Keepin' the Tea Warm

The pyramids were built by contemporary workers who received wages and were fed and taken care of during construction

The Dendera “lightbulb” is a representation of the creation myth and has nothing to do with electricity

We didn’t find “““copper wiring””” in the great pyramid either

Hatshepsut wasn’t transgender

The gods didn’t actually have animal heads

Hieroglyphs aren’t mysteriously magical; they’re just a language (seriously we have shopping lists and work rosters and even ancient erotica)

The ancient Egyptian ethnicity wasn’t homogeneous

While the Egyptians were fine-ass astronomers they didn’t align any of their enormous and/or important buildings to modern star constellations, because constellations look very different now than they did ~5000 years ago 

Speaking of that particular sphinx, the Napoleonic expedition is not responsible for its missing nose

Akhenaten was not a “heretic” by contemporary standards

Ramses II appropriated a lot of his predecessors’ buildings/reliefs and isn’t really deserving of the epithet “the Great”

It was not, in fact, practice to shave off eyebrows after cats died; Herodotus lied about that

Here are some vetted Egyptological books/sources (that are by and large appropriate for a lay-audience) you can find most, if not all of the above:

Lehner, M., The Complete Pyramids

Wilkinson, R. H., The Complete Temples of Ancient Egypt

Hornung, E., The One and the Many: Conceptions of God in Ancient Egypt

Dunand, F. & Zivie-Coche, C., Gods and Men in Egypt

Kemp, B., Ancient Egypt: Anatomy of a Civilization

Bard, K., An Introduction to the Archaeology of Ancient Egypt

Stevenson Smith, W., The Art and Architecture of Ancient Egypt

Kitchen, K. A., The Life and Times of Ramesses II, King of Egypt

Sweeney, D., Sex and Gender (in Ancient Egypt)

McDowell, A. G., Village Life in Ancient Egypt:  Laundry Lists and Love Songs

The thing about Seth is that he is half of a whole. Not only in the sense of “without chaos there is no order”, but also in that the Egyptians liked to see joined in their king both the aspects of Horus (faithfullness, respect for parents) as well as Seth (strength, cunning). 

Hatshepsut describes herself as follows:

(…) as I wear the White Crown, as I appear in the Red Crown, as Horus and Seth have united for me their two halves, as I rule this land like the son of Isis (Horus), as I have become strong like the son of Nut (Seth). (After Sethe & Helck, 1906)

Turner (2016) likens Seth to a minister of foreign affairs rather than a foreigner himself. He served a purpose, even as he was worshipped by the Hyksos, the invading foreigners - foreigners who were eventually driven out. Only after Seth “failed” to aid in the driving out of further invading foreigners did he become villified.

As for the appearance of the gods: certain gods were portrayed with animal heads, but this does not mean that the Egyptians thought of their gods as being anthropomorphic with an animal head tacked on - it means that the gods had two (or more) distinct forms, and that they could appear as either. 

Hathor, for example, was portrayed as both a cow and a woman, as well as a woman with a cow’s head, or a ureaus snake, or a lioness, or the cow’s head (with feminine characteristics) seen on columns. There is a statue on the Louvre that shows four of these forms side by side:

The iconography of the gods is, as Hornung (1971/1982) puts it, “an attempt to indicate something of [their] complex nature.” So in our example Hathor can appear in many forms, indicating her many-faceted nature. She’s not simply a woman with a cow’s head; she can be in the woman and she can be in the cow.

We all love disaster movies! The cool special effects, the underdog stories, the underlying themes of hope. As cool as they are, they do tend to use misconceptions about natural disasters. This normally wouldn’t be an issue since Hollywood will always embellish but it’s important to know the true science behind these phenomena should you ever encounter them.

1) Pyroclastic flows will kill you almost instantly, you cannot survive a direct hit

Movies guilty of this: Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, Dante’s Peak

Pyroclastic flows exceed 100km/h and reach temperatures over 1,000°C. You definitely cannot outrun it in either car or on foot. The boiling hot toxic gas, ash, and lava in the flow will kill you instantly and pummel your smoking corpse into oblivion. Sorry, Chris Pratt.

