26 Claudius Counted 5,984,072 Male Citizens
In 48 CE, Roman emperor Claudius conducted a census that counted 5,984,072 adult male citizens across the Roman Empire, slightly fewer than 6 million. The count excluded women, children, enslaved people, and free adult men who lacked Roman citizenship, so it did not represent the empire’s total population. The total exceeded the figure recorded at Roman emperor Augustus’s death by about 1 million, partly because Claudius founded colonies and granted their inhabitants blanket citizenship.
27. In 1859, students from Winchester Medical College in Virginia took the body of Watson Brown, a son of American abolitionist John Brown, after the raid on Harpers Ferry. The college skinned and preserved it at full length as an anatomical exhibit; a label identified the body as John Brown’s son and declared, “Thus always with Abolitionists.” Union troops discovered the display after entering Winchester in 1862, and soldiers under General Nathaniel Banks retaliated by burning the college to the ground, and the institution never reopened.
28. During the American Revolutionary War, William Franklin, son of American Founding Father Benjamin Franklin, remained fiercely loyal to British King George III. William served as New Jersey’s final colonial governor from 1763 until Patriot authorities arrested him in 1776, and after his release in 1778, he became the chief American Loyalist leader in British-occupied New York City. His refusal to join the Patriot cause permanently shattered his relationship with his father, and they met for the last time in 1785 but never reconciled before Benjamin’s death. Benjamin’s 1788 will left William almost nothing and explicitly cited his son’s wartime conduct.
29. In 2024, after years of negotiations through Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History, the Mexican government paid an anonymous family 9.5 million pesos for three Aztec codices that the family had preserved as traditional stewards. Although all three documents remain incomplete and heavily damaged, they depict the founding of Tetepilco, an inventory of the Church of San Andrés Tetepilco, and the history of Tenochtitlan. The 20-sheet historical codex traces Tenochtitlan from its founding in 1300 through 1611 and portrays Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés as a Roman soldier. The institute added the manuscripts to the National Library of Anthropology and History’s collection of more than 200 Mesoamerican codices.
30. In 1957, Brazilian geneticist Warwick E. Kerr deliberately crossed African and European honeybees in Brazil, hoping to produce a bee that could collect more honey in warm climates. People later called the resulting Africanized honeybees killer bees, although Kerr designed the experiment to improve honey production rather than aggression. The bees escaped from their laboratory hives after someone accidentally removed a queen excluder, which allowed them to breed with local bees and spread their highly defensive traits. They reached the United States border around 1990.
31 Alexander Kept Iliad Beside Dagger
Macedonian king Alexander the Great carried an annotated copy of Homer’s Iliad on his campaigns and reportedly kept it beneath his pillow beside his dagger. Greek philosopher Aristotle had prepared the special edition, which became known as the Iliad of the Casket. Alexander called the poem a “handbook of the military art” and modeled himself after its warrior Achilles.
32. About 1 in every 1,000 girls is born with trisomy X, which gives her an extra X chromosome, yet fewer than 10% of girls and women with the condition receive a diagnosis. It can cause learning disabilities, increased height, wide-spaced eyes, incurved little fingers, and early menopause, although some people show no symptoms. Most live normal lives, but their socioeconomic status averages lower than that of the general population.
33. In 1634, a French carpenter named Zacharie Cloutier settled in Beauport, New France, in what is now Quebec. Researchers at the University of Montreal later counted 10,850 of his French-Canadian descendants by 1800, more than for any other Quebec colonist. His documented descendants include Canadian singers Justin Bieber, Celine Dion, Shania Twain, and Alanis Morissette, Canadian actors Ryan Gosling and Jim Carrey, American singer Madonna, and American actress Angelina Jolie.
34. In 2019, German adhesive company DELO set a Guinness World Record by suspending a 17.20-tonne truck in the air for one hour using their glue. A crane lifted the truck one meter through a bonded aluminum cylinder with a radius of just 3.5 centimeters. DELO developed its heat-resistant MONOPOX epoxy specifically for the attempt, surpassing the 16.09-tonne record set by the German Aerospace Centre in 2013.
