1 Kenya Monkey Causes Nationwide Blackout
In June 2016, a monkey climbed onto the roof of the Gitaru hydroelectric power station in Kenya and fell onto a high-voltage transformer. The fall caused the transformer to trip and triggered a cascade that shut down the entire national grid. Most of Kenya lost power for around four hours while engineers worked to restore electricity across the country. Despite causing a nationwide blackout, the monkey survived the incident and was handed over to wildlife officials.
2. During the mid-2000s production of the film The Devil Wears Prada, producers invited real fashion industry designers and executives to appear as themselves in cameo roles. Many of them declined because they feared upsetting Vogue editor Anna Wintour, who many believed inspired Meryl Streep’s character, Miranda Priestly. As a result, the movie relied more on fictionalized portrayals than real-life fashion power players.
3. In 2014, researchers analyzing old samples and records traced the main HIV pandemic back to King Leopold’s former Belgian Congo, centering on what is now Kinshasa in the early 20th century. Genetic evidence suggests the virus jumped from chimpanzees to humans as early as 1909, probably through the handling or butchering of bushmeat. Scientists believe the first person to be infected likely acquired the virus in the 1920s. From there, HIV spread silently for decades until doctors recognized AIDS in the late 20th century.
4. In 2018, a man who bought a storage unit for $500 from auctioneer Dan Dotson of Storage Wars opened a safe inside and found $7.5 million in cash. After the sale, the original owners quickly contacted the buyer through an attorney. They first offered $600,000 to get the money back, but negotiations ended with a deal in which the buyer returned the cash for a $1.2 million reward.
5. In the 1970s, American journalist Daniel Schorr covered the unfolding scandals around President Richard Nixon. During a live television broadcast, Schorr began reading Nixon’s infamous political enemies list aloud to viewers. As he worked his way down the names, he suddenly discovered that his own name appeared on the list. He kept reading despite the shock.
6 Fahrenheit Sets Zero With Salt
In the early 18th century, physicist Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit developed the mercury thermometer and needed fixed points to build his temperature scale. In his laboratory, he dissolved salt in water. He then marked 0°F at that salt–water minimum, anchoring the lower end of the Fahrenheit scale to a simple mixture he could maintain in his lab instead of a natural freezing point.
7. The kangaroo rat, found in the deserts of North America, can survive its entire life without consuming liquid water. Instead, it gets almost all of its moisture from the seeds it eats and from metabolic water produced as it breaks down food. Its kidneys concentrate urine extremely well, and it loses very little water through breathing or waste.
8. The maze procedure is a type of heart surgery for patients with atrial fibrillation where surgeons create a precise pattern of scars in the upper chambers of the heart. These scars form a kind of electrical maze that blocks the abnormal signals while allowing normal impulses to travel through and control the heartbeat. By trapping and redirecting the faulty rhythms, the surgery helps restore a regular heart rhythm. The procedure cures atrial fibrillation in about 80% to 90% of patients.
9. In 1815, English race walker George Wilson attempted to walk 1,000 miles around London in just 20 days. After newspapers covered his feat, huge crowds began to follow him, including circus performers, prostitutes, rowdy troublemakers, and alcohol sellers who turned the route into a chaotic spectacle. The disorder grew so disruptive that authorities stepped in. One mile into his 16th day of walking, Wilson was arrested for disturbing the peace, cutting his ambitious challenge short.
10. In 1979, Monty Python released Life of Brian, a religious satire film that immediately stirred controversy over its treatment of faith and biblical themes. In the United Kingdom, 11 local councils banned the film, while Norway and Ireland imposed nationwide bans. The backlash turned into a marketing opportunity in neighboring Sweden, where distributors promoted it with the tagline, “So funny it was banned in Norway.”
11 Brian Scalabrine Destroys Amateur Challengers
In 2013, former NBA player Brian Scalabrine, who averaged just 3 points per game over his career, responded to critics who mocked his bench role by organizing a 1-on-1 challenge. Four volunteers who claimed they could beat him met him on the court to prove it. Scalabrine treated the event seriously and dominated every matchup. By the end, he had won all the games with a combined score of 44–6.
12. In 1976, American historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich coined the phrase “well behaved women seldom make history” in a scholarly article about Puritan funeral services. She used the line to argue that historians largely ignored ordinary, virtuous women and should pay more attention to their lives and work. Over the next decades, the quote escaped academia and began appearing on T-shirts, mugs, greeting cards, and bumper stickers as a popular slogan. Ulrich later returned to the idea in her book Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History, which explores how women have shaped history in ways traditional narratives often overlook.
13. In medieval Europe, alchemists worked with seven known metals: gold, silver, quicksilver, copper, iron, tin, and lead, and they matched each one to the seven classical planets. They associated gold with the sun, silver with the moon, quicksilver with Mercury, copper with Venus, iron with Mars, tin with Jupiter, and lead with Saturn. Because of this planetary pairing, quicksilver took on the name of its celestial counterpart, and people now call the element mercury.
14. In the 1980s, a Soviet physician investigating a mysterious hepatitis outbreak among soldiers in Uzbekistan suspected it was not hepatitis A. To prove it, he deliberately ingested fecal samples from 22 infected soldiers and waited. Thirty-six days later, he developed hepatitis himself and then had his stool examined under an electron microscope. The images revealed a new pathogen, now known as the hepatitis E virus.
15. Since 1954, the United States has banned tonka beans as a food ingredient because they contain coumarin, a chemical that can be toxic in high doses. Chefs still prize the beans for a complex flavor that tastes like a mix of vanilla, licorice, caramel, and cloves. In the US, authorities have raided restaurants caught using tonka beans in defiance of the ban. Some chefs have even relied on smugglers to bring the beans into the country so they can use them in their dishes.
16 Philip Pullman Undermining Christian Belief
In 2001, English novelist Philip Pullman told an interviewer that he was “trying to undermine the basis of Christian belief.” In 2002, Mail on Sunday columnist Peter Hitchens seized on that remark and branded him “the most dangerous author in Britain.” Pullman had written his His Dark Materials trilogy as a deliberate rebuttal to what he saw as the heavy Christian message in C. S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia.
17. In 2001, West Virginia attorney Mark Hunt, whose infant son Andrew died at 10 months old after surgery for several birth defects, secretly funded a human cloning laboratory in hopes of replicating his child. Hunt and his wife Tracy enlisted a French biochemist and formed a company called Bioserve to finance the project. Their plan copied animal cloning techniques: scientists would extract DNA from Andrew’s tissue, place it into a human egg with its own DNA removed, and implant the reconstructed egg into a surrogate mother. After ABC News exposed the secret lab, Hunt said he would not start another facility, but he also admitted he still hoped that future cloning technology might give his son’s genetic makeup a chance to continue.
18. After retiring from the NHL in 1999, Wayne Gretzky became the rare player whose Hall of Fame induction did not follow the usual three-year waiting period. On June 23, 1999, the Hockey Hall of Fame selection committee approved him for immediate induction by reason of outstanding preeminence and skill, and he entered the Hall that November. He remains the most recent player to have that waiting period waived. In 2000, the NHL honored him further by retiring his jersey number 99 across the entire league.
