So this is a Chistmas story my mom told me while I was home recently and i thought y’all might enjoy.
So, one Christmas back in the 60′s, my great-grandmother was reminiscing about Christmas in England, and how they used to have pheasant for Christmas, but Ohio sucks and they’d never get to do something like that.
Well Shit! goes my grandfather, them woods are full of pheasants, I’ll get you one. So grandpa and a dubiously related man named “uncle popeye” went out with shotguns to get great-grandma a pheasant for Christmas dinner.
They’re gone for a LONG time. according to mom, they were basically expecting grandpa and Popeye to be gone for a few hours and come back with a store-bought chicken and apologies.
Instead, they come back eight hours later, covered in mud and freezing cold from the Cleveland winter, but Surprise! they have a Pheasant. Great-grandma gives them a lecture about staying out so long and worrying her, but agrees to dress the bird so they can all have a traditional English Roast Pheasant. Grandpa and Popeye retire to the living room to drink beer and talk about what great woodsmen they are when Great-grandma screams from the kitchen.
“TOM!!” She bellows and literally every male in the house jumps because literally every man has been named “Tom” for three generations at that point. “THERE’S NO BULLET HOLE IN THIS BIRD.”
They both look massively sheepish and eventually admit that they hadn’t had much luck finding pheasants in the woods and were about to go to the store to get her a chicken when they… backed over the pheasant.
“Then what were you idiots doing in the woods for eight hours?”
“We weren’t out there for THAT long-” Popeye starts before grandpa decks him. Grandma and Great-grandma have to menace them with wooden spoons to get the truth out, but eventually they take thier oversize hiking boots off to reveal bandages.
Turns out they had only been in the woods for Two hours looking for pheasants before LITERALLY tripping over one, and they both reflexively aim at the ground and… Shoot each other in the foot. They hadn’t backed over the Pheasant in the woods. They’d backed over it in the Hospital parking lot.
And that’s the story of how my great-grandmother made a Roast Pheasant and the ladies of the house got to eat the whole thing while Grandpa and Popey had to watch.
“dubiously related man named uncle popeye” wasn’t even close to the wildest part oh my god! This is such a good story!!!!
So you prompted me to call my mother and ask how Popeye was related to them, and apparently he’s my great-grat-grandmother’s first-husband’s cousin’s son.
The First Husband is the whole reason my mother’s family came to america in the first place apparently. in 1902, he decided he didn’t want to be father to 9 girls anymore, so he went out for a pint one night and fucked off to Chicago without actually divorcing GGG. For a few years she thought he’d been killed and dumped in the Thames (these things happened in Liverpool in the 1900′s) and shortly re-married, and Second Husband fathered two more daughters with her, including my Great-Grandmother.
In 1908, First Husband wrote from Chicago for money. This was a problem because despite fucking off to another continent, they were still married, and GGG was committing bigamy. Despite pleading her case before the courts that Really, Y’all gave me his death certificate when he didn’t turn up after a month, they fined her an outrageous amount of money and only commuted her prison sentence because “her brood would place undue stain on the orphanage”.
Yes, really.
Second Husband, who was a halfway decent man that only beat her sometimes, suddenly dies of knife wound in a Pub fight, and GGG is left up shit creek with 10 girls and nobody willing to hire a bigamist maid. So GGG attempts to woo First Husband back to England. She goes so far as to pay a photographer to take Nudes of her to remind him what he left.
That was an exciting Christmas, going through an old album and finding THOSE.
Despite GGG’s heartfelt efforts and godlike booty, First Husband remained in the US, enjoying his new life of running credit scams and bootlegging.
After another 4 years of this nonsense, GGG gets the money to ferry herself and her brood across the atlantic to America, where they weren’t so uptight about the sex lives of domestic workers and she could probably get a job. The ALMOST come on the Titanic- we found the tickets next to the nudes- but at the last moment, Great-Aunt Liz catches the Measles, forcing everyone into quarantine and saving them from an icy death. They instead come on the next boat, and have to pick up the survivors of the Lusitania. Everyone gets lice and has to be shaved at Ellis Island.
