Just another nerd

Me: is that you, Doug

The credits: Freaky Creature played by Doug Jones

Me: DOUG!!!

WHERE IS HE?! 

Basically they did not have to go as hard as they did here. A Christmas Carol covers 60 years of fashion through flashbacks and they still manage to do nearly everything right. 

I’m mainly going to be talking about the human actors here because it’s harder to judge Muppet costumes proportionally, but those costumes are still on point 90% of the time.

First off, A Christmas Carol was published in 1843, and anyone who knows me knows I love the absolute train wreck that was mid-19th century men’s fashion. Do you like plaid? GOOD, BECAUSE IT’S ALL PLAID. Mixed with whatever else your little Victorian heart desires, color schemes be damned. Go wild.

This of course means I absolutely love Fred.

This outfit is hideous and it is also 1000% on point.

We also get to see him in a different outfit the next day, along with his wife and some friends.

First off, MORE PLAID, good for you. Second, I can literally find near-identical images of both these ladies’ dresses just by googling “1843 fashion plate”, I shit you not. To the damned year.

A good part of the story involves travelling through Scrooge’s life, so we get to see the costumes varying wildly over the course of several scenes. This was a time when styles were changing rapidly, and you had to keep up if you wanted to be fashionable and keep up appearances. Fashion changed so fast that you can often pinpoint an outfit to within a year or two like the ones above. 

First, we go to Scrooge’s childhood school. Given the timeline that’s normally put forward Michael Caine is definitely not old enough to play Scrooge, but ignore that for now. Let’s say if Scrooge is 75ish in 1843, it’s about 1783 when we see him leaving school and going off to be an apprentice. We actually see a few years of Little Scrooge fashion, but it’s fairly standard stuff. Scrooge doesn’t have a super childhood and his clothing is pretty plain, but it’s totally on par for the time. Why this haircut though? It makes me sad.

Then we jump ahead a few years and it’s about 1789. The whole group is attending the Fozziwig Christmas party and have gotten tarted up like they’re about the storm the Bastille, including Gonzo and Rizzo.

Again, they look absolutely ridiculous and it is absolutely accurate. 

Now, this is super ostentatious and a lot of people would have considered it way too French for their taste in this time period. But it definitely did happen (I’ve seen stripey bubblegum pink menswear in person) and like. It’s the Muppets. So, Rule of Funny.

Scrooge and Belle are dressed way closer to average Londoners of the time, and it’s worth noting that both are supposed to be somewhat poor. Fozzy pays everyone well but Lil’ Scrooge is still a skinflint and Belle is just getting by. They’re both looking darn good but their clothes are much more understated than everyone else’s and maybe even on the verge of out of style. 

Even their hair is pretty good. Including his. Also, holy shit does this guy look like he could be a young Michael Caine. Like, he doesn’t actually look how Michael Caine looked when he was that age, but if I didn’t know that I would totally buy it. Wow.

Then we jump ahead another ten to twelve years or so. This is the period I know the least about, especially when it comes to outerwear, so Jane Austen stans please comment. I don’t think it looks too bad though.

Here’s a couple of fashion plates from 1801 and 1803 for comparison.

I’d also like to point out that there is a wide variety of costumes based on social class that we get to see in the 1843 “present” that you wouldn’t really notice. So while the Scrooge family that’s doing alright for itself is wearing the latest looks, the rest of the town is not. A few of the women in the crowd dancing around Scrooge during “It Feels Like Christmas” are wearing dresses a couple of years out of date. Not too far, but you can see some looks from the tail end of the 1830s before women started shrink-wrapping their sleeves onto their arms.

You can see something similar to these outfits from 1839 in the crowd.

Contrast this with Mrs. Cratchit, who is living in poverty and has put on her absolute best dress for Christmas; it’s silk but it’s ten years out of style. 

This would have been the height of fashion in the early-mid 1830s.

And that’s important for making a world look real. Fashion was super important back then, but even so average people weren’t necessarily chucking their clothing out every year to keep up with the latest fashions unless they could really afford to. You would get there eventually, but you don’t want everyone in your universe, rich and poor, to look like they just stepped out of the latest fashion magazine. 

It’s absolutely astonishing to me that they put so much effort into this. I don’t tend to go down the rabbit hole of nitpicking historical costumes in movies as much as some, but when a movie that you never expected does it very right it just throws me for a loop. 

The Moon landing was faked

 Inability to comprehend financial planning or budgeting, sometimes even at a basic level; for example, estimating the cost of the items in a shopping basket or balancing a checkbook.

Inconsistent results in addition, subtraction, multiplication and division.

Difficulty with multiplication, subtraction, addition, and division tables, mental arithmetic, etc.

Problems with differentiating between left and right.

A “warped” sense of spatial awareness, or an understanding of shapes, distance, or volume that seems more like guesswork than actual comprehension.

Difficulty with time, directions, recalling schedules, sequences of events. Difficulty keeping track of time. Frequently late or early.

