Official Random Fact/Random Thought Thread!

[Dave Shepard]

The manor houses of medieval England had a fire pit in the middle of the room. 100% of the heat, 100% of the smoke.

A friend has journals from his grandmother's family circa late 1800's. There was one entry that said it was so cold that the ice in the kettle on the kitchen stove hadn't melted in three days, and the stove was running wide open.

 

[Burnham]

An interesting part of history is the degree of advanced tech for building, including central heating through indirect heated floors, water supply and sewerage systems, etc. that the Romans developed and deployed during their occupation of what became England. Started maybe 50 years AD, lasted some 350 years if memory serves.

When they left, the ability to maintain those systems left with them. Within a couple hundred years or so, the people (Saxons, Britons, and Vikings) living there were back to building fires in the middle of a wattle hut with no chimney, or an old Roman building and venting the rooms through holes they had bashed in the roofs.

 

[CurSedVoyce]

 

[lxskllr]

I've had bread my father made in the freezer that was there when he died. That's been 24+ years now. His bread was terrible. He was a good baker, but he got the notion of doing everything himself, including grinding raw grain to make flour. He was NOT a good miller, and he bought large quantities of ingredients, so they went bad before they got used. His bread was like a brick with a lead core, and tasted like it was pulled out of a 19th century wall. I saved though, cause he made it. There was zero chance of me eating any, but it was there.

There's been some disturbing trends affecting my ability to get snus from Sweden, so I've made some sizeable purchases that added significantly to my already large stockpile, and I barely have any room in my freezer for food. It's packed with tobacco. Well, I had two of my father's bricks in there taking up room I could use, and the choices were me dying with it in there, or feeding it to the birds. The sensible option of course is feeding it to the birds, so that's what I've been doing. I'm on the second loaf now. It's been an especially cold winter, so it's a nice bonus for the critters, but it's a melancholy feeling. It's a bit of the past gone forever.