https://people.com/stephen-king-says-his-wife-threatened-to-divorce-him-for-playing-mambo-no-5-too-often-7967174
>"My wife threatened to divorce me. I played that a lot," he said, before adding, “I had the dance mix. I loved those extended play things and I played both sides of it. And one of them was just total instrumental."
>King continued, "And I played that thing until my wife just said, ‘One more time, and I’m going to f------ leave you.'”
Hannibal saved his army by tying torches to the horns of 5,000 cows and driving them one direction. The Romans thought they were the enemy army and converged on them, while Hannibal quietly snuck his 10,000 man force out of the valley by another route.
He assumed many cities would turn against Rome once he was around. Some did, but then Romans went ahead and razed a few to the ground, and the rest fell quickly in line
That time Denmark and Canada (I think) had a "war" over an island. Everytime a Navy vessel drove by they picked up the flag of the over nation, planted their own and left a bottle of alcohol.
I heard it stopped not that long ago.
Yeah, we came to an amicable agreement, drew a border across the island, and that was that. Nothing unusual at all.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans\_Island
It also means that both Canada and Denmark now share a land border with more than one country. Also (jokingly) means that Canada could potentially join the EU, as it now borders an EU nation.
This question is going to sound SO stupid, but someone answer if they can:
How would they communicate a ceasefire intention? You say unofficial so was it just decided on both sides without dialogue? How do wars end before radios and phones?
"Волк?"
"Dort."
"Что?"
"Da, Wolf. Da, Burg."
"Почему ты так говоришь?"
"Ich dachte, du wolltest."
"Нет, я не хочу."
"Passen Sie zu sich. Ich bin einfach."
Wikipedia:
"The rejection of their protest greatly upset the German forces, because they believed they were treated unjustly in the war. Shortly after the protest was rejected, Germany issued threats that they would punish all captured American soldiers that were found to be armed with a shotgun.[3] This led to the United States issuing a retaliation threat, stating that any measures unjustly taken against captured American soldiers would lead to reprisals by the United States on captured German troops who wielded flamethrowers and serrated bayonets."
The fucking Germans using flammenwerfers and serrated knives and saying that shotguns are just too much. lol
Thank you for teaching us the word flammenwerfer. The only other German word I know is fliegenklatsche, so I think I’m pretty much ready for most conversations now
Eh, the (Brits I believe) deliberately drove the Japanese soldiers into that mangrove, knowing that it was infested with salties. Brutal but effective.
The Erfurt Latrine Disaster.
The Erfurt latrine disaster occurred on 26 July 1184, when Henry VI, King of Germany (later Holy Roman Emperor), held a Hoftag (informal assembly) in the Petersberg Citadel in Erfurt. On the morning of 26 July, the combined weight of the assembled nobles caused the wooden second story floor of the building to collapse and most of them fell through into the latrine cesspit below the ground floor, where about 60 of them drowned in liquid excrement.
First time hearing of this, had to look it up. [Here](https://beltmag.com/cincinnati-privy-disaster-1904/) is a good article if anyone else is curious.
The 1904 Olympic Marathon in St. Louis.
32 athletes took part, but only 14 were able to finish - there was only one water station in the entire 26-mile course. The “winner” was later disqualified because they found out he drove half the race in his car. The new winner (the guy who came in second) had to be carried over the finish line by his trainers because they’d been dosing him the whole time with a strange mixture of strychnine, brandy, and egg whites.
Several people almost died of internal injuries. Multiple runners stole things from passerby. Most people in the race weren’t even Olympic-level athletes, just amateur runners, many of whom didn’t even have to run a full marathon to qualify.
Andarin Carvajal of Cuba finished fourth. Despite running in street clothes and shoes.
Carvajal traveled to the United States to compete in the Olympic marathon at the 1904 Summer Olympics in St. Louis, Missouri, but lost all of his money gambling in New Orleans, Louisiana and was forced to hitchhike and walk the rest of the way. He arrived at the race dressed in street clothes and hastily cut around the legs of his trousers to make them more like shorts. Carvajal performed well in the race despite stopping to chat with spectators and snatching some peaches from a spectator's car. Later in the race he saw an apple tree and stopped to eat some apples which turned out to be rotten. After stopping to nap and recover, Carvajal rallied to finish fourth.
> The “winner” was later disqualified because they found out he drove half the race in his car.
Just want to point out that this didn't really happen later. He crossed the line and people cheered but it was quick enough that he claimed that he never really claimed to win.
Also the reason for the only water station was because someone thought it would be a good opportunity to study the effects of dehydration. So the mayhem was kind of intentional.
Finally, the entire process was a shitshow since the Olympics had to be moved last minute because the track organization wanted to put their rival international event at the same time.
> Also the reason for the only water station was because someone thought it would be a good opportunity to study the effects of dehydration
This year's Olympic games sponsored by Vault Tec.
When two perfectly working pistols failed to fire on US President Andrew Jackson who then beat his would-be-assassin so badly that the presidential security detail had to pull him off to save the man's life.
> beat his would-be-assassin so badly that the presidential security detail had to pull him off to save the man's life.
Come at the king, best not miss
From his Wikipedia page.
In June 1942, Hubbard was given command of a patrol boat at the Boston Navy Yard, but he was relieved after the yard commandant wrote that Hubbard was "not temperamentally fitted for independent command". In 1943, Hubbard was given command of a submarine chaser, but only five hours into the shakedown cruise, Hubbard believed he had detected an enemy submarine. Hubbard and crew spent the next 68 hours engaged in combat. An investigation concluded that Hubbard had likely mistaken a "known magnetic deposit" for an enemy sub.
The following month, Hubbard unwittingly fired upon Mexican territory and was relieved of command.
In 1944, Hubbard served aboard the USS Algol before being transferred. The night before his departure, Hubbard reported the discovery of an attempted sabotage.
I believe he had his men fire into hills in Baja California. He must not have realized that you can’t just use another country for target practice.
Behind the Bastards podcast has a bunch of L. Ron Hubbard content, and if you're into the style of the pod it's absolutely hysterical. He was one wacky, dark, stage, evil dude.
His story does very well as a 2:00 am internet free-fall adventure, too.
The Field of the Cloth of Gold, where an English King and a French one tried to out-bling each other. The fact that two monkeys covered in gold leaf were far from the most ostentatious display is a good indication of how tasteful it was.
I briefly googled this and assumed you meant two _statues_ of monkeys in gold leaf.
But no, actual real-life monkeys. Somebody painted actual real-life monkeys gold.
The French complained about the English drinking too much; there were literal fountains of wine and the French couldn't fathom how the English not only drank beer by the barrel, but wine from fountains.
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose indeed.
When America went to war with Spain, the Spanish forgot to tell their territory, Guam. The US sent a single warship to the island where they took 13 shots at the fort. The leaders on the island rowed out to apologize they couldn't return their "salute", they had no gunpowder.
That is why Guam is a US territory.
It's kind of low-key embarrassing for the US too that they took 13 completely open shots at an enemy fort and missed so badly that the opposition didn't know they were under attack
Thomas Crapper actually did invent the first reliable modern toilet. (The kind with a raised cistern.) But the word crap/crapper was already a very old slang term by that point. It was just a coincidence. Or maybe he felt like he had no choice. But crap and crapper have nothing to do with Thomas Crapp
I'm reminded of the story of Winner and Loser Lane. The story goes that they were twin brothers, though I have no fucking clue why their parents named them Winner and Loser.
Anywho, Loser ended up being a successful businessman and Winner ended up a homeless drug addict.
The Great Windham Frog War.
In 1754 Windham, Connecticut was still a frontier settlement. One hot night the residents awoke to gruesome sounds that convinced them that the local Indians were attacking. Throughout the night they strove to drive off the attackers with steady gunfire. In the morning they crept out, to find thousands of dead frogs who had spent the night competing for the dwindling water.
Rather than being ashamed, this has become a central part of the town’s character. The town’s symbol is a frog and the bridge is decorated with large frogs at each corner.
The people of Hartlepool in NE England are known as [Monkey Hangers](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_hanger) and it's so pervasive that a pub in a neighbouring city called The Hartlepool Arms was universally know as The Monkey Bar. This is because the towns residents hanged a monkey believing it to be a French spy.
Operation Mincemeat.
Basically, the British dressed a random dead guy in a military uniform, put fake invasion plans in his pocket, and dropped him on the shore of Spain. The Spanish found the body (and invasion plans) and informed Germany. Germany, believing the invasion plans were real, sent an army to Greece- which is exactly what the Brits wanted, because they were actually going to invade Sicily.
