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Strange questions that sometimes need answering (or not asking in the first place really).

Matt N said:
... (I sense this was in gest, but the sentiment still stands).
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Oh Matt, twice in a couple of days...the joy!
Did you mean jest?

And back to your post, football has always been local/tribal.
I constantly pull the Yorks/Lancs tribal gag, but I have much love (sadly) for many tykes...

But scenes like Blackburn/Burnley derbies are reserved for the fiercest local mindless scumthugs to beat each other up on the streets after matches, to settle old scores and seek revenge for previous conflicts.
The underclass need someone to hate.
The scum of the town next door is as good as any.

The game slowly turning professional meant better players from other areas, particularly Scotland, were recruited to improve teams, as simple as that.
There are a number of footballers in my local cemetery, including Fergus Suter, recognised (on netflix!) as probably the first professional player...Glasgow to Blackburn as a big career move...poor sod!
 
rob666 said:
Oh Matt, twice in a couple of days...the joy!
Did you mean jest?

And back to your post, football has always been local/tribal.
I constantly pull the Yorks/Lancs tribal gag, but I have much love (sadly) for many tykes...

But scenes like Blackburn/Burnley derbies are reserved for the fiercest local mindless scumthugs to beat each other up on the streets after matches, to settle old scores and seek revenge for previous conflicts.
The underclass need someone to hate.
The scum of the town next door is as good as any.

The game slowly turning professional meant better players from other areas, particularly Scotland, were recruited to improve teams, as simple as that.
There are a number of footballers in my local cemetery, including Fergus Suter, recognised (on netflix!) as probably the first professional player...Glasgow to Blackburn as a big career move...poor sod!
Click to expand...

And humans are tribal by their very nature, you can apply it to almost anything, sports, music etc down to work colleagues and friendship groups.

Why even on here we have the Merlin Mavericks vs the Paultons Posse 😜
 
Homophones and homonyms catch people out, especially me.
You still get full points mate, two in a very long time, but I will be checking.
And talking tribes, it isn't that long since minor wars in the "Towers Posse Versus the Beach Crew", is it?
 
rob666 said:
Homophones and homonyms catch people out, especially me.
You still get full points mate, two in a very long time, but I will be checking.
And talking tribes, it isn't that long since minor wars in the "Towers Posse Versus the Beach Crew", is it?
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Trust me, I’ve made far more than two typos if you look back far enough…
 
Why must the human brain try to "interpret" images?
Pareidolia is a know thing, of course. Supposedly our minds try to turn everything in to a face.
...
So can someone please explain to me why my brain saw this thumbnail, and instantly thought, "Ooh, a Martian tripod" ‽

IMG_6130.jpeg

I guess at least my brain didn't default to mushroom clouds, for once?
 
jon81uk said:
Although the actual lyric is just "(What's) she gonna look like with a chimney on her?" it doesn't specify the chimney is on the head.
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That is what I originally asked Gemini, through a voice prompt. The transcription sadly added head.

Do you honestly think that I, of all geese, would type something without capital letters and (crucially) an appropriate question mark? 🪿
 
…how did we develop cheese?

It seems like a bizarre and convoluted formulation. Devised the query while muching on some Emmental …
 
The_bup said:
…how did we develop cheese?

It seems like a bizarre and convoluted formulation. Devised the query while muching on some Emmental …
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Entirely by accident, it would seem. Milk used to be stored and transported in sacks made from animal stomachs. The stomachs naturally contain rennet, which is an enzyme that curdles milk.

The combination of the hot sun, the remaining rennet and the movement from the transportation would have naturally separated the solid curds and liquid whey.

The semi solid milk was more preservable, with a different texture and taste. It also would have been less prone to causing illness, due to the reduced lactose, and could be stored for longer.

After the initial discovery, it's the additional tinkering which refines everything.

I'm more interested in the "wise" people who thought it a good idea to dry out the leaves of a plant, ground them up, set them on fire and inhale the fumes.
 
I believe the legend behind smoking is that a native American lad threw some leaves on a fire, while making smoke signals, and liked the smell. Pretty straight forward.
It's the first guy to milk a cow that I'm more concerned about,
 
GooseOnTheLoose said:
Entirely by accident, it would seem. Milk used to be stored and transported in sacks made from animal stomachs. The stomachs naturally contain rennet, which is an enzyme that curdles milk.

The combination of the hot sun, the remaining rennet and the movement from the transportation would have naturally separated the solid curds and liquid whey.

The semi solid milk was more preservable, with a different texture and taste. It also would have been less prone to causing illness, due to the reduced lactose, and could be stored for longer.

After the initial discovery, it's the additional tinkering which refines everything.

I'm more interested in the "wise" people who thought it a good idea to dry out the leaves of a plant, ground them up, set them on fire and inhale the fumes.
Click to expand...
I always find your either boundless knowledge or incredible research skills terrifying.

Who are you, goose, who are so wise in the ways of science?
 
I have an odd question for you all today, and it’s one that I’m not even sure has an answer per se.

Recently, my family and I were having a discussion about our family tree. A few years ago, my mum had a subscription to Ancestry and plotted the whole family tree of my maternal grandmother’s side (incidentally, she’s the one who’s by far the most “born and bred local” to where we currently live, with my maternal grandfather hailing from Birmingham and my whole paternal side of the family hailing from Kent and South East London), and she recently got the tree back out and looked at it.