19. In the final weeks of World War II in 1945, thousands of Germans took their own lives in panic as the Red Army advanced into Hitler’s collapsing Reich. Families killed themselves together, often using poison or gunshots, because they feared Soviet occupation and believed Nazi propaganda about what awaited them. In Berlin alone, authorities recorded around 7,000 suicides during this period. In several places, including entire towns, large groups chose mass suicide instead of surrender.
20. For the 2015 James Bond film Spectre, producers commissioned ten custom Aston Martin DB10 sports cars built exclusively for the movie. The crew used several of these cars for high-speed chases and stunt work, especially during the Rome night sequence. By the end of filming, crashes and effects work had destroyed or heavily damaged multiple DB10s. The total value of Aston Martins wrecked for the production reached about $37 million.
15 Most Controversial & Costly Blunders in History
21 Victoria Beckham Costly Flop Album
Victoria Beckham’s self-titled debut album, Victoria Beckham, reportedly cost about £5 million to produce. Despite the huge production budget, it sold only 54,000 copies in Britain.
22. In 1783, as the American Revolutionary War ended, British commanders in New York chose to honor their wartime promise of freedom to enslaved people who had joined them. The Treaty of Paris required the return of all property, including escaped slaves, but British commander Sir Guy Carleton refused to hand these Black Loyalists back to American enslavers. Instead, officials compiled the Book of Negroes, a detailed register of thousands of men, women, and children who had gained their freedom. To prevent their seizure and re-enslavement in the new United States, they evacuated them by ship to Nova Scotia and other British territories.
23. In 1876, James A. Garfield, who later became president of the United States, published a new proof of the Pythagorean theorem in the New England Journal of Education. His argument used a geometric construction involving right triangles to show that a² + b² = c². Historians credit this work as an original contribution to mathematics. Garfield remains the only U.S. president known to have published an original mathematical proof.
24. In 1978, two years before The Empire Strikes Back hit theaters, Darth Vader actor David Prowse reportedly gave away the film’s big twist at a public event. While talking about the upcoming sequel, he said that in the next movie fans would learn that Darth Vader was Luke Skywalker’s father. At the time, almost no one took the comment seriously or realized its importance.
25. Grand Duchess Elizabeth Feodorovna, both aunt and sister-in-law to Tsar Nicholas II, saw her life change in 1905 when her husband, Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich, was assassinated. After his death, she left the imperial court, joined a convent in Moscow, and founded a religious community devoted to serving the poor and sick, even selling her own wedding ring to support the work. She spent the following years living simply and focusing on charity instead of royal privilege. Despite her devotion, Bolshevik forces arrested her after the Russian Revolution and murdered her in 1918.
RE: Fact #20 (Spectre Destroys Aston Martin Fleet) – Yeah, the DB10 was actually made just for the movie and never actually went into production.
Are you serious? That’s pretty cool.
RE: Fact #6 (Fahrenheit Sets Zero With Salt) – Just a heads-up, the original scale Celsius came up with was actually reversed – water froze at 100°C and boiled at 0°C.
Yeah, so Anders Celsius actually set up his original scale with 0 degrees being the boiling point and 100 degrees being the freezing point. He did that because he wanted to skip using negative numbers. It gets pretty chilly in Sweden, so negative temps are more common there than boiling temps. Plus, it was a popular way to label scales back then. Someone, either Linnaeus or Kristen, ended up flipping the numbers. Celsius himself never actually used the scale the way we know it today. Now, the scale is actually based on Kelvin.
RE: Fact #8 (Maze Heart Surgery Cures Fibrillation) – My husband had an ablation done a few months back and it completely cleared up his Afib. It’s pretty wild that it was an outpatient thing! He went in around 7:30 am and we were back home by 3 pm.
I had to have an ablation while I was awake because my heart was so weak they couldn’t sedate me. When they burn your heart literally it feels like heartburn (indigestion).
RE: Fact #12 (Well Behaved Women Historian Ulrich) – She said in an interview that she actually finds the alternative take on the quote pretty funny and doesn’t mind it.
RE: Fact #29 (Gavle Boy Collapses Swedish Witchcraft) – Anna Göldi, one of the last women executed as a witch in Europe, was killed in 1782. It seems like a lot of this happened because she accused her employer of sexual harassment and possibly rape.
That’s not the last witch to be executed in Europe. If you search for it, you’ll see that Barbara Zdunk was executed 30 years later.
So, Barbara Zdunk wasn’t actually found guilty of being a witch. The main accusation was that she caused a fire, and the witch part seemed to be more of a side issue.
That said, she might have been the last person in Europe legally sentenced to be burned alive. There were other accusations and lynchings for witchcraft after that, but those weren’t official legal proceedings, more like mob justice.
Back then, even people living through it thought it was complete BS.
And it still happened, which is the problem.
Things were pretty wild back then. Someone asked if a guy committed treason, and after thinking about it, they said they weren’t sure. Then, they mentioned he was Jewish, and immediately decided he was guilty.
RE: Fact #8 (Maze Heart Surgery Cures Fibrillation) – I had this done a few years back too. My irregular heartbeats went from over 17% down to almost zero. They used ablation for mine, and it was a total game-changer!
Wonder if this was discovered by accident? Maybe the first surgeon messed up and left a big scar on the heart. Then the patient wakes up feeling great and the doctor’s like, “Yeah, totally meant to do that, just invented a new procedure.”
I’m not a doctor, so someone in the know can definitely correct me if I’m off base, but basically, your heart’s electrical signals are supposed to follow a pretty specific path. It all starts with these special cells that act like a natural pacemaker, and then the signals travel through fibers that make your heart contract in the right sequence.
So, if those signals aren’t conducting properly, it makes sense that doctors would try to create pathways for the correct signals and block the ones that aren’t working right. That’s why the maze procedure seems like a really logical approach and not just something they figured out by accident.
Was it the minimally invasive surgery, or the more involved sternotomy with the big vertical cut?
RE: Fact #10 (Life Of Brian Banned Internationally) – That was the first R-rated movie I ever saw. My dad saw it back in the day, and then about twenty years later, he was humming “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life.” We kids thought it was hilarious. He told us we’d watch it together for Daddy-Daughter Night the next time my mom was away for work. Unfortunately, after two decades, he’d totally forgotten why the movie was so controversial it got banned in Norway. He actually only remembered it was rated R when we were at the video store. My sister and I were 11 and 9, respectively. But he’d made a promise, and he was going to keep it, so he figured it might be okay with parental guidance.
Dad during the movie:
Dad after the movie: Girls, it’s really important you don’t tell these jokes at school… or to Mom, alright?
My dad showed my brother and me Blazing Saddles when we were 6 and 9. He gave us a whole talk beforehand about what’s right and wrong, and told us never to repeat anything from the movie. But even with that, he still had a few moments where he said, “Oh yeah, totally forgot about that part.”