35. In August 1998, a Japanese woman from Fukuoka City created and sold a fan-made Pokemon manga depicting erotic acts between Ash Ketchum and Pikachu. Nintendo and two other copyright holders filed a complaint a few months later, and Kyoto police arrested her eight days later for violating Japanese copyright law. Police detained her in Kyoto for 22 days, and authorities fined her for selling five copies at 600 yen each and possessing about 100 more for distribution. The case became Japan’s first arrest of a doujinshi artist and unsettled the country’s amateur manga community.
36 Judgment Day Beat Racial Censorship
In February 1956, the Comics Code Authority tried to stop EC Comics from reprinting the 1953 story “Judgment Day” because its astronaut protagonist was Black, even though the Code contained no ban on Black characters. Writer Al Feldstein and artist Joe Orlando had created the story as an allegory against racial prejudice, which depended on the final reveal of the astronaut’s race. A Code administrator named Charles Murphy ordered publisher William Gaines to change the final panel, but Gaines refused and threatened to alert the press. Murphy reversed his decision and allowed the story to run with the Code seal.
37. Atari programmer Warren Robinett secretly inserted the message “Created by Warren Robinett” into the 1980 Atari 2600 game Adventure because the company refused to credit its developers. He kept the hidden room secret from everyone at Atari until a 15-year-old boy from Salt Lake City named Adam Clayton discovered it and mailed the company instructions for reaching it. Atari considered removing the message, but creating a new ROM mask would have cost about $10,000. A software director named Steve Wright compared hidden features like Robinett’s message to Easter eggs, leading Atari to keep it, adopt the term, and encourage similar secrets in later games.
38. As bees fly, friction gives them a positive electrostatic charge, while grounded flowers usually carry a slight negative charge. This difference pulls negatively charged pollen onto the bee, and some positively charged pollen later leaps from the bee to another flower’s pistil. Each visit depletes some negative charge from the flower, so other bees can tell which blooms have been stripped of pollen and nectar recently, for as long as 100 seconds.
39. Fat choy is an edible cyanobacterium that grows in the Gobi Desert and the Qinghai Plateau, but has no nutritional value and sells at a high price as a luxury food. Its Cantonese name sounds like a phrase meaning “struck it rich,” making it popular in Chinese New Year dishes. Heavy harvesting on the Mongolian steppes has worsened erosion and desertification, prompting the Chinese government to restrict its collection and causing prices to rise further. Fat choy can also contain BMAA, a toxic amino acid linked to ALS, Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, and dementia, although a 2009 study found that not every genuine sample contained it.
40. In a 2014 case, doctors treated a 47-year-old former nurse who had swallowed an unknown amount of antifreeze by giving her carefully measured whisky. Ethanol stops the liver from turning ethylene glycol into bad stuff . That ‘s why it is known as a substitute for the antidote fomepizole . Doctors gave her a loading dose of 2.5 milliliters per kilogram followed by 35 milliliters of whiskey an hour. They placed her beside two patients recovering from alcohol withdrawal, creating an unusual challenge for the hospital staff.
41 Shanghaiers Kidnapped Sailors For Profit
During the late 1800s, American crimps, also called shanghaiers, drugged, tricked, or forced men aboard ships and collected $25 to $50 for each sailor they supplied. Nearly 100,000 men may have been crimped from San Francisco and Portland alone because sailing ships needed large crews for long voyages. Sailors fought back by forming unions, while U.S. President Woodrow Wilson signed the Seamen’s Act in 1915 to regulate their wages, food, safety, and living conditions. Steamships then carried more cargo with fewer workers, making crimping unprofitable and helping end the practice during the early 1900s.
42. Archaeologists and historians still do not know what language the people of Late Bronze Age Troy spoke around 1300 BCE or whether the city used a single language at all. The site contains no Greek writing from the relevant period, and current evidence points away from Greek as the Trojans’ native language. Luwian remains one candidate because of regional connections, possibly Luwian names, and a hieroglyphic Luwian seal found at Troy, but none of this evidence proves what residents spoke. Although the Iliad portrays Trojans and Greeks speaking the same language, scholars consider the portrayal a poetic convention rather than historical evidence.
43. Actor Leonard Nimoy started smoking as a teenager because he thought cigarettes were cool and believed advertisements presenting them as part of a doctor-recommended healthy lifestyle. By the time he moved to Los Angeles after high school, he smoked two packs a day, and nicotine addiction kept him smoking for 37 years. The birth of his first grandson persuaded him to quit in 1985, but doctors diagnosed him with COPD in 2013 after years of worsening breathing problems. Nimoy became an anti-smoking advocate before dying from complications of COPD in 2015.