Once in america, GGG finds out First Husband has died, For Realsies, please come identify his corpse and also he owes the state of Illinois like $500 in court fees so-
To which GGG goes “LOL, NO.” and moves to Cleveland with her Youngest daughter (my great-grandmother) and her new Russian husband, and takes over as manager of the local grocery store and leads a life of relative american-lower-middle-class comfort until her death in 1928 at age of 58.
…So you understand our confusion that GG knew of Popeye’s existence at all.
This is the quality content I am on tumblr for! 😂👍🏻 Thank you for sharing this and bless you and your family! 💕
I just wanna know why GGG’s nude photos were just tossed in a family album along with all the other special pictures. Did they just stumble across them between a great-aunt’s baptism pic and another’s wedding photo?
They were in a plain brown envelope tucked in with the 1963 Christmas photos.
Right between the pictures of Grandma’s Dog Spooky wearing like seven christmas decorations (So named because she was totally black except for a white mark on her chest and a propensity for 4AM garbage disposal noises) and of Grandpa getting smashed on Great-Aunt Liz’s Rumballs, to be precise.
This person needs to write a book about their family stories. It would sell like wild.
I want to hear more every time this post comes around XD
Art. Pure art is what this is.
Ok, because several people in the tags have pointed out that the Thames is nowhere near Liverpool:
I called mom, again, to ask why the hell i would write that, because I distinctly recall the phrase “GGG was certain he’d been thrown in the Thames” when Grandma repeated the tale for me, but I am also ADHD as fuck and my brain might have invented that sentence.
Turns out, the truth is another Hot Mess.
The WHOLE line is “GGG was certain he had been thrown in the Thames like his brother, Who ran afoul of several criminal organizations while running cons in London and we’re not sure WHO actually did him in but it was a big affair to travel to London when they fished his body out with the eels.”
So “Thrown in the Thames” was GGG’s colloquialism for “was murdered due to gambling debts”
“Why did GGG even MARRY first husband?” I asked.
“He had a nice mustache, apparently.”
quick reboggle for tagging purposes, and YES, this is the story I eventually got onto buzzfeed for, but on a different post.
So uh, the short version of this post had been going around and I thought the newer followers might like the full version. Some notes:
-Great-Grandpa Adam was on the Volturno, not the Lustiania (Apologies for that, my source was my slightly dementia-addled grandparents 10 years ago), got onto the SS Minneapolis, which GGG and her brood had hopped on when it made a pit stop in Liverpool after the Titanic thing didn’t work out.
-We don’t sell the Titanic tickets becuase they’re A) an hilarious bit of family history B) only going to get more valuable.
-No, I’m not posting the nudes you fucking animals. Have this instead:
Great-Aunt-Liz’s Rumball Recipie:
1 box vanilla wafers or similar cookie, smashed into a fine powder, by either rolling the bag with a pin or (More authentically) repeatedly slamming the bag on the counter whilst airing grievances.
Half a bag ground walnuts or pecans, smashed whilst airing REALLY BIG grievances
“3 cups powdered sugar, maybe more.”
Couple tablespoons (none of Great-Aunt Liz’s Recipes have actual measurements, good luck guys) Cocoa powder
“Glass of Rum for balls, Glass for you” ….I’m going to guess that means about 1 cup rum, though probably more.
“Cuppa” Honey, which probably means “teacup” or ½ cup
“Water, Enough” I’m so sorry.
Sift dry ingredients together, whist drinking. Stir in wet ingredients whilst yelling at children to get cat out of tree. Shape into ping-pong balls. Hand out to friends, family & neighbors until they forgive you in writing.
