I only saw the play. Should look up the movie.
I got the reference. I’m old.
From what I can tell, the man-in-the-moon marigold belongs to tagetes erecta, which is pretty damn diverse (but not as infamorphic as the cabbage species). It comes in a variety of colorations, though I have not seen that partcular name used other than here.
It does appear that t. erecta has more than a smidge of food value for humans and other critters. At one time, it was being fed to chickens in pursuit of more colorful yolks.
Still is, by anyone who cares about the quality of their eggs rather than just the quantity. They taste better, too.
Something I totally did not appreciate as a 6-16 year old. I grew up wondering why the “steam engine in playground” was removed, not replaced, when it got too rusty and torn.
When my dad started out, Engineers were sometimes teamed with Computers. Marrying the Computer was not unknown, like Doctors marrying Nurses.
Irradiation induced mutation was one of the theories used to try to reconcile the known age of the earth with Darwinian evolution and Lyell gradualism. It didn’t work: collapse of the Gradualism hypothesis occurred in the 1970s, with the reaction causing significant cultural/political/legal results in the USA that are still being felt.
Irradiation continues as a way of stressing plants, like water starvation or freezing or burning. It’s used to investigate the kinds of mutations you get following stress events. I don’t think it’s still used as a way of creating random mutation, to see “what turns up”. That’s what they were trying in the 60s.
Irradiation as a means of providing high rates of mutation made its way into popular culture, with stories/movies/TV shows like “Spider Man”.
A bullet lodged in a human body can emerge through the skin on its own, years later. In the case of this British woman…
(Spoilered for those grossed out by new holes in someone’s body)
She woke up one morning to find the sheets soaking wet. Naturally she thought she must have wet the bed for some reason, but then she realized the bedding was wet not with urine, but with blood. Then she noticed the small, heavy lump of metal lying next to her on the sheet.
Years before she had been shot, though she doesn’t say how that happened. The doctors had said it would be too risky to remove the bullet, which was near her spine and inhibiting movement on her right side. So she lived with the bullet for years until it just… came out. It was a happy ending for her, because she regained the full use of her right side immediately. But still, it horrifies me that something like that bullet can just ooze its own way out of the body. It’s possible that the woman was so physically impaired that it was difficult for her to make regular doctor visits. I doubt that bullet moved the entire distance in one night.
Under better circumstances, the doctors would presumably have noticed that the bullet’s position was changing, and recommended surgery when it was sufficiently far away from the spine.
IDK, when I read those testimonials about thank you God for this wonder I was paralized but now I see my instinct is to be very very sceptical of the whole story. If the bullet is the same shown in the pics it was not even pointy, I can’t see how it would pierce skin and exit the body as described.
Was the determined little bullet eventually reunited with it’s gun?
I can understand that, but FWIW some of the people commented claiming to have had similar experiences. The workings of living organisms can be very strange. For example, if I had never heard of Guinea worm infestation, I’d find it hard to believe if someone told me about it just now.
Foreign body migration is a well documented phenomenon but I’m unconvinced it is actually a process for expelling said items. These objects can just as easily move toward a vital organ. It’s just an accident of circumstance when one makes its way to the epidermis.
I recently heard of a couple of bands on the pub/club circuit in the north of England, usually Yorkshire-ised parodies of pop songs, with the intriguing names
The Everly Pregnant Brothers
The Bar-Steward Sons of Val Doonican[1]
And don’t get me started on Dickie and Dottie…
Popular singer of the 70s/80s, think Perry Como light, all knitwear and Irish folk/family-friendly humour ↩︎
I have been aware that there is a book called Culpeper’s Herbal for, ehh, a few decades at least; but I knew nothing of its history before today.
It starts with the creation by royal charter of two societies, The Royal College of Physicians in 1518; and the Worshipful Society of Apothecaries in 1617.
The former took control of medical practice away from the church and made the profession somewhat self-regulating; and the latter undermined (or at least was seen as undermining) the power of the RCP and handing at least some power to apothecaries.
