When men were real men

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Svartalf
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Re: When men were real men

Post by Svartalf » Mon Jun 09, 2014 7:48 pm

Wow, I didn't know you had such an overproduction of milk that you had enough to make plastics out of... whatever the time it happened.
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mistermack
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Re: When men were real men

Post by mistermack » Mon Jun 09, 2014 7:54 pm

Svartalf wrote:Wow, I didn't know you had such an overproduction of milk that you had enough to make plastics out of... whatever the time it happened.
Plastic is cheap today, but it wasn't back then. It was in competition with stuff like ivory, in the button trade.
Wikipedia wrote: Although it could not be moulded once set, and was hence produced in sheets, it was inexpensive to produce due to its simple manufacture. Galalith could be cut, drilled, embossed and dyed without difficulty, and its structure manipulated to create a series of effects. No other plastic at the time could compete on price, and with ivory, horn and bone products becoming far more expensive, it found a natural home in the fashion industry.
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Re: When men were real men

Post by pErvinalia » Tue Jun 10, 2014 3:02 am

It's interesting to see that we are going back to organic plastic substitutes these days. It's a re-evolution.
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Re: When men were real men

Post by JimC » Tue Jun 10, 2014 3:21 am

I, like, totally dig organic plastics, man...
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Re: When men were real men

Post by piscator » Tue Jun 10, 2014 6:06 am

DaveDodo007 wrote:
Făkünamę wrote:
mistermack wrote:I remember once, years ago, a bunch of seven or eight of us were drinking and yakking together in the living room of a shared house in winter.
A faint smell of fish started wafting around, but nobody said anything. ( we were in our early 20s, a mixture of males and females ).
The smell of fish got stronger and stronger, but nobody said anything. But some of us were giving each other funny looks. Eventually, some guy said ''what the fuck is that smell'' and we went through the ''well it's not me'' routine, and established that it wasn't one of us. (relief).

Then we went round every corner of the room, and tracked it down to a two-way adapter, that the 3kw electric fire was plugged into. It was red hot.

I found out later that some of the plastics in those days were bulked out with whale bone.
(This was about 1976, but it was a very old adapter).

The smell of fish was so perfect, it was like you were in the market, at a fish stall.
Ah for the heady days when whale bone was more plentiful and cheap than plastic.
It all went downhill when Capt Ahab lost his mind. How are you suppose to harpoon plastic?

Ahab is just misunderstood. He invented GIS. He knew whalebone comes from the mouth of a baleen whale, and a great white sperm whale has great white teeth instead of baleen. He was a scrappy fucker, he paid good, and he could find fish. He was right about that fkn whale too. The big white SOB came back and sank the Pequod when he didn't have to.

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Re: When men were real men

Post by mistermack » Tue Jun 10, 2014 11:20 am

There's a documentary series on the BBC at the moment in Britain, about Britain's Whalers. I watched it last night.
It didn't actually end till the 1950s or 60s, and the real damage was done towards the end, in the more mechanised era, not the times when they used to go out and spear whales by hand.

They were operating out of South Georgia, in the Antarctic, and basically it started out that they just used the blubber, boiled down for oil for oil lamps, but by the end, they were using practically everything, including all the bones. And whale oil was in demand during the war for making nitro-glycerine.

They got 22 tons of bones from a big humpback, so there must have been some kind of market for it, but they didn't say what for.
What they called whalebone in corsets, or umbrellas, wasn't really bone, it was balleen. Balleen is actually bristles, not bones, and it's flexible and not brittle like bone.
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Re: When men were real men

Post by piscator » Tue Jun 10, 2014 10:15 pm

I have an 12' piece of humpback baleen from the villagers of Nuiqsut on my living room wall, and a collection of humpback and bowhead baleen baskets from the Inupiat villages of Pt Hope and Pt Ley.
Eskimos carve whale bones like wood, but the bones are usually very old.

Image



Humpback whale blubber has sort of a coconut flavor when it's fresh, but nothing stinks as bad as a rotting marine mammal.

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Re: When men were real men

Post by mistermack » Wed Jun 11, 2014 11:07 am

My mother's family are from a place called Balleen, in the west of Ireland. We've still got a house there. I got balleen in my blood, man.

I doubt if the name is anything to do with whales, though. Although it is wet.

One snippet from the whaler documentary, the right whale was called the right whale, because it floated when dead. The order of preference was dominated by how well they floated after you killed them, and the right whale floated the best. So it was the right one to go for.

In the old days, they never touched the Blue Whale, because it was too fast, and would sink when you killed it, and pull the boats down with it. It was only when the ships got really big and mechanised that they bothered with the blues. But by then, the best whales were in decline anyway.
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Re: When men were real men

Post by camoguard » Wed Jun 11, 2014 10:13 pm

As a person who jumped from page 1 to page 11 of this thread, I'm now going to have to go back and read the bits in the middle so that I can figure out how the opening post about men being men turned into a comment about whalers.

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Re: When men were real men

Post by Svartalf » Wed Jun 11, 2014 10:18 pm

Who cares, there's nothing wrong with being a pansy whose hands are good for nothyng beyond typing and turning book pages.
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Re: When men were real men

Post by JimC » Wed Jun 11, 2014 11:55 pm

camoguard wrote:As a person who jumped from page 1 to page 11 of this thread, I'm now going to have to go back and read the bits in the middle so that I can figure out how the opening post about men being men turned into a comment about whalers.
Ratzian threads have super de-railing powers, not found on run-of-the-mill forums...
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Re: When men were real men

Post by pErvinalia » Thu Jun 12, 2014 2:24 am

:hehe:
Sent from my penis using wankertalk.
"The Western world is fucking awesome because of mostly white men" - DaveDodo007.
"Socialized medicine is just exactly as morally defensible as gassing and cooking Jews" - Seth. Yes, he really did say that..
"Seth you are a boon to this community" - Cunt.
"I am seriously thinking of going on a spree killing" - Svartalf.

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Re: When men were real men

Post by mistermack » Thu Jun 12, 2014 8:39 pm

JimC wrote: Ratzian threads have super de-railing powers, not found on run-of-the-mill forums...
Mill forums might stay on the rails, but they can be pretty boring. There's not much happening in the world of mills these days.
While there is a market for shit, there will be assholes to supply it.

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Re: When men were real men

Post by JimC » Thu Jun 12, 2014 9:24 pm

mistermack wrote:
JimC wrote: Ratzian threads have super de-railing powers, not found on run-of-the-mill forums...
Mill forums might stay on the rails, but they can be pretty boring. There's not much happening in the world of mills these days.
There's trouble down 't mill! :?
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Re: When men were real men

Post by mistermack » Thu Jun 12, 2014 9:34 pm

JimC wrote: There's trouble down 't mill! :?

One o't crossbeams gone on skew on t'treadle again?
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