About 1,000 years ago, this ‘Tables’ game board was smashed up with an axe and thrown into a rubbish pit at Gloucester Castle! 🪓 😳
Ancient evidence perhaps of a sore loser!? 😂
Ironically it is the world’s oldest surviving complete tables set!
Gloucester Museum 📷 by me
#Archaeology
A Roman emperor didn’t just mourn his boyfriend. He made him a god, and built an empire‑wide cult around him.
Hadrian’s lover, Antinous, drowned in the Nile in 130 CE, before his 20th birthday. Hadrian was reportedly devastated (“wept like a woman”), then did something almost unthinkable: he deified Antinous by imperial order, without waiting for the Senate.
What followed wasn’t a private shrine. It was infrastructure: temples across the Greek East and Latin West, a new city (Antinoöpolis) on the spot where Antinous died, statues and busts mass‑produced throughout the empire, and an organized cult that sometimes worshipped him as a full god, sometimes as a hero.
In Egypt, priests fused him with Osiris - Osiris‑Antinous - because of how he died. In Greece and beyond, people treated his image as sacred, with games, oracles, and local priesthoods. Some sources even claim Hadrian himself wrote “oracles” in the new god’s name.
This isn’t just a love story; it’s a power move. Hadrian used religion, urban planning, and imagery to freeze a personal loss into public permanence. If you control the gods, you can make grief immortal, and turn a forbidden relationship into state‑sanctioned worship.
The uncomfortable question: how many “myths” we study are really just politics dressed in marble?
They wouldn’t take you unless you weighed 107 pounds
and still had six teeth.
That was the minimum.
That’s how hungry America was in 1933.
March 31, 1933 — FDR signs the Civilian Conservation Corps into law. Unemployed young men, mostly 18 to 25, single, broke. $30 a month. Twenty-five of it had to go home so the family could eat.
The physical exam was not looking for athletes.
Too short? Out.
Under 107 pounds? Out.
Fewer than six usable teeth? Out.
That was the line they drew after four years of bread lines and empty cupboards. Boys showed up gaunt. Doctors later said about three out of four were underweight. Some arrived “almost a physical wreck.”
They stuffed themselves the first days in camp. Cooks ran out of steak.
Then the work started.
Planting trees. Building fire towers, trails, parks, dams, bridges. Living in tents and barracks.
Three squares a day that “stuck to the ribs.” In a few months many gained 8, 12, even 20 pounds. They left looking like a different country than the one that sent them.
Nearly three million passed through the camps before the program ended in 1942. They sent money home. They learned a trade. They put muscle back on a generation the Depression had tried to starve.
The bar to get in was 107 pounds and six teeth.
That wasn’t toughness.
That was how close the country had come to breaking its sons.
Would a 107-pound kid with six teeth get a second look today… or a second chance?
#CCC #GreatDepression #AmericanHistory
Disclaimer
Based on CCC enrollment standards and 1930s Army/Surgeon General reports. Weight and dental minimums varied slightly by year and camp. Shared as history.
French general Michel Yakovleff on Trump's plan to build a runaway INSIDE Iran under active bombing to airlift uranium out of Iran:
"stop snoring cocaine" 😂
Dr. Sherri Tenpenny: “We’ve got to stop calling chicken pox and measles diseases... because they’re not. They’re infections, and infections come and go in a week to 10 days, and leave behind a lifetime of immunity. A disease is something that comes and stays, and frequently can’t be cured. So when you vaccinate to avoid an infection, what you potentially are doing is causing a disease.”
Infections come and go. The question is what they leave behind.
Studies have reported links between natural childhood measles/chickenpox and lower adult cancer and heart-disease risk:
• Albonico et al., 1998 — History of febrile childhood infections (measles, chickenpox, rubella, etc.) linked to lower overall cancer risk, strongest for chickenpox/rubella and non-breast cancers.
• Montella et al., 2006 (Leukemia Research) — Childhood measles and chickenpox linked to lower Hodgkin lymphoma; measles also linked to lower non-Hodgkin lymphoma (esp. follicular B-cell).
• Tennant et al., 2013 (Eur J Epidemiol, Newcastle Thousand Families, n=1,142 born 1947) — Childhood measles linked to lower cancer mortality as adults.
• Pesonen et al., 2007 (Atherosclerosis) — Childhood contagious diseases (including varicella/chickenpox) linked to lower coronary heart disease and fewer acute coronary events.
• Kubota et al., 2015 / JACC study (Atherosclerosis, 103,836 Japanese adults, ~21-year follow-up) — History of measles (and measles + mumps) linked to lower cardiovascular mortality.
They found God within themselves. They found themselves within their journeys. They found each other when the frequency aligned. And now they pour everything they were given back into the world.