World War I Folklore â The Legend of the UB-85 Seamonster
On April 30th, 1918 British patrols in the North Atlantic came upon the German U-Boat UB-85 in the open ocean, manned by a visibly terrified crew. Rather than dive, the crew of the U-Boat immediately surrendered, offering no resistance. It was noticed that the submarine had sustained damage which prevented it from submerging, however there were no reports of combat actions by Allied forces in the area. Immediately, the U-Boatâs commander, Captain Gunther Krech was interrogated. His explanation was one that the British officers certainly did not expect.
According to Krech the submarine had surfaced the night before in order to recharge its batteries when a large monster crawled out of the dark waters and climbed aboard the deck of the sub. Krech described the creature as thus,
âThis beast had large eyes, set in a sort of skull. It had a small head, but with teeth that could be seen glistening in the moonlight. Every man on watch began firing a sidearm at the beast, but the animal had hold of the forward gun mount and refused to let go.â
Immediately the creature began to shake the sub back and forth, attempting to capsize the boat. The battle continued as the men fired upon the monster while it continued to rattle the boat. Eventually the monster gave up and let go, disappearing into the dark abyss. The U-Boat was saved, but damage to the U-Boat resulting from the battle with the creature made it impossible for the boat to submerge.
UB-85 was scuttled by the British, her crew taken as prisoners of war.
In 1943, a team of ingenious Italian doctors invented a deadly, contagious virus called Syndrome K to protect Jews from annihilation. On October 16 of that year, as Nazis closed in to liquidate Romeâs Jewish ghetto, many runaways hid in the 450-year-old Fatebenefratelli Hospital. There, anti-Fascist doctors including Adriano Ossicini, Vittorio Sacerdoti and Giovanni Borromeo created a gruesome, imaginary disease.
The doctors instructed âpatientsâ to cough very loudly and told Nazis that the disease was extremely dangerous, disfiguring and molto contagioso. Soldiers were so alarmed by the list of symptoms and incessant coughing that they left without inspecting the patients. Itâs estimated that a few dozen lives were saved by this brilliant scheme.
The doctors were later honored for their heroic actions, and Fatebenefratelli Hospital was declared a âHouse of Lifeâ by the International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation.
One of my favourite anecdotes about the first Golden Age of Piracy is that, at one point, Captain Henry Morgan left England in one ship, and arrived in the Caribbean commanding a completely different ship, and nobody knows why. What happened to the first ship and how he acquired the second one are entirely unrecorded.
At some point in his short career (1715 until 1718), the English pirate Ben Hornigold attacked a sloop near Honduras just to steal all the hats of the crew, because his own crew had gotten drunk the night before and they had tossed every single one of their own hats overboard.
Bartholomew Roberts, arguably the most successful pirate in history by ships captured (a whopping 470 in 3 years), didnât actually want to be a pirate. His ship was captured and he was forced to join the pirate crew.
PSA to all you fantasy writers because I have just had a truly frustrating twenty minutes talking to someone about this: itâs okay to put mobility aids in your novel and have them just be ordinary.
Like. Super okay.
I donât give a shit if itâs high fantasy, low fantasy or somewhere between the lovechild of Tolkein meets My Immortal. Itâs okay to use mobility devices in your narrative. Itâs okay to use the word âwheelchairâ. You donât have to remake the fucking wheel. Itâs already been done for you.
And no, it doesnât detract from the ârealismâ of your fictional universe in which you get to set the standard for realism. Please donât try to use that as a reason for not using these things.
There is no reason to lock the disabled people in your narrative into towers because âthatâs the way it wasâ, least of all in your novel about dragons and mermaids and other made up creatures. There is no historical realism here. You are in charge. You get to decide what that means.
