Since Know Your Meme doesn't give the reference for why it's a lake, maybe not everybody is familiar with british lore:
The mythical Lady of the Lake:
Probably best known via Monthy Python:
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.
In short: She teaches Lancelot arts and writing, infusing him with wisdom and courage, and overseeing his training to become an unsurpassed warrior.
This reminds me that Monty Python and the Holy Grail contributed actual historical knowledge about Arthurian legends to my knowledge base while growing up. Other examples of Python unintentional education include knowing the names of a myriad of obscure cheeses (the cheese shop skit), a shocking number of anachronistic synonyms for death (the parrot skit) and notable contributions of the Roman Empire (Life of Brian 'What have the Romans ever done for us?' skit).
While it didn't contribute to my GPA at the time, I'm sure I could name more notable philosophers than any other 8th grader in my school (philosopher's song skit). However, in high school it did spark the interest to look up and read about each of the philosophers in the song.
The problem is that comedy is frequently not factually accurate.
Roman Imperial contributions? Was Roman wine better than pre-Roman wine in that region? Did they improve sanitation, irrigation, medicine etc.? Rome was an oppressive slavery based society.
Then what about the Spanish Inquisition sketch? It keeps repeating "fanatically devoted to the Pope"" The Spanish inquisition was an arm of the Spanish monarchy, at least two Popes tried to shut it down, and some historians have suggested one of its aims was to reduce the power of the Papacy.
I do like the Philosopher's Song, the Dead Parrot and Cheese Shop.
Other comedies are no better. Black Adder has a witchfinder (an early modorn innovation) in a Medieval setting.
Note that, at least in Thomas Malory’s telling, the arm holding Excalibur out of the lake is not the Lady Of The Lake, who is nearby on the lake. The arm holding Excalibur is neither named nor explained.
I believe the meme format typically involves asking the tank questions as if it were a great sage with wisdom to impart.
So it has to so with the lady of the lake because not only is there a body of water but in both cases there is a role for paying deference to the entity in the water (Lady or tank).
This feels like a ghost of the internet of the 1990s.
This writeup deserves its own website, something with minimal CSS, where you'll discover a bunch of family snapshots and party photos if you click around.
That's an aesthetic / scene preference (that I happen to agree with). The content is the most important part -- you can find this kind of curiosity and knowledge seeking all over the place. It'll probably even stay readable on stackexchange longer than the average handmade site from the 90s.
> where you'll discover a bunch of family snapshots and party photos if you click around.
Yes, lovely. The sort of site where private moments might be kindly shared by an individual. To be distinguished from the forcible asset stripping and loss of ownership (theft, really) that form the terms and conditions of a large corporate's ToS today.
I still think wikipedia hit those "this is my passion" sites harder than social media did. What's the point of building a site about widgets, when 90% of people are just going to hit the Widget page on wikipedia?
This entire deep dive is great. I feel compelled to call out this heroism:
> 1st Lieutenant de Wispelaere had prepared the bridge for demolition ... De Wispelaere immediately pushed the electrical ignition, but there was no explosion... Wispelaere now left his shelter and worked the manual ignition device. Trying to get back to his bunker, he was hit by a burst from a German machine gun and fell to the ground, mortally wounded. At the same time, the explosive charge went off.
This is also mentioned in the ConeOfArc video linked on stackexchange. However, at 4:17 in the video, the speaker shows a sign describing two versions of the event. In the first version, Wispelaere died due to a German shell (not a machine gun). In the second version, he was killed by the explosion of the detonating device after shortening the fuse (“l’explosion du dispositif de mise à feu”; not sure how to translate this exactly).
The fact that this extraordinarily obscure question had such a thoroughly researched and intricately detailed answer almost restores my faith in Internet forums.
> The photo was taken about coordinates 50.29092467073664, 4.893099128823844 near modern Wallonia, Belgium on the Meuse River.
