I post anything and everything. Don't expect to see any consistency in my posting habits. I have a bad habit of forgetting to tag stuff because I probably have ADHD or something. I've been on this website since Superwholock reigned supreme.
hi, gentle reminder that you can reclaim slurs for yourself but not for the entire community! Please don’t say g*y when talking about other fags, it is a harmful word that has been used against the queer community to hurt mlm, use less harmful words like cocksucker, faggot, queer, and fairy! Thank you ✨
how long until someone takes this one seriously I wonder
To everyone who read g*y as goy, you know what sure new discourse just dropped, calling people goy is homophobic now and you must call non Jewish people fags that’s the rule I’m sure we can wrap the slur discourse enough to lead to that conclusion
TL;DR - The third thing was Sugar. Not mustard, not paprika, not dried herbs, not something lost in the mists of time.
It was sugar, and there’s historical proof.
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ETA: I’d put about 70% of this post together before @dduane said “Have you seen this?”
“This” was from @jesters-armed, in firstwith my notions about The Fifth Element Third Condiment, and even a mention that the posts were “…a bit long(ish)”.
Ahem.
Yes they were, with no change here. You have been warned. :->
Well, okay, there’s one change. The pix in this post are new and, combined with the illustrations in older posts, go even further towards confirming that what I once called a theory, I now regard as Fact.
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Here are a couple of 19th-century table caddies, proper name “cruet sets”. Take a look at the labels. They answer the “what was it?” question asked by that TikTok in a single word.
Sugar.
Not just in English, Spanish too.
Azucar.
Even without labels to tell them apart and even when the containers were of matched size and shape, sugar-casters always had larger holes than pepper-shakers.
Sometimes not much larger, as here…
…but usually, like those below and above, more than big enough to ensure no confusion between sugar and pepper.
A container of similar shape with no holes, as in the set above, held mustard.
Mustard was never a shaker seasoning; it didn’t work that way. Its spiciness doesn’t activate until the dry “mustard flour” was mixed with water, vinegar, beer or wine and left to stand for several minutes.
This produced a runny-to-stiff paste which was at first transferred from pot to plate on the point of a knife, but soon got its own dedicated spoon.
There’s a slot in this mustard-pot’s side for a spoon, and the set pictured above may also have such a slot, unfortunately facing away from the camera.
A matched spoon became part of any mustard-pot set…
…and was such a uniform size that “mustard-spoon” was a recipe measurement along with dessert-spoon, tea-spoon, salt-spoon and even cayenne-spoon. (I’ve posted about cayenne as a table condiment elsewhere).
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Where’s the salt-shaker in those sets?
When sets like those were in common use, salt-shakers weren’t.
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So how did people use salt if it wasn’t in a shaker?
In the Middle Ages and Renaissance salt was put out in ornate dishes called a Salt which were often spectacular works of art.
This was placed at the top end of the table where important people sat; those seated further down were “below the salt”.
Later, and still nowadays in formal settings, salt went into smaller dishes - salt-cellars - which like mustard had their own spoons. These were set on the table between two or four guests.
They took salt with the spoon, and instead of sprinkling it all over, they made a little heap of salt on the side of their plate and added pinches as required with finger and thumb.
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The same side-of-plate thing is done with mustard.
English mustard is extremely pungent *, far more so than the Grey Poupon which TikTok Guy slurps so casually off his finger. A little can go a long way, too much can be overpowering, and slathering it over an entire plateful of food can make that food inedible.
(* I’m aware Chinese and Russian mustards are even hotter; they’re not relevant here.)
I once had the educational (okay, also entertaining) experience of watching a friend from the USA putting Colman’s English on their hot-dog as if it was French’s Yellow, then taking a bite. Even then they were lucky, because mustard is hottest when made fresh and the shop-bought from a jar was much weaker than it might have been.
“Made mustard” of the kind which went onto Regency, Victorian and Edwardian tables packs quite a punch, and dishes of that period was far from bland; it took two world wars and their associated rationing to give British food its rep for being dull.
Here’s an example of how mustard is used.
Even though it’s from a jar and feeble by comparison with fresh-made, it’s likely that most of this will remain untouched when the meal is over.
Jeremiah Colman, founder of Britain’s best-known mustard company, was only half-joking when he claimed that the firm’s excellent sales record, and his own fortune, came from not from mustard eaten but from what was left on plates.
Whether on the plate or on the food, mustard for table use never came out of a shaker.
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The TikTok cites Bill Bryson, an American writer who, though living in the UK and presumably familiar with local grocery shops, failed to connect the proper name of the shaker (“caster” - TikTok Guy uses the name himself) with a grade of sugar sold by Irish / UK shops right now.
Here are the three standard grades - coarse, medium and fine. Note what the middle grade is called.
“"Caster” has become a single-word description for “fine-grain quick-melting fast-mixing general-purpose cooking-and-baking sugar” but is a literal description both of how it was used (“cast” as a verb) and the container (“caster”) it was in.
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TikTok Guy mentions the “expense and effort” of using sugar.