RE: Fact #16 (Philip Pullman Undermining Christian Belief) – The Mail on Sunday accused them, which is a pretty trashy newspaper. Also, not many people in the UK seem to care much about religion anymore, especially compared to a couple of generations ago. The Archbishop of Canterbury even backed Pullman on this.
RE: Fact #46 (James Riley Sahara Enslavement Memoir) – This is a really interesting story. Discovery actually did a documentary about it, which was based on Dean King’s book, “Skeletons On The Zahara.” King did a lot of extra research beyond the original book. After Riley managed to escape, some of his sailors were rescued too. The cabin boy who was with him actually lived a long life, into his 80s, and even became a ship’s captain himself.
Discovery really didn’t have to turn into what it is now.
It feels like this is catering to people who aren’t naturally curious, which is a bummer because it really should be teaching kids how to find that spark themselves.
RE: Fact #36 (Prince Khaemweset Restores Ancient Monuments) – That Wikipedia page is really interesting to read. It tells the cool story about how Auguste Mariette found what they first believed was Khaemweset’s mummy in Saqqara. Now, people think it was actually a bunch of sacred resin and Apis Bull bones shaped like a person. That would be more proof that Khaemweset was still super respected later in Egyptian history.
Nobody knows where he was buried right now. He might have been laid to rest in that huge, broken-down tomb KV5 in the Valley of the Kings. A lot of Ramesses II’s sons, maybe around 70 of them, were buried there, including his oldest son Amunherkhepeshef and his second son Ramesses. For sure, Khaemweset died before Ramesses II, and Ramesses II was followed by his thirteenth son, Merneptah.
I also thought it was cool how he was a hero from ancient Egyptian fiction!
RE: Fact #28 (King James Writes Anti Tobacco) – Could we bring back “counterblaste”?
RE: Fact #13 (Quicksilver Renamed Mercury By Alchemists) – When they found out about an eighth metal, medieval alchemists were like, “Whoa, there’s another whole planet out there!”
RE: Fact #5 (Daniel Schorr Reads Nixon Enemies) – Even if you don’t like Nixon, you have to admit he was good at making an enemy list. It’s like he knew the guy would be reading it and added him to it ahead of time.
RE: Fact #38 (Ol Dirty Bastard Rambling ICP) – Yeah, and if my memory from Behind The Paint is right, ODB also recorded himself just talking over a bunch of other songs that were sent to him when he was in rehab.
Violent J mentioned in his book that he also paid Snoop Dogg for a track on that same album, and it was a totally different situation. What Snoop sent over was great right away.
They were known nationally but didn’t get much respect. Bruce and Utsler wanted the group to be taken more seriously, so they planned to have some famous rappers on their album. Bruce specifically wanted Snoop Dogg and Ol’ Dirty Bastard involved. They paid Snoop Dogg $40,000 for his part in “The Shaggy Show,” and he even helped them get in touch with Ol’ Dirty Bastard, who got paid $30,000. Ol’ Dirty Bastard recorded his track super fast, but it was mostly just him talking about “bitches.” Bruce and Utsler spent a whole week pulling just four rhymes out of all that rambling. They ended up re-recording the track and calling it “Bitches.”
RE: Fact #34 (Nogaret Automaton Prefigures Frankenstein Story) – The Vampyre actually came out before Dracula. Back in the 19th century, authors were definitely inspired by what was popular and by each other, just like now. It’s not just the story that makes a book a hit; how it’s told matters too. Both Frankenstein and Dracula were written in a way that was just better, making them easier for readers to get into.
Just wanted to add that The Vampyre also came out of those ghost story writing sessions back in 1816 at Villa Diodati by Lake Geneva. Byron actually started the story, but he never finished it. He had actually written about vampires before in his 1813 poem, The Giaour. He was basically the first person to write vampire fiction, and it was inspired by stories he heard while traveling in the Balkans.
Later, John Polidori turned it into a full story and published it in 1819. But Byron really kicked off the modern vampire tropes and even inspired the classic vampire character. The whole idea of the charming gentleman vampire? That came from Byron, with Lord Ruthven being based on him.
The Vampyre was a huge hit back then and really influenced a lot of future stories. It’s way less obscure than Nogaret’s book. And yeah, Dracula eventually became more popular, but that was like eighty years later, and there were tons of vampire stories in between. For example, Carmilla by Sheridan Le Fanu was a big deal, published a good 25 years before Dracula.
I’m mostly amazed that the names and themes are so similar. And “Wak-wik-vauk-an-son-frankésteïn” is just so silly.
RE: Fact #39 (Bagdad Arizona Copper Company Town) – My dad grew up in Baghdad. My grandfather was actually hired to set up their school system there, and there’s even a plaque in the high school dedicated to him.
No way, my dad grew up there too!
My grandpa was also in high school
RE: Fact #19 (1945 German Mass Suicides Panic) – Yeah, the Japanese did something similar, like on Saipan. They called them Banzai cliffs, where people would jump off rather than surrender to the Americans.
Thinking about Saipan, I remember it might have been a bit different there. Some people believe the Japanese military pushed civilians to commit suicide.
It’s like a state that’s a family annihilator.
A lot of people in Okinawa made that choice themselves, but a lot of it was influenced by Japanese propaganda that claimed Marines would rape and eat them. It’s pretty somber seeing those cliffs there, especially knowing that some women even jumped with their kids.
RE: Fact #28 (King James Writes Anti Tobacco) – What’s really interesting is how fast tobacco became a problem after it was introduced. It just goes to show how addictive it is. It was brought to France in 1559 and to England in 1586. And fun fact, the word “nicotine” actually comes from Jean Nicot.
Could be a sign of how dull things were back then. Folks didn’t have much going on, so they picked up smoking.
RE: Fact #31 (IKEA Danish Names For Doormats) – The only thing at IKEA named after something Finnish is a toilet brush.
I looked and couldn’t find a toilet brush with a Finnish name. Maybe Swedes just aren’t that creative with names for things like that.
RE: Fact #34 (Nogaret Automaton Prefigures Frankenstein Story) – Wak-Wik doesn’t show up until page 42 in a 63-page story, so I don’t think he was the main inspiration. The last 20 pages really focus on him and his automata, but “Frankenstein” was a more widely known name, and stories about inventors experimenting on the dead in a castle called Frankenstein were more common than this novel ever was. It’s more likely both authors were drawing from those castle Frankenstein stories.
So, I’m pretty sure people just made up the stories about the Frankenstein castle guy messing with dead bodies after Mary Shelley’s book got popular. But yeah, he was definitely known as an alchemist, which is a cool link.
RE: Fact #26 (Korean White Hanbok Everyday Tradition) – So luckily, the tteokbokki we know today wasn’t around until 1953. That means this messy habit probably disappeared around the same time the saucy dish that would totally get on your clothes did!
RE: Fact #31 (IKEA Danish Names For Doormats) – As someone from Denmark, I totally love this! It’s genius. I just wish they’d own up to it and say, “Yep, we totally meant to do this!” I mean, we can let them have this one. They’re not allowed to have fun in Sweden, which is why they have to come all the way to Helsingør, Denmark, just to get drunk.