Great writeup, but I did have a little chuckle reading "it was taken about near here", followed by coordinates precise enough to identify a single atom. https://xkcd.com/2170/
When I toured Jacques Littlefield's Tank Ranch they had, what I believe to be, this exact tank. They told the story of how it had been lost in the river and sat there and they went to see if it was still there and arranged to get it removed and returned to California where they restored it.
If someone was so motivated, they could probably go back to the internet archives of the auction that happened after Jacques died to find a picture of both the restored tank and its providence.
Germans pioneers wore white uniforms? That sounds like the worst possible colour for digging ditches, recovering tanks or camouflage (if it isn't snowing). Why would they do that? Did Hugo Boss do the design?
From the link, the white pants are part of the "Drillich" work uniform. From searching around, these were intended as work uniforms / overalls. You were intended to wear these (there were both pants and jackets) over your actual uniform, and these would take the abuse.
It seems like the early war patterns were simply undyed. Mid-war versions were apparently dyed darker.
I'm not saying that you're saying that, but there is a persistent meme that Hugo Boss designed the Nazi officer uniforms, or maybe is was the SS, or it was the whole Wehrmacht. This lends a certain mystique to the Nazis and cements the notion that they were somehow extra sharp. Aesthetic forbidden fruit. I don't like that, not in the least because it's not correct. The uniforms for all the Nazi arms of the state were designed by party insiders. Boss didn't even start designing men's tailored suits until after the war.
This is not to exculpate Hugo Boss, but to knock the shine of fancy suits off of the nazis. Hugo Boss had been selling ready made menswear since 1923, joined the nazi party in 1931, and won contracts to produce the uniforms much the way FEDS Apparel makes the USDA branded polo shirts [1]. In fact, he produced the uniforms using slave labor. He's guilty as sin.
> It's a Panzer IVD of the 31st Panzer Regiment assigned to the 5th Panzer Div. commanded by Lt. Heinz Zobel lost on May 13th, 1940. The "lake" is the Meuse River. The man is a German pioneer.
I love the train of comments confidently but incorrectly identifying the tank (there are at least three highly-specific, different identifications given which use words like "definitely" and make claims to expertise).
With a snorkel attached. The engine needs oxygen and dislikes water. Both sides of the war invented that capability in the early 40s, though obviously not every tank had the capability.
It's also a great example of the doctrines and tradeoffs of different armies. For example Russian tanks usually have space-efficient thin snorkels, while modern Western tanks have wide snorkels that double as a way for the crew to escape if they get stuck while driving submerged
Why on earth doesn't the top answer have more upvotes. Impressive research, with full background, alternative pictures and an original picture of the panzer falling into the river.
While this didn't get much attention on History Stack Exchange, see ConeOfArc's YouTube video (which has 963k views as of today): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HaRO_dTqO1E
See also ConeOfArc's video from a month later, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RO58B6LcTfM (1M views). The video above is about the initial search and problem, this video is after many Internet strangers worked together to solve it.
I think a very small number of people today are aware of Arthurian legend. I think I have heard the phrase "lady of the lake" before but never really knew any context around it until I just now searched the term. I would have guessed it was the name of a ship or something.
Yeah and I seriously question what feels like “I couldn’t find anything about this in Google therefore nobody knows anything about this”. [1] I worked in a specialized reference library for a while and it was very eye-opening to see university students fail to find, say, 90% of our materials.
[1] Quoting:
> However, no-one seems to know the origins of the image
Since Know Your Meme doesn't give the reference for why it's a lake, maybe not everybody is familiar with british lore:
The mythical Lady of the Lake:
Probably best known via Monthy Python:
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.
In short: She teaches Lancelot arts and writing, infusing him with wisdom and courage, and overseeing his training to become an unsurpassed warrior.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_of_the_Lake
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/EnigmaticEmpower...