Expense:
From the Middle Ages up to the early 1600s sugar was indeed expensive and only for the rich.
Good Queen Bess’s teeth were in an appalling state because of her sugar consumption, and less-wealthy people sometimes blackened their (healthy) teeth, to suggest they too could afford enough sugar to cause rich-people tooth decay.
However, increased use of slave labour on sugar plantations meant the end product became more and more affordable, and by the mid-1700s sugar was no longer “a luxurious delicacy”. It became a household staple, enough that in 1833 politician William Cobbett ranted about how overindulgence in sugary tea had sapped the vitality of the English working class.
His remedy was home-brewed beer, and lots of it (!)
Effort:
TikTok Guy uses the word as if it’s something out of the ordinary, and seems unaware of how much physical labour - from preparing and cooking food to fetching water to washing dishes to tending the fire or range - went on every single day in a pre-modern-gadgets kitchen.
For instance, before electrical ease or hand-cranked convenience, whipping cream to thickness or beating egg-whites stiff enough for meringues meant thrashing away with a bundle of twigs “until it be enough”, however long that took.
By comparison, breaking down a sugar-loaf was quick and easy, especially since there was a tool for the purpose called “sugar nips”.
There’s a set in one of the TikTok photos, though TikTok Guy didn’t comment on them. He may not have known what they were.
Once nipped off, sugar chunks were reduced to the required texture with a pestle-and-mortar, exactly as was done with every other crushable ingredient in that period kitchen.
This and everything else wasn’t effort in the way TikTok Guy thinks; it was just - especially if a mortar was involved - The Daily Grind.
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Conclusion:
I’ve posted about sugar casters before, and the first time (six years ago) was amusingly cautious:
So that third container was IMO for sugar.
Since then, backed with increasing amounts of hard visual proof as shown here and elsewhere, I’ve gone from caution to Certainty.
The “mystery” third container in table cruets was for SUGAR, with enough historical evidence in the form of specifically labelled and shaped containers to confirm it beyond doubt.
embracing the patterned ambiguity of gender and sex as more or less social constructs can grant you so much more precision in thinking about so many concepts in science.
like, if there was a study (and I’m just making this up as an example) showing women suffer from mosquito bites more than men do
you could do the ~“Gender Critical”~ thing and go “see!? mosquitoes get it!!”
OR
you could go “that’s interesting” and start asking more questions, like:
is this data self-reported? controlled?
were they studying the women or the mosquitoes?
did the study use methods that would let you tell the difference between “being bitten more often” and “noticing bites more often”?
did the study include any trans people and were their results any different? if yes were they on HRT or not?
how similar were the men and women in aspects other than gender? do we know their social class, jobs, diets, blood types?
because in fact the study i made up just then could lead to a huge variety of conclusions. from my description above you can’t tell the difference between studies that show:
mosquitoes are attracted to people with higher estrogen levels
mosquitoes are opportunistic and women spend more time near mosquito habitats for sociocultural reasons
every gender gets bitten about the same amount but men are socialised to pay less attention to physical discomfort so more of them don’t notice minor bites compared to women (and by more we mean like 60-40, this is a bell curve thing)
we accidentally got heaps of women in the study that have the mosquito’s favourite blood type and not so for the men, oops
mosquitoes are attracted to people with more x and y in their diets, which is currently mostly women for, again, largely sociocultural reasons
etc etc etc
you’re just not going to understand actual Gender Science, and therefore reality, if you can’t put “hmm, but what do they mean by woman this time” in your mental toolkit in a relatively neutral way.
Honestly this is a great way of presenting the kind of scientific literacy that is needed in an era of clickbait headlines and sound bites and facts that turn into memes; so much science “news” as reported by mass media distills nuanced studies into easily quotable and shocking one-liners that generally ignore the context behind the statistic.
Allow me to make use of tumblr’s new longpost shortening feature for a moment to say HEY… the comic we’ve been working on for the past year is live with *11 episodes* you can read RIGHT NOW.
Are you into Tech-Fantasy?Trans protagonists?Dragons?Comedy? …Romance? An oddball team of not-quite-knights chasing after a God’s last wish?
I made this post back on april 2022. Season 1 was completed just yesterday! :’) 💖 You can now read the whole first saga, for free, at any moment.
Not to toot our own horn, but I think it’s pretty damn good.
I’ll toot the creators’ horn for them: this comic is so good. Soooooo freaking good. It’s so good I recommend it to coworkers.
Yes. So good I recc’d it IRL.
And I’ve recc’d it here before, and I’ll do it again, I’m sure. Now’s a great time to jump on, though, cause you’ve got a bunch to binge but not so much that it feels overwhelming.
Seriously. It’s so good.
I binged the entire thing in like two and a half hours and I gotta say dear fucking lord this comic slaps. PLEASE give it a whirl it’s phenomenal!
My favorite cosmic horror has always been “It isn’t that they are so large and incomprehensible that they do not care about us any more than you care about a single flatworm in the river muck of some Siberian woodland”.