Also:
âDepiction of Chinese philosopher Confucius in a wheelchair, dating to ca. 1680. The artist may have been thinking of methods of transport common in his own day.â
âThe earliest records of wheeled furniture are an inscription found on a stone slate in China and a childâs bed depicted in a frieze on a Greek vase, both dating between the 6th and 5th century BCE.[2][3][4][5]The first records of wheeled seats being used for transporting disabled people date to three centuries later in China; the Chinese used early wheelbarrows to move people as well as heavy objects. A distinction between the two functions was not made for another several hundred years, around 525 CE, when images of wheeled chairs made specifically to carry people begin to occur in Chinese art.[5]â
âIn 1655,Stephan Farffler, a 22 year old paraplegic watchmaker, built the worldâs first self-propelling chair on a three-wheel chassis using a system of cranks and cogwheels.[6][3] However, the device had an appearance of a hand bike more than a wheelchair since the design included hand cranks mounted at the front wheel.[2]
The invalid carriage or Bath chair brought the technology into more common use from around 1760.[7]
In 1887, wheelchairs (ârolling chairsâ) were introduced to Atlantic City so invalid tourists could rent them to enjoy the Boardwalk. Soon, many healthy tourists also rented the decorated ârolling chairsâ and servants to push them as a show of decadence and treatment they could never experience at home.[8]
In 1933 Harry C. Jennings, Sr. and his disabled friend Herbert Everest, both mechanical engineers, invented the first lightweight, steel, folding, portable wheelchair.[9] Everest had previously broken his back in a mining accident. Everest and Jennings saw the business potential of the invention and went on to become the first mass-market manufacturers of wheelchairs. Their âX-braceâ design is still in common use, albeit with updated materials and other improvements. The X-brace idea came to Harry from the menâs folding âcamp chairs / stoolsâ, rotated 90 degrees, that Harry and Herbert used in the outdoors and at the mines.[citation needed]
âBut Joy, how do I describe this contraption in a fantasy setting that wont make it seem out of place?â
âIt was a chair on wheels, which Prince FancyPants McElferson propelled forwards using his arms to direct the motion of the chair.â
âIt was a chair on wheels, which Prince EvenFancierPants McElferson used to get about, pushed along by one of his companions or one of his many attending servants.â
âBut itâs a high realm magical fantasââ
âIt was a floating chair, the hum of magical energy keeping it off the ground casting a faint glow against the cobblestones as {CHARACTER} guided it round with expert ease, gliding back and forth.â
âBut itâs a stempunk novââ
âUnlike other wheelchairs heâd seen before, this one appeared to be self propelling, powered by the gasket of steam at the back, and directed by the use of a rudder like toggle in the front.â
Give. Disabled. Characters. In. Fantasy. Novels. Mobility. Aids.
If you can spend 60 pages telling me the history of your world in innate detail down to the formation of how magical rocks were formed, you can god damn write three lines in passing about a wheelchair.
Signed, your editor who doesnât have time for this ableist fantasy realm shit.
Colorization by me, original photo from @sixpenceee
This is amazing! Thank you.
Honestly, this is one of the most chilling pictures Iâve ever seen, especially colorized.
 Four years later in 1944, these two were deported to Auschwitz, but were spared from the Auschwitz Gas Chambers and were sent to Bergen-Belsen, where they died a year later in 1945. Barely five years after this picture was taken these two died of Typhus in presumably the most violent concentration camp the Nazis made.Â
Pictures like these are both heart warming and depressing. They were so happy before their lives were taken⊠They could have lived such wonderful and lengthy lives.
âIn spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart.â This quote makes me sad every time I read it, knowing that the very people she hoped would change resulted in her eventual death.