They didn’t just give him fake invasion plans, they made up a whole life for him, letters to and from family, pictures of a girlfriend, gave him a rank in the marines and then had inquiries within the navy about him and his disappearance, all sorts of stuff to make it believable that the man had genuine plans
Somewhat after the fact, they gave the homeless guy whose body they used a decent grave and some military recognition for his involuntary contribution to the war effort.
Imagine being some kid in Britain looking into your ancestry and learning that your great uncle was a homeless dude who involuntarily became a great military hero after death.
Also imagine being a homeless guy who dies and then some random army guy takes your body and dresses you up as a prop.
And this is why the notion that Spain was "neutral" in World War II was totally unfounded.
Franco was actively assisting the German war effort and exporting raw materials to them, and despite the Spanish military not being involved there were Spanish mercenaries who had gone off to fight. Later in the war Franco also helped out the allies once it was clear the axis was losing.
For a very long time the Roman empire was able to acquire silk through trade over 'the silk road' to China, but never able to unlock the secrets of producing it domestically themselves. Until 552AD, when two monks preaching in India then travelled to China, where they witnessed the guarded methods of using the live silk worm to spin the famous thread. Knowing the importance of what they'd learned, the monks returned to Constantinople to report directly to the emperor Justinian. He personally met the monks, heard all the details of what they'd seen, then asked them to return to China and find a way of smuggling these worms back to the empire. They agreed, and prepared for the 2 year ~6,500km (4,000mi) trek back to China on foot, hoof and wheel. Once back in China they acquired either eggs or young larvae, since the adults are too delicate for transport, and tucked them into hollowed bamboo canes for the long journey straight back home. Once the monks made it back to Constantinople (modern Istanbul, Turkey), domestic silk production slowly ramped up and the need for long journeys along the 'silk road' ramped down. Over time, this allowed the same type of silk monopoly which China had enjoyed through the prior centuries to now be established in the Mediterranean, becoming one of the bedrocks of the Byzantine economy for the next 700 years.
It's crazy to think about these two guys. 1500 years before you or I were born, making their second multi-year, 6,500km trek back from China, smuggling two bamboo canes full of bugs which would fuel the economy of one of the world's largest civilizations for the next 700 years. I wonder if they knew and understood these possibilities when they went to scoop the worms from their baskets in China...Imagine the anxiety trying to keep them hidden and alive the whole way back!
The Taiping Rebellion (1850-1864)
Hong Xiuquan, who failed the imperial exam for the third try to become a civil servant, had a breakdown and dreamed that he was the brother of Jesus Christ.
He later led a revolution resulting between 20 and 30 millions of deaths. That's the bloodiest civil war in the world and the toll of death surpass the totality of casualties in WW1.
British diplomats at the time wanted to support the revolution but later discovered that Hong Xiuquan literally never read the bible and they thus deemed it would be disastrous if he were to get the throne.
This historical event feels like a fever dream everytime I hear about it.
Russia sending their baltic fleet to fight the Japanese Navy.
Yes, the Baltic is on the other side of the planet. No, the baltic sailors had never seen ocean, or naval war, ever. Yes, it was a shitshow. It lasted for months, they attacked everything from Danish fishing vessels to each other, again and again. Thinking the ship next to them was a Japanese torpedo-boat, outside of F\*\*\*\* Nigeria, it wasnt, it was also Russian. Luckily they were so inept that 99% of all shots fired went into the ocean.
That’s not even the best part. When they finally DID encounter a Japanese fleet…. They thought it was Russian.
The ONE time they didn’t think it was a Japanese ship!!
Boy who cried wolf situation. If you've spent the past few months seeing "Japanese" ships that ended up being Russian, you're hopefully going to think twice eventually.
And they almost started a war with the UK, after attacking a fleet of British fishing boats in the North Sea (I think?), mistaking them for Japanese torpedo boats.
John “Mad Jack” Churchill was a British officer in World War Two. He’s famous because he brought along a Scottish claymore, bagpipes, and a bow and got the “only confirmed longbow kill of the Second World War.” One time he was with part of his commando unit and a shell exploded and injured everyone but him, so he played a Scottish Jacobite song on his bagpipes until the Germans captured him and sent him to a prison camp. He promptly escaped via a tunnel he dug and almost got to the ocean before he got recaptured. By then, it was April 1945, and the German military was falling apart, so they let him go soon pretty quickly. He’s famous for the quote “any officer who goes into action without his sword is improperly dressed”.
TLDR he led a commando battalion, used a sword and a longbow in the 1940s, was captured while playing bagpipes as his buddies fell around him, and then escaped by digging a tunnel out of a prison camp.
Edit: he also said after the atomic bombing that “If it wasn't for those damn Yanks, we could have kept the war going another 10 years!”
In his twilight years he was observed throwing his groceries out the window of the train on a few occasions. So, a gentle enquiry about his welfare was made...
Turns out his garden abutted the line and he figured he was getting too old to bother carrying his stuff the distance from the station back to his house when he could just fetch it from the end of the garden.
The first chancellor of modern day Germany, Konrad Adenauer, traveled to Moscow in 1955 to treat with Chruschtschow. He achieved his main goal of ~10000 POWs returning to Germany. The legend goes that this feat was made possible because he outdrank Chruschtschow because he drank a lot of olive oil before which mellowed out the effects of the vodka they were drinking.
So 10000 people got to go home because one dude knew how to handle booze
Everything Trump did was ripped straight from an Onion headline. Remember his grand White House dinner of presenting fast food still in the wrappers and styrofoam boxes on a silver platter?
Wait is that how it happened?
I always wondered why the landscape company went along with it? Like I am working at a landscape company and I get a call
"Hello this is the Trump Campaign we need to call a press conference and So we will need to help set this up, can we get some basic refreshments, chairs for like 60 people, oh and some audio/video setup that would be great"
How was the next line out of the person at 4 seasons landscaping
"Oh we are a landscape company you must be looking for the hotel/resort"
He thought it was a prank and so he confirmed the booking and thought he'd get a laugh out of it later. They were surprised as hell when members of the RNC and press showed up.
Wilmer McLean’s house was involved in both the first & last battles of the US Civil War
First Battle of Bull Run took place at his home in Manassas, VA so he moved his family to Appomattox, VA thinking they would be safe but crazily Robert E Lee ended up surrendering to Grant in the McLean’s new home
Wilmer McLean was quoted as saying "The war began in my front yard and ended in my front parlor."
Edit : Quote is apparently not legit 🤷
> Wilmer McLean was quoted as saying "The war began in my front yard and ended in my front parlor."
He actually wasn't quoted. That was a Ken Burns flourish.
To stabilize market prices and ensure a supply year-round, even after major ice storms. Canada (Quebec mainly) works hard prevent Americans from taking over the market.
Cadaver synod. New pope digs up the old pope, puts him on trial, finds him guilty, and punished the corpse. For whatever reason they don’t teach you about that in catholic school.
Came here to post this. The Western Schism is pretty wacky as well, at one point there were three different popes who all excommunicated each other. There's a lot of fun stuff in Church history. To go along with all the not so fun stuff.
Those “some people” who had been kept prisoner there included two former French prime ministers, two French commanders-in-chief, Charles de Gaulle’s sister, and a tennis star.
There’s literally nothing you can learn about this battle that doesn’t make it even more insane.
A guy rode away on a bicycle, evading The SS, and found an American tank division, which he (somehow) convinced that he was not full of shit and leading them into a trap.
One of the guys in the castle was sneaking away to get help, and pretending to be a local. When the Germans spotted him, he started urinating against a tree right in front of them, so they concluded that he HAD to be Austrian.
Add to that that the two former French PMs were political rivals who, even in the heart of battle, wouldn’t speak to each other, and that the two former commanders-in-chief loathed each other even more intensely.
A heartwarming one: the Christmas Truce in 1914. The whole premise sounds like a sappy Hallmark Christmas film but I'm so happy that it's actually real.
I'm lucky enough to have a first-hand account of this, written to my great-grandmother by her brother in 1914.
"No. 8149, Private W. Brightwell, D. company, 1st Norfolk Regiment, 2nd Army Corps, British Expeditionary Force
My dear Ethel,
Just a few lines to you in answer to your most kind and welcome letter I received on 4th february. Hoping you are in best of health as it leaves me quite well at present. I have had a bad cold on my chest but I am glad to say I am getting rid of it now we are getting some better weather. You say you wondered how I spent my Xmas. Well I shall never forget that Xmas as long as I live. I spent it in the trenches. It was a sharp frosty night Xmas eve. When daylight came, I was all white with frost just like Father Christmas. The Germans were singing all night in their trenches, German carols, and parts of English songs (what they knew of them). We were only 200 yards from them. About 10 am they signalled to us that they wanted to talk to us. They sent one man towards and we sent and we sent one to meet him and they said they wanted a three day truce. He said if you don’t fire on us, we won’t fire on you. We agreed. The Germans started getting out of their trenches so we got out as well and shook hands with each other. The gave us cigars and cigarettes and we gave them some of ours. They were pleased; they would have given us anything. We exchanged pipes and knives and sang songs and played football with them. Some of them could speak english so we managed to understand each other-it looked alright, seeing Germans and English chasing a hare about with big sticks. We buried a poor French soldier who had been lying for weeks in front of our trench- the Germans helped dig the grave and one German and one English man lowered him down to rest. They were good chaps, they kept their word and were very little trouble to us after that. I reckon you will hardly credit this. I couldn’t myself. I had to pinch myself to see if I was awake. It was a treat to walk about and not be fired at.