It’s been “This magnificent thing which defies explanation and is so grand and big it refuses to obey such tiny concepts like physics and reality cares about us so much. It loves us. It is fascinated by us endlessly. It wants to bring us closer to it, to talk to it, to hold conversations. But it cannot understand us. And we cannot understand it. And so it is terrible and dangerous.”
Cosmic horror where the haunted house loves you so completely that it creates a door to a perfectly black hallway in your living room. You can walk down it for five and a half chilly minutes. Cosmic horror where your lonely domicile is so grateful that you live within its bones that it grows new ones for you.
It flexes its wallpaper tendons. It splays its stony foundations out for you, home-liver. It takes itself and it builds a home from which you are safe from all the outside world which could harm and age you. Here in these eternal attics and parlors and boudours and stairwells, the house will love you so deeply that no one will ever see you again.
Horror which is scary because the incomprehensible doesnt care about you will always amount to nothing when you know about horror which is scary because the incomprehensible cares about you in a way which you cannot tell it you do not want.
Isn’t this just explaining an ant’s relationship to a human? Or a fish in a fishtank?
No. You do not feel a deep and compelling love for a random ant on the sidewalk and want to do everything possible in your power to try and show it how much you love it. You also comprehend perfectly what a fish in a fishtank needs to survive and thrive, and what might cause it harm or distress. Also, many fish are intelligent enough to recognize their human carers and form relationships with them as such.
This is a post explaining the Chicxulub impactor’s relationship with gravity.
I spent so much of my life romanticizing the Great and Powerful Enormity of the Sea, reading about the salt and the sweat of the sailors straining to haul the sails or anchor while dreading the monsters in the cold, icy deep fathoms below…and now you tell me that a fathom is only 6 feet deep -
Six feet is still more than enough for a grave.
Hi, that is the most metal addition you could have possibly made to this post
I was just thinking about the second comment when I scrolled down and saw it. :->
Alternately if you have one of these gadgets…
…then “May I take your coat, sir?” becomes:
Shoves you into drum and rolls you under heavy weight until your hide comes off of its own accord.
(This was done to criminals during a couple of periods of history, though with a spiked barrel instead of a silicone tube.)
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As @dduane has said when looking at any number of kitchen gadgets: “The difference between a cooking appliance and a torture device just depends on how they’re used.”
Or indeed, how they’re introduced. Try this:
“Good evening, Mr Bond. I want you to look at some devices recently purchased from the so-useful Internet.”
“I want you to think about what they do.”
“I want you to think about what else they can do.”
“I want you to think about where you are.”
“I want you to think about why you’re here.”
“I want you to think about what you were doing before you came here.”
“Because tomorrow morning some friends of mine are going to come in.”
“And they’re going to ask you some questions.”
“And you should think very carefully about how you intend to answer.”
I just went on a rant about plungers, how’s your day going?
“go off bestie”? Okay, I will.
This is a plunger.
Classic red cup with a wooden stick. We all know it, love it, and have seen a cartoon character using it to unclog a toilet. Right?
WRONG.
The image above is actually a drain plunger, used on sinks, showers, and baths. Not on toilets.
These are a toilet plungers.
Take note of the variations. Each of them have a flange of sorts at the bottom, either connected via a cup or more accordion-like tube. These are designed to actually get down into the toilet bowl where it flushes down, giving it more space and leverage to unclog blockages. See the example below:
Notice how the flange allows it to go deeper into the toilet to provide more power to the plunge. Sink/drain plungers are far less efficient and effective at the task.
Sink plungers can also have an accordion shape to help with power in plunging, but crucially do not have or need the flange that toilet plungers do.
To recap: cup plungers are for sinks, showers, bathtubs, and other drains. Flange and accordion plungers are for toilets. Notably, accordion plungers are slightly harder to use, but are more powerful when used correctly than their flange counterparts.
So the next time you see a cartoon, video game, or stock art depicting a cup plunger being used on a toilet, you can feel the same levels of anger and emotion that I do!
why does this have nearly 100 notes
Because with this level of passion, containment is futile 
The real question is why does this not have a million notes? This is information that will very likely, at some point, be incredibly useful to anyone who has indoor plumbing. Which is, you know, probably, 99.99% of this website’s user base. (I’m sure there’s someone out there using Tumblr who lives in a house built in 1850 which never got upgraded and they still have an outhouse rather than toilet.)
I think we should let Ron Perlman burn a house down. You know, as a treat.
Thanks @ingdamnit for bringing this to my attention.
Here’s the uncensored transcript:
“But I will say one thing before I get off this. The motherfucker who said ‘we’re going to keep this thing going until people start losing their houses and their apartments.’ Listen to me motherfucker. There’s a lot of ways to lose your house, some of it is financial, some of it is karma, and some of it is just figuring out who the fuck said that. And we know who said that, and where he fucking lives. There’s a lot of ways to lose your house. You wish that on people, you wish that families starve, while your making 27 fucking million dollars a year for creating nothing. Be careful motherfucker. Be really careful. Cause that’s the kind of shit that stirs shit up. Peace out.”
ALT
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