âIn the spring of 1940, when the Nazis overran France from the north, much of its Jewish population tried to escape the country towards the south. In order to cross the border, they needed visas to Spain and Portugal, and together with a  flood of other refugees, tens of thousands of Jews besieged the Portuguese consulate in Bordeaux in a desperate attempt to get that life-saving piece of paper. The Portuguese government forbade its consuls in France to issue visas without prior approval from the Foreign Ministry, but the consul in Bordeaux, Aristides de Sousa Mendes, decided to disregard the order, throwing to the wind a thirty-year diplomatic career. As Nazi tanks were closing in on Bordeaux, Sousa Mendes and his team worked around the clock for ten days and nights, barely stopping to sleep, just issuing visas and stamping pieces of paper. Sousa Mendes issued thousands of visas before collapsing from exhaustion.
The Portuguese governmentâwhich had little desire to accept any of these refugeesâsent agents to escort the disobedient consul back home, and fired him from the foreign office. Yet officials who cared little for the plight of human beings nevertheless had a deep reverence for documents, and the visas Sousa Mendes issued against orders were respected by French, Spanish and Portuguese bureaucrats alike, spiriting up to 30,000 people out of the Nazi death trap. Sousa Mendes, armed with little more than a rubber stamp, was responsible for the largest rescue operation by a single individual during the Holocaust.â
âHomo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow by Yuval Noah Harari
If the law is unjust, breaking the law is an act of justice
I genuinely do not understand this unrelenting insistence that we compare every horrendous thing the United States does to the Holocaust, when there are much better comparisons to be made toâŠwell, the United fucking States.Â
The United States has a long, sordid history of separating families: The Transatlantic Slave Trade and the families impacted by slavery for generations after being stolen from their homes and sold to the highest bidder, for one. The Bureau of Indian Affairs boarding schools, where Native children were ripped from their families in order to have their language, culture, and beliefs stamped out of them through forced assimilation and conversion to Christianity, for another.Â
The United States has an awful history of putting people in detention centres: Japanese and Native Alaskan internment camps during WWII, Fort Cass, Fort Snell, and other Native American internment camps that Indigenous Peoples were forced into throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, not even to mention Guantanamo Bay, and the camps so-called dissidents in the places like the Philippines, Vietnam, and other nations Americans had occupied were put into.
The United States has always been horrible to its immigrants, specifically non-white and/or non-Christian refugees. My own grandfather, an immigrant form India, couldnât become a citizen of the United States despite being a college lecturer and the spouse of a US citizen due to Asian Exclusion, and had to continuously enrol in university courses he never actually took despite the fact that he was teaching them, just to stay in the country on a student visa. The one truly valid comparison to the Holocaust era you could make would be to the United States turning away Jewish refugees from Nazi-occupied Europe aboard the St Louis and sending them back to their deaths because that same law used to keep my grandfather from becoming a citizen had been put in place specifically to keep more Jews and Asians from coming into the country.
Like, the United States is not âbecoming Nazi Germanyâ all of a sudden. This is not some aberrant âUnAmericanâ behaviour. This is the United States being the United States, doing what the U.S. has always done from the moment of its inception.Â
Also, as one of my FB friends said on this topic recently:Â âNazi Germany was not famous for cruelty toward asylum seekers, it was famous for making millions of asylum seekers and then murdering millions including many from my family.â
There is no good reason to constantly trot out bad Holocaust comparisons when we know damn well this is the same inhumane bullshit America was fucking built on. Hitler, Nazis, and The Holocaust are not just shorthand for âthe government being really bad.â It was a specific atrocity that devastated the Jewish and Romani communities of this world, and you donât need to constantly devalue it and re-traumatise Jews and Roma over and over again when you can just as easily condemn the heinous way asylum seekers at the US border are being treated by saying the United States is still in the business of systematic oppression and has not learnt anything from its own appalling history.Â
Iâve said it before and Iâll say it again: non-Romani goyim donât get to drag out the proverbial corpses of our people and use them in a macabre puppet show in order to give their issues weight.
^plus non-gays and able-bodied people pls
No.
