Today I Learned

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My mom is in her native homeland in Central America where she will stay until May 9th and is the oldest sibling
of the maternal side of The Anonymous Household.

Some people have a tobacco smoking fetish where they don't just find the smoking itself sexy, they find all the gross, nasty and life-threatening health hazards of smoking sexy. Like getting smokers cough and their teeth and fingers getting stained or even their lungs turning black. Some people in their 20s or 30s have even developed chronic lung disease because they *wanted* to and smoked as much as they could to get that way.

The human race is nutso.

Didnt know about THAT. But I did know that there is a sub genre of porn for men who...get off on watching women smoke cigarettes.

On a related there is an advice column for the "sexually adventurous" shall we say...called "Savage Love". He had one female (maybe she was anorexic) reader ask him "where can I find some hot porn pics of folks in fast food places chowing down on burgers?". He said just "go to the nearest McDonald and watch it for free". I guess anything (fast food or tobacco) that folks get inhibited about consuming- becomes forbidden fruit -that can become a sexualized fetish.

Before the invention of crash test dummies, people used cadavers to crash test vehicles and other things.

Most of the cadavers were of older men that had died non-violent deaths. Soon people complained mainly because of the supposed immorality of using human bodies. So they started using live animals like pigs or chimpanzees instead, which of course was even worse, since dead people can't suffer due to being well, dead, and it was also being done to help save more lives.

This eventually lead to the creation of crash test dummies. But most of the dummies look like adult males, especially the ones in the driver's side in the crash test. That's pretty sexist and ageist.

Or maybe it's just because most males are d... okay I'll stop.

I found lists of people in different countries who were fatally killed by domestic dogs on Wikipedia.

One incident that I found particularly morbidly interesting happened in the USA in the early 20th century. A man had given his bride a puppy as a gift on their wedding day, and the puppy bit her. No one thought it was a big deal, until the puppy bit another dog, and then they both showed symptoms of rabies, or hydrophobia as it was normally called in those days. The bride got rabies too, and she and both the dogs died soon afterwards.

Being attacked by dogs is scary enough, but it must have been really terrifying before dogs started being vaccinated for rabies and other things.

That's sad. ^

Emily Brontë was bitten by a rabid dog and she self-cauterized the wound with an iron.
Then it got infected and she nearly died from that.

Gabbo, the ventriloquist dummy from The Simpson's episode "Krusty Gets Kancelled" was named after the main character in a pre-code drama film called "The Great Gabbo". But in the film, Gabbo is the ventriloquist, his dummy is named Otto. Gabbo was unable to express himself or show emotions except through Otto. Not unlike The Simpson's Gabbo, who could sing, dance, be a jerk, and called himself "A bad widdle boy".

Today, I've learned that a punch buggy is a classic Volkswagen beetle.