RE: Fact #7 (Kangaroo Rat Lives Without Water) – If a person’s life is only about three days, can they still do that?
You know, technically, any animal could live its whole life without water.
Yeah, people can totally do that too. There are lots of veggies that hydrate you. I mean, eating 3 kilos of cucumbers daily wouldn’t be ideal, but you could definitely survive without drinking water that way.
Newborns don’t drink water, so they could be around for a few more months.
Wow, I just learned recently that babies can actually die if they’re given water.
RE: Fact #23 (President Garfield Proves Pythagorean Theorem) – Wikipedia says the proof isn’t easy. That’s right, but it’s a simple tweak to a proof from the 12th-century Indian mathematician Bhaskara. You can see how similar they are if you look at proofs 4 and 5.
This doesn’t mean Garfield copied anyone. The story I heard is that things were boring in the House of Representatives, and Garfield was just doodling at his desk when he came up with the proof on his own. This kind of thing happens a lot in math – you think you’ve discovered something new, only to realize it was already a minor point made by a famous mathematician centuries ago
RE: Fact #11 (Brian Scalabrine Destroys Amateur Challengers) – He’s saying that when it comes to playing basketball, he’s a lot more like LeBron than any of us are like him.
There are only about 450-500 NBA players, so these guys are truly the elite of the elite. Scalabrine played in the league for ten years; they weren’t paying him that much and keeping him on the roster just for fun.
When you watch Scalabrine play, he actually dominates opponents using really solid, basic skills. Being a big guy helps, of course, but it’s mostly about him getting to the right spot and always having a knack for the basket. It’s almost like instinct. You can tell it’s super easy for him, even when he’s just on the bench.
RE: Fact #45 (Second Sight Abandons Bionic Eyes) – Whoa, hold up. So, we’ve already got bionic eyes, and the company that made them went under, leaving their customers in the lurch? And this all went down in 2020?
RE: Fact #29 (Gavle Boy Collapses Swedish Witchcraft) – After Malin Matsdotter was executed, the judges started questioning witnesses differently. Before, they’d write down what the kids said the first time and then just have them confirm it at trial. But after that, they made the kids retell their stories, and they were pretty shocked to find out every single one changed, even the Gävle Boy’s. I guess that’s probably why we have “Objection! Leading the witness!” in courts today.
Yeah, why do police interviews these days start with open-ended questions to gather info, instead of just asking direct questions right away?
It’s interesting how the wording of a question can totally change people’s answers. I remember seeing a documentary about this. Participants watched a video of a car hitting another car.
The estimated speed of the car varied depending on whether the question used the word “bumped” or “crashed.” When asked about the speed when the cars “bumped,” people gave lower estimates. But when asked about the speed when the cars “crashed,” the estimated speed went up.
And also, the person asking you questions will keep asking the same thing in slightly different ways.
So, basically, you’re saying that this is how things *should* be, but a lot of the time, they’re not.
RE: Fact #9 (George Wilsons Riotous London Walk) – Hey, do you have a permit for that walk?
RE: Fact #43 (Jose Bonilla Photographs Comet Fragments) – About 20 years back, I set up my 4-inch Newtonian telescope with a solar filter so my daughter could see the sun’s surface. Before we packed up, I took one last peek. This potato-shaped thing was tumbling across the sun, and I was like, “Wow! How lucky am I?” I knew it was an asteroid, of course, but I figured it was pretty rare for a casual stargazer like me to catch something like that.
RE: Fact #42 (Prohibition Fake Rabbis Wine Racket) – Yeah, there was this thing called Vine Glo. It was basically a block of grape concentrate, and the instructions were super clear: don’t let it sit in a cabinet for two weeks to ferment, or it would end up as wine.
Don’t mix cough syrup with iodine and lye, okay?
Seriously, don’t leave it for two weeks or it’ll turn into fu*ked-up wine. You really don’t want that.
RE: Fact #22 (British Evacuate Black Loyalists Freed) – So I saw Hamilton a while back, and knowing about the history of Black Loyalists, I was pretty annoyed by how much they seemed to try and portray the American Founding Fathers, or at least some of them, as early champions of racial equality.
The whole idea that the American Revolution was this huge fight against tyranny is a story that’s really stuck around and managed to adapt itself for modern views, while similar national stories elsewhere are falling apart.
As someone with British roots and Canadian nationality, I had a similar reaction to seeing Hamilton – I felt like standing and taking off my hat when King George III appeared.
The writers seemed to assume everyone watching would automatically hate His Majesty, which ended up making him and the other Loyalist character completely right about everything.
RE: Fact #21 (Victoria Beckham Costly Flop Album) – She really didn’t sing much on the Spice Girls songs; it seemed like she was mostly there to keep spirits up.
Yeah, I think it’s because her singing wasn’t that great. I had no idea she even put out a solo album. I remember reading somewhere years ago that she wasn’t a strong singer and was mostly there to fill out the group.
She’s not only not good at it, she actually dislikes doing it!
There’s a documentary on BBC iplayer right now about British girlbands. I watched the 90s episode yesterday, and the guy who created them had this idea to give each member a persona. That way, the whole teen girl market could connect with at least one of them. He picked Victoria because she seemed really sophisticated during her audition, and he figured she’d appeal to slightly older teen girls.
It’s all about her vibe, you know? It’s the same deal as all the others. The Spice Girls were such a massive success because they had five distinct personalities with looks and sounds to go with them. It was totally fine for Vic to pout in the background and Geri to be loud because that’s what made their characters work.
RE: Fact #21 (Victoria Beckham Costly Flop Album) – Seriously forgot she sings.
Victoria Beckham seems to be able to dabble in a bit of everything – singing, making documentaries, writing books, designing cars – and apparently, she doesn’t have to be great at it to try it.
RE: Fact #25 (Grand Duchess Elizabeth Gives All) – She started the Marfo-Mariinsky Convent, which was a place to help sick, wounded, and injured soldiers get better, and also take care of poor people and orphans. Even though I’m not a big fan of Russian Orthodox churches usually, this one really stands out. It’s got this unique, almost storybook kind of vibe.
It’s awesome that it’s still sticking to its mission!
Yeah, looks like there are plenty of wounded Russian soldiers.
RE: Fact #40 (Ancient Danish Chewing Gum DNA) – Basically, a young hunter-gatherer.
RE: Fact #13 (Quicksilver Renamed Mercury By Alchemists) – That’s the kind of awesome useless trivia I’m all about.
RE: Fact #4 (Storage Wars Safe Holds Millions) – Seriously, who puts $7.5 million into a storage unit and then just forgets to pay the rent on it? That’s just wild.
Mafia, cartel, doesn’t matter which you call them.