44. In June 2024, a man named Brandon Garrett missed a curve while driving with his four dogs on U.S. Forest Service Road 39 in Baker County, Oregon, sending his truck into a ravine near a creek. One dog ran nearly four miles through the wilderness to the family’s campsite, arriving at 9:30 a.m. and alerting relatives that something was wrong. The family found Garrett’s truck but could not reach him, so rescuers cut a path with chainsaws and descended with a rope and rescue blanket. They recovered Garrett about 100 yards from the crash with his three other dogs alive, then transported him to a hospital.
45. First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln remained in the White House for nearly six weeks after witnessing the assassination of U.S. President Abraham Lincoln at Ford’s Theatre in 1865. She did not attend his funeral, and President Andrew Johnson allowed her to remain in the executive mansion while she grieved. Shortly before leaving, she wrote to U.S. Senator Charles Sumner that she would depart brokenhearted, with nearly every hope in life crushed. She left Washington with her sons Robert and Tad and settled in Chicago.
15 Most Controversial & Costly Blunders in History
46 Leopard Seal’s Twenty-Day Postmortem Care
In 2025, University of Rhode Island researchers Emily Sperou and Renato Borras-Chavez published the first documented observations of mother leopard seals caring for dead offspring in Patagonia, Chile. The behavior, dubbed postmortem attentive behavior, or PAB, involved nuzzling the bodies, carrying the bodies in their mouths, guarding them and moving them between ice floes. One mother spent 20 days with her pup’s corpse, the longest PAB episode recorded, and one of the longest documented in any mammal. “The oxytocin released after birth may extend the maternal bond,” the researchers said, but they could not say if the seals were grieving.
47. In 1356, Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV’s Golden Bull decree gave the Empire’s seven prince-electors 30 days to choose a new King of the Romans in Frankfurt. Four votes formed a majority, preventing three electors from blocking the selection. If the deadline expired, the electors could eat only bread and water and could not leave Frankfurt until they chose a ruler. The decree governed key parts of the Holy Roman Empire’s constitutional structure for more than 400 years.
48. On February 11, 2013, hackers seized Emergency Alert System equipment at KRTV, WKBT-DT, WBUP, WNMU, and KENW across Montana, Michigan, Wisconsin, and New Mexico. During ordinary programs, viewers heard: “Civil authorities in your area have reported that the bodies of the dead are rising from their graves and attacking the living.” Engineers concluded that the attackers likely entered the equipment through factory-default passwords published in user manuals. The FCC and FEMA urged broadcasters to strengthen their security, but authorities never identified or caught the hijackers.
49. In 1223, Mongol generals Jebe and Subutai left a 1,000-man rearguard as bait, and the Rus’ and Cuman coalition destroyed it before chasing what looked like a defeated army. The Mongols maintained their false retreat for nine days, stretching the pursuing forces across the steppe and exhausting them. At the Kalka River in present-day Ukraine, the Mongols suddenly formed for battle and overwhelmed the divided coalition before all its units could arrive. The contemporary Novgorod First Chronicle reported that only one in ten soldiers returned to Rus’.
50. The U.S. Army relies on one industrial plant, the Watervliet Arsenal near Troy, New York, to make cannon tubes for the M1 Abrams tank, M109 Paladin self-propelled howitzer, and M777 lightweight howitzer. Founded in 1813, the nation’s oldest arsenal increased production after the United States began sending howitzers to Ukraine in 2022, and output tripled over the next three years. The Army modernized the facility and began seeking secondary producers because dependence on Watervliet created a single point of failure.
RE: Fact #47 (Prince-Electors Had Thirty-Day Imperial Deadline) – So they had more than thirty days?
RE: Fact #15 (Hitler Gave Newlyweds His Photograph) – Considering who this couple was, that was probably their favorite gift.
It’s like a MAGA couple getting a signed photo of Trump directly from him, I’m sure they would have loved it.
RE: Fact #33 (Zacharie Cloutier Links Eight Celebrities) – The coolest thing is that we’re able to trace the lineage of some random French carpenter 400 years later.