We have explained this a million times over: Only Jews and Roma were target for total annihilation by the Nazis, and are therefore the only groups who have intergenerational trauma related to the holocaust. Some LGBTQ and Disabled people certainly were targeted (though not in the same way), but there plenty of individuals fitting that description who werenât at all. In fact, there were gay and disabled people in Hitlerâs inner circle, so to suggest members of those groups outside of Jewish or Romani contexts are entitled to reference the Holocaust like we do is really in poor taste.
Basically, with disabled and LGBTQ individuals who were not Jewish or Romani, there were plenty of instances where people just just chose to overlook it. However, if an LGBTQ and/or disabled person was Jewish or Romani, there was no looking the other way; they were killed.Â
Please stop inserting yourselves into our trauma, kthanksbai.
Most of this information is taken from the book âThe Readers Digest Book of Strange Stories and Amazing Factsâ copyright 1975, revised 1976. I apologise for any inaccuracies, please remember this is just for fun.
The first recorded victim of the curse, at least according to legend, was a Hindu priest who fell under its spell 500 years ago soon after it was mined. He stole it from the forehead of an Indian temple idol but he was caught and put to death by torture.The diamond turned up in Europe in 1642 in the hands of French trader-smuggler Jean Baptiste Tavernier.He made enough money from selling it to buy himself a title and an estate. Then his son got so badly into debt through gambling that Tavernier was forced to sell everything he owned. Bankrupt, he headed back to India to remake his fortune, only to be torn apart by a pack of wild dogs. (Though this is disputed and some believe the official story that he lived to the age of 84 and died of natural causes but whereâs the story in that?)The gem reappeared in the possession of the French King Louis XIV, The Sun King.He had the diamond cut from itâs original 112.5 carats down to 67.5 carats.
This 1400 year old book of archaic hymns and religious text is being examined by scientist at the Department of Energyâs SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in California. Itâs being examined not because itâs a priceless and historic artifact, but because the original text contained in the book belonged to Galen of Pergamon, a Greek physician and philosopher born under the Roman Empire during the 2nd century.
 He was known as one of the greatest medical minds of antiquity. The parchment contained within this 1400 year old book was originally inscribed with the teachings of Galen, translated by an unknown hand centuries after the physicianâs death, before being hidden by psalms for an entire millennium. Scientist believe that Galenâs text was covered up for economic reasons (parchment used to be expensive) and not for malicious reasons.
For nearly a decade, scientists and scholars have been using multi-spectral imaging to try to reveal the scrubbed traces of the ancient underlying text, and thanks to a team at SLACâs Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource, we might finally succeed in deciphering the hidden words. What they have found so far has been âincredibly mind-blowingâ and they still have over 200 pages left to decode.
Saltykova was born to into wealth and luxury in 1730.Â
 Some state that the reason for her decline into madness was a love affair gone sour. She took a lover after her husband died, and when he betrayed her, she nearly killed him with her own hands. Her lover and his lover fled from the region, but the incident seemed to awaken a kind of bloodlust in Saltykova. Though she was a woman of great refinement, she became famous for her tempers and her sudden mood swings.Â
Court records from her trial stated that she would grow incensed and suddenly throw logs at the girls who were trying to serve her. Sometimes this would quell her rage, but other times, she would simply begin to beat them violently.
Eventually, Saltykovaâs violent outbursts became even more cruel. There were whispered reports of her casting young women and girls into the snow to die of cold, of beating them until their bones broke and of pouring boiling water over their bare bodies.
She continued with these terrible murders until 1762. That was the year when two serfs finally presented their case to Catherine II, the empress of Russia.
Catherine II proclaimed a strange sentence on Saltykova. She was to be displayed for an hour in Moscowâs famous Red Square wearing a sign that said âI have tortured and murdered.â
she spent the next 33 years of her life imprisoned. At first she was kept in a windowless cell in absolute darkness. A nun would come and offer her food and a candle, removing the candle when the food was done. In later years, she would be allowed to go to church, though she could only stand outside and hear the sermon, though not enter.
đ„ There is beauty in destructionđ„ 