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Foot binding was a tradition among Chinese women from around a thousand years ago to less than 100 years ago. Billions of women endured the crippling tradition, although many died trying to achieve the goal of “lotus feet.” The process of deforming a girl’s feet was started when she was between two and five years old.
To begin the foot binding process, the foot binder would gently soak the child’s feet in a solution of animal blood and herbs. Her toenails were trimmed and groomed, and her feet were thoroughly massaged. Once the skin was softened and the muscles were relaxed, the foot binder would curl the child’s toes down towards the sole of the foot as far as the bones would allow. The binder would then curl the toes farther than the bones would allow, snapping the toddler’s phalanges and forming a kind of twisted foot-fist. No manner of pain relief was employed during this process, so the binder was required to disregard any agonized screams. Next, the arch was broken.
But that’s just the beginning of the process. Read the rest of it, and how foot binding finally fell out of style, at Damn Interesting. Link
To many wealthy Lithuanians, it was just a fancy horseback riding academy. But horses aren’t the only things kept in the barn: the CIA had built a secret prison there, where they interrogated (or tortured, your choice of word) suspected al-Qaeda terrorists.
ABC News has the story:
The CIA constructed the prison over the next several months, apparently flying in prefabricated elements from outside Lithuania. The prison opened in Sept. 2004.
According to sources who saw the facility, the riding academy originally consisted of an indoor riding area with a red metallic roof, a stable and a cafe. The CIA built a thick concrete wall inside the riding area. Behind the wall, it built what one Lithuanian source called a "building within a building."
On a series of thick concrete pads, it installed what a source called "prefabricated pods" to house prisoners, each separated from the other by five or six feet. Each pod included a shower, a bed and a toilet. Separate cells were constructed for interrogations.
Back in the middle ages, a popular form of torture is to force a poor sap to sit on a pointy stool called the Judas Cradle. You can imagine what that does to the guy’s backside.
Fast forward to modern times and lo, this torture chair was transformed into an edgy "Stake-chair" by Russian designer Ton Guglya:
Stake-chair and stake-stool for those who like to be «on the edge». Practically it is very comfortable to seat on a glass cube (with round corners and a deepening in the top). Woody structure is actually wooden. If you doubt the historical authenticity of the torture stake — search it on the internet.
The Pew Research Center conducts a lot of surveys – but this one yielded a very surprising result: churchgoers, especially Evangelicals, are more likely to support torture than those unaffiliated with any religious organization.
The more often Americans go to church, the more likely they are to support the torture of suspected terrorists, according to a new survey.
More than half of people who attend services at least once a week — 54 percent — said the use of torture against suspected terrorists is "often" or "sometimes" justified. Only 42 percent of people who "seldom or never" go to services agreed, according to the analysis released Wednesday by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.
White evangelical Protestants were the religious group most likely to say torture is often or sometimes justified — more than six in 10 supported it. People unaffiliated with any religious organization were least likely to back it. Only four in 10 of them did.
(Photo: sduffy [Flickr])
AskMen has a pretty nifty post about the 5 things you didn’t know about Shakespeare. Take, for instance, the word "torture" – yep, good ol’ Will invented it (well, technically he made the noun "torture" which existed at the time into the verb form):
3- Shakespeare invented "torture"
Shakespeare didn’t just invent "torture," but also "excitement," "addiction" and "savagery." Another of the five things you might not have known about Shakespeare is just how much he’s influenced the English language. Our man Will invented about 1,700 words in the English language. A remarkable number of the phrases and words we use every day first appeared in Shakespeare’s work. Shakespeare converted verbs into adjectives or nouns into verbs whenever it suited him. Amazingly, his linguistic inventions stuck, and we still use them today.