When I was a kid growing up outside Chicago in the 80s, my neighbor found a briefcase stuffed with hundreds by the road. Clearly it was mob money. They did hand it in, but no one ever claimed it. So, it was put into a trust for the four kids who found it to use for college. My neighbor was a real idiot and never actually claimed the money because he couldn’t even make it through one semester of community college, which was the only requirement to get his share. His parents probably regretted that part of the deal later on.
There was a lot of mafia stuff going on in my little town. We were only about 20 minutes from the city. It took me years to realize my dad was totally involved with the mafia. He wasn’t actually in it, but he was a full-blooded Italian union leader in that town back then. We built a house right next to the mayor’s wrecking yard for a reason. My dad was stealing scrap metal. For years. That explains where all the money came from and why it all vanished when he got fired. And all the time he spent in court. He said it was about age discrimination, but after looking into it, I found out he ratted everyone out and got off.
It also explains why every week we’d go to an Italian restaurant that felt like something out of Goodfellas, my dad would be in a suit, and he’d spend most of his time talking with other guys in suits. They looked like mobsters, because they were. I finally got my mom to admit it a few years ago after I laid it all out and asked, “So if it wasn’t the mob, what the heck was going on?” I don’t know why she was so hesitant. She hated him by then. She probably felt bad that she exposed us to that stuff. Which, honestly, I’ve got some news for you. The mafia sh*t isn’t the thing from my childhood I spend my nights thinking about.
We should try to negotiate its return.
So, the article mentions the guy who auctioned it explained that all sorts of things, like even going to jail, could cause this to happen. He also thought it was probably dirty money and said he would’ve grabbed that 1.2 million too, just to avoid any trouble over where it might have come from.
Thanks! That’s a good point I hadn’t really considered. Getting back 1.2 million sounds like a solid return, especially since it’s money that won’t cause you trouble down the road.
RE: Fact #5 (Daniel Schorr Reads Nixon Enemies) – Guess this journalist must have been pretty good if a president was actually mad at them.
Hey, so if you check out the article, the folks who discovered they made the list actually saw it as an honor. And get this, one guy who *wasn’t* on the list was pretty bummed about it.
RE: Fact #32 (AWS S3 Typo Breaks Internet) – Hey, everyone makes mistakes! If you’ve never accidentally messed up the production environment with a slip of the finger, go ahead and cast the first stone.
If you’ve never broken production, you probably don’t have the authority to.
RE: Fact #15 (Tonka Beans Banned In America) – So apparently, the internet says this smells like freshly cut grass mixed with vanilla, liquorice, caramel, and clove, with a warm undertone and a touch of magnolia. I once opened a container with that in it and took a sniff, and honestly, it smells a bit like furniture polish to me.
This makes me wonder if they could smell the raw bean itself. It’s kind of like nutmeg – super fragrant when you freshly grate it over ice cream or coffee.
Have you tried that special coffee?
And by the way, nutmeg is another thing that’s banned in some places. I think it’s whole nutmeg they’re talking about, not just the ground stuff.
I use tonka beans to make ice cream, and they’re really delicious! I’ve never gotten a grassy flavor from them. To me, they taste like a richer, more complex vanilla. I hadn’t thought of them as caramel or anise before, but I guess you could describe it as a vanilla bean that was somehow influenced by those flavors. Everyone who’s tried my ice cream has liked it, although a few people have said they still prefer regular vanilla. I personally think tonka beans are superior.
RE: Fact #36 (Prince Khaemweset Restores Ancient Monuments) – It’s pretty mind-blowing how long the ancient Egyptian timeline is. Imagine us today fixing up buildings from the 8th century AD – that’s kind of the same scale!
It’s wild to think how much closer in time the Roman Empire’s peak was to the moon landing than to when the pyramids were built. The Romans themselves looked back at Ancient Egypt and Ancient Greece as already ancient history.
So, apparently, Herodotus, the Greek historian, is sometimes brought up when talking about the pyramids. But get this, when he checked them out around 500 BC, they were already two thousand years old.
RE: Fact #25 (Grand Duchess Elizabeth Gives All) – When people bring up her being used as a rallying symbol for the Whites, they’re overlooking two things:
First, the Russian Imperial Rules specifically stated that women couldn’t inherit the throne.
Second, she was already a nun, well past childbearing age, and only had a distant connection to the royal family.
At most, you could say the Soviets wanted to eliminate anyone with ties to the unpopular Tsar. And sadly, this isn’t just a Communist thing. In civil wars and revolutions, it’s super common for innocent people to get killed just because they’re connected to one side or another.
You’d think her being a nun would have been enough for the Bolsheviks. They weren’t exactly fans of religion, just like they weren’t fans of the aristocracy.
They had an entire organization focused on messing with and killing clergy.
Even if they aren’t officially part of any group, smaller, less popular communities often end up being targets for killing, torture, having their stuff taken, or being forced into labor during revolutions, no matter who’s in charge.
Plus, there’s a ton of sexual violence, cities get destroyed and burned down, leaving people homeless with no food, animals, or medical care. Kids are especially at risk of starving or not getting food, again, regardless of which side is winning, just because a revolutionary army can do whatever it wants. They’ll also force people to work or join the military for whoever shows up and threatens their family, or kidnaps them.
I get why they might want to erase everything from the old system, so there’s no easy way to go back and no reminders of how things used to be. It sends a strong message. And not all revolutions are bad; some are even necessary, the only real way to fight for a good cause and push back against brutal oppression, even with all the terrible stuff that happens.
But in the end, every revolution needs innocent people to suffer and die to establish the “new world.”
RE: Fact #12 (Well Behaved Women Historian Ulrich) – When you think about it, people who always play by the rules don’t usually make history. To make history, you’ve gotta be someone who’s not happy with the current way things are and actively tries to change them.
RE: Fact #36 (Prince Khaemweset Restores Ancient Monuments) – It’s wild to think about how long Ancient Egypt existed. They were even studying things from that time!
If you were studying the pyramids back when Cleopatra was around, it’d be like us studying Ancient Greece today.
Cleopatra lived closer to our time than to when her own pyramids were built.
RE: Fact #15 (Tonka Beans Banned In America) – People often use these beans in desserts and even in perfumes.
RE: Fact #40 (Ancient Danish Chewing Gum DNA) – I’ll take the Duck with Hazelnuts too! Sounds amazing.
Hold up, we gotta take down the mammoth first.
RE: Fact #30 (Seoul Name Literally Means Capital) – Tokyo just means “Eastern Capital”. There was a time when the capital of Japan was different, depending on who was in charge.
RE: Fact #5 (Daniel Schorr Reads Nixon Enemies) – Yeah, he totally had a point. Politicians and journalists are pretty much natural enemies, you know?
RE: Fact #14 (Soviet Doctor Discovers Hepatitis E) – How many more samples do you want us to get ready? The 16th is done, and you’re asking for 6 more.
He said with a sh*t-eating grin
RE: Fact #40 (Ancient Danish Chewing Gum DNA) – 6,000 years from now, someone will probably find a perfectly preserved nicotine pouch and realize the person who used it mostly ate Mountain Dew and cheese puffs.
Seems like people these days are about 30% high-fructose corn syrup and micro-plastics by weight.