Poor memory (retention & retrieval) of math concepts; may be able to perform math operations one day, but draw a blank the next. May be able to do book work but then fails tests.

Difficulty reading musical notation. Difficulty with choreographed dance steps.

Having particular difficulty mentally estimating the measurement of an object or distance (e.g., whether something is 3 or 6 meters (10 or 20 feet) away).

When writing, reading and recalling numbers, mistakes may occur in the areas such as: number additions, substitutions, transpositions, omissions, and reversals.

 Inability to grasp and remember mathematical concepts, rules, formulae, and sequences.

 Inability to concentrate on mentally intensive tasks.

I can’t even comprehend what it might be like being a human who doesn’t have all of these characteristics. I don’t know how a brain can possibly just “remember” how to do long division or know what ten feet looks like.

There are three distinct types of dyscalcula: semantic memory, procedural concepts, and working memory.  I have don’t have dyslexia/dysgraphia or global memory problems, so my type is semantic memory. I have all but one of the symptoms in the above list. I also have trouble reading maps and am almost always lost geographically (even when going somewhere I’ve been repeatedly). There are theories about the cause or contributing factors of dyscalcula, but none have been proven. As a result there are currently very few interventions (aka: special courses, teaching styles, or universal hacks) available, and those that exist attempt to treat the symptom rather than addressing the root cause. None of these interventions really have enough evidence to suggest that they are truly effective (but they are often quite spendy). And many sites/services that focus on helping folks who are not neurotypical suggest that adults with dyscalcula simply “brush up on their math skills.” Like that’s even a possibility (spoiler alert - ain’t got no skills to brush up).

I struggled with math throughout school.  Long division in fifth grade was when I stopped being able to fake math capability.  I was only required to take math up to geometry, and I very nearly failed it (it was very bad for my GPA). In university I took a computer science class to avoid the math I would have been required to take (two no-credit remedial classes plus the lowest level credit class).  My husband learned about dyscalcula from a broadcast on public radio a year and a half after I finished uni.

I thought I was stupid for years because I couldn’t memorize phone numbers and struggled with anything math related. I graduated high school with honors and finished uni in three and a half years. But I still thought I was stupid, because I still couldn’t do math.

Sources & starting points

Wikipedia

Dyscalculia.org

ADDitude: What is Dyscalculia overview

“Extreme thirst has a lot of causes.  Let’s check your blood sugar, and let’s take a skin sample to see if you’re developing scales.”

“Joint pain is pretty common when someone’s pushing themself that way with training, and I’d definitely recommend some rest, but it sounds like it’s been coming on with the moon so we might want to do a blood test to check for lycanthropy.”

“I’m going to give you this journal.  Keep track of how often you’re near bodies of water and copses of trees – not single trees, there needs to be a cluster.”

STARCH MASKS

O N   H E R    B O D Y

does that mean

Pranget sex?

20 foot waterslide

while uu are

“Substitute beliefs” is an umbrella concept that can be applied to understanding introjects (fictional and real-life), pseudomemories, non-human alters, and more.

It’s important to note that not all substitute beliefs are harmful–they may be comforting, or even feel empowering. You don’t necessarily have to stop being a ghost! That said, it may be worth mentioning in therapy to make sure it’s a healthy belief to engage with.

For a long time, archeologists didn’t know how greek women did their high-piled braids and hair. There was a word that translated to “needle” in the descriptions. They went, “seems like we’ll never know.” Then a hairdresser took a fucking needle (big needle) and did the fucking thing you do with needles, which is sew - and by sewing the braids into place, she replicated ancient styles.

The Egyptians had diagrams of construction steps for their pyramids. Archeologists went “oooh, ancient primitive people, how they do this?” LITERALLY MYTHBUSTERS OR THE OLD DISCOVERY CHANNEL or someone went “what if we did the thing the pictures said they did” AND GUESS FUCKING WHAT. GUESS FUCKING WHAT.

Also that thing with native Americans saying squirrels taught them how to get sap for maple syrup, and colonizers going “that’s a myth sweaty”

Because the sources left by Romans always just said to mix with water. Because, if you were a Roman??? Obviously you knew that you used seawater for cement. Duh. That’s so obvious that they never really bothered specifying that you use seawater to mix it, because it wasn’t necessary, everyone knew that. 

But then the empire fell, other empires rose and fell, time passed, and by the time we were trying to reconstruct the formula the ‘mix the dry ingredients with seawater’ trick had been forgotten, until chemical analysis finally figured it out again. 

It’s sort of like the land of Punt, a ally of Egypt that’s mentioned all the time, but we don’t actually know where it was located. Because it isn’t written down anywhere. Why would they write it down? It’s Punt. Everyone knew where Punt was back then. It’d be ridiculous to waste the ink and space to specify where it was, every child knows about Punt. 

More interestingly, to me at least, is that in the 1960s and 70s he was a great radical political cartoonist, and sadly, many cartoons of those days are still just as relevant today. A small selection: