Im enjoying the longevity of tumblrs recontextualization style of humor. a seemingly innocuous post followed by like “posts that a gnome would make” or like “are you a phone”
Sometimes it blows my mind that there are people that don’t wear glasses/contacts. Like they can literally see with no aid. Like they wake up and just be out here seeing. What a wild concept.
And people say stuff like ‘lol don’t you hate it when you look up in the middle of the night and see a spider on your ceiling’ like bitch (!!) i could have Nicholas II last czar of Russia hangin from my ceiling fan and i would be none the wiser
I reopened tumblr to follow my favourite fic writer (hi becca it’s meghan hehe) but then fell into the rabbit hole of looking at my own tumblr and now I’m laying in bed chuckling into the darkness at posts from like two years ago
also the fact that my header has links from like six years ago that only work on desktop? bless this mess
My husband’s job primarily employs adult men but there is one (1) teenage girl and my husband said originally he worried she might be a bit of an outcast but instead every man on the crew was like “huh guess I am a dad/older brother now.”
She was in a car crash on the way to work one morning and called my husband to let him know she’d be late and he was like wtf guess I’m gonna be late too because I’m coming to pick you up and then he told his team and they were like I think you mean WE are coming.
Imagine you are a teenage girl probably rushing to get to work and you crash your probably new car and feel absolutely miserable and now you’ll be late to work but then suddenly in the distance a car full of all the adult men you work with just pulls up and is like “we came all the way here to pick you up” the mental image right now is fr.
Apparently she tried to call her dad but it was 3am and he was obviously sleeping so she called my husband and he not only came to find her but fished her glasses out of the hood of the car (she’d dropped them while looking inside), drove her to the hospital, and told her to take the day off. She insisted on coming back to work so he used his lunch break to watch TV with her to make sure she didn’t doze off (concussion risk).
You’ve heard of the Mom friend but my husband is very much the Dad friend. He said when he answered the phone she said “hey please don’t be mad” and he’s never felt such powerful Fatherhood energy in his life.
Girl: *calls for aid*
Every single dad packed into the car:
This is possibly my favorite response to this post
This girls father: Thanks for helping my daughter out guys
There is a method of growing rhubarb known as “forcing” where the plant grows in complete darkness and is tended to in candlelight. It grows so quickly during this process that you can hear it grow. [1, 2]
Thanks! I hate it.
What kind of horror movie shit is this?
P l a n t
I didn’t think it was possible to make a torture chamber for plants and yet
Anyways, here’s a soundcloud link of forced rhubarb:
They ran out of ways to torture people so they invented ways to torture plants.
I’m trying to look up the history, since bean said it was the British, and he’s right since it was first done in 1817 in the Chelsea Physic Garden, originally named the Apothecaries Garden in 1673 by the Worshipful Society of Apothecaries for plants for medicinal uses, which rhubarb was used for as well.
As for the why… I think it was just one of those old things of “why not?”.
Specifically, it’s noted that rhubarb thrives in cold, wet weather which, jokey stereotypes aside, is pretty much what the weather is like in Britain for several months of the year. In addition, it’s noted that rhubarb grows especially well in nitrogen rich soil which is also quite handily found in abundance in Britain.
This all brings us to the whole candlelit harvesting thing. At some point, farmers realised that rhubarb’s trademark tartness could be eliminated if the plant was grown in the dark at a certain stage, and that the act of doing this actually made the stalks of the plant taste sweet, negating the need for sugar to be added to dishes containing it.
With this information in hand, farmers quickly developed and subsequently refined the process of growing rhubarb in the dark. For example, it was eventually realised that rhubarb could be “forced” to grow by subjecting an immature plant to frost, which nobody had ever really tried before since frost is normally a death sentence for many plants. However, with rhubarb, this merely, as one rhubarb expert notes, “makes the rhubarb crown break its winter dormancy and stimulate the conversion of starch stored in the rhubarb crown to glucose”.
Normally this glucose is used by the entire plant during growth. However, by putting the rhubarb in total darkness at a certain stage, the leaves of plant will be anaemic and wilted, resulting in all of that delicious glucose being left in the plant’s stalk, hence why rhubarb grown in this manner is so much sweeter than rhubarb grown via more traditional means.
Naturally, once this was discovered, farmers began growing rhubarb in specially constructed “forcing sheds” which were kept in total darkness and kept warm by whatever means they had available. Prior to this, the rhubarb was and still is simply left in a field for around two years to allow the roots to grow while periodically being covered in nitrogen rich fertiliser. In the 18th century, the fertiliser used was mostly manure and something known as shoddy (essentially discarded woolen fibres) sourced from wool manufacturers. Today, however, farmers mostly use manure which in addition to being cheap and plentiful, stops thieves stealing the rhubarb.
oh fuck that soundcloud link. imagine hearing this in the dead of night
i would be That Guy who throws a rock into the deep dark spooky water with bad vibes that everyone says not to disturb. and yeah obviously i’d die for it but at least i’d die doing what i loved: throwing rocks and causing problems on purpose