2) Tsunamis do not crest, they are more like a sudden flood than a wave

Movies guilty of this: Literally any movie with a tsunami ever

Tsunamis are massive and sudden floods caused by the displacement of ocean water due to earthquakes or massive landslides. They’re not tidal waves and thus do not crest. It’s poetic, but inaccurate.

3) Hail is always spherical and doesn’t fall in big cinder blocks of ice

Movies guilty of this: The Day After Tomorrow

Hail can get quite large and can definitely be fatal, but they are exclusively spherical. Hail is formed by water droplets cycling through the updrafts of a thunderstorm and the rotational movements make the resulting hail a ball.

Looks more like a stage hand is throwing the remains of an ice swan than a hail storm

4) You cannot freeze instantaneously. Not even in space.

Movies guilty of this: The Day After Tomorrow, Geostorm, The Cloverfield Paradox, Sunshine

Space, and certain places on Earth, can get exceedingly cold. The coldest temperature ever recorded on Earth was −89.2 °C. That’s damn cold. But you still wouldn’t flash freeze into a peoplesicle within mere seconds. Intense cold can kill you quickly if you’re completely exposed but it would still take time before your body would be a thoroughly frozen chunk of meat. As for space, it can get quite cold, but it’s also an empty vacuum. There’s nothing around you but empty void, which means there’s also nothing to transfer your body heat away from you. Without convection, your body heat would be lost via radiation and that can take a long time.

5) Earthquakes over 10 on the Richter scale are physically impossible on Earth.

Movies guilty of this: 10.5

You would need a massive fault line to carry that sort of energy. Something on the scale of going through the earth’s core. Which does not exist . Even then, if such an earthquake would occur, the planet would literally explode.A 15 magnitude earthquake would release energy on the magnitude of 1x10^32 joules. That, coincidentally, is the same amount of energy contained in the gravitational binding of the Earth. Simply put, anything greater than 9.9 on the Richter scale is impossible and would cause the Earth to explode.

6) California will and can not sink into the Pacific like a big slab, and it can’t break away from the rest of the US.

Movies guilty of this: 2012, 10.5

Most movies cite the San Andreas fault as the reason for the cleavage, but even this isn’t enough. The San Andreas fault is a transform fault, meaning the North American plate and the Pacific Plate are slowly horizontally grinding past each other, not pushing away. As California is a part of the greater Pacific plate, it literally could not snap free from it to “sink into the sea”. Because if the entire tectonic plate underneath California where to flip over and sink then the entire ocean would drain away into the mantle.

7) You can’t sink in lava. You also can’t stand near it without being burned.

Movies guilty of this: Volcano, Lord of the Rings: Return of the King

Lava is molten rock, and is incredibly dense. In fact, it’s three times as dense as humans, who are mostly water. If you were to cannonball into a lava pit, you would dip in a bit before bouncing to the top and floating. You would also burn up and die super quickly. Because fresh lava can exceed 1,200°C! Even standing a couple feet away from a lava flow, you would feel the intense heat radiation. You would lose your eyebrows and probably the top layer of your skin if you stood too close. There’s a reason why volcanologists wear protective suits. Sam and Frodo would have been roasted.

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FINALLY SOMETHING ABOUT BRAZIL’S SITUATION ON MY DASHBOARD

A left-handed person walks into most classrooms and immediately is made aware of their left-handedness - they have to sit in a left-handed seat, which restricts their choices of where to sit. If there are not enough left-handed seats, they will have to sit in a right-handed seat and be continuously aware of their left-handedness. (There are other examples like left-handed scissors or baseball mitts as well.)

Meanwhile, right-handed people have much more choice about where to sit, and almost never have to think about their right-handedness.

Does this mean right-handed people are bad? No.

Does it mean that we should replace all right-handed desks with left-handed desks? No.

But could we maybe use different desk styles that can accommodate everyone and makes it so nobody has limited options or constant awareness that they are different? Yes.

But when I was a tiny princess, my dad used to be my royal advisor. He would come to me, and over tea we would discuss the problems of the kingdom. He would tell me that new people wanted to move to the kingdom, and ask me what we should do. Or he would tell me that the teddybears and the dolls were fighting over the enchanted forest, and ask me what to do. Basically, he took the trappings of the princess culture, and used it as a tool to teach me about leadership, civic responsibility, and compassion. 