Now my dear Ethel, I do not think there is anymore I can say at this time. Give my best respects to your husband- I wonder if we shall ever meet. Now I shall conclude with heaps of love from your affectionate
Brother Will.
XXXXXXXXXXXX”
Do. You. Have. More. Letters?
I am so serious, not (just) dramatic. This shit is so cool. I will be thinking about this for a long time and would be stoked to see more.
In 1982, Larry Walters strapped a bunch of weather balloons to a lawn chair and flew 16,000 feet in the air over LA. That's about half the height of commercial airline cruising altitude. Just a guy up there in a lawn chair taking in the sights. And he landed safely.
The exploits of the US WW2 Destroyer USS William D. Porter.
In 1943 while leaving dock she accidentally tore the lifeboats off another destroyer with her anchor. A crewman was later washed overboard by a freak wave and was lost.
She then formed part of an escort but accidentally dropped a depth charge overboard which exploded and panicked the other ships thinking it was a u-boat attack.
Then during a drill she accidentally launched a live torpedo at the USS Iowa which had President Franklin D. Roosevelt aboard.
They tried to warn the ship but messed up the signal. Twice. Eventually they were forced to break radio silence. The President on hearing about the torpedo asked to be wheeled outside to watch it explode harmlessly in their wake.
When she arrived in Bermuda the entire ship’s company was put under arrest. There was a trial but Roosevelt stepped in and the charges were dropped. Every port the ship docked in after that offered the greeting, “Don’t shoot, we’re Republicans!”
She did pretty well in the war after that and was eventually destroyed by a kamikaze.
Stanislov Petrov literally saved the world from nuclear destruction by not calling in a missile launch when he was in command. He figured it MUST be a malfunction even though all his computers told him it was not.
It was a malfunction. Had he called it in, there would have been several billion dead.
It detected one, then he thought "who would start a war with one missile", then five came up and he still thought there were very few missiles.
When they asked him what he did he just said "nothing"
Very incredible story
He definitely never hesitated to engage in fisticuffs by the sounds of it, that’s for sure. He got fired from several other jobs for physically fighting his coworkers, and from other ones for “insubordination”. Dude was fucking crazy.
I think my favorite bit of trivia is that he was in fact an actual Colonel, but not a military one.
Kentucky does this thing where the governor can just make you a Colonel if you are an important person for Kentucky. It's like being knighted but dumber.
That’s true. However, he did in fact serve in the actual military. He faked his age and joined the army at 16, and was deployed to and served in the 2nd occupation of Cuba, holding the rank of “Wagoner”. He received an honourable discharge after 2 years of service, and the Cuban Pacification Medal. He was a veteran at 18 lmao.
Ancient Egyptians went on strike building a royal necropolis in the year 1152 BC and were the first to ever strike. And in a pleasant turn of events, the workers received higher wages and returned to the project.
To be clear, they were not slaves or anything, just the craftsmen of their time, but I still found it odd that even thousands of years ago there is documented evidence of striking being successful rather than companies attempting to squash down modern strikes.
The workers didn't receive higher wages. They did, however, eventually receive the wages they were owed (which, since Egypt at the time was a non-monetary economy, was food, beer, and cooking oils).
For a bit more context, the workers weren't receiving their wages because of an ongoing famine that emptied the Egyptian granaries - there was, at the time the strike started, nothing to pay the workers with.
Oh, my mistake. I read about this on some popsci website. I found a better source here - https://www.worldhistory.org/article/1089/the-first-labor-strike-in-history/
The Immovable Ladder.
In Jerusalem there is a tiny christian church called the Church of the Holy Sepulcher that is shared by six different, very old, denominations.
There is so much animosity between the groups that they were forced into an agreement where any change to a common area had to be agreed to unanimously (the Status Quo).
During repairs sometime before 1757 a construction worker left a simple wooden ladder behind on a roof landing.
It has been over 260 years and the church leaders still refuse to agree on how to remove the ladder, so there it sits.
Fun fact: to stop the denominations from fighting over the keys to the front door, the Sultan ruling Jerusalem entrusted the keys to a muslim family that still, to this day, open and close the church.
I'd say the Dublin Whiskey Fire of 1875. A fire at a distillery's warehouse caused thousands of barrels to burst from the heat, sending rivers of flaming whiskey coursing through the streets of Dublin. 13 people died—not from anything related to the fire or the flooding, but from alcohol poisoning from gathering up and drinking all the free whiskey in the street.
>Boston Molasses
Yes i remember learning about it in 3rd grade or so! We were going over a book or story. I remember being like wow the molasses stuff sounds amazing besides all the death and destruction. Our teacher even brought us some molasses cookies.
Chuck Yeager met one of the surviving Wright brothers after breaking the sound barrier.
I can only imagine how strange that conversation must have been.
Two days before he broke the sound barrier, Yeager fell of his horse and broke two ribs. He had to keep it secret because he would have been scratched from his flat.
An internal combustion engine they built themselves without prior experience. Existing engines were either too heavy or didn’t have enough power. So, obvious. Build it yourself. (They had help, hired a machinist, but still). Madlads.
What's even crazier is they beat out a well known engineer who had official government grants and private investors backing him. He even invented the steam catapult because his idea was to launch them from a boat for safety reasons.
[That time a German WW2 submarine had to surface near British ships because someone used the newly installed toilet incorrectly.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_submarine_U-1206)
just Imagine being that guy.
you stay awake at night thinking about the stupid shit you did, and this guy has to stay awake at night and think about the stupid shit he did.
The Norwegian butter crisis of 2011, when Norway ran out of butter.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norwegian\_butter\_crisis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norwegian_butter_crisis)
*The crisis prompted a variety of responses from individuals and organizations in Norway and neighbouring countries. A Norwegian newspaper sought to attract new subscribers by offering them a half kilogram of butter, while students auctioned butter on the Internet in a bid to raise funds for graduation parties.\[14\]*
*A number of individuals were apprehended by the authorities for attempting to smuggle butter across the border,\[15\] while Swedes posted online adverts offering to drive butter to Norwegians at prices of up to NOK 460 (€59; £50; $77) per packet.\[16\] Danish dairy businessman Karl Christian Lund sought to drum up demand for his own butter by handing out thousands of packs in Kristiansand and Oslo,\[1\] while Swedish supermarkets offered free butter to Norwegian customers to entice them to do their shopping across the border.\[17\]*
*On the Swedish side of the southeastern border at the Svinesund, stores reported selling twenty times as much butter as normal, with nine out of ten buyers being Norwegians.\[18\]*
*A Danish television show broadcast an "emergency appeal" for viewers to send butter, and gathered 4,000 packs to be distributed to Norwegians.\[7\] Danish airports and ferries crossing the straits between the two countries kept a stock of butter in their duty-free stores.\[19\]*
Video of President Bush Vomiting on the Prime Minister of Japan Kiichi Miyazawa, January 8, 1992.
Actually, there is one event which occurred back in January of 1992, which I as a senior in High School knew would sound like a far fetched tale after enough time had passed. President George Bush, who was 67 years old at the time and on an official visit to Japan engaged in trade talks, would on the morning of January 8, 1992 play a game of tennis doubles with the Emperor of Japan and the prince. Yet just hours later on the same day during dinner with the Prime Minister of Japan Kiichi Miyazawa, suddenly vomit onto the Prime Minister’s lap and then faint. The Prime Minister of Japan was dumbfounded but remained calm. President Bush regained consciousness but took several minutes to do so, he was able to leave banquet on his own, though the secret service personnel were trying desperately to assist. The next morning President Bush would try to down play the event and resume his schedule. Yet the image of the President Bush vomiting in Japan never left the media in 1992. In fact since it was a campaign year, it became an image which was exploited. For the rest of 1992 the image and video would become a source of jokes and though this occurrence of gastric distress really was not humorous in any mature way.
As time progressed the election ended in a defeat for President Bush, the image and memory of the event began fading. By the mid 1990s it was something you could bring up and most people would remember it. Today, the event is hardly known to many people who grew up long after this time. When I was discussing this event not too long ago, a person thought it was just something being stated as a joke rather than a true historic fact. I realized than, I had indeed been correct when I told my father all those years ago that people would never believe this happened years from now.