How much did it cost? I don’t want to hear all that.
RE: Fact #39 (Bagdad Arizona Copper Company Town) – The town of Morenci, Arizona is kinda like that too, the whole place really relies on the mine.
It’s a bit different from being completely owned by the mining company, though. New Orleans depends on our port, but the port doesn’t own the city.
RE: Fact #26 (Korean White Hanbok Everyday Tradition) – It must have been shocking for Chinese and Japanese visitors, considering white has been the traditional mourning color in East Asia for ages.
They usually weren’t visitors, so…
Even in South Asia, white is still the traditional color for mourning.
RE: Fact #6 (Fahrenheit Sets Zero With Salt) – That name, Daniel Fahrenheit, totally reminds me of one of Roger’s characters from American Dad!
Francine makes a super specific joke about Fahrenheit, and Rogerto just rubs their forehead like “ugh, I only use Celsius,” and mutters about how dumb Francine is. But honestly, her joke was pretty clever and technically right, and nobody else even got it.
Daniel Fahrenheit, who invented the evening weather report
Hey Haley, does Daniel Fahrenheit sound like a real person to you? Come on, it’s obviously me.
RE: Fact #41 (Pyongyang Metro Deep Cheap Subway) – Hey, just so you know, the Pyongyang Metro actually got built a year before the Seoul Metropolitan Subway. Pyongyang was in 1973, and Seoul was in 1974.
It’s really interesting how they both started around the same time, but South Korea’s system ended up being one of the most advanced metro networks globally, while North Korea’s stayed really basic and old-fashioned.
North Korea was actually doing better financially than South Korea up until 1981.
Actually, that’s not quite right. South Korea’s GDP per capita was already higher than North Korea’s back in 1974. By the 80s, South Korea was a lot more well-off, and North Korea’s economy was already having a tough time, even before the Soviet Union collapsed.
Over in the Bay Area, BART started running back in 1972. Their system is actually more similar to Pyongyang’s than Seoul’s.
I’ve been to SF, DC, Boston, Paris, and Tokyo myself, so I totally believe this.
RE: Fact #30 (Seoul Name Literally Means Capital) – Beijing basically just means “northern capital”.
With Nanjing being the “southern capital,”
Xi’an used to be known as Xijing, the western capital.
And Tokyo being called the “Eastern Capital.”
RE: Fact #35 (Franz Ferdinand Unpopular Reform Plans) – And “Take Me Out” is such a banger.
Also, keep “This Fire” in mind.
RE: Fact #14 (Soviet Doctor Discovers Hepatitis E) – So this doctor intentionally ate 22 fecal samples?
That’s ridiculous! He thought 22 was just a palate cleanser and not another cup of sh*t. He’s a gentleman, not a glutton.
RE: Fact #7 (Kangaroo Rat Lives Without Water) – Hey, I think some lizards do something similar in the Atacama desert. It’s a place with no fresh water, just lots of really salty pools, but there are juicy flies that hang out there.
I’ve got a Uromastyx that’s similar. They’re usually not supposed to have water because they get enough from their food. I do give mine a little water now and then to check for dehydration, but there’s never standing water in her enclosure. It’s always amusing when folks visit and are surprised she doesn’t have a water dish.
RE: Fact #44 (Canadian Firefighters Texas Pizza Mixup) – This campaign is great! I remember when it first became popular, and it felt like such a good idea in a world that’s been getting pretty rough.
RE: Fact #45 (Second Sight Abandons Bionic Eyes) – Yeah, I think this has happened before with prosthetics. Like, a company goes under and then suddenly your prosthetic is just a paperweight ’cause there’s no support for it anymore.
There’s also the Freehand system, which was made by a company called Neuro Control. It pretty much gave hand function back to people with high spinal cord injuries who had paralysis in their arms. A lot of people really loved it and still use it today, even though the company that made the parts went out of business over twenty years ago.
RE: Fact #35 (Franz Ferdinand Unpopular Reform Plans) – Conservatives and radicals both dislike liberals, but for different reasons. Conservatives don’t want anything to become more liberal. Radicals, on the other hand, don’t want liberal reforms that would make things better for people, because they think that would make it harder to get people on board with a revolution. It’s kind of like why Czar Alexander II of Russia was assassinated back in 1881.
Maximilian of Mexico’s whole deal was like, “I’ll try to make everyone happy by doing the unexpected!” But it ended up pleasing no one.
The poor guy even asked to be elected Emperor of Mexico to make his new subjects happy. He wasn’t even that bad as a ruler, just super unlucky.
RE: Fact #18 (Wayne Gretzky Skips Hall Wait) – The NHL Hall of Fame also mentioned this will be the last time they skip the waiting period for a player.
RE: Fact #3 (HIV Origins In Belgian Congo) – People thought this was likely way back in the 80s.
It’s probably a virus that takes ages to show symptoms, infecting people slowly and without anyone realizing it until the perfect storm of events lets it take off.
The scariest part is that there are probably tons of similar diseases out there that we don’t even know about yet, but could cause big outbreaks.
So, after World War II, globalization really kicked into high gear, and lots more people started traveling globally. The story goes that AIDS first showed up in the New York Haitian community and then spread to gay men because of their deep involvement in the shipping industry. It’s interesting because one of the earliest documented cases of AIDS outside of Africa was actually a Norwegian sailor back in 1968.
Man, that family went through so much. The dad got it, then his wife got it, and then their youngest kid caught it during birth. The 8-year-old daughter passed away from AIDS in January of ’76, followed by the dad in April, and then the mom in December. It’s heartbreaking for the kids who survived, especially watching their family suffer like that from AIDS.
That also links to the first suspected death from AIDS in the US. It’s amazing work those doctors did saving samples and testing to find the origins. So much goes on behind the scenes that most of us don’t realize.
Basically, the racist Belgian colonial government really limited education for Congolese people. When Congo gained independence, there were hardly any black college grads, but the country was in huge need of educated professionals like doctors and engineers.
So, the UN brought in Haitians to help out because they were Black, spoke French, and were used to the climate. It’s thought that when at least one of those Haitians returned to Haiti with HIV, that’s how it got there.
From Haiti, it spread to the US in a few ways: Haitian immigrants moving to places like Miami and New York, Haitians selling blood to help American hemophiliacs, and Haiti being a spot for gay sex tourism.
RE: Fact #3 (HIV Origins In Belgian Congo) – Yeah, King Leopold was in charge of the Congo Free State. The Belgian Congo was something that happened later on.
So I meant the virus started during Leopold’s time ruling the Congo, but thanks for pointing that out!
Technically, you’re right, it’s not totally accurate. The Congo Free State wrapped up in 1908, and the evidence here only goes back to 1909.
RE: Fact #1 (Kenya Monkey Causes Nationwide Blackout) – Planet of the Apes: Fall of the Transformers
RE: Fact #31 (IKEA Danish Names For Doormats) – Hey, I’m Danish, and this is actually a pretty common thing in our culture! We tend to tease each other in small ways like this – it’s just part of how we interact.