The Catholic Church in Quebec was great at record-keeping. They tracked everything and preserved those old records from the start of the colony. They did it for control back then, but it’s a goldmine for genealogists now, so they’ve kept it up.
RE: Fact #36 (Judgment Day Beat Racial Censorship) – There is a wild irony in this story being centered on racial discrimination. The comic features an astronaut scouting a planet inhabited by robots who are identical except for their colors: half are blue and half are orange. One group is treated as inferior just because of their color, and the astronaut reports that the planet isn’t ready for contact until they overcome that racism. The kicker is that in the final panel, he takes off his helmet and he’s Black. Apparently, that reveal was enough to trigger a ban.
It reminds me of that Star Trek episode where people who are black and white on opposite sides fight each other. It was ridiculous, but the point was so relevant.
RE: Fact #21 (Robert Moses, America’s Nondriving Urbanist) – That explains why he designed the city the way he did. He grew up seeing cars as a luxury for the rich and wanted the city to be reserved for them. He even called the working class ‘animals’ and actively tried to sabotage New York’s mass transit systems.
RE: Fact #40 (Whisky Treats Ethylene Glycol Poisoning) – I’m a veteran and I’m old enough to remember our clinic keeping a bottle of Everclear in the drug safe specifically for this.
RE: Fact #16 (Delta Crew Joked, Then Crashed) – I’m confused because I’m 100% sure I’ve heard pilot voice recordings from many incidents that occurred after this.
Likely only relevant voice recordings, as stated.
RE: Fact #27 (Winchester College’s Abolitionist Corpse Display) – “But it wasn’t about slavery.” /s Plenty of the guys in Union blue knew exactly what they were fighting against.
RE: Fact #43 (Leonard Nimoy’s Smoking Caused COPD) – There is a radio station online that plays old broadcasts from the 30s through the 50s, commercials included. It is wild to hear ads where they actually say things like, “Most doctors recommend you smoke this brand for a cleaner, better taste.”
RE: Fact #31 (Alexander Kept Iliad Beside Dagger) – From what I recall, the “battle strategy” in the Iliad is basically: “this guy gets blessed by a god and goes on a John Wick-style rampage until he is taken down by someone blessed by a different god.” It is not exactly the Art of War.
Alexander led the charge in every battle. Since these guys were getting advice from deities living on mountains, getting blessed by a god was probably a solid strategy.
this really explains why Alexander was so successful. He understood that while wars drag on, they can also be won in a flash when things shift. He also believed the gods played a massive part in battle. He managed to take cities without excessive bloodshed and made sure not to insult the gods, either his own or those of the places he conquered. Faith and drive are major factors, especially when they’re buoyed by omens and rumors. Cruelty, unnecessary violence, and trampling over local cultures usually just come back to bite you. Even in the Iliad, when Hector kills Patroclus and tries to disrespect his body, it actually forces Achilles back into the fight despite his hatred for Agamemnon. Hector’s choices just unified the Greeks and made them stronger. And when Achilles drags Hector’s body, it doesn’t even make Priam surrender, even though he’s begging for his son back. There’s definitely a lot of wisdom for a commander if you read between the lines.
RE: Fact #17 (Prairie Madness Afflicted Isolated Settlers) – It’s a different time and place, but I watched a WWII documentary where a former German soldier mentioned that the endless, empty Russian steppes had a similar psychological effect on many of his fellow soldiers.
RE: Fact #43 (Leonard Nimoy’s Smoking Caused COPD) – Both of my grandmas were told by their doctors in the 60s to smoke to lose weight. One ended up dying of emphysema and the other from lung cancer.
RE: Fact #41 (Shanghaiers Kidnapped Sailors For Profit) – Around 1900, shanghaiing was a massive, organized criminal enterprise. In ports like San Francisco, Seattle, and Portland, thousands of men were kidnapped annually to fill crews for long-haul merchant ships because the work was so brutal that nobody wanted to sign up voluntarily. Victims were often drugged with opium or just knocked unconscious.
RE: Fact #5 (Habsburg Monarchs Amassed 160, 000 Furnishings) – They should host a massive online estate sale, how cool would that be? Imagine being able to sleep in some random Habsburg monarch’s bed.
RE: Fact #42 (Trojan Language Probably Wasn’t Greek) – Most of the real evidence from that period was destroyed because the guy leading the Troy excavation was basically a hobbyist who used dynamite to blast a trench straight down to bedrock, destroying the layers he was actually looking for.