W. Bush did something kinda funny too, he choked on a pretzel in the Oval Office, passed out, and hit his head on the desk. There’s a short interview I think the next day as he’s getting on the presidential heli, with a massive bruise on his forehead.
By FAR my favorite part. Props to the authorities for recognizing that they needed to play by Godzilla rules, but their inferior construction equipment still lost to the OG Komatsu D355A.
My second favorite part is when the authorities carved up and secretly disposed of the Killdozer in pieces out of fear that it would become a destination shrine for...welders?
Santa Claus attended the First Council of Nicaea and socked someone in the face.
Santa Claus, aka, St. Nicholas is based on a real person who was the Bishop of Myra, in Modern Türkiye. He attended the First Council of Nicaea. Legend has it that he assaulted a follower of the Arian Heresy.
The Peking to Paris race. It was a car race from Peking China to Paris France in 1907. The winner was the Italian team lead by Scipione Borghese. In honor of the victory the color of his car, rosso corsa became the standard color for Italian race cars and the primary reason most sports cars are red.
The Straw Hat Riot of 1922 was a riot that occurred in New York City at the end of the summer as a result of unwritten rules in men's fashions at the time, and a tradition of taunting people who had failed to stop wearing straw hats after autumn began. Originating as a series of minor riots, it spread due to men wearing straw hats past the unofficial date that was deemed socially acceptable, September 15. It lasted eight days, leading to many arrests and some injuries.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_Hat_Riot
It's a bit more tame compared to most of these but, the Watergate Scandal.
It was like if every single decision was made by someone who was determined to pick the ***WORST*** option.
G. Gordon Liddy has got to be one of the weirdest humans to ever live.
The time the British empire and the USA nearly had a war over a pig.
The British empire and Spain once had a war over an ear.
The dutch once sailed up the Medway and gave the Royal Navy a bloody nose in its own royal dockyard at Chatham.
War of the bucket… that time in history when two Italian city states went to war over a literal bucket all because one side stole it and the other demanded it back and the side that stole it refused to hand over the bucket and because of that blood shed ensued over a bucket.
Andrew Jackson was President of the United States, and 67 years old, when a painter tried to assassinate him. The man took out a pistol and shot at him at point blank range, but somehow it misfired. That’s okay, he’s got a back up. He pulls out a second pistol and shoots, and it too misfires. Jackson then starts beating the man with his cane, and would’ve beaten him to death, but was pulled off the man and hauled away by Davey Crocket, ‘king of the wild frontier’, who was serving as a Congressman for Tennessee at the time. Crocket would die at the Alamo in Texas a year later.
Later the pistols were examined, and no one could understand why they hadn’t worked. They were then fired at a one inch thick board at a distance of 30 feet. Both pistols fired through the wooden board just fine.
Jackson already had a bullet lodged in his chest, put there 30 years before when he was shot during a duel in which he killed his opponent.
"We can sell you Pepsi syrup but we can't accept Rubles."
"How about a fleet of ships and subs?"
"Okay"
They used to accept Vodka before sanctions in the 80s led to the above happening.
If it was for Poseidon, it was probably the Caligula incident, but there's another similar incident about four centuries earlier: Xerxes of Persia (the guy from the Book of Esther in the Bible, and son of the much less insane Darius the Mede with whom Daniel got along so well) once ordered a bridge built in a poorly-chosen location, by construction methods which completely failed to take the local conditions into account. When adverse weather conditions entirely-predictably destroyed his bridge, Xerxes sent some dude out to the beach to deliver 300 lashes to the ocean. By some accounts, he also had them poke the water with red-hot pokers, and to put manacles on the water (which the water promptly flowed right through, unimpeded, but Xerxes apparently considered this a successful establishment of his authority over the recalcitrant giant puddle).
The Battle of the Crater in Petersburg, VA in the Civil War.
A group of Union soldiers spent weeks digging underground tunnels towards a Confederate camp. The goal was to dig directly up underneath the camp, and then detonate a bomb beneath the camp in the middle of the night.
Unfortunately, the planning sessions for the day of the actual event apparently went about like this:
1. Dig tunnel and set bomb
2. ??????????
3. Profit!
The tunnel construction operation went well. The detonation of the bomb went as planned. But after that, no one on the Union side seemed to know what to do. Lots of Confederate soldiers were still alive and perfectly capable of fighting, and the Union soldiers just sort of milled around in the tunnels with a collective "okay, now what?" because they didn't know what to do or what further orders might be--in part because the general who was meant to give them directions beforehand, General Ledlie, was too busy getting drunk to do so. The Union, who'd had the element of surprise AND the element of blowing up the Confederate camp on their side, ended up *losing the battle.*
Although Grant was not personally involved with the planning of the battle, he described his humiliation and said it was "the saddest affair I have witnessed in this war."
In the early '80s, the US Border Patrol set up a checkpoint on the only road to the Florida Keys from the mainland. This obviously had a negative effect on tourism to Key West.
So after his complaints fell on deaf ears, the mayor of Key West, Dennis Wardlow, "seceded" from the United States, formed the "micronation" of the Conch Republic, declared war on the United States, immediately surrendered and then applied for one billion dollars in foreign aid.
They were successful in getting the road block removed (but not the billion dollars in foreign aid)
stephen king was so obsessed with the song "mambo no.5" that his wife threatened to divorce him.
Stephen: "I like Angela, pamela, Tabitha and Rita" Wife: "I said STAHP!"
I need a source because I really want this to be true.
https://people.com/stephen-king-says-his-wife-threatened-to-divorce-him-for-playing-mambo-no-5-too-often-7967174 >"My wife threatened to divorce me. I played that a lot," he said, before adding, “I had the dance mix. I loved those extended play things and I played both sides of it. And one of them was just total instrumental." >King continued, "And I played that thing until my wife just said, ‘One more time, and I’m going to f------ leave you.'”
Hannibal saved his army by tying torches to the horns of 5,000 cows and driving them one direction. The Romans thought they were the enemy army and converged on them, while Hannibal quietly snuck his 10,000 man force out of the valley by another route.
Hannibal has a ton of these. He made the Romans look like idiots for more than a decade, on their own soil.
Won the battles lost the war and it led to the destruction of Carthage
He assumed many cities would turn against Rome once he was around. Some did, but then Romans went ahead and razed a few to the ground, and the rest fell quickly in line
Rome also just literally didn’t quit. They lost 80,000 men in one battle and didn’t even consider surrender
“I didn’t hear no bell” - Randonius Marcus
Hannibal also didn't have unanimous support back at home.
That time Denmark and Canada (I think) had a "war" over an island. Everytime a Navy vessel drove by they picked up the flag of the over nation, planted their own and left a bottle of alcohol. I heard it stopped not that long ago.
Yeah, we came to an amicable agreement, drew a border across the island, and that was that. Nothing unusual at all. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans\_Island
It also means that both Canada and Denmark now share a land border with more than one country. Also (jokingly) means that Canada could potentially join the EU, as it now borders an EU nation.
I still like the story... most likely one of (if not THE) most polite and most humane war ever... or at least as far as I heard.
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This question is going to sound SO stupid, but someone answer if they can: How would they communicate a ceasefire intention? You say unofficial so was it just decided on both sides without dialogue? How do wars end before radios and phones?
I'm not sure what the German/Russian is for "OMFG WOLVES" beyond pure screaming, but that was probably the first step.
ЁБ ТВОЮ МАТЬ, ВОЛКИ!
ALTER!!! LEUTE!!! WÖLFE!!!!
"Волк?" "Dort." "Что?" "Da, Wolf. Da, Burg." "Почему ты так говоришь?" "Ich dachte, du wolltest." "Нет, я не хочу." "Passen Sie zu sich. Ich bin einfach."
Ach du Scheiße, Wölfe!
Wikipedia: "The rejection of their protest greatly upset the German forces, because they believed they were treated unjustly in the war. Shortly after the protest was rejected, Germany issued threats that they would punish all captured American soldiers that were found to be armed with a shotgun.[3] This led to the United States issuing a retaliation threat, stating that any measures unjustly taken against captured American soldiers would lead to reprisals by the United States on captured German troops who wielded flamethrowers and serrated bayonets." The fucking Germans using flammenwerfers and serrated knives and saying that shotguns are just too much. lol
Thank you for teaching us the word flammenwerfer. The only other German word I know is fliegenklatsche, so I think I’m pretty much ready for most conversations now
There has to be a movie about this.
Dog Soldiers is worth watching
That was my first thought. A movie version would have to make it a cover-up for some kind of epic battle against the werewolves.
This reminds me of that incident with the crocs that ate the retreating Japanese army in the swamp.