It’s pretty wild that one of my favorite Denmark facts is that if someone from Sweden walks into the country across the frozen bay, the law actually lets you hit them with a stick.
Totally, it’s a whole tradition. People in Sweden make fun of Danes, Danes make fun of Swedes, Norwegians make fun of Swedes, and Finns make fun of Swedes too.
I recall seeing something about Danes and Swedes having names for Norwegians, and Swedes and Norwegians having names for Danes. But it seems like Norwegians and Danes don’t really have any specific nicknames for Swedes, as if there’s nothing worse than being called a Swede.
You didn’t need to repeat that Danes make fun of Swedes.
RE: Fact #20 (Spectre Destroys Aston Martin Fleet) – They made 10 DB10s, with 8 being stunt cars and 2 being “show cars.” I’m assuming the stunt cars didn’t have all the pricey features, and it seems they’re valuing them based on one of the show cars that sold for $3.5m at auction. That’s a pretty BS claim, if you ask me.
This claim is totally baseless. That valuation is only so high because it’s basically one of only two cars like it. If all 10 were actually for sale, the price would be way lower, and if it were a production car, even lower still. This is just making numbers up.
Yeah, and this car also has a plaque that Daniel Craig signed.
RE: Fact #23 (President Garfield Proves Pythagorean Theorem) – You should check out “Death by Lightning” immediately.
RE: Fact #16 (Philip Pullman Undermining Christian Belief) – Peter Hitchens, a well-known right-wing commentator, accused them.
Sounds like Peter had some big family gatherings when he met up with his brother, the well-known atheist Christopher Hitchens.
Hitchens was also on the right, just a different kind of rightwinger.
They also famously had a big disagreement about the Iraq war. Christopher was for it, and Peter was against it.
RE: Fact #6 (Fahrenheit Sets Zero With Salt) – It’s 200 degrees. They call him Mr. Fahrenheit because of that.
RE: Fact #38 (Ol Dirty Bastard Rambling ICP) – Don’t pay someone whose judgment might be impaired upfront. RIP ODB.
So you front them $20-40 to get enough drugs to get them through the job. Then you gotta tell ’em something like, “Don’t break the security cameras,” so they don’t just rob you instead. Learned this from paying someone to do a job for me.
So, our neighbors hired someone who was on meth to paint their whole house, inside and out. They apparently got it done in about a day.
Haha, you got there first! I’m a big Wu-Tang fan too, but ODB was definitely an addict, no way around it. It’s hard to rely on someone like that for important stuff.
So, the story of how ODB ended up on that Pras song, “Ghetto Superstar,” is pretty wild.
RE: Fact #39 (Bagdad Arizona Copper Company Town) – Wonder if they pay with company script
Back in high school in the 2000s, my economics teacher had a school store. Students in his class were basically forced to work there for $1 an hour, paid in store credit. I wasn’t in that class, but I told someone that it sounded illegal for two reasons: one, the state minimum wage was already more than $1 an hour, and two, paying in store credit is essentially company scrip, which is against federal law.
Heard that the median income is around $99k a year, and rent for a 4-bedroom house is like $425 a month.
What the fu*k, I love my corporate overlords
The Wikipedia page mentioned in the post states that men have a median income of $50,000, while women have a median income of $40,506. Where did the $99k median income figure come from? It also seems like the next family on the list for a 4-bedroom place has been waiting for two years, and the company has to decide if your family is even eligible for it. So getting that salary or home might not be as simple as it seems.
I used to work there as a contractor. I recall there being a Bash’as grocery store, two diners, and a bar. The mine owns all the buildings, and the businesses just rent them. Even though it’s like any small town, you still pay for everything in dollars. The thing is, nobody owns their home; you have to move out once you stop working at the mine. And since it’s so far from anywhere else, there’s not much reason to stick around.
Is this where Bagdad Cafe is located?
RE: Fact #14 (Soviet Doctor Discovers Hepatitis E) – Did he eat poop from 22 people?
He eats people like you for breakfast.
Seriously? He eats that stuff for breakfast?
These medical researchers from last century were truly something else! I recall reading about other folks who were investigating a mysterious fever that was killing people. It’s wild because half of them ended up dying too, but they didn’t give up because they were trying to save thousands of lives. It reminds me of doctors who used to test drugs on themselves first. Just the peak of human dedication!
When my wife was diagnosed with diabetes, I remembered this old story: before they had proper tests, they’d have people drink a patient’s pee. If it tasted sweet, they had diabetes.
People always ask how they came up with such a weird testing method, but honestly, I’m more curious about how anyone ever discovered that sweet pee was a sign of anything!
Werner Forssmann proved it wouldn’t kill you by sticking a catheter in his arm and into his heart. And the guy who showed that heliobacter causes stomach ulcers actually infected himself and gave himself ulcers. Talk about dedication to science!
RE: Fact #37 (UAE Workforce Dominated By Migrants) – It’s pretty tough for most folks to become citizens through naturalization. I had a friend whose dad lived there for 50 years, and he had to leave when he retired.
Just to be clear, when he first got there in the 80s, there was hardly anything around. He was basically there from the start.
It kind of reminds me of the old formula one saying: people from other countries in the Middle East are like light bulbs. If they’re not “shining,” they’re gotten rid of. If you get sick or can’t keep up, the expectation is that you leave.
I recall Qatar back in the 90s. There was just one small department store/supermarket called The Centre, a McDonald’s, a Dairy Queen, The Sheraton, and The Ramada, and that was pretty much it. I grew up there, but I’d never think about working there because you’re not really wanted.
And this is talking about the ones who are well-paid and have some status, not the ‘migrant workers’ who get paid almost nothing and work in terrible conditions.
Yep, the C ring road in Doha. Good times.
RE: Fact #3 (HIV Origins In Belgian Congo) – After learning about the Belgian Congo, it’s hard not to feel like you want to punch King Leopold.
RE: Fact #46 (James Riley Sahara Enslavement Memoir) – So, the British Consul in Mogadore, William Wilshire, who got this guy freed, was also covering the American Consul job because there weren’t any Americans around. He managed to free a bunch of European and American sailors, which is pretty wild considering the War of 1812 had just wrapped up.
RE: Fact #32 (AWS S3 Typo Breaks Internet) – One thing I really appreciate about the tech industry is how open most major companies are about their slip-ups. It’s how we end up hearing about these kinds of things. I bet the post-mortem on this Cloudflare situation will be quite informative and insightful.
RE: Fact #2 (Anna Wintour Scares Fashion Cameos) – What’s funny about Anna Wintour is she actually showed up to the premiere… wearing Prada.
Just a PR stunt. Doesn’t mean she wouldn’t have punished the others though.
RE: Fact #24 (Darth Vader Actor Spoils Twist) – So, the line he said was “No Luke… Obi-Wan killed your father,” right? They were trying to keep that secret.
Yeah, that’s true if you look at it a certain way.
RE: Fact #22 (British Evacuate Black Loyalists Freed) – This also kicked off one of the first race riots in North America and led to some of them eventually resettling in Freetown, Sierra Leone. Lots of their descendants still live there today as Sierra Leone Creole or Krios. It’s a super interesting story.
I wonder why that might be, lol
RE: Fact #27 (Nintendo Creates Goombas For Beginners) – They were really strapped for memory. They also did a few other things:
The clouds and the bushes are actually the same asset, just with different colors applied.
For the ending theme music, the intended pattern was A, A, B, A. They ended up cutting out the B section, so it just repeats A, A, A, A. The full version was included in the Japanese version of Super Mario Bros 2, which came on a floppy disk, giving them more storage space.
The game only scrolls to the right because of how they encoded the level data to save space.
So, one thing I really like is that Bowser doesn’t have black on his sprites during the final levels. Instead, he uses the black background to get that black coloring for his sprites.
That’s not really about saving memory. It’s more about how to get around the three-color limit for sprites.
Yeah, that one-way scrolling thing also helps a bunch with tricky environments. Like, if Mario broke a brick or hit a question mark block, they only had to keep track of what happened with that stuff as long as it was visible. Once it scrolled off, you couldn’t go back to it, so they could just reuse that memory for new stuff on the map.
The Super Mario Bros. 2 that came out in Japan is actually different from the one we got in the US. The Japanese version was a Famicom Disk System game that never made it over here. Instead, we got it in the US as a Super NES game called Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels, which was included in Super Mario All-Stars. The Super Mario Bros. 2 released in the West is a totally separate game that eventually came out in Japan as Super Mario USA. They could have totally released the Japanese version in the West with a bigger cartridge, but they thought it was too tough for players over here, so they decided to make their own game instead.
It’s kinda funny, because back in the PS1 days, they actually made American versions of games *harder* than the Japanese ones. The thinking was that most folks rented games instead of buying them, so making them tougher meant people would have to rent them more times to beat them.
RE: Fact #1 (Kenya Monkey Causes Nationwide Blackout) – The monkey got a promotion to senior electric engineer.
Found a big system flaw, got it.
Seriously impressive! Who knew monkeys were so career-driven, haha.
It’s pretty wild when folks realize it doesn’t have any official credentials.
RE: Fact #35 (Franz Ferdinand Unpopular Reform Plans) – From what I recall, Franz Josef basically felt he had to invade Serbia because his heir was shot, even though he apparently didn’t get along with the guy. Seems like Kaiser Wilhelm was the only one who really cared for him.
Kaiser Wilhelm was the only one who really liked him, which says a lot.
These guys were pretty different in what they believed and how they wanted to run things. Wilhelm was all about making minorities in Germany more German and putting more power in Berlin, while Franz Ferdinand wanted the opposite for Austria.
Also, Conrad von Hotzendorf, the Chief of the General Staff, who was really eager to invade Serbia.
Conrad von Hotzendorf has been really stretching the saying “Never ascribe to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence” since way back in 1914.
Considering the Austro-Hungarian army was way bigger than Serbia’s, I bet that went super well. Reads like a world falling apart. Oh no.
RE: Fact #37 (UAE Workforce Dominated By Migrants) – What do all the locals do, like whip themselves with a cat o’ nine tails?
They hold onto people’s passports so they can’t leave. Then they survive off of cheap labor from others and a struggling oil industry.
This country is the only oil-dependent nation that’s really thrived after its oil days. They don’t rely on oil much anymore, except for their sovereign wealth fund. It’s a place where people from Africa, Asia, and Europe can easily connect for business, thanks to easy visas and lower taxes.
Back when I first moved there 9 years ago, you’d hear radio ads in English, Urdu, Hindi, Pinoy, and Arabic. They all mentioned it was illegal for employers to hold onto your passport and that you could call an anonymous tip line about it. This used to happen pretty often, but things have changed a lot. The government really wants to put a stop to it because the bad press just isn’t worth it.
Yeah, historically, government jobs were the go-to for Emirati folks – super stable, comfy, with early retirement and job security locked in. But now, there are just too many of those roles, so the government’s pushing programs to get more Emiratis into the private sector.
RE: Fact #27 (Nintendo Creates Goombas For Beginners) – Super Mario Bros is about as advanced as you could get on the NES without needing special hardware built into the cartridge. Things like extra RAM or even a whole extra sound chip could have been added, but SMB didn’t have any of that, so they had to make every bit of data count.
It featured 32 unique multiscreen levels across different environments, over a dozen enemies with colorful sprites, and likely the most sophisticated movement code ever seen in a home video game. That’s especially impressive when you compare it to pretty much any game on the Atari 2600.
When I was first learning the basics, I tinkered with the movement code and found something pretty neat. Turns out, the movement is all based on constants in a table that controls how it “feels.” This meant they could adjust movement without changing any code, which really sped up the process. It’s a really smart design.
RE: Fact #22 (British Evacuate Black Loyalists Freed) – My ancestor was one of those people. They relocated him and his family to Nova Scotia, but he had to buy his wife and kids back. The family still has the bill of sale.
Wow, that’s a pretty wild family story!
Yeah, my dad did his ancestry thing and we’ve actually connected with our American relatives. So it’s legit, not just a family story. I think he’s even listed in the Book of Negroes.
RE: Fact #13 (Quicksilver Renamed Mercury By Alchemists) – Yeah, it’s interesting how the symbols for genders are also linked to planets and metals. Like, the male symbol is also used for Mars and iron, and the female symbol represents Venus and copper.
So, I think that might be a little mixed up. The popular idea is that girls go to Jupiter to get more stupider.
boys go to Venus to j*rk their own pean*s
RE: Fact #17 (Mark Hunt Funds Human Cloning) – So this scientist, Boisselier, who’s a big deal in cloning, is also part of the Raelians. Apparently, they’re super into cloning because they believe aliens created life on Earth through cloning ages ago.
Yeah, I thought the same thing. It’s wild how things turn out to be stranger than fiction sometimes.
So, my sister used to work at a casino near Vegas, and there was some kind of convention happening. Turns out, they’re also a sex cult.
If you’re gonna join a cult, might as well pick one with sex!
So many strange quasi-cults and bogus science trends happening among tech folks and investors. It’s like the “eccentric rich” people of today.
RE: Fact #15 (Tonka Beans Banned In America) – Looks like there are high levels of a chemical in there that can harm your liver. Cinnamon has that same chemical, but way less of it.
RE: Fact #4 (Storage Wars Safe Holds Millions) – So, Dobson says he heard this story from someone who heard it from someone else, and neither of them are named. Plus, that picture of a bag full of cash? It’s just a generic stock photo from Getty Images. Basically, it’s all totally impossible to check.
RE: Fact #17 (Mark Hunt Funds Human Cloning) – “My son passed away. We would have done anything to save him. We would have done anything to create a twin of him, if that were possible. We tried. We didn’t break any laws. We spent our money. And maybe some people took advantage of us. But in the end, we had to say goodbye.”
This whole story is really, really sad.
Glad to hear they could move on!