t always all that alcoholic (or consistent in quality or ingredients). The Germans were ahead of their time with the Reinheitsgebot, those laws that regulated the purity and limited the ingredients that could go into beer.

People have been drinking water, bioling water and filtering water for a looooooong time

Laudanum was also used for things like headaches and on teething babies’ gums, so it wasn’t just for “women’s issues.” But yeah, I mentioned the industrial pollution to someone else, as well as population density. People were just packed in more densely in Europe than they were in other parts of the world, and that…

What’d he say about Leibniz?