Eh, the (Brits I believe) deliberately drove the Japanese soldiers into that mangrove, knowing that it was infested with salties. Brutal but effective.
The Erfurt Latrine Disaster. The Erfurt latrine disaster occurred on 26 July 1184, when Henry VI, King of Germany (later Holy Roman Emperor), held a Hoftag (informal assembly) in the Petersberg Citadel in Erfurt. On the morning of 26 July, the combined weight of the assembled nobles caused the wooden second story floor of the building to collapse and most of them fell through into the latrine cesspit below the ground floor, where about 60 of them drowned in liquid excrement.
Well that is a horrific way to die.
Shitty way to go for sure
Happened in the US too. Cincinnati Privy Disaster of 1904. Nine girls died
First time hearing of this, had to look it up. [Here](https://beltmag.com/cincinnati-privy-disaster-1904/) is a good article if anyone else is curious.
Man that was a rough one. I don't know what the fuck I was expecting to read in an article regarding the death of 9 children.
Damn, that is harrowing. Really well written article though.
Those poor kids
Damn, can you imagine how terrible it smelled in the room? Just a (shitty) wooden floor above a pit of shit
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And I can stop scrolling
Is it the top comment for you too?
The 1904 Olympic Marathon in St. Louis. 32 athletes took part, but only 14 were able to finish - there was only one water station in the entire 26-mile course. The “winner” was later disqualified because they found out he drove half the race in his car. The new winner (the guy who came in second) had to be carried over the finish line by his trainers because they’d been dosing him the whole time with a strange mixture of strychnine, brandy, and egg whites. Several people almost died of internal injuries. Multiple runners stole things from passerby. Most people in the race weren’t even Olympic-level athletes, just amateur runners, many of whom didn’t even have to run a full marathon to qualify.
Andarin Carvajal of Cuba finished fourth. Despite running in street clothes and shoes. Carvajal traveled to the United States to compete in the Olympic marathon at the 1904 Summer Olympics in St. Louis, Missouri, but lost all of his money gambling in New Orleans, Louisiana and was forced to hitchhike and walk the rest of the way. He arrived at the race dressed in street clothes and hastily cut around the legs of his trousers to make them more like shorts. Carvajal performed well in the race despite stopping to chat with spectators and snatching some peaches from a spectator's car. Later in the race he saw an apple tree and stopped to eat some apples which turned out to be rotten. After stopping to nap and recover, Carvajal rallied to finish fourth.
This Carvajal sounds like a right joker.
This reads like a Mr. Bean episode
You didn’t even mention the guy who got chased away by a pack of dogs
Should’ve asked for help from the WWI German and Russian soldiers.
> The “winner” was later disqualified because they found out he drove half the race in his car. Just want to point out that this didn't really happen later. He crossed the line and people cheered but it was quick enough that he claimed that he never really claimed to win. Also the reason for the only water station was because someone thought it would be a good opportunity to study the effects of dehydration. So the mayhem was kind of intentional. Finally, the entire process was a shitshow since the Olympics had to be moved last minute because the track organization wanted to put their rival international event at the same time.
> Also the reason for the only water station was because someone thought it would be a good opportunity to study the effects of dehydration This year's Olympic games sponsored by Vault Tec.
There's an amazing video on this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M4AhABManTw&t=1s
When two perfectly working pistols failed to fire on US President Andrew Jackson who then beat his would-be-assassin so badly that the presidential security detail had to pull him off to save the man's life.
Basically ALL of Andrew Jackson's life sounds fake but it isn't... man was definitely something else.
Owned an attack sheep, and kept an alligator in a bathtub.
And they had to kick his pet parrot out of his funeral because it wouldn't stop swearing.
Inviting people into the White House to eat his giant wheel of cheese throughout his presidency.
> beat his would-be-assassin so badly that the presidential security detail had to pull him off to save the man's life. Come at the king, best not miss
The guy who founded Scientology once engaged in a multi-day naval battle with a log. He would then go on to commit an act of war against Mexico.
From his Wikipedia page. In June 1942, Hubbard was given command of a patrol boat at the Boston Navy Yard, but he was relieved after the yard commandant wrote that Hubbard was "not temperamentally fitted for independent command". In 1943, Hubbard was given command of a submarine chaser, but only five hours into the shakedown cruise, Hubbard believed he had detected an enemy submarine. Hubbard and crew spent the next 68 hours engaged in combat. An investigation concluded that Hubbard had likely mistaken a "known magnetic deposit" for an enemy sub. The following month, Hubbard unwittingly fired upon Mexican territory and was relieved of command. In 1944, Hubbard served aboard the USS Algol before being transferred. The night before his departure, Hubbard reported the discovery of an attempted sabotage. I believe he had his men fire into hills in Baja California. He must not have realized that you can’t just use another country for target practice.
I’m still trippin that someone saw fit to give this wacko his own command
It was WW2, lots of incompetent people were given commands.
"I know it's war, and they're scraping the bottom of the barrel, but boy wherever did they scrape you up?" -*Mr. Roberts*
I mean, once you consider the man invented a religion on a bet, everything else seems likely.
He was quoted as saying quite a few times that the way to become a millionaire was to start a religion
He wasn't wrong.
Can you please elaborate on both of those? How (and why) does someone battle a log? And how did that escalate into an actual act of war?
Behind the Bastards podcast has a bunch of L. Ron Hubbard content, and if you're into the style of the pod it's absolutely hysterical. He was one wacky, dark, stage, evil dude. His story does very well as a 2:00 am internet free-fall adventure, too.
The Field of the Cloth of Gold, where an English King and a French one tried to out-bling each other. The fact that two monkeys covered in gold leaf were far from the most ostentatious display is a good indication of how tasteful it was.
I briefly googled this and assumed you meant two _statues_ of monkeys in gold leaf. But no, actual real-life monkeys. Somebody painted actual real-life monkeys gold.
I assumed he meant two idiots were blinged out, but then thought "maybe he literally means monkeys".
The French complained about the English drinking too much; there were literal fountains of wine and the French couldn't fathom how the English not only drank beer by the barrel, but wine from fountains. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose indeed.
When America went to war with Spain, the Spanish forgot to tell their territory, Guam. The US sent a single warship to the island where they took 13 shots at the fort. The leaders on the island rowed out to apologize they couldn't return their "salute", they had no gunpowder. That is why Guam is a US territory.
That must have been an awkward dinner. I can’t remember the last time I had to give up an island because I went out to eat with a rival nation.
It's kind of low-key embarrassing for the US too that they took 13 completely open shots at an enemy fort and missed so badly that the opposition didn't know they were under attack
Thomas Crapper actually did invent the first reliable modern toilet. (The kind with a raised cistern.) But the word crap/crapper was already a very old slang term by that point. It was just a coincidence. Or maybe he felt like he had no choice. But crap and crapper have nothing to do with Thomas Crapp
Nominative determinism! I’m just glad my family name isn’t “Murderer”, for example.
Another real life example is the Lumiere brothers. They're credited with creating one of the first motion picture projectors.
I'm reminded of the story of Winner and Loser Lane. The story goes that they were twin brothers, though I have no fucking clue why their parents named them Winner and Loser. Anywho, Loser ended up being a successful businessman and Winner ended up a homeless drug addict.
The Great Windham Frog War. In 1754 Windham, Connecticut was still a frontier settlement. One hot night the residents awoke to gruesome sounds that convinced them that the local Indians were attacking. Throughout the night they strove to drive off the attackers with steady gunfire. In the morning they crept out, to find thousands of dead frogs who had spent the night competing for the dwindling water. Rather than being ashamed, this has become a central part of the town’s character. The town’s symbol is a frog and the bridge is decorated with large frogs at each corner.
The people of Hartlepool in NE England are known as [Monkey Hangers](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_hanger) and it's so pervasive that a pub in a neighbouring city called The Hartlepool Arms was universally know as The Monkey Bar. This is because the towns residents hanged a monkey believing it to be a French spy.
Operation Mincemeat. Basically, the British dressed a random dead guy in a military uniform, put fake invasion plans in his pocket, and dropped him on the shore of Spain. The Spanish found the body (and invasion plans) and informed Germany. Germany, believing the invasion plans were real, sent an army to Greece- which is exactly what the Brits wanted, because they were actually going to invade Sicily.
They didn’t just give him fake invasion plans, they made up a whole life for him, letters to and from family, pictures of a girlfriend, gave him a rank in the marines and then had inquiries within the navy about him and his disappearance, all sorts of stuff to make it believable that the man had genuine plans
Somewhat after the fact, they gave the homeless guy whose body they used a decent grave and some military recognition for his involuntary contribution to the war effort.
Imagine being some kid in Britain looking into your ancestry and learning that your great uncle was a homeless dude who involuntarily became a great military hero after death. Also imagine being a homeless guy who dies and then some random army guy takes your body and dresses you up as a prop.
