Historical Lolcow General

[aspirin]

im not sure if this should be locked but i just feel like this is a really bad thread

 

[registereduser]

The Spanish Hapsburgs. They inbred themselves literally into a circle so that the last Hapsburg, Charles II, was not only rife with physical deformities and mental disabilities, but was also completely sterile, so the family died out when he did. In an attempt to keep the blood pure, or whatever, they basically led to their own downfall.

They really liked first cousin and uncle-niece marriages.

 

[CalmMyTits]

I feel really bad for Charles. it wasn't his fault he was so inbred to the point of idiocy.

This is not the first time (or family) of royal inbreeding. Louis XIV (the Sun King) and his wife were double first cousins. His great-great-great-grandson (Louis XVI) was married to his second cousin Marie Antoinette. Queen Victoria married her cousin. Today's Queen Elizabeth is also married to her cousin (third cousin, I believe)

But I doubt anyone was as inbred as poor Charles.

 

[exball]

I feel really bad for Charles. it wasn't his fault he was so inbred to the point of idiocy.

This is not the first time (or family) of royal inbreeding. Louis XIV (the Sun King) and his wife were double first cousins. His great-great-great-grandson (Louis XVI) was married to his second cousin Marie Antoinette. Queen Victoria married her cousin. Today's Queen Elizabeth is also married to her cousin (third cousin, I believe)

But I doubt anyone was as inbred as poor Charles.

Charles couldn't walk until he was eight. Honestly, I feel really shitty thinking about his life.

 

[registereduser]

Nah, I definitely feel bad for Charles, too. He had all kinds of problems, but the people around him just chalked it up to him being cursed, or some stupid shit. I just find the idea of a royal family inbreeding themselves out of existence amusing, because of the elitist ideas behind their inbreeding.

 

[RP 520]

The Spanish Hapsburgs. They inbred themselves literally into a circle so that the last Hapsburg, Charles II, was not only rife with physical deformities and mental disabilities, but was also completely sterile, so the family died out when he did. In an attempt to keep the blood pure, or whatever, they basically led to their own downfall.

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They really liked first cousin and uncle-niece marriages.

I remember reading about him, he isn't really a lolcow but more of an extremely sad textbook example of why inbreeding is bad. His Prognathism (lower jaw misaligned with his skull) was so severe that he couldn't eat or speak properly, so he couldn't talk until he was about 4 years old, his caretakers treated him like an infant until he was 10 as they were afraid he would go insane otherwise, he had terrible hyper sensitivity which is why he never bathed, he had "water in the head" among other ailments from inbreeding as well.

The people that raised him pretty much went against their gut feelings, went ahead and gave him the responsibilities of managing Spain (which was collapsing at that point in time) and trying to manage that on top of his personal issues broke him mentally (even though he was arguably already retarded) and pretty much drove him insane and back into a toddler-like state of mind. I read in a book that his hygiene was so bad that in his last years he was confined to a bed, his hair had all fallen out, he smelled like rotten meat as parts of his body were already rotting away while he was still alive, and was in utter agony every moment he was awake. His autopsy report was pretty gruesome at that too, he was a sad case.

Edit: I'm kind of starting to agree with the fellow above poster that this should be closed, the first few people were kinda funny but now it's just getting into sad, evil/crazy and unfortunate people territory.

 

[Arctic]

The Chris-Chan of the 19th century?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_McGonagall

This is William McGonagall, a 19th century Scottish poet usually considered the worst of all time, who has a surprising amount of things in common with Chris. Like Chris, his work (poetry, in this case) was awful yet his delusional mind denied that. He also held disproportionate grudges against certain people (innkeepers in his case because they often threw fruit at him while he was reading his poetry). He even walked 50 miles, hoping for the queen to make him poet laureate, only to be shooed away at the entrance by a "jerkop". Like Chris (until recently), he too hated alcohol and believed it should be banned to an extent.

He was even trolled by a couple of students pretending to be a foreign king, that had supposedly knighted him as "Topaz McGonagall, Grand Knight of the Holy Order of the White Elephant Burmah".

Despite all this, he still had a wife and family, so I suppose he was sane to some extent.

 

[Grand Number of Pounds]

Re: The Our Pet Lolcow of the 19th century?

We have a thread on historical lolcows

 

[random_pickle]

Re: The Our Pet Lolcow of the 19th century?

Could the admins merge threads please?

