Fun fact! Having a job every day is actually a fairly new thing.
In olden times, people had daily chores and other things to do but their workload/ daily working hours was actually much lower than it is today. Even in farming communities.
The concept of working super hard every day actually comes from capitalism, which in turn comes from Puritanical ideology.
The Puritans believed in salvation through work and in no play.
Early capitalists adopted this ideology because it meant higher productivity and therefore more money if their factories were running near constantly.
The idea of needing to be continuously productive in order to be useful/ allowed things like food and shelter, is actually quite an insidious ideal that is deeply rooted in the American culture.
4 day work weeks have actually proven to be more productive than the 5 day week. But corporations won’t adopt it willingly because it means less of a stranglehold on their workers.
This looks like a fucking parody post, or an edgy edit, but it’s 100% official real Flintstones.
Clarification: I don’t hate this book, I love it, it’s amazing. It’s just that taking a step back and looking it out of context is still really funny. Especially the line “We participated in a genocide, Barney.”
ok but imagine them in their cartoon forms saying this dialogue i’m
can we have some context to this, perhaps?
Bedrock is having a mayoral election. One of the candidates is a violent war mongering asshole that riles people up against the lizard people. This reminds Fred and Barney of their time in the army.
Back then the father of said violent candidate was riling people up against the “tree people”. Fred, Barney, and other soldiers fought what they believed to be a defensive measure against the tree people. Turns out, it was actually an invasion, in order to kill off the tree people and take over their forest to build Bedrock.
That’s what Fred means when he says he and Barney participated in a genocide. They literally did.
(Extra fun fact, Barney adopted a tree person baby after the war, and his son Bamm-Bamm is the last tree person.)
My favorite particular bird is the Pfeilstorch! This is a piece of taxidermy from the early 1800s currently on display at the University of Rostock in Germany.
In the early 1800s, natural historians and biologists did not know where birds went for the winter. They just disappeared. Some people thought they hibernated like bears, or turned into fish (!!) or flew to the moon (!!)
Cut to 1822 when a this bird was found in Germany. It was still alive, walking around with this spear in its neck. The spear was made from wood that only grows in central Africa. The German biologists determined that the bird had been speared in central Africa and then flew north to Germany. This was how they figured out that birds migrate with the changing seasons.
obi-wan: an elegant weapon for a more civilised age luke: what did you use it for? obi-wan: well, one time i hacked off a guy’s limbs and left him to die in a volcano