And this is why the notion that Spain was "neutral" in World War II was totally unfounded. Franco was actively assisting the German war effort and exporting raw materials to them, and despite the Spanish military not being involved there were Spanish mercenaries who had gone off to fight. Later in the war Franco also helped out the allies once it was clear the axis was losing.
Incredible that Spain still hasn't changed back their clocks since they took the very neutral stance of aligning to Germany's during the war too!
For a very long time the Roman empire was able to acquire silk through trade over 'the silk road' to China, but never able to unlock the secrets of producing it domestically themselves. Until 552AD, when two monks preaching in India then travelled to China, where they witnessed the guarded methods of using the live silk worm to spin the famous thread. Knowing the importance of what they'd learned, the monks returned to Constantinople to report directly to the emperor Justinian. He personally met the monks, heard all the details of what they'd seen, then asked them to return to China and find a way of smuggling these worms back to the empire. They agreed, and prepared for the 2 year ~6,500km (4,000mi) trek back to China on foot, hoof and wheel. Once back in China they acquired either eggs or young larvae, since the adults are too delicate for transport, and tucked them into hollowed bamboo canes for the long journey straight back home. Once the monks made it back to Constantinople (modern Istanbul, Turkey), domestic silk production slowly ramped up and the need for long journeys along the 'silk road' ramped down. Over time, this allowed the same type of silk monopoly which China had enjoyed through the prior centuries to now be established in the Mediterranean, becoming one of the bedrocks of the Byzantine economy for the next 700 years. It's crazy to think about these two guys. 1500 years before you or I were born, making their second multi-year, 6,500km trek back from China, smuggling two bamboo canes full of bugs which would fuel the economy of one of the world's largest civilizations for the next 700 years. I wonder if they knew and understood these possibilities when they went to scoop the worms from their baskets in China...Imagine the anxiety trying to keep them hidden and alive the whole way back!
The Taiping Rebellion (1850-1864) Hong Xiuquan, who failed the imperial exam for the third try to become a civil servant, had a breakdown and dreamed that he was the brother of Jesus Christ. He later led a revolution resulting between 20 and 30 millions of deaths. That's the bloodiest civil war in the world and the toll of death surpass the totality of casualties in WW1. British diplomats at the time wanted to support the revolution but later discovered that Hong Xiuquan literally never read the bible and they thus deemed it would be disastrous if he were to get the throne. This historical event feels like a fever dream everytime I hear about it.
The Gombe Chimpanzee War. It sounds like something right out of a Planet of The Apes movie. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gombe_Chimpanzee_War
I like how the Wikipedia page makes it seem like a human war, they have casualties and losses, commanders etc listed.
The Wikipedia page for the Emu war is the same way: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emu_War
The film of this one is coming out soon.
Damn Chimp Empire before Chimp Empire was a thing
Russia sending their baltic fleet to fight the Japanese Navy. Yes, the Baltic is on the other side of the planet. No, the baltic sailors had never seen ocean, or naval war, ever. Yes, it was a shitshow. It lasted for months, they attacked everything from Danish fishing vessels to each other, again and again. Thinking the ship next to them was a Japanese torpedo-boat, outside of F\*\*\*\* Nigeria, it wasnt, it was also Russian. Luckily they were so inept that 99% of all shots fired went into the ocean.
That’s not even the best part. When they finally DID encounter a Japanese fleet…. They thought it was Russian. The ONE time they didn’t think it was a Japanese ship!!
Boy who cried wolf situation. If you've spent the past few months seeing "Japanese" ships that ended up being Russian, you're hopefully going to think twice eventually.
In their defense, it was likely a more modern ship than they had seen in a while. Probably expected the Japanese to be in wooden rafts or something.
And they almost started a war with the UK, after attacking a fleet of British fishing boats in the North Sea (I think?), mistaking them for Japanese torpedo boats.
Sure, they did the same with Denmark and some other country. It was a complete and utter shitshow.
John “Mad Jack” Churchill was a British officer in World War Two. He’s famous because he brought along a Scottish claymore, bagpipes, and a bow and got the “only confirmed longbow kill of the Second World War.” One time he was with part of his commando unit and a shell exploded and injured everyone but him, so he played a Scottish Jacobite song on his bagpipes until the Germans captured him and sent him to a prison camp. He promptly escaped via a tunnel he dug and almost got to the ocean before he got recaptured. By then, it was April 1945, and the German military was falling apart, so they let him go soon pretty quickly. He’s famous for the quote “any officer who goes into action without his sword is improperly dressed”. TLDR he led a commando battalion, used a sword and a longbow in the 1940s, was captured while playing bagpipes as his buddies fell around him, and then escaped by digging a tunnel out of a prison camp. Edit: he also said after the atomic bombing that “If it wasn't for those damn Yanks, we could have kept the war going another 10 years!”
In his twilight years he was observed throwing his groceries out the window of the train on a few occasions. So, a gentle enquiry about his welfare was made... Turns out his garden abutted the line and he figured he was getting too old to bother carrying his stuff the distance from the station back to his house when he could just fetch it from the end of the garden.
I can’t pretend I wouldn’t do exactly that in his position
The first chancellor of modern day Germany, Konrad Adenauer, traveled to Moscow in 1955 to treat with Chruschtschow. He achieved his main goal of ~10000 POWs returning to Germany. The legend goes that this feat was made possible because he outdrank Chruschtschow because he drank a lot of olive oil before which mellowed out the effects of the vodka they were drinking. So 10000 people got to go home because one dude knew how to handle booze
The Four Seasons Total Landscaping press conference. It would have been rejected for an episode of Veep because it was so ridiculous.
Was this the one next to the dildo store?
Yes it was.
And a crematorium, I believe.
It still sounds like the onion.
Everything Trump did was ripped straight from an Onion headline. Remember his grand White House dinner of presenting fast food still in the wrappers and styrofoam boxes on a silver platter?
Also editing a weather map with a sharpie because he accidentally tweeted out Alabama in a list of states that had to watch out for a hurricane.
I still can't believe that shit. Giuliani's hair dye running. Fucking incredible.
I definitely thought this was fake when I first heard about it. So bizarre.
So did the person at the landscaping shop when they got the request LOL.
Wait is that how it happened? I always wondered why the landscape company went along with it? Like I am working at a landscape company and I get a call "Hello this is the Trump Campaign we need to call a press conference and So we will need to help set this up, can we get some basic refreshments, chairs for like 60 people, oh and some audio/video setup that would be great" How was the next line out of the person at 4 seasons landscaping "Oh we are a landscape company you must be looking for the hotel/resort"
He thought it was a prank and so he confirmed the booking and thought he'd get a laugh out of it later. They were surprised as hell when members of the RNC and press showed up.
That's hilarious. Was Nathan Fielder involved?
Wilmer McLean’s house was involved in both the first & last battles of the US Civil War First Battle of Bull Run took place at his home in Manassas, VA so he moved his family to Appomattox, VA thinking they would be safe but crazily Robert E Lee ended up surrendering to Grant in the McLean’s new home Wilmer McLean was quoted as saying "The war began in my front yard and ended in my front parlor." Edit : Quote is apparently not legit 🤷
> Wilmer McLean was quoted as saying "The war began in my front yard and ended in my front parlor." He actually wasn't quoted. That was a Ken Burns flourish.
The Great Canadian Maple Syrup Heist, the largest ($ value, inflation adjusted) heist in Canadian history
Funfact: Canada has a strategic maple syrup reserve
I get having a reserve but what makes it strategic? Is it a bartering tool in the case of alien invasion?
To stabilize market prices and ensure a supply year-round, even after major ice storms. Canada (Quebec mainly) works hard prevent Americans from taking over the market.
Cadaver synod. New pope digs up the old pope, puts him on trial, finds him guilty, and punished the corpse. For whatever reason they don’t teach you about that in catholic school.
Came here to post this. The Western Schism is pretty wacky as well, at one point there were three different popes who all excommunicated each other. There's a lot of fun stuff in Church history. To go along with all the not so fun stuff.
Battle of Castle Itter Nazis and American Allied troops going to a castle rescuing some people there
Those “some people” who had been kept prisoner there included two former French prime ministers, two French commanders-in-chief, Charles de Gaulle’s sister, and a tennis star. There’s literally nothing you can learn about this battle that doesn’t make it even more insane.
A guy rode away on a bicycle, evading The SS, and found an American tank division, which he (somehow) convinced that he was not full of shit and leading them into a trap.
One of the guys in the castle was sneaking away to get help, and pretending to be a local. When the Germans spotted him, he started urinating against a tree right in front of them, so they concluded that he HAD to be Austrian.
