1. When eurasian nomads first started making pants in the first millenium BC, they didn’t cut the cloth to shape, they wove the shapes they needed on the loom. Mostly rectangles, but still interesting.
2. Pants were a very elaborate garment at the time! When humans first started weaving and wearing cloth, clothes were pretty much “giant rectangle that you wrap around your body and sometimes a belt”. Then, people started making tunics and tunic derivatives, which is basically another rectangle, but this time with a hole for your head and sometimes sewn up the side. Now you have TWO pieces of clothes: the rectangle with a hole, and the bigger wrappy rectangle. This covers like 90% of ancient clothes, including the Roman toga and tunica. So pants, which covered your legs individually, were very ???? to ancient mediterranean people.
3. Otzi, an austrian guy who lived ~3300 BC, was found frozen in the Alps, wearing “pants”, consisting of two individual leg-sleeves made of animal skins with the fur inwards, and a loincloth. The legs of the “pants” tied on to a belt.
4. This is a similar setup to European medieval hose, except that hose didn’t have fur, and also had footies. Also, the whole separate-legged pants things is why our modern word ‘pants’ is plural, even though today it’s one garment.
5. Pants enabled a big leap in military technology- chariots to cavalry. Pants means you can ride a horse and still have your genitals intact afterwards. Turns out, sticking people on top of horses is much more effective than having the horses drag the people around behind them.
6. In like ~300 BC, the Chinese were having massive amounts of trouble with the pants-wearing, cavalry-having Eurasian nomads. Then, some guy had the brilliant idea of making everyone wear pants instead of robes, and proceeded to drive back the nomads and unite China.
7. The Romans and Greeks considered pants to be barbaric and feminine. But having muscular legs was very masculine. Some men were known for wearing ridiculously short tunics to show off their thighs. Marc Antony once mooned everyone by accident because he was wearing a miniskirt and no pants. Very manly.
8. Peter the Great decided that Russia had to be more like the rest of Europe, so he implemented some really strict policies, including a beard tax and mandatory pants. Yes, you could be punished if you didn’t wear pants.
9. The fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent was a major factor in making it acceptable for women to wear pants in public, which wasn’t really a culturally accepted thing until almost the end of the 60′s. In 1966, he debuted on the runway the first women’s tuxedo, which was met with a very ‘meh’ critical reception at the time, but is now considered one of fashion’s most influential works.
10. In the UK, ‘pants’ specifically refers to underpants.
bonus fact: it’s really not that hard to put pockets on pants, but so many designers seem incapable of figuring it out.
@scifigrl47 There are rules about pants. Rules that do not involve tying two tubes to your belt and hoping for the best.
And now there needs to be fic about people posting “FUN FACTS ABOUT PANTS” all over the tower in an effort to get DJ to care about pants.
It is a wasted effort, but everyone learns neat things about historical fashion!
Scientists named the octopus cities Octopolis and Octlantis and I just – yes.
wow i hope they invite us to their parties
I saw a documentary about this. Climate change and habitat destruction, while bad, are forcing some octopuses to live closer together, potentially solving a problem that has kept them from being a far more dominant species. They are super smart and very capable of learning from each other but when they live alone, they never get a chance to learn from other generations because their parents leave or die. Now there’s older ones living with younger ones who can pass on knowledge.
Lol a bunch of octopuses just crawled up on a beach the other day for no discernible reason and it was like “meh, it’s 2017” and everyone kinda missed it. I found it funny as fuck and decided they were coming out here to tell us all to cut our shit out.
Usually Megatrons will try to kill each other on sight unless particularly driven towards the same target, in which case they’ll work together, but on occasion, narcissism wins out.
Aries: “The word please doesn’t make me any money, kid.”
Taurus: “When there’s no cops around, anything’s legal!”
Gemini: “Sounds like something a responsible parent wouldn’t want you doing… Good thing I’m an uncle. Avenge me, kids! AVENGE ME!”
Cancer: “Finally, a good reason to punch a teenager in the face.”
Leo: “You see, it’s, it’s funny because marriage is terrible!”
Virgo: “Yes, YES! Burn the child!”
Libra: “I was awoken by the sound of mockery. Where is it? Show me the object of ridicule.”
Scorpio: “Wash off the shame, Stan. Wash off the shame.”
Sagittarius: “Would it be wrong to punch a child?”
Capricorn: “Well! I learned nothing.”
Aquarius: “Darn beautiful men! Always eating out of my trash.”
Pisces: “Road safety laws, prepare to be ignored!”
If you ever think history impressive or grand, here’s a story for you:
Right after ww2, Jews were freed, but basically had no citizenship to speak of, and the allied forces weren’t that!helpful. So a group called the TTG was formed to help emigrate (read: smuggle) Jews from Central Europe, to Mediterranean ports, where they would take boats to Israel.
The TTG did this by piling the Jewish refugees into trucks bearing British insignia, their operatives dressing up as British soldiers, and just openly driving to port cities.
If they were ever stopped by actual military forces, they would say they were a part of a covert supply missing, under special orders from Major Tuches. They would stress that the contents of the trucks was super secret and to not be disturbed under any circumstances. They saved over 300,000 Jews like this.
If that sounds reasonable to you, here’s the thing: TTG stands for Tilhas Teezee Gesheften, and the operatives named one Major Tuches as their commanding officer whenever they needed to.
Or, to translate that into English, the event that saved the lives of hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees was called Operation Kiss My Ass led by Major Asshole.