One result of this was publication a year later (1618) by the RCP of The Pharmacopoeia Londinensis (which had been in prep for some time, in fact). This work - in Latin, naturally - defined approved medicines and thus limited what apothecaries could do. (It’s one of the antecedents of The British Pharmacopoeia).
Enter Nicholas Culpeper, a kind of guerrilla physician (and astrologer), who only went and translated the Pharmacopoeia into English, thereby outraging the medical establishment.
In 1640, Culpeper married Alice Field, the 15-year-old heiress of a wealthy grain merchant, which allowed him to set up a pharmacy at the halfway house in Spitalfields, London, outside the authority of the City of London, at a time when medical facilities in London were at breaking point. Arguing that “no man deserved to starve to pay an insulting, insolent physician” and obtaining his herbal supplies from the nearby countryside, Culpeper could provide his services free of charge. This and a willingness to examine patients in person rather than simply examining their urine (in his view, “as much piss as the Thames might hold” did not help in diagnosis), Culpeper was extremely active, sometimes seeing as many as 40 patients in a morning. Using a combination of experience and astrology, he devoted himself to using herbs to treat his patients…[snip]…Culpeper saw medicine as a public asset, not a commercial secret, and the prices physicians charged as too high compared with the cheap, universal availability of nature’s medicine.
All of this leads to the subsequent publication of The English Physitian; Or, an Astrologo-Physical Discourse of the Vulgar Herbs of This Nation: Being a Compleat Method of Physick. aka Culpeper’s Herbal, a kind of home-doctoring guide..
This is very far from a complete history of Culpeper and his times - I’m trying to keep it brief. The whole story is fascinating, and I’m still reading up on it myself. Here’s a few links.
Culpeper’s herbal The English Physitian and its debt to apothecary John Parkinson - PMC.
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Today I learned that foosball is not just a casual game played for fun in bars, school activity centers, and workplace break rooms.
In fact, there are formal international tournaments, with official rules and a governing body to oversee and sanction events and record tournament outcomes.
I learned this because our local news has a story about my country of residence winning silver in the Table Football World Cup, held this year in Spain.
So if you’re a back-of-the-bar competitor with dreams of international celebrity, take heart, because there’s a sport made for you.
I used to play each weekend when I lived in Belgium, we were quite good. Well, good: Carlos and Nicole were good, Cheo and I were mere two- or three-trick ponies. But we had a lot of fun.
One day we played agaist a team that played in the local amateur league that happened to drop by our usual bar. The sport is still made for me, I like sports where you can drink a beer while playing. But forget about international or even local celebrity, professional level, never mind World Champoinship. No chance. Not in a million years. It is amazing what people who know what they are doing and have practised methodically are capable of with those little balls. I was flabbergasted. I don’t think we managed to score even a single goal. Still was funny, in a humbling way.
But it is nice to know Luxemburg ever became world champions at anything! Congratulations for the silver medal ten years later! That is quite an achievement for such a small country.
Yup. I had a friend who played Foosball at the national level. He had a tournament quality table in his house, and I learned to play there. I was good - he was amazing.
I recall one weekend, he had just gotten back from Nationals - Open Doubles, where he and his teammate placed top 10. My friend and I beat them in a friendly game, but he was being kind 
Every now and then I end up somewhere with a table, and play around. It’s fun to see how much/how little I can still do.
I thought the whole of Foosball was to rotate the little guys as fast as you can hoping the ball ends up in the opposite goal. You are telling me there’s actual strategy and skill to it? will wonders never cease?.
(The above mindset may explain why nobody wanted me in their Foosball team)
(Calling it Foosball is weird, “Metegol” should be properly translated as “Scoregoal”, what is this “Foosball” thing?, on the other hand it could be worse, I heard in heathen parts of the Spanish-speaking world it’s called “Futbolín” which is, frankly, an horrible name)
That’s actually not allowed, even according to the pub rules I’m familiar with.
ETA: I’m not 100% sure, but ISTR that “foosball” comes from German “Fußball”.
Yeah, I remember that, but our extremely amateur games did not strictly enforce that rule, if at all.