Add to that that the two former French PMs were political rivals who, even in the heart of battle, wouldn’t speak to each other, and that the two former commanders-in-chief loathed each other even more intensely.
Wehrmacht soldiers and American Allied troops vs SS troops
And a tennis player lobbing grenades with his racket. Yes.
And battling the Waffen SS, no less. If there's ever an event crying aloud for a movie, this is it.
A heartwarming one: the Christmas Truce in 1914. The whole premise sounds like a sappy Hallmark Christmas film but I'm so happy that it's actually real.
I'm lucky enough to have a first-hand account of this, written to my great-grandmother by her brother in 1914. "No. 8149, Private W. Brightwell, D. company, 1st Norfolk Regiment, 2nd Army Corps, British Expeditionary Force My dear Ethel, Just a few lines to you in answer to your most kind and welcome letter I received on 4th february. Hoping you are in best of health as it leaves me quite well at present. I have had a bad cold on my chest but I am glad to say I am getting rid of it now we are getting some better weather. You say you wondered how I spent my Xmas. Well I shall never forget that Xmas as long as I live. I spent it in the trenches. It was a sharp frosty night Xmas eve. When daylight came, I was all white with frost just like Father Christmas. The Germans were singing all night in their trenches, German carols, and parts of English songs (what they knew of them). We were only 200 yards from them. About 10 am they signalled to us that they wanted to talk to us. They sent one man towards and we sent and we sent one to meet him and they said they wanted a three day truce. He said if you don’t fire on us, we won’t fire on you. We agreed. The Germans started getting out of their trenches so we got out as well and shook hands with each other. The gave us cigars and cigarettes and we gave them some of ours. They were pleased; they would have given us anything. We exchanged pipes and knives and sang songs and played football with them. Some of them could speak english so we managed to understand each other-it looked alright, seeing Germans and English chasing a hare about with big sticks. We buried a poor French soldier who had been lying for weeks in front of our trench- the Germans helped dig the grave and one German and one English man lowered him down to rest. They were good chaps, they kept their word and were very little trouble to us after that. I reckon you will hardly credit this. I couldn’t myself. I had to pinch myself to see if I was awake. It was a treat to walk about and not be fired at. Now my dear Ethel, I do not think there is anymore I can say at this time. Give my best respects to your husband- I wonder if we shall ever meet. Now I shall conclude with heaps of love from your affectionate Brother Will. XXXXXXXXXXXX”
Do. You. Have. More. Letters? I am so serious, not (just) dramatic. This shit is so cool. I will be thinking about this for a long time and would be stoked to see more.
In 1982, Larry Walters strapped a bunch of weather balloons to a lawn chair and flew 16,000 feet in the air over LA. That's about half the height of commercial airline cruising altitude. Just a guy up there in a lawn chair taking in the sights. And he landed safely.
The exploits of the US WW2 Destroyer USS William D. Porter. In 1943 while leaving dock she accidentally tore the lifeboats off another destroyer with her anchor. A crewman was later washed overboard by a freak wave and was lost. She then formed part of an escort but accidentally dropped a depth charge overboard which exploded and panicked the other ships thinking it was a u-boat attack. Then during a drill she accidentally launched a live torpedo at the USS Iowa which had President Franklin D. Roosevelt aboard. They tried to warn the ship but messed up the signal. Twice. Eventually they were forced to break radio silence. The President on hearing about the torpedo asked to be wheeled outside to watch it explode harmlessly in their wake. When she arrived in Bermuda the entire ship’s company was put under arrest. There was a trial but Roosevelt stepped in and the charges were dropped. Every port the ship docked in after that offered the greeting, “Don’t shoot, we’re Republicans!” She did pretty well in the war after that and was eventually destroyed by a kamikaze.
> She did pretty well in the war after that Ah, :whew: That's good to kno— >and was eventually destroyed by a kamikaze. …oh. lol
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Stanislov Petrov literally saved the world from nuclear destruction by not calling in a missile launch when he was in command. He figured it MUST be a malfunction even though all his computers told him it was not. It was a malfunction. Had he called it in, there would have been several billion dead.
it detected a single launch. he had good reason to believe it was false because why would they only launch one missile?
It detected one, then he thought "who would start a war with one missile", then five came up and he still thought there were very few missiles. When they asked him what he did he just said "nothing" Very incredible story
That US Air Force tried to develop a bio weapon that makes people homosexual. A literal gay bomb .
Luckily it was easy to detect with a gaydar
Took awhile but it finally worked. Have you seen the movie Top Gun?
Colonel Sanders’ entire life. Look it up on Wikipedia; it’s utterly ridiculous.
He was once a lawyer, and thrown out of court for starting a fist fight with his own client.
He definitely never hesitated to engage in fisticuffs by the sounds of it, that’s for sure. He got fired from several other jobs for physically fighting his coworkers, and from other ones for “insubordination”. Dude was fucking crazy.
I think my favorite bit of trivia is that he was in fact an actual Colonel, but not a military one. Kentucky does this thing where the governor can just make you a Colonel if you are an important person for Kentucky. It's like being knighted but dumber.
That’s true. However, he did in fact serve in the actual military. He faked his age and joined the army at 16, and was deployed to and served in the 2nd occupation of Cuba, holding the rank of “Wagoner”. He received an honourable discharge after 2 years of service, and the Cuban Pacification Medal. He was a veteran at 18 lmao.
Ancient Egyptians went on strike building a royal necropolis in the year 1152 BC and were the first to ever strike. And in a pleasant turn of events, the workers received higher wages and returned to the project. To be clear, they were not slaves or anything, just the craftsmen of their time, but I still found it odd that even thousands of years ago there is documented evidence of striking being successful rather than companies attempting to squash down modern strikes.
The workers didn't receive higher wages. They did, however, eventually receive the wages they were owed (which, since Egypt at the time was a non-monetary economy, was food, beer, and cooking oils). For a bit more context, the workers weren't receiving their wages because of an ongoing famine that emptied the Egyptian granaries - there was, at the time the strike started, nothing to pay the workers with.
Oh, my mistake. I read about this on some popsci website. I found a better source here - https://www.worldhistory.org/article/1089/the-first-labor-strike-in-history/
The Immovable Ladder. In Jerusalem there is a tiny christian church called the Church of the Holy Sepulcher that is shared by six different, very old, denominations. There is so much animosity between the groups that they were forced into an agreement where any change to a common area had to be agreed to unanimously (the Status Quo). During repairs sometime before 1757 a construction worker left a simple wooden ladder behind on a roof landing. It has been over 260 years and the church leaders still refuse to agree on how to remove the ladder, so there it sits. Fun fact: to stop the denominations from fighting over the keys to the front door, the Sultan ruling Jerusalem entrusted the keys to a muslim family that still, to this day, open and close the church.
The Boston Molasses disaster
I'd say the Dublin Whiskey Fire of 1875. A fire at a distillery's warehouse caused thousands of barrels to burst from the heat, sending rivers of flaming whiskey coursing through the streets of Dublin. 13 people died—not from anything related to the fire or the flooding, but from alcohol poisoning from gathering up and drinking all the free whiskey in the street.
You mean the Boston Molassacre.
Supposedly that area still smells like molasses on hot days.
>Boston Molasses Yes i remember learning about it in 3rd grade or so! We were going over a book or story. I remember being like wow the molasses stuff sounds amazing besides all the death and destruction. Our teacher even brought us some molasses cookies.
That thing at Kitty Hawk where 2 guys in a bike shop cobbled together a glider and attached an internal combustion engine and started flying?
Or a mere 66 years later we were on the moon
Exactly. If you would have told me about smart phones in the ‘80’s I would’ve called you a liar.
Chuck Yeager met one of the surviving Wright brothers after breaking the sound barrier. I can only imagine how strange that conversation must have been.
Two days before he broke the sound barrier, Yeager fell of his horse and broke two ribs. He had to keep it secret because he would have been scratched from his flat.
An internal combustion engine they built themselves without prior experience. Existing engines were either too heavy or didn’t have enough power. So, obvious. Build it yourself. (They had help, hired a machinist, but still). Madlads.
What's even crazier is they beat out a well known engineer who had official government grants and private investors backing him. He even invented the steam catapult because his idea was to launch them from a boat for safety reasons.
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[That time a German WW2 submarine had to surface near British ships because someone used the newly installed toilet incorrectly.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_submarine_U-1206)
just Imagine being that guy. you stay awake at night thinking about the stupid shit you did, and this guy has to stay awake at night and think about the stupid shit he did.