This reminds me that Monty Python and the Holy Grail contributed actual historical knowledge about Arthurian legends to my knowledge base while growing up. Other examples of Python unintentional education include knowing the names of a myriad of obscure cheeses (the cheese shop skit), a shocking number of anachronistic synonyms for death (the parrot skit) and notable contributions of the Roman Empire (Life of Brian 'What have the Romans ever done for us?' skit).
While it didn't contribute to my GPA at the time, I'm sure I could name more notable philosophers than any other 8th grader in my school (philosopher's song skit). However, in high school it did spark the interest to look up and read about each of the philosophers in the song.
The problem is that comedy is frequently not factually accurate.
Roman Imperial contributions? Was Roman wine better than pre-Roman wine in that region? Did they improve sanitation, irrigation, medicine etc.? Rome was an oppressive slavery based society.
Then what about the Spanish Inquisition sketch? It keeps repeating "fanatically devoted to the Pope"" The Spanish inquisition was an arm of the Spanish monarchy, at least two Popes tried to shut it down, and some historians have suggested one of its aims was to reduce the power of the Papacy.
I do like the Philosopher's Song, the Dead Parrot and Cheese Shop.
Other comedies are no better. Black Adder has a witchfinder (an early modorn innovation) in a Medieval setting.
Pop culture is not historically accurate!
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Note that, at least in Thomas Malory’s telling, the arm holding Excalibur out of the lake is not the Lady Of The Lake, who is nearby on the lake. The arm holding Excalibur is neither named nor explained.
Is Thomas Malory of some kind of significance?
Edit: he was apparently one of the primary fanfiction authors of the english tradition
There's also Father Thames, the River God of London https://www.nationaltrustcollections.org.uk/object/1140390
Sorry maybe I'm dense, but what does the lady of the lake have to do with this image aside from a body of water being present?
I believe the meme format typically involves asking the tank questions as if it were a great sage with wisdom to impart.
So it has to so with the lady of the lake because not only is there a body of water but in both cases there is a role for paying deference to the entity in the water (Lady or tank).
Upright Citizens Brigade also has a few nice bits about the Lady of the Lake
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DhPXGABqG5w
This feels like a ghost of the internet of the 1990s.
This writeup deserves its own website, something with minimal CSS, where you'll discover a bunch of family snapshots and party photos if you click around.
That's an aesthetic / scene preference (that I happen to agree with). The content is the most important part -- you can find this kind of curiosity and knowledge seeking all over the place. It'll probably even stay readable on stackexchange longer than the average handmade site from the 90s.
Where the url root is /~username, and if there is an error it is an Apache one not Nginx and certainly not a 404 page that cost $10k to design.
http://lileks.com/bleats/index.html
It could form an entire Lucas Pope game.
> where you'll discover a bunch of family snapshots and party photos if you click around.
Yes, lovely. The sort of site where private moments might be kindly shared by an individual. To be distinguished from the forcible asset stripping and loss of ownership (theft, really) that form the terms and conditions of a large corporate's ToS today.
I still think wikipedia hit those "this is my passion" sites harder than social media did. What's the point of building a site about widgets, when 90% of people are just going to hit the Widget page on wikipedia?
3 replies →
This entire deep dive is great. I feel compelled to call out this heroism:
> 1st Lieutenant de Wispelaere had prepared the bridge for demolition ... De Wispelaere immediately pushed the electrical ignition, but there was no explosion... Wispelaere now left his shelter and worked the manual ignition device. Trying to get back to his bunker, he was hit by a burst from a German machine gun and fell to the ground, mortally wounded. At the same time, the explosive charge went off.
This is also mentioned in the ConeOfArc video linked on stackexchange. However, at 4:17 in the video, the speaker shows a sign describing two versions of the event. In the first version, Wispelaere died due to a German shell (not a machine gun). In the second version, he was killed by the explosion of the detonating device after shortening the fuse (“l’explosion du dispositif de mise à feu”; not sure how to translate this exactly).
I haven't seen the lake tank image being used as a meme anywhere, except now or maybe I have to explore the world of memes some more.
