When I was 15 I dated an older boy who cheated on me with his adopted sister’s sister (who was 13 to his 18 years) because I wouldn’t have sex with him. Yes - all round awful. He and his sister-child girlfriend hounded me and my immediate family for months and months for some reason. We had to go to the police in the end. Many years later my nana confessed that she bumped into him in a shopping centre around that time and he pretended he didn’t know her. She chased him down and hit him upside the head with her heavily overloaded handbag while shouting “that’s for being such a little shit to my granddaughter!” Best part - the mates who were with him nearly pissed themselves laughing at him. I’ve often tried to envision the scene and it’s not unlike this photo. Love you nana.
I hadn’t thought about it in such a long time but it sprang to mind the second I saw that photo. And it was really late and my partner was asleep so I decided to share my weird, barely relevant, but kinda wholesome story with some strangers!
I’m assuming they got carbohydrates elsewhere? That hardly seems like enough calories to last a working adult for a week. Also that’s a ton of sugar it’d take me at least a month to go through that amount but also I don’t drink tea like the Brits do.
I would assume most of that sugar is going into cakes and puddings. If you’re only getting one egg a week, it’s probably put to more use in baking than eating straight up.
I get it. I made a concerted effort to stop using sugar in foods, and I’ve been quite successful. Carrots are a great way to add sweetness, so I go through a ton of those orange beauties.
Bread wasn’t rationed but the only bread you could get your hands on was “the national loaf”, which my grandmother informed me was “saltier than unwashed seaweed”.
Potatos and carrots were abundant so lots of people learned to make potato scones and potato dumplings to make their flour stretch further.
The ministry of food developed recipes to help people make their rations last.
Woolton Pie is one that stuck around because it was so versatile.
Bread wasn’t rationed but the only bread you could get your hands on was “the national loaf”, which my grandmother informed me was “saltier than unwashed seaweed”.
lmao
Makes one grateful to live in a more plentiful age!
But it’s not the burned, mutilated bodies that stick with me. It’s the faces of the white men in the crowd. There’s the photo of the lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith in Indiana in 1930, in which a white man can be seen grinning at the camera as he tenderly holds the hand of his wife or girlfriend. There’s the undated photo from Duluth, Minnesota, in which grinning white men stand next to the mutilated, half-naked bodies of two men lashed to a post in the street—one of the white men is straining to get into the picture, his smile cutting from ear to ear. There’s the photo of a crowd of white men huddled behind the smoldering corpse of a man burned to death; one of them is wearing a smart suit, a fedora hat, and a bright smile.
Their names have mostly been lost to time. But these grinning men were someone’s brother, son, husband, father. They were human beings, people who took immense pleasure in the utter cruelty of torturing others to death—and were so proud of doing so that they posed for photographs with their handiwork, jostling to ensure they caught the eye of the lens, so that the world would know they’d been there. Their cruelty made them feel good, it made them feel proud, it made them feel happy. And it made them feel closer to one another.
My favorite part of this picture is the expressions on everyone else’s faces. It’s a nice mixture of “'I’m never getting these hours of my life back” and "hmmm, interesting choice, i wonder how they’ll counter that decision.
The general public tends to make snap impressions. Even if this was how a CVC looked on a real tanker, people weren’t looking at them side by side. The photo op was a very transparent attempt to “look tough” by someone who simply didn’t, and probably shouldn’t have tried to do so.
That aside, his liner at least does seem about a size too large. The liner is massive and because of that, the CVC shell’s lip is about even with the top of his head. As opposed to a properly fitting CVC, the lip of the shell just about touching the top of the eyebrows:
And he might have ended up being a standup dude in another time.
That’s something that I think about often.
The average intelligence of the population of the world isn’t that great. Most people accept whatever reality is instilled in them. If you take a little baby and raise it up to think of some people as animals, they’ll probably never question it, and being surrounded only by people who accept that reality, they’ll never have a reason to question it. I very rarely meet a person who has ever really questioned their reality. It always surprised me when I do.
Most abolitionists came from a world where they were they weren’t exposed to slavery, so they were able to question it. Even then, only around 2% of the population were abolitionists, they just fought really hard for their cause until it rose up high enough to actually be considered for action.
I’m not even putting myself into that small group of people smart enough to question their reality. If I hadn’t grown up with the internet there’s a good chance I’d be a preacher in a Pentecostal holiness church somewhere. That small handful of people who question their reality help spread their questions to the idiot masses.
That’s why I admire people who fight for positive change above all other people. They fight an uphill battle daily. Sometimes they win big and I’m grateful they do.
One of my kids came out as gay. I grew up in a very homophobic environment in the 70s. I would quite often called timid people puffs etc. Sometimes around my kids, because that was how I grew up. You discouraged timid behaviour to stop them getting bullied. Realising one of your kids is gay was a real eye opener for me as to how bad these phrases are.
I would never treat a gay person differently. I just saw it as an expression that was common when I was young, and also in the environment I worked in. For context, I used to play squash with a guy from work, who everyone was convinced was gay. He actually got married in a heterosexual relationship a few years later, but whether he was or wasn’t never bothered me. This ofc doesn’t excuse the practise, it just shows how warped I was.
General Sherman early in life was quite alright with slavery and a casual racist against Black people, and later became an ardent anti-racist (at least, anti-racist with regards to anti-Black racism). He noted, some years after the US CIvil War, when asked by younger folk how so many people could have blithely accepted slavery, that man is more a creature of habit than originality.
lol, in the 70 years the Arabs have been getting you to scream "Genocide", the "Palestinian" headcount has increased a hundred fold. A miracle by anyone's estimation, wouldn't you say.
Arabs haven’t gotten me to scream anything, the Israelis and their actions have. And you’re exactly right, they continue to ethnically cleanse the area like good little Nazis.
I have a camera from… before that era (a cannon retina II from 1937-1939 that my grandfather used during the war), it has a textured film advance knob that’s super easy to use quickly. Someone skilled with their camera could probably get 3-4+ shots if they were prepared for it. If they had a camera with a film advance with the flip-up swivel knob, it could be considerably more.
I used mine for a photography course (everything about it still works flawlessly, just missing some powder coat paint from a couple places) and without much skill I could have managed maybe 2 myself - but analogue cameras were dying when I was growing up, the closest you’d usually come is those disposables or cheap plastic shell cameras, and you couldn’t do much with those. So totally different skillset than I was exposed to.
Jim Meads took the photo. He and his family were neighbors of Bob Sowray, who was supposed to be flying the plane originally. He told Jim he was going to be flying that day, so Jim took his kids to see it.
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