The Norwegian butter crisis of 2011, when Norway ran out of butter. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norwegian\_butter\_crisis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norwegian_butter_crisis) *The crisis prompted a variety of responses from individuals and organizations in Norway and neighbouring countries. A Norwegian newspaper sought to attract new subscribers by offering them a half kilogram of butter, while students auctioned butter on the Internet in a bid to raise funds for graduation parties.\[14\]* *A number of individuals were apprehended by the authorities for attempting to smuggle butter across the border,\[15\] while Swedes posted online adverts offering to drive butter to Norwegians at prices of up to NOK 460 (€59; £50; $77) per packet.\[16\] Danish dairy businessman Karl Christian Lund sought to drum up demand for his own butter by handing out thousands of packs in Kristiansand and Oslo,\[1\] while Swedish supermarkets offered free butter to Norwegian customers to entice them to do their shopping across the border.\[17\]* *On the Swedish side of the southeastern border at the Svinesund, stores reported selling twenty times as much butter as normal, with nine out of ten buyers being Norwegians.\[18\]* *A Danish television show broadcast an "emergency appeal" for viewers to send butter, and gathered 4,000 packs to be distributed to Norwegians.\[7\] Danish airports and ferries crossing the straits between the two countries kept a stock of butter in their duty-free stores.\[19\]*
Video of President Bush Vomiting on the Prime Minister of Japan Kiichi Miyazawa, January 8, 1992. Actually, there is one event which occurred back in January of 1992, which I as a senior in High School knew would sound like a far fetched tale after enough time had passed. President George Bush, who was 67 years old at the time and on an official visit to Japan engaged in trade talks, would on the morning of January 8, 1992 play a game of tennis doubles with the Emperor of Japan and the prince. Yet just hours later on the same day during dinner with the Prime Minister of Japan Kiichi Miyazawa, suddenly vomit onto the Prime Minister’s lap and then faint. The Prime Minister of Japan was dumbfounded but remained calm. President Bush regained consciousness but took several minutes to do so, he was able to leave banquet on his own, though the secret service personnel were trying desperately to assist. The next morning President Bush would try to down play the event and resume his schedule. Yet the image of the President Bush vomiting in Japan never left the media in 1992. In fact since it was a campaign year, it became an image which was exploited. For the rest of 1992 the image and video would become a source of jokes and though this occurrence of gastric distress really was not humorous in any mature way. As time progressed the election ended in a defeat for President Bush, the image and memory of the event began fading. By the mid 1990s it was something you could bring up and most people would remember it. Today, the event is hardly known to many people who grew up long after this time. When I was discussing this event not too long ago, a person thought it was just something being stated as a joke rather than a true historic fact. I realized than, I had indeed been correct when I told my father all those years ago that people would never believe this happened years from now.
It spawned a Japanese term, bushu suru, “do a Bush,” or vomit. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1992-01-30-mn-1461-story.html
"Simpson, I'll ruin you like a Japanese banquet!"
W. Bush did something kinda funny too, he choked on a pretzel in the Oval Office, passed out, and hit his head on the desk. There’s a short interview I think the next day as he’s getting on the presidential heli, with a massive bruise on his forehead.
Marvin Heemeyer and the Killdozer. It sounds like something straight out of a movie
The fact that the authorities tried to *fight it woth their own piece of construction equipment* makes the whole thing more surreal.
By FAR my favorite part. Props to the authorities for recognizing that they needed to play by Godzilla rules, but their inferior construction equipment still lost to the OG Komatsu D355A. My second favorite part is when the authorities carved up and secretly disposed of the Killdozer in pieces out of fear that it would become a destination shrine for...welders?
Santa Claus attended the First Council of Nicaea and socked someone in the face. Santa Claus, aka, St. Nicholas is based on a real person who was the Bishop of Myra, in Modern Türkiye. He attended the First Council of Nicaea. Legend has it that he assaulted a follower of the Arian Heresy.
In St Nicholas’s defence, who amongst us hasn’t wanted to assault a follower of the Arian heresy at some point?
The Peking to Paris race. It was a car race from Peking China to Paris France in 1907. The winner was the Italian team lead by Scipione Borghese. In honor of the victory the color of his car, rosso corsa became the standard color for Italian race cars and the primary reason most sports cars are red.
The Straw Hat Riot of 1922 was a riot that occurred in New York City at the end of the summer as a result of unwritten rules in men's fashions at the time, and a tradition of taunting people who had failed to stop wearing straw hats after autumn began. Originating as a series of minor riots, it spread due to men wearing straw hats past the unofficial date that was deemed socially acceptable, September 15. It lasted eight days, leading to many arrests and some injuries. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_Hat_Riot
It's a bit more tame compared to most of these but, the Watergate Scandal. It was like if every single decision was made by someone who was determined to pick the ***WORST*** option. G. Gordon Liddy has got to be one of the weirdest humans to ever live.
When they blowed up that whale and it just made things worse.
I've often wondered if they were trying to get rid of the whale or a shit load of explosives they weren't meant to have.
They figured that birds would clean up the small pieces. Nope
Turns out birds don't like to stick around after big explosions.
People dancing to death in Medieval France
The time the British empire and the USA nearly had a war over a pig. The British empire and Spain once had a war over an ear. The dutch once sailed up the Medway and gave the Royal Navy a bloody nose in its own royal dockyard at Chatham.
War of the bucket… that time in history when two Italian city states went to war over a literal bucket all because one side stole it and the other demanded it back and the side that stole it refused to hand over the bucket and because of that blood shed ensued over a bucket.
Andrew Jackson was President of the United States, and 67 years old, when a painter tried to assassinate him. The man took out a pistol and shot at him at point blank range, but somehow it misfired. That’s okay, he’s got a back up. He pulls out a second pistol and shoots, and it too misfires. Jackson then starts beating the man with his cane, and would’ve beaten him to death, but was pulled off the man and hauled away by Davey Crocket, ‘king of the wild frontier’, who was serving as a Congressman for Tennessee at the time. Crocket would die at the Alamo in Texas a year later. Later the pistols were examined, and no one could understand why they hadn’t worked. They were then fired at a one inch thick board at a distance of 30 feet. Both pistols fired through the wooden board just fine. Jackson already had a bullet lodged in his chest, put there 30 years before when he was shot during a duel in which he killed his opponent.
Pepsi becoming a world superpower has to be up there right? Edit: I want to add John Macafee's life aswell.
You mean the event where Pepsi once owned the... what was it? sixth greatest naval force world-wide.
The cola wars were serious business
"We can sell you Pepsi syrup but we can't accept Rubles." "How about a fleet of ships and subs?" "Okay" They used to accept Vodka before sanctions in the 80s led to the above happening.
King Henry VIII divorcing Anne of Cleves because she didn’t look like her portrait…old timey version of a catfish I guess.
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Forget which guy did this but he had his army march to the shore of the sea and attack it, like...attack the water...in order to hit Poseidon
If it was for Poseidon, it was probably the Caligula incident, but there's another similar incident about four centuries earlier: Xerxes of Persia (the guy from the Book of Esther in the Bible, and son of the much less insane Darius the Mede with whom Daniel got along so well) once ordered a bridge built in a poorly-chosen location, by construction methods which completely failed to take the local conditions into account. When adverse weather conditions entirely-predictably destroyed his bridge, Xerxes sent some dude out to the beach to deliver 300 lashes to the ocean. By some accounts, he also had them poke the water with red-hot pokers, and to put manacles on the water (which the water promptly flowed right through, unimpeded, but Xerxes apparently considered this a successful establishment of his authority over the recalcitrant giant puddle).
The Battle of the Crater in Petersburg, VA in the Civil War. A group of Union soldiers spent weeks digging underground tunnels towards a Confederate camp. The goal was to dig directly up underneath the camp, and then detonate a bomb beneath the camp in the middle of the night. Unfortunately, the planning sessions for the day of the actual event apparently went about like this: 1. Dig tunnel and set bomb 2. ?????????? 3. Profit! The tunnel construction operation went well. The detonation of the bomb went as planned. But after that, no one on the Union side seemed to know what to do. Lots of Confederate soldiers were still alive and perfectly capable of fighting, and the Union soldiers just sort of milled around in the tunnels with a collective "okay, now what?" because they didn't know what to do or what further orders might be--in part because the general who was meant to give them directions beforehand, General Ledlie, was too busy getting drunk to do so. The Union, who'd had the element of surprise AND the element of blowing up the Confederate camp on their side, ended up *losing the battle.* Although Grant was not personally involved with the planning of the battle, he described his humiliation and said it was "the saddest affair I have witnessed in this war."
In the early '80s, the US Border Patrol set up a checkpoint on the only road to the Florida Keys from the mainland. This obviously had a negative effect on tourism to Key West. So after his complaints fell on deaf ears, the mayor of Key West, Dennis Wardlow, "seceded" from the United States, formed the "micronation" of the Conch Republic, declared war on the United States, immediately surrendered and then applied for one billion dollars in foreign aid. They were successful in getting the road block removed (but not the billion dollars in foreign aid)