@AuthenticWmGibs is a funny fake William Gibson Twitter account, which tweets plausible-sounding precis of imaginary Gibson novels (or, as the Twitter bio has it, “Synopses for William Gibson novels that are definitely 100% real, but only in a timeline with greater authenticity than this one.”)
so. they made a new german discowrld essentials edition, with a new covers (which is good because the old ones are real bad)
and they are these manga-like ‘build a picture’ style, which i like
but. oh my god. look at that vimes
this isn’t samuel ‘worked the night-shift for 30 years, runs on coffee and spit, has probably not slept more than 3hours any given day’ vimes
this is the guy who played vimes in murder-mystery play, ‘inspired by real events’. hammy acting, horrible script, ‘Clues’ everywhere, heroic fightscenes, big speaches. Vimes threadened to shut the whole thing down for slander. Sybil probably got an autograph
I’ve been staring at this post for 15 minutes and I can’t stop laughing omg omg I’m seeing stars oh no.
Sybil invited the damn company to the house for their afterparty and you know it.
the actor earnestly explains at one point the fitness routine he undertook to ‘get in character’ for the part of the ‘heroic commander’ while pointing at various melon-sized muscle groups. vimes himself is sitting there shoveling something that’s 98% grease by volume into his face and also staring balefully. he’s never done a pushup in his life. he wouldn’t know a fucking pushup if it spat on him in the street. sybil is doing her absolute best not to laugh and her best is nowhere good enough. the actor, encouraged by the (presumably) admiring male stares and flirtatious female giggles, goes on to describe his hair-care regimen.
Added some info because people were either curious or didn’t get it? I mean, I’m 7,000 notes too late to fix stuff since my comment “The twist is they are all dragons” was removed somewhere in the chain. I just really want people to laugh AND learn, ya know? DRAGONS!!
I’ve seen a few posts with people trying to imagine how Solarpunk would look and how people would adapt in different parts of the world so I thought I’d share a few interesting technologies that are being developed.
Wasp’s 3D printer can be assembled by 2 people and can build houses with zero cost in materials because it uses mud, clay, natural fibers – basically anything that there’s plenty of at the site.
The Eliodomestico solar distiller can produce 5 liters of clean drinking water each day. You fill it with salty or dirty water in the morning and by the end of the day you have clean drinking water.
The Wilson Solar Grill stores up energy during the day so that you are still able to cook dinner after dark, unlike the traditional solar grill that can only be used during daylight. Great for people in areas that currently rely on burning wood to cook food.
In colder regions with plenty of plant life you could use this compost heap heating system to keep your home warm.
Here is a fascinating article on how densely populated countries, who don’t have enough space for agriculture and currently rely on food imports, could find food security with floating vertical farms.
Abandoned oil rigs could be turned into living hubs and marine research stations.
WarkaWater Towers can collect 25 gallons of potable water from the air every day and are made from bamboo or juncus stalks.
Also for areas with little water scientists from Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China have developed a special fabric that can can clean itself just by being exposed to sunlight.
The Arctic Harvester is a concept for a floating city that would fuel itself by eating icebergs. It would also be designed to take advantage of endless daylight during summer.
Here is a proposal for a solar powered hydroponic food belt for the Arabian Peninsula.
So if my students finish a quiz/test early, I ask them to draw me stuff on the back (partly so those who need more time are less self-conscious about still having the test out, partly because fuck yeah, pictures), and it may be the single best decision of my career.
In the past couple of weeks, I’ve told these kids that (a) the Romans believed there were demons in their public toilets and (b) the word for “janitor” comes from “ianitor”, which means “(door) guard”.
So now I’m getting drawings of superhero janitors taking on toilet demons, and it’s so beautiful.
Aaaaand today a student showed me a video of himself lighting a fire in his toilet while chanting the conjugation of the word “to be”.
He said he wanted to recreate the ancient toilet demons, and I have concerns.
K… but why conjugations of to be?
My students kept forgetting how to conjugate esse, so I turned it into a rhythmic chant that I had them say over and over. The problem is that when you chant ANYTHING in Latin it sounds like you’re summoning a demon, which they decided was awesome, so uh. Now I’ll just be randomly walking through the hallway and hear voices chanting, “sum es est! sumus estis sunt!”
I’m 99% sure my colleagues think I’ve started a cult.
Keep doing what you’re doing. I’m sure everyone will turn out all the better for it.
Nogling 