Schliemann was a total treasure hunter and I can’t stand him, but I definitely get the urge to use dynamite when I am trying to clear rocks and dirt that are packed as hard as concrete.
RE: Fact #23 (Arc de Triomphe Flag Returned) – I know it is not a huge deal, but it drives me a little crazy seeing that people apparently cannot spell French words correctly.
RE: Fact #34 (DELO Glue Suspended 17-Tonne Truck) – Just to clarify, it’s “tonnes”, not “tons”. A tonne is 1, 000 kilograms, while a ton is 2, 000 pounds. So 17.2 tonnes is actually just shy of 19 tons.
That really depends on where you live. Since “ton” isn’t a strict SI unit, a ton is just a metric tonne where I am. So for me, a ton is 1, 000kg.
RE: Fact #47 (Prince-Electors Had Thirty-Day Imperial Deadline) – Is that similar to how cardinals pick a pope? I heard if they can’t agree, they get locked in until they do, with their food rations cut until they make a decision.
The 1268 papal election actually lasted three years. Eventually, they started locking the cardinals in and cutting their food, and in the end, they even removed the roof of the room.
RE: Fact #23 (Arc de Triomphe Flag Returned) – I bet a lot of ordinary people back then didn’t really grasp the historical weight of what was happening around them. To the French, that flag was a symbol of resistance, but to most soldiers and locals, it was just one of thousands of flags being tossed around after the liberation.
RE: Fact #48 (Zombie Hack Seized Five Stations) – The Emergency Alert System is pretty vulnerable because the security on the broadcast equipment is sometimes really weak.
RE: Fact #37 (Warren Robinett Secretly Credited Himself) – Man, back then you really needed a good imagination.
RE: Fact #49 (Mongols’ False Retreat Crushed Rus’) – The wild part is that this was supposedly just a scouting mission. Jebe and Subutai weren’t even tasked with conquering territory, yet they managed to crush a combined Rus army on their way back and still had the presence of mind to report what they found.
It is not much of a stretch to call Genghis Khan, Subutai, and Jebe three of the greatest military minds in history. It is honestly mind-blowing that they were all serving under the same flag at the same time.
RE: Fact #13 (Chuck Hughes’ Fatal NFL Collapse) – Technically, Damar Hamlin also died on the field, but they were able to resuscitate him.
RE: Fact #17 (Prairie Madness Afflicted Isolated Settlers) – I grew up in the prairies but now live out east. My dad passed away a few years ago, so I went back and drove from Edmonton through Calgary to Banff. If you don’t live in the prairies, you forget how oppressive that much sky can be. It’s so blue and open with no buildings or trees to break it up. I can see why people got prairie madness, I really didn’t like it.
I drove across the U.S. west-to-east a few years ago and those endless, open spaces really got to me, too. I have thalassophobia, and it felt somewhat like that, just inverted.
RE: Fact #26 (Claudius Counted 5, 984, 072 Male Citizens) – The world was much less crowded before the Industrial Revolution.
RE: Fact #30 (Killer Bees Escaped Brazilian Experiment) – Just another reminder that honeybees are basically domesticated livestock, not a natural, native pollinator. Learning the truth about them completely changed my view.
RE: Fact #7 (Olo Required Selective M-Cone Stimulation) – What are the costs and risks to set this up? A science museum could make some decent money offering this as a special ticketed experience for science geeks.
I think it’d be a tough setup for the general public. If I recall correctly, the experiment required mapping the individual’s eye cone cells and positioning lasers to match their specific eye configuration. It’s like a fingerprint; since we all have these three types of cones scattered randomly, you’d need a unique map for every person. That said, with enough investment, maybe there could be software that does that quickly? Probably a future thing.
RE: Fact #20 (Karen Carpenter’s Fatal Ipecac Abuse) – I’ve read a few books on her, so I’m going by memory, but along with starving herself, she was heavily abusing ipecac, laxatives, and thyroid medication. She went to New York for full-time outpatient treatment, but she actually got worse. She ended up being hospitalized with a feeding tube, and the theory is that the weight gain happened too quickly. Eating disorders weren’t as well understood back then, and treatment has come a long way since. Even though I haven’t read the whole fact, I’ve always understood that it was years of starvation and medication abuse, combined with the rapid weight gain, that weakened her heart. It’s so sad because she was at a healthy weight when she died, but I’m not sure she had recovered psychologically.