 

[Arctic]

It's sad to see how many of these people were in ruling positions

 

[Holdek]

This guy would come up in similar threads on /cow/:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_J._Guiteau

Pretty much this guy thought he was solely responsible for getting James Garfield elected (though the speech he wrote in favor of him was just a speech he wrote support Ulysses Grant and changed it to Garfield after Garfield got the Republican nomination) and demanded that he receive an ambassadorship (first in Vienna, but he later settled on Paris). Of course they rejected him over and over to a point that the Secretary of State told him personally to get lost. So, this guy decides to assassinate Garfield, he even bought a gun with fancy ivory handles so it would look good in a museum exhibit about the assassination.

Apparently during the trial, he asked Garfield's successor, Chester A. Arthur to set him free in return for raising Arthur's salary by making him the new president.

The wikipedia article goes into a bit how kooky he was.

Probably the most lulzy of America's presidential assassins. Still...

I probably wouldn't know that the President had been shot if I was watching a comedy and the most famous actor in America jumped from the balcony to the stage yelling in Latin about killing tyrants, then getting his foot caught on the American flag and breaking his leg upon landing, and thus would laugh at first.

Lee Harvey Oswald was complete fail in life, defected to Russia as a marine and realized that living under communism actually sucks, but was able to return to the United States because the US Embassy in Moscow never bothered to complete the paperwork on his US citizenship renunciation. Then when he arrived at the airport back in the US he expected throngs of reporters but none were interested . Also when traveling to Mexico to try to get a Cuban visa he didn't speak any Spanish and so kept accidentally ordering full meals instead of snacks at the many stops his bus made.

IDK anything about the guy who assassinated William McKinley but I know when his VP Teddy Roosevelt assumed office he said he wasn't worried about meeting a similar fate because he was a great boxer, which is kind of funny. Also the whole story about T.R. being shot in the chest but continuing his speech is pretty crazy too.

 

[sparklemilhouse]

Many of his acts, however, were unpopular. Most notorious was Butler's General Order No. 28 of May 15, 1862, that if any woman should insult or show contempt for any officer or soldier of the United States, she shall be regarded and shall be held liable to be treated as a "woman of the town plying her avocation", i.e., a prostitute. This was in response to women in the town who were pouring buckets of their own urine on Union soldiers, and who at the time could get away with anything as respectable women.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_B ... politician)#New_Orleans

 

[Henry Bemis]

Guiteau seems like he was the king of attention whores and considering the time period, I'm surprised as to why they didn't haul his ass off to an insane asylum which could have prevented the assassination.

Mostly because asylums of the time really deserved the label "loony bin." Nobody wanted to go in there, and nobody wanted to be connected to anyone in there. The closest Guiteau ever got to an asylum was by pleading not guilty due to insanity, one of the first cases to try the plea. (Spoiler: Shooting the President really stacks the deck against you.)

Also amusing is that Guiteau was briefly a member of the Oneida Community, a Burned-Over commune that advocated free love. It was brief because he couldn't get any; hence, his nickname, "Charles Git-Out."

 

[Flowers For Sonichu]

IDK anything about the guy who assassinated William McKinley but I know when his VP Teddy Roosevelt assumed office he said he wasn't worried about meeting a similar fate because he was a great boxer, which is kind of funny. Also the whole story about T.R. being shot in the chest but continuing his speech is pretty crazy too.

It's widely believed Czolgosz did it to impress Emma Goldman

 

[DavidFerrie]

(Started a duplicate thread on this very topic, which I deleted. Here was my example of a Historical LOLCow, reposted.)

"Lord" Timothy Dexter, an early American trader and probable slow-in-the-mind who became notorious throughout Revolutionary War-era New England. Check out these credentials -- do they remind you of anyone we know?

• He had a hugely-inflated sense of his own importance, and dubbed himself with honorific titles that nobody else accepted;
• His contemporaries thought he was a buffoon, and trolled him relentlessly by giving him bad advice, which he took seriously and literally;
• He filled his house with bizarre and childish artwork and statuary;
• He was a terror to the rest of his family, and caused them much suffering;
• He staged a big, self-centered public spectacle, witnessed by countless strangers, that ended up with him going berserk and getting into serious legal trouble;
  
• He was a self-published, self-promoting "author" whose work became infamous for its utter incoherence, hilarious spelling and grammar mistakes, and complete lack of proper punctuation, and created a whole underground of people trying to figure it -- and him -- out.
  
• He was associated with s.

 

[NobleGreyHorse]

This is William McGonagall, a 19th century Scottish poet usually considered the worst of all time, who has a surprising amount of things in common with Chris. Like Chris, his work (poetry, in this case) was awful yet his delusional mind denied that. He also held disproportionate grudges against certain people (innkeepers in his case because they often threw fruit at him while he was reading his poetry). He even walked 50 miles, hoping for the queen to make him poet laureate, only to be shooed away at the entrance by a "jerkop". Like Chris (until recently), he too hated alcohol and believed it should be banned to an extent.

