Growing up, a ‘brodie’ meant putting your foot down on your motorcycle, and spinning the rear tire around, making circles with your foot as the pivot point. There’s an old (short?) movie from the '30s on TCM where a woman wants to commit suicide by jumping off of a bridge. A man says something like, ‘Why would you want to do a brodie off the bridge?’ I understood it in context, but I’d never heard ‘brodie’ used that way. So I looked it up.
I learned there is a plausible argument to be made that Edward Aveling murdered Karl Marx’s daughter Eleanor. The verdict at the time, and held by many biographers of Eleanor still, was suicide, perhaps due to despondency over Aveling’s terrible treatment of her. And he was undoubtedly a shit. But a new book suggests he chloroformed her, intubated her, and administered the prussic acid that killed her. The evidence is not overwhelming; the most pressing point is the autopsy noted Eleanor had a perforation in her stomach likely caused by prussic acid. This suggests she didn’t drink it but that it was administered through a tube. Aveling was a doctor and had the knowledge to administer the chloroform found in the house and intubate Eleanor.
Watched a 3 hour program about the JonBenet Ramsey killing. It isn’t something I really followed, but I learned that:
The parents didn’t consent to a police interview until 4 months after the murder.
The parents swore that their daughter went straight to bed after arriving home that night and they had no contact with her. But the ME found undigested food (pineapple) that must have been eaten just before death, and the Mom’s fingerprints were the only ones on the bowl/utensil from which it was served.
The SOD* theory which seems to appear in every murder defense asserted a stranger’s entry through a downstairs window – which crime scene photos showed covered by old cobwebs (impossible to go thru and leave them intact).
The parents wrote and sold a book about their daughter’s killing.
I knew none of these things, as I hadn’t paid much attention. I had no idea how creepy and weird her parents were. Any questions I personally had about the poor kid’s fate have been answered.
Not today, but in the past few days, I found out about an NGO organization called “Clitoraid”, where gynecologists go to areas plagued by female genital mutilation, and do their best to reverse the procedure and train local doctors. The best known participating surgeon is the prominent gender reassignment surgeon Dr. Marci Bowers, who used to be Dr. Mark Bowers.
Now the story gets REALLY weird.
Clitoraid was founded by the Raelians, a Canada-based UFO and sex cult. Dr. Bowers says she is not a Raelian, but some of the doctors involved with the organization are.
I saw this thread this morning: I fell on my keister yesterday. Having taken German in high school and college, I thought it was spelled wrong. In German, ie makes the ee sound, and ei makes the eye sound. (Ei, by the way, is the German word for egg. But I digress.)
I found out that Kiste, pronounced kee-steh, is a German word for a satchel/suitcase/chest, especially one secured with straps and a lock. It’s from the Latin ciste, from which we get the English word chest. Kiste, meaning buttocks, is recorded in Hans Ostwald’s Rinnsteinsprache (Gutter Speech ), a slang dictionary from 1906. The English word keister is attested to in 1881, as a name of a certain conman.
So while it’s not clear how keister, as in a locked satchel, became a slang word for the buttocks, it is plain to see how the English word keister, pronounced kee-ster came from the similarly-pronounced German word Kiste.
I just learned half an hour ago that “onanism” (rightly) means coitus interruptus in English. I wanted to make a clever post in the “lascivious Bible passages” thread where someone posted about the sin of Onan, about how or why “onanism” became synonymous with masturbation, but gladly googled the word before. My confusion stemmed from the fact that in my native German, “Onanismus” and “onanieren” in fact mean masturbation and masturbate, which I’ve always found odd.
Likewise, “Sodomie” in German doesn’t mean anal sex like sodomy in English, but sex with animals. Also prone to lead to much confusion between English and German speakers, but I’ve known this difference for a long time.
I hope it’s ok to cheat a little and share something I learned within the last week. The phrase “I have a dream” was not originally supposed to be in Dr. King’s famous speech. He’d been using the phrase a lot, so he was advised not to use it again. At some point while he was giving the speech Marian Anderson said, “tell them about the dream, Martin.”
