Interesting. I found the house I was born into on the market back in 2013. It isn’t currently on the market, but you can still find the basic info on it. I did grow up in that house, until I was 10, so I do remember it. What I found interesting about the listing is that the “year built” information was wrong, and remains wrong to this day. It says it was built in 1977. I was born in 1968. My parents bought that house and moved into it in 1964 or 65 and they were not the original owners. I think the house was built in 1960, give or take a couple of years. I have no idea how the build date in the real estate system got so far off. Had the year built said 1979 or 1980, I would know what happened. There was a massive F4 tornado that ripped through my hometown on April 10, 1979. It destroyed a large portion of town, and completely destroyed the neighborhood the house I grew up in was in. We had moved across town just a few months earlier. Bizarrely, however, our old house was the only house on that block that survived the tornado, and it survived with very little damage. There were two massive mulberry trees in the back yard, and that’s the direction the tornado came from, so the assumption was that the trees shielded the house. So anyway, had the real estate info said the house was built shortly after that tornado, I would understand the mistake. Every other house on that street had to be rebuilt and were in 1979-1981 or so. But that’s not what it says. It says my old house was built in 1977. And it definitely wasn’t.
https://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-detail/4654-Bunny-Run-Dr_Wichita-Falls_TX_76310_M70012-34764
In the US:
Of course, we’ll be infested with nanoparticles when this happens. I almost fell off my chair laughing.
Is this where I confess that as part of an exchange program my family was in, I’ve been a few times to Lincoln’s home when he was a lawyer in Springfield, the capital of Illinois, and I pretty much had a religious experience each time, holding onto the wood banister to go up the stairs to the bedroom floor and then back again?
No idea why we imbue such psychic memory in physical things, but it’s definitely a thing.
This is a fun little bit of pareidolia on Mars.
That’s one hell of a sneer.
Why UK singers sound American when they sing
It’s been acornagedden here. The oak trees have been dropping acorns on our roof for almost three months now – I swear it averages a couple of them an hour. At that rate, our roof has taken around at least a thousand hits. Amazing it hasn’t caved in by now.
Going out? Don’t forget your hat.
What we know of psychopaths is generally wrong.
Two things I learned:
1 - Being a psychopath is not necessarily a bad thing. It all depends on your intentions.
2 - Donald Trump cannot possibly be a psychopath. Why? Because he has no charm.
People say he does, though. Well, probably not anymore, as he can barely string words together in a semblance of order, but apparently he was charismatically charming in person.
It’s good to hear that personalities can be lumped in such neat categories with rigid correlations. /s
History doesn’t usually repeat itself, but it often rhymes.
Chris French, Head of the Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit at Goldsmiths, University of London, has a hunch about why people find some places to be more haunted than others. “The moment that you say to someone, ‘And this room is supposed to be haunted,’ your whole psychological mindset changes,” he says. “You enter the room and you notice creeks and little changes in temperatures and all sorts of things that you probably wouldn’t have noticed if somebody hadn’t put that in your mind.”
French has dedicated his academic career to discovering what exactly happens to the human mind when we experience ostensibly paranormal events. According to him, an important ingredient to inspiring paranormal experiences is context.
History often repeats itself, I’ve learned from reading lots of history (and other) books. That’s why some folks are just sick of the same shit - like oppression of any given kinds of people, poverty, greed, war, ad nauseum - happening over and over again.
History repeats itself because humanity repeats itself.
Can I say, that as a historian, I’ve never been a fan of that phrase about history repeating. It strikes me as one of those reductive truism that is aimed at ignoring specific contexts and more importantly, our own ability to shape history which a good understanding of history will give us. Human history is not just a record of events, it’s an interpretation of events in a way that helps us to make sense of our present and how we got to our present. Whatever the ruling ideology of the day is often made to seem natural (capitalism as inevitable, for example) and then people use our natural inclination for narrative and pattern recognition to see a repetitious cycle, often imagined as the rise and fall of civilizations.
But I think this gets a bit closer to things - that it’s US that is “repeating” because we look at the past as an inevitable template. We understand that we are shaped by the events of history, and take lessons from the past, but then we repeat those mistakes again by the choices we make, rather than seeing the past as offering a lesson for what we maybe could do different.
I think since we’re, limited in our ability to understand the world given our mortality, our senses, our ability to hold information in our heads, etc, etc, and that compared to the sweep of written history (that against the backdrop of natural history, which goes on for billions of years), means we can only grok so much of the world. That’s the argument, I think, for more collective structures - not just to care for each other, but also depend on each other’s knowledge to help all of us out. This is the larger problem with the ongoing gate-keeping of knowledge production and consumption, especially around the notion copyright and intellectual property - that concepts and ideas can be commodified, rather than be something freely shared for the good of all…
I don’t know if that makes any sense, but basically, I don’t think history repeats, except for when people make that a reality, so… humanity repeats history, because we think it’s inevitable… But we can certainly imagine our way out of that, because we have done so before…