RE: Fact #14 (Crank That Took Ten Minutes) – Meanwhile, the song you spent a year making on your $700 licensed version of Ableton only got a pity listen from your grandma.
RE: Fact #40 (Whisky Treats Ethylene Glycol Poisoning) – Whiskey isn’t a treatment itself, but it contains ethanol, which is. Ethylene glycol (antifreeze) isn’t inherently toxic until the liver metabolizes it. Ethanol and ethylene glycol compete for the same liver enzyme. If you flood the system with enough ethanol, the enzyme chooses the ethanol, allowing the ethylene glycol to pass through the body unprocessed. That said, ethanol isn’t the primary treatment, and no one should try to self-treat antifreeze poisoning by getting drunk. That would be incredibly dangerous.
RE: Fact #33 (Zacharie Cloutier Links Eight Celebrities) – Just a heads up: the combination of solid record-keeping and small founder populations means anyone with French Canadian roots will likely find enough family tree data to make these kinds of connections.
RE: Fact #14 (Crank That Took Ten Minutes) – I remember my PE class had to come up with choreography. We picked that song and the teacher didn’t see an issue with it, so there we were, four 13-year-olds happily cranking that and superman-ing that hoe.
RE: Fact #6 (Nero Fell, Judges Awarded Victory) – It’s worth noting that a lot of what we know about Nero comes from his successors who were clearly out to ruin his reputation. The Roman senatorial class looked down on chariot racing and acting, but Nero was actually popular with the common people.
RE: Fact #25 (Joseph Palmer’s Beard Provoked Imprisonment) – According to Wikipedia: “A prominent Fitchburg minister once accosted him: “Palmer, why don’t you shave and not go around looking like the devil?” Palmer replied: “Mr. Trask, are you not mistaken in your comparison of personages? I have never seen a picture of the ruler of the sulfurous regions with much of a beard, but if I remember correctly, Jesus wore a beard not unlike mine.””
RE: Fact #26 (Claudius Counted 5, 984, 072 Male Citizens) – For context, the current metro Rome population is just under 4.5 million.
RE: Fact #13 (Chuck Hughes’ Fatal NFL Collapse) – You should look up how many college players died before the forward pass was legalized.
That was back when both teams would just link arms and run headfirst as a human wall into the other side.
RE: Fact #36 (Judgment Day Beat Racial Censorship) – I’ve always wondered if the DS9 episode “Far Beyond the Stars” was meant as an homage to this.
RE: Fact #17 (Prairie Madness Afflicted Isolated Settlers) – I’m a West Coast rainforest dweller, so whenever I go somewhere without mountains where everything is brown, it feels off to me. My wife is from the desert, so she feels in her element whenever we go somewhere hot and dry. I think wherever you grow up sets your baseline for life.
RE: Fact #1 (Angela Lansbury Fled Manson’s Orbit) – She was an Irish citizen and had been visiting Ireland since the 1930s. Her kids had spent plenty of time there during summer holidays before they moved. It makes sense it was a natural place for them to go.
RE: Fact #4 (Ann Hibbins Faced Witchcraft Execution) – Witchcraft accusations were often just a cover for misogyny. They were usually aimed at women who didn’t fit the traditional mold, women who were outspoken, independent, and whose deaths often benefited someone else. It’s no shock that this happened to Ann. How dare she successfully call out men for not doing their jobs correctly!
RE: Fact #7 (Olo Required Selective M-Cone Stimulation) – I was a bit of a hippie back in the day, and I’ve definitely seen colors that felt like nobody else had ever seen.
RE: Fact #8 (ICBM Silos Create Nuclear Sponge) – One of my professors grew up on a massive farm in South Dakota. The government leased some of their land to build a nuclear silo, and that lease is still going 50 years later. He said that’s exactly how he was able to afford college.
RE: Fact #3 (Instant Coffee Won Blind Taste-Test) – Instant coffee has come a long way since I was a kid when the only options were those red and white labels. While I prefer using a cafetiere and ground coffee, I keep some of the newer instant brands on hand for visitors or emergencies. They’re actually pretty good.