Since the Proclaimers were from Leith, I now have "(I Would Walk) 500 Miles" stuck in my head. Thanks, McGonagall.

What nobody has mentioned about him so far is that in addition to being a really bad poet, he was also a really bad actor. By his own account, he was required to pay his local theatre for the privilege of playing Hamlet or Macbeth. In a production of the latter play, the actor playing MacDuff made the stage stabbing gesture that "killed" MacB., but McGonagall wanted to draw out the combat and keep going, so he acted like a little kid going "Nuh-uh, you did not get me" and refused to fall down for several minutes until MacDuff's actor lost his shit and yelled at McGonagall on stage.

McG. was also notorious for his views on alcohol -- he was an early temperance crusader. He would recite poems in pubs, whose owners would supply their customers, for a very modest fee, with rotten vegetables and eggs to throw at him. This is slightly reminiscent of OPL and the pennies, except pennies are technically slightly useful. There is no record of his winning a single convert to the water wagon.

If you're wondering about where the professor in the Harry Potter books got her name, wonder no longer: JK Rowling has said the most hilariously awful export of Dundee (worse, even, than The Broons and Oor Wullie, who are canonically Dundee residents) was a direct inspiration for Professor McGonagall's name (spelling in her version?), although basically nothing else about her.

 

[darkhorse816]

The "senator, you are no Jack Kennedy" remark made by Lloyd Bentsen to Dan Quayle during the 1988 Vice Presidential Debate:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senator,_y ... ck_Kennedy

(Quayle was being the lolcow btw)

When I was in Congressional debate my Freshman year of high school, the school that was hosting one of our tournaments used the closed-circuit TV to show everyone a tape of political bloopers while they calculated our scores. People from both sides were made fun of. But the person who had the most bloopers was Dan Quayle.

There's one when he's still a Senator, and he's at this luncheon. Everyone has salads in front of them, but no one is eating them because someone is giving a speech, and manners and stuff. All except one person. At the corner of the screen, Dan Quayle is munching on his salad.

Then there's one when he's on the campaign trail, and a woman asks him for an autograph. He says sure, and she gives him a slip of paper. He forgets to take a pen out, so instead he pretends he has one and signs it with his finger.

And there's the piece de resistance: when he corrected a kid about how to spell potato. According to Dan Quayle, it's POTATOE, you stupid little kid.

And once he gave a speech during the 1992 campaign about the moral decline in the states and the media, and he used the show Murphy Brown as an example, because she had a child out of wedlock. So the creators of the show decided to fight back by playing the speech in the episode, because the character Murphy Brown was a well-known news anchor, and because Dan Quayle almost sounded like he was talking about Murphy as if she was a real person. The episode tackled the speech, and the newsmagazine Murphy anchors for does a story about the ever-evolving American family. And then they dump a truckload of potatoes in front of Dan Quayle's house. Apparently the creators of Murphy Brown are trolls.

 

[Flowers For Sonichu]

When I was in Congressional debate my Freshman year of high school,

Congress debate sux policy rules!

I got another one:

The Kellogg Brothers

1. Religious crazies who invented cereal because they thought it would stop you from masturbation.
2. Only invented cereal after their efforts to make genital mutilation ended in failure. He recommended melting the clitoris of horny women off with acid.
3. Introduced black squirrels into the area to get rid of brown squirrels, it failed and now there's black and brown squirrels.
4. Invented a bunch of worthless shit that was more harmful than good: http://www.oobject.com/category/15-dr-kellog-contraptions/

 

[DavidFerrie]

The Cherry Sisters -- an inbred Iowan family from the late 1800s who cooked up an inept and bizarre "variety show", and toured the Midwest as possibly the worst stage act in history. The Cherries were hugely popular because wherever they appeared, audiences paid good $ to heckle, troll, and even throw rotten vegetables at them while they "performed" songs and sketches that made OPL's most brainless creations seem like masterworks. In true delusional fashion, they never admitted to themselves that the volleys of catcalls and overripe produce were a genuine reaction to their talent-free awfulness, preferring to blame "jealous" rivals for the barrage. They're believed to have saved the career of famed theater impresario Oscar Hammerstein, who, frustrated that his "good" acts were losing money, booked them in his tony Manhattan theater, and made a mint off the New Yorkers who flocked to the shows and continuously pelted the sisters with all manner of insults and missiles.

 

[The Knife]

Well, someone already got to Florence Foster Jenkins, so here's my second