Hats off to all who helped each other find this once lost story from history.
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/panzer-of-the-lake
Went there for the first time and found out it's banned in my country.
4 replies →
Another point is the fact that i saw more "anime version" of this meme than the original foto
1 reply →
You're not getting your BM degree, not with that attitude.
I am feeling the humor behind this sentence if only I knew what BM is.
2 replies →
The fact that this extraordinarily obscure question had such a thoroughly researched and intricately detailed answer almost restores my faith in Internet forums.
Helps that it tickles a few things that people in subcultures get very nerdy about: military topics, WWII, etc.
> The photo was taken about coordinates 50.29092467073664, 4.893099128823844 near modern Wallonia, Belgium on the Meuse River.
Great writeup, but I did have a little chuckle reading "it was taken about near here", followed by coordinates precise enough to identify a single atom. https://xkcd.com/2170/
Going to be a different atom once you walk near. Or temperature changes, the wind blows, and so on.
We’ll need to give each atom a unique ID. That would solve the problem.
Let's start with electrons. I've got SN001 here with me, but I haven't been able to find any others...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-electron_universe
IPv8 is accepting RFCs
5 replies →
No man steps into the same 14-digit-precision geocoördinate twice.
When I toured Jacques Littlefield's Tank Ranch they had, what I believe to be, this exact tank. They told the story of how it had been lost in the river and sat there and they went to see if it was still there and arranged to get it removed and returned to California where they restored it.
If someone was so motivated, they could probably go back to the internet archives of the auction that happened after Jacques died to find a picture of both the restored tank and its providence.
The stack exchange link and the article about the search say it was recovered in 1941
Germans pioneers wore white uniforms? That sounds like the worst possible colour for digging ditches, recovering tanks or camouflage (if it isn't snowing). Why would they do that? Did Hugo Boss do the design?
From the link, the white pants are part of the "Drillich" work uniform. From searching around, these were intended as work uniforms / overalls. You were intended to wear these (there were both pants and jackets) over your actual uniform, and these would take the abuse.
It seems like the early war patterns were simply undyed. Mid-war versions were apparently dyed darker.
Here's a forum with a bunch of pictures of examples: https://www.militariacollectors.network/forums/topic/4042-th...
Post WW II the Panzer IV's were offloaded to the Middle East. But it competed well with its Soviet T-34.
At first it looked like Czech military fatigue but the confluence of two rivers points to Germany.
> The man is an unnamed German pioneer likely at the time of recovery.
Undyed coveralls makes sense, thanks.
Edit: ops, that joke wasn’t clear.
A prisoner’s uniform needs to be cheap, distinctive, and easy to spot it doesn’t need to be clean.
If the person were a prisoner he wouldn't be carrying a rifle..
5 replies →
> Did Hugo Boss do the design?
I'm not saying that you're saying that, but there is a persistent meme that Hugo Boss designed the Nazi officer uniforms, or maybe is was the SS, or it was the whole Wehrmacht. This lends a certain mystique to the Nazis and cements the notion that they were somehow extra sharp. Aesthetic forbidden fruit. I don't like that, not in the least because it's not correct. The uniforms for all the Nazi arms of the state were designed by party insiders. Boss didn't even start designing men's tailored suits until after the war.
This is not to exculpate Hugo Boss, but to knock the shine of fancy suits off of the nazis. Hugo Boss had been selling ready made menswear since 1923, joined the nazi party in 1931, and won contracts to produce the uniforms much the way FEDS Apparel makes the USDA branded polo shirts [1]. In fact, he produced the uniforms using slave labor. He's guilty as sin.
someone with better citations saying the same thing with more details seven years ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/78ho4c/comme...
[1] think of these dorky (no offense to the dorks who keep our milk free of pathogens) polos or windbreakers when you think of the nazi uniforms https://www.fedsapparel.com/collections/us-department-of-agr...