RE: Fact #26 (Claudius Counted 5, 984, 072 Male Citizens) – This is a bit misleading. While free adult males were eligible for citizenship, most of them weren’t actually citizens. That was actually a big draw for military service, since you could retire as a citizen after your career in the army.
RE: Fact #30 (Killer Bees Escaped Brazilian Experiment) – “We were hoping for the higher production and docility of European bees and the temperature tolerance of African ones… instead we got the anger and vengeance of the African strain plus the ability to withstand cooler temperatures like the European one. Great.”
RE: Fact #1 (Angela Lansbury Fled Manson’s Orbit) – She used to be a regular at a shop my mom worked at in Cork City. They always had nice things to say about her. For a long time, they just treated her like any other customer until one day a delivery driver was complaining about someone stealing from his van. Another customer joked, “Jessica over there will sort it out, it’s probably your brother-in-law.” She took it really well and would share stories about her acting career every time she visited after that.
RE: Fact #24 (Grant’s Warning Deterred Japanese Borrowing) – >In a two-hour meeting with the emperor, Grant warned him against becoming indebted to foreign powers, lest Japan fall “into the abyss into which Egypt has fallen”; Grant’s warning reportedly made a “forceful impression” on the emperor and his advisors and led to the rejection of various loan proposals in the following years. [109]
RE: Fact #28 (William Franklin’s Loyalism Estranged Benjamin) – His grandson, Benjamin Franklin Bach, was also a hardcore anti-federalist. He ended up dying of yellow fever while waiting for his sedition trial, right before the Sedition Act of 1798 went into effect.
RE: Fact #41 (Shanghaiers Kidnapped Sailors For Profit) – The legend goes that James “Shanghai” Kelly had a bar in San Francisco with trapdoors to dump passed-out drunks onto boats to be forced into labor. It’s likely just a myth, but the fact that it was such a common story shows just how rampant that practice was.
RE: Fact #30 (Killer Bees Escaped Brazilian Experiment) – Does anyone else remember these being a big concern for a while back in the 90s?
RE: Fact #2 (Varro Predicted Invisible Disease-Causing Creatures) – This might also just be a misunderstanding of how malaria spreads. It was a massive problem across the empire, but the Romans didn’t realize mosquitoes were the ones responsible.
RE: Fact #3 (Instant Coffee Won Blind Taste-Test) – Pepsi beat Coke in a blind test too, which pushed them to change their recipe, a total disaster. Blind taste tests don’t really mimic how you actually drink something over time. They usually just favor whatever is sweeter.
RE: Fact #34 (DELO Glue Suspended 17-Tonne Truck) – Not to be confused with DELU glue, which made the truck swear it was hanging in mid-air when it didn’t actually lift an inch.
RE: Fact #12 (Negros Fruit Dove’s Sole Specimen) – I find it interesting that the only other sighting was in the 90s, from someone who also ended up shooting the bird. Things aren’t looking good for the species.
RE: Fact #24 (Grant’s Warning Deterred Japanese Borrowing) – One of the questions from China’s final Imperial Exam in 1904 included this: ###> Q3 – When Japan began its reforms, they hired Westerners and grew more powerful by the day. “Egypt hired over a thousand foreigners, yet lost control over their finances and judiciary, permanently weakening it. ” Go over the respective cases in detail and come up with a plan to learn from their gains and losses. Egypt’s situation was well-known throughout East Asia back then.
RE: Fact #11 (Moon Caves Could Shelter Astronauts) – If this isn’t the setup for a sci-fi horror or action movie, I don’t know what is.
RE: Fact #16 (Delta Crew Joked, Then Crashed) – In most countries, there is a button to erase the audio recordings when a flight ends. Investigators can sometimes recover the audio if there is a crash, but pilots still do it to cover their tracks, which usually just gets them into much deeper trouble.
RE: Fact #9 (Meredith Victory Saved 14, 000 Refugees) – Five babies in a crowd of 14, 000 people seems like a high number. Maybe there was some selection bias where pregnant people were prioritized or given the best chance to get on the boat.
RE: Fact #38 (Bees Detect Flowers’ Electric Signals) – Everything I learn about bees makes them sound more wild. How did they evolve to sense electrical charges? The static is one thing, but being able to detect the positive charge of a flower is mind-blowing.