When my mum and nan talked through the tree, one thing I noticed was that in one of the generations back in the late 1800s, early 1900s or so, two people with the same surname married and had children… and my nan very nonchalantly implied that they were cousins or at very least closely related. There were some other bits further back as well that implied that some probable… inter-familial relations occurred in my family a couple of centuries back. I guess this in itself is not too surprising… with the Forest of Dean being a rural area and the village where I grew up having less than 1,000 residents even now, the gene pool was naturally quite small, and back when the wider world was bigger and less accessible, local people tended to reproduce with whoever was available. If that was your cousin, then so be it! Resultantly, the Forest of Dean has a reputation, locally at least, for being a bit inbred, and when I tell people where I’m from, one of the questions non-locals often ask me is how many fingers I have on each hand and how many toes I have on each foot!

Anyway, the question that occurred to me when seeing this was; how distantly related do two people have to be before them marrying and having children with each other is not considered “inbreeding” in the sense that is heavily frowned upon in modern Western society?

I know that marrying and having children with your first cousin is technically legal in the UK, and indeed is considered perfectly acceptable and common in some ethnic communities, but modern Western civilisation still tends to frown upon you marrying and having children with your first cousin, and it’s vanishingly uncommon among the White British population for that reason. But my question is; is there not a point in the continuum of ancestry where if you go far enough back, you can be so distantly related to a person that you are, for all intents and purposes, not really family? Due to a combination of the aforementioned probable historic inbreeding in my family and one great-grandmother a few generations back who had an awful lot of children, I am technically the “4th cousin x times removed” of a number of people in my childhood village who I would never have considered family, including my childhood next door neighbour and my mum’s primary school bully. At the point of 4th cousins and beyond, surely you share very little DNA?

And even though I’m no creationist, is every human being on Earth not very, very distantly related through a complex web of ancestry if you go back far enough? With how exponential population growth is, there must have been one zero point many years ago where every human on Earth stems from, surely? I don’t quite know what that zero point is, but surely the process of evolution and the dawn and proliferation of **** sapiens as a species started from somewhere?
 
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Matt N said:
I have an odd question for you all today, and it’s one that I’m not even sure has an answer per se.

Recently, my family and I were having a discussion about our family tree. A few years ago, my mum had a subscription to Ancestry and plotted the whole family tree of my maternal grandmother’s side (incidentally, she’s the one who’s by far the most “born and bred local” to where we currently live, with my maternal grandfather hailing from Birmingham and my whole paternal side of the family hailing from Kent and South East London), and she recently got the tree back out and looked at it.

When my mum and nan talked through the tree, one thing I noticed was that in one of the generations back in the late 1800s, early 1900s or so, two people with the same surname married and had children… and my nan very nonchalantly implied that they were cousins or at very least closely related. There were some other bits further back as well that implied that some probable… inter-familial relations occurred in my family a couple of centuries back. I guess this in itself is not too surprising… with the Forest of Dean being a rural area and the village where I grew up having less than 1,000 residents even now, the gene pool was naturally quite small, and back when the wider world was bigger and less accessible, local people tended to reproduce with whoever was available. If that was your cousin, then so be it! Resultantly, the Forest of Dean has a reputation, locally at least, for being a bit inbred, and when I tell people where I’m from, one of the questions non-locals often ask me is how many fingers I have on each hand and how many toes I have on each foot!

Anyway, the question that occurred to me when seeing this was; how distantly related do two people have to be before them marrying and having children with each other is not considered “inbreeding” in the sense that is heavily frowned upon in modern Western society?

I know that marrying and having children with your first cousin is technically legal in the UK, and indeed is considered perfectly acceptable and common in some ethnic communities, but modern Western civilisation still tends to frown upon you marrying and having children with your first cousin, and it’s vanishingly uncommon among the White British population for that reason. But my question is; is there not a point in the continuum of ancestry where if you go far enough back, you can be so distantly related to a person that you are, for all intents and purposes, not really family? Due to a combination of the aforementioned probable historic inbreeding in my family and one great-grandmother a few generations back who had an awful lot of children, I am technically the “4th cousin x times removed” of a number of people in my childhood village who I would never have considered family, including my childhood next door neighbour and my mum’s primary school bully. At the point of 4th cousins and beyond, surely you share very little DNA?

And even though I’m no creationist, is every human being on Earth not very, very distantly related through a complex web of ancestry if you go back far enough? With how exponential population growth is, there must have been one zero point many years ago where every human on Earth stems from, surely? I don’t quite know what that zero point is, but surely the process of evolution and the dawn and proliferation of **** sapiens as a species started from somewhere?
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Matt, please go outside.

Get laid if you can too. Just not with your cousin.
 
GooseOnTheLoose said:
Matt, please go outside.

Get laid if you can too. Just not with your cousin.
Click to expand...
Was that question too deep for this thread, seeing as I dove a bit into the origins of humanity at the end?

Maybe so, and I apologise if it was… it was just genuinely something I wondered when we were looking through the family tree my mum made!
 
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