I thought Hugo Boss designed Nazi uniforms. Apparently not. As you say, he just made them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugo_Boss_(businessman)
Don't know the origin of the image but I wonder if it formed the inspiration for this iconic hostile emergence from the River Thames:
https://shorturl.at/yGKOg
Nerd sniping is my favorite kind of content on the internet
https://xkcd.com/356/
Ok, now I need the answer to that question, what will the resistance...
Answered on explain xkcd ((4/π − 1/2) ohms, or roughly 0.773 ohms): https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/356:_Nerd_Sniping
Must resist urge...
> It's a Panzer IVD of the 31st Panzer Regiment assigned to the 5th Panzer Div. commanded by Lt. Heinz Zobel lost on May 13th, 1940. The "lake" is the Meuse River. The man is a German pioneer.
Interesting uniform
"Panzer of the Lake, what is your origin?"
"Krupp factory in Essen, apparently."
I love the train of comments confidently but incorrectly identifying the tank (there are at least three highly-specific, different identifications given which use words like "definitely" and make claims to expertise).
Can tanks work underwater?
With a snorkel attached. The engine needs oxygen and dislikes water. Both sides of the war invented that capability in the early 40s, though obviously not every tank had the capability.
It's also a great example of the doctrines and tradeoffs of different armies. For example Russian tanks usually have space-efficient thin snorkels, while modern Western tanks have wide snorkels that double as a way for the crew to escape if they get stuck while driving submerged
Some of them can:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9itXfVSMj0
Only if they get paid overtime.
Modern remix: https://www.google.com/search?q=tank+in+river+ukraine
Why on earth doesn't the top answer have more upvotes. Impressive research, with full background, alternative pictures and an original picture of the panzer falling into the river.
While this didn't get much attention on History Stack Exchange, see ConeOfArc's YouTube video (which has 963k views as of today): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HaRO_dTqO1E
See also ConeOfArc's video from a month later, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RO58B6LcTfM (1M views). The video above is about the initial search and problem, this video is after many Internet strangers worked together to solve it.
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I’m so scarred by LLMs that I wonder if I’d ever be able to trust it.
How would that be very different? I sent that prompt now and got a similar response, not as detailed, but the summary is correct and the same.
Are they training on StackOverflow?
StackOverflow and Wikipedia are the main things they trained on. These days they have more custom content written for them.
1 reply →
new to me, kinda lame meme lol
That's a meme? I've never seen that photo before in my life and I'm pretty aware of most memes.
I highly doubt that - most memes are short-lived, community specific or barely identifiable to outsiders.
But you are, of course, unaware of memes you are not aware of.
Speak for yourself. I’m not aware of any memes that I am unaware of.
Just google 'tank of the lake, what is your wisdom' and you can catch up on a new meme genre
I think a very small number of people today are aware of Arthurian legend. I think I have heard the phrase "lady of the lake" before but never really knew any context around it until I just now searched the term. I would have guessed it was the name of a ship or something.
Most of them? Are you sure?
https://www.reddit.com/r/MemeEconomy/comments/egxfws/12880_m...
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/panzer-of-the-lake
It's most popular in military enthusiast circles, especially around the video games World of Tanks and War Thunder, which tend to be somewhat insular
This begs the question, is it a meme if it is not seen?
Sounds like a question you should ask the panzer of the lake.
1 reply →
There are more memes than one person can know.
Yeah and I seriously question what feels like “I couldn’t find anything about this in Google therefore nobody knows anything about this”. [1] I worked in a specialized reference library for a while and it was very eye-opening to see university students fail to find, say, 90% of our materials.
[1] Quoting: > However, no-one seems to know the origins of the image
Do you have a go-to bit of advice you give to students who you've spotted are lacking research (and just plain search) skills?
(i.e. Something to kickstart them in the right direction, not just a way of saying "learn how to search better!")
I think people prefer the similar (derivative?) "senpai of the pool" for receiving wisdom from a non-native occupant of a body of water.
As long as you remember that supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.