Timeline for Favorite Question and Answers from First Quarter 2021

Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0

5 events

when toggle format	what		by	license	comment
Apr 4, 2021 at 16:30	comment	added	Adamant		The star called Wormwood that corrupted and poisoned the waters of the Earth was definitely a reference to the Chernobyl accident (literally, wormwood in Ukrainian) that poisoned the land and water around it, right? Anyway, add to all that the fact that the author seems to be trying to promote ideas from papers they wrote as a graduate student a decade or more ago, without indicating their affiliation no less. I upvoted the more plausible ones, but downvoted the insufficiently-sourced speculation.
Apr 4, 2021 at 16:28	comment	added	Adamant		An question that suggested that by noting that the pronunciation of "arm" was "arrum", Dodgeson was not making the cheap and obvious joke about Irish people suggested by the context, but rather referencing a flower? Even though "arrum" is not the same as "arum," the phrase "giant arm" does not appear in the paragraph at all, and the claimed resemblance between the flower and the original illustration is very difficult to see. Frankly, a lot of this seems like pareidolia to me. As with Biblical interpretation, it is easy to underestimate the probability of coincidences.
Apr 4, 2021 at 16:21	comment	added	Adamant		I can tell why I, at least, downvoted some. The ones that I downvoted seemed to be speculative interpretations of some element of the work that required a number of leaps of logic and often passed over more obvious possibilities. Bill the Lizard is Satan because someone throws a common household object at him? Inkwells are uncommon these days, but in that era they were so common that perhaps it was hardly more unusual than throwing a shoe (would we take all shoe-throwing to be a reference to George Bush?)
Apr 4, 2021 at 14:06	history	edited	Rand al'ThorMod	CC BY-SA 4.0	added 335 characters in body
Apr 4, 2021 at 14:01	history	answered	Rand al'ThorMod	CC BY-SA 4.0