The author Josephine Tey came up with a name for these historical myths. She called it Tonypandy.
The few that were manned, likely did, but not turned to Navy frequencies, just the Coast Guard, rescue agencies and of course emergency frequencies.
Stringfellow used a guide wire? Seems appropriate.
Tonypandy - love it.
“A characteristic feature of stories is that they help us to make sense of the world, to position ourselves in it and to bolster our contemporary outlook.”
The whole thing is obviously contrived to make a joke / glurge work.
As @LSLGuy points out, the lights are wrong, and even in the days before GPS and radar, any carrier or battleship would know they are operating close to land.
Radio protocols for calling unidentified objects would make it clear before any exchange started.
It’s obviously a joke.
Yes, it’s an old joke, never expected to have been taken seriously.
So, this story dates back to when Christ was a seaman third class?
No. It dates back to when he was a lighthouse.
According to Leonard Cohen he was both.
Dammit. I thought he was the light on the hill or something.
There is myth that Mozart was buried in a paupers grave, and that no one bothered to attend is false.
First of all Vienna laws dictated that everyone got buried in a common grave with a shroud, no coffin. And almost no one attended anyone actual burials. But in a church service there were like a dozen attendees, and the Freemasons honored him with a event that drew thousands of fellow masons.
“Tear catcher” vials, AKA lacrymatory.
Debunked in detail in this blog entry:
“Another odd Victorian practice, or so the story goes, is that they’d collect their tears of sorrow in a ‘tear catcher’ and use them as a measure of grieving time. Once the tears cried into them had evaporated, the mourning period was over.”
(Also claimed: after the mourning period, the contents were to be dripped onto the departed’s grave)
This other blog researched the phrase and only found evidence of it having been a slang term for handkerchiefs (somewhat more gentile than “snot-locker”). The vials themselves were used for perfumes or smelling salts, etc., or whatever else looked conspicuous on a chatelaine.
Nonetheless, a brisk trade exists online for faux-antique tear-catchers, of lovely ornament.
Good one, thanks!
Also the myth of spiral staircases in castles making it easier for defenders, due to left vs right hand.
Once the enemy has breached your walls and is in your stairways you are pretty much fucked.
Hard to argue with that.
Richard the Lionheart was a GREAT King and John was the worst.
Nope, while John was certainly not great, Richard was one of the worst. Richard, along with his two other Brothers (Henry and Geoffrey) led several rebellions against their own father, which John mostly stayed out of. Richard stayed in England very little during his reign, coming back only to milk it dry of more taxes for his Crusades- the Saladin Tithe for example. He married but produced no heir- reasons unknown (I think too busy fighting but other claim he was gay- but Richard was known to have raped several women). Then Richard again milked England for his ransom, which the people blamed John for (Many Robin Hood stories and films have John the one raising outrageous taxes, not Richard)- said ransom being 2-3 times the crowns income for a year.
John was no prize, sure, but “Lackland” was his appellation as - being the 4th son- he inherited few lands. True, he lost most of the Plantagenets lands in France, but that was mostly due to money troubles- the kingdom having been bled dry by “The GREAT” Richard.
“Blonde, blue-eyed, light-skinned Kalash people in the Hindu Kush are descended from Alexander the Great’s soldiers.”
No they are not. Not even a tiny bit. Not in the least. I wish they’d stop repeating that. Genetic studies of the Kalash reveal no connection to Greece or Macedonia or anywhere else in Europe. Their genetic group is unique to them in the whole world. Their ancestors split off very early from the basal North Eurasian hunter-gatherers many thousands of years before Alexander. Probably came from Siberia. They’ve stayed genetically isolated in the mountains ever since.
I did not know that- thanks. But I do not remember hearing the myth either.
Ugh, you cannot find a single tourist brochure-type mention of Kalash without that phony claim about Alexander’s men. So tired of it. For that matter, the Hunza people are not mysteriously healthy and long-lived; they get just as sick in Hunza as anyplace else, and they don’t have unusual numbers of centenarians. Again, tourist-brochure hype.
Have the various centenarian myths been mentioned in this thread yet? I think they do count as historical, just not ancient history.
The brief summary (from memory) is that various “long lived” people (Hunza, Okinawa, “Mediterranean”, or whatever) are all myths. The various reasons range from poor record keeping, to fraud, to possibly pranking the western scientists.
Poor record keeping is easy to understand. Language barriers, wars, moving country boundaries, even calendar changes mean someone might not know their birth year on the standard calendar.
Fraud is usually stuff like taking over your older relative’s pension, or draft dodging.