Lockets With Miniature Animals Inside

The Woods of Wonder on Etsy

Following up to this post, here’s a fantastic look at Victorian “fancy dress balls”–they were all the rage at the time, but really picked up in the later half of the century where the focus was more on self-expression than hiding oneself, as was the case at 18th-century masquerades (Phantom hearkens back to this earlier tradition, but the idea of a masquerade hiding one’s true identity also works perfectly for its theatrical setting).

Here are some wackier costumes from fancy dress balls. I’m in love with this one:

And look! A bee!

Here’s a fashion plate with some costume ideas from across the centuries (and of course, we wouldn’t be in the Victorian era if there weren’t a bit of tone-deaf cultural appropriation with the Native American costume.):

It was actually common for women to wear shorter skirts at these balls so they could show off their fabulous boots (as you see above, and as is the case with Christine’s stage version of the Star Princess dress):

Depending on your host, masks of all kinds were welcome, so you were free to be as unsettlingly disturbing as you wanted while you lounged by the punch bowl and made rabbit eyes at the eligible young heiress whose hand in marriage comes with fifty thousand pounds a year and a lifetime of resentment because women’s rights didn’t exist yet:

Suppose you can’t make it to the most fashionable balls London or Paris this season. If it’s 1883 and you are Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt and happen to have $6 million of disposable income at your fingertips, why not throw your own fancy dress ball for New York City’s elite (and spend millions on champagne alone)? And why don’t you one-up every single one of your guests by dressing as that most wondrous of new inventions, Edison’s electric light? I defy the Rockefellers to steal your spotlight when the spotlight in question could very easily electrocute them.

Like flowers? Of course you do. Like spring? Oh, my God, do you ever. Like pretending you’re but a mere shepherdess, giggling and flouncing away from the advances of the blacksmith’s apprentice? GOOD LORD, YES. Like  the 18th century? HELL YES, OH MAN, GIMME THAT ROCOCO SPRING FLOWER EXPLOSION:

BUT WAIT! You’re not gonna let that Rococo Spring Flower Explosion HARLOT flounce away with your suitor, are you? HELL NO, YOU ARE NOT. Which is why you are prepared to send her running dressed as a GORGEOUS FREAKING BUTTERFLY:

But where would a butterfly be without a lovely flower upon which to perch? Enter your secret lesbian lover, the Rose:

Or, if you’re uncomfortable with NOT being the center of attention every waking moment, you could just pull the equivalent of one-upping the bride at a wedding by wearing white and come dressed as the DAMN SUN:

But maybe you’re more of the goth persuasion. Might I suggest a tasteful sorceress?

A dainty Batman ensemble to match your wife’s delicate moth angel gown?

Vampire mistress of the night, perhaps?

Actually, bat motifs were an extremely popular costume option, not just in the 19th century, but also at 18th century balls:

But if it’s 1880 and you want to carry on grandma’s bat tradition, this might be a more modern take on a pocket-sized blood-sucking demon:

Or this:

You are so thrilled to attend the costume ball like the goth nightmare you are, you can hardly contain your enthusiasm:

Here is a tastefully acceptable take on Satan. Might I sample your punch, Mrs. Higgenbottom, before I make away with your soul?

“Oh, Ella!”

“Yes, Constance?”

“Oh, I do so love your seagull gown.”

“Oh, why thank you, my dear friend!”

“But I’ve not the slightest idea what I shall wear to the ball!”

“Why, Constance, it is a simple matter of identifying something near and dear to your heart and then adapting it into a suitable costume. I, for example, find solace in the sea, particularly in the birds of the sea, and most particularly when they nose-dive into and defecate upon the boat, shrieking like banshees in heat. Hence, the seagulls adorning my gown. What do you like the very most, Constance?” “MOTHER-EFFING LOBSTERS.”

Or, maybe you’re just a shameless ho and don’t give a brass farthing about showing your ankles, your calves, your thighs, or your hoo-ha at the Embassy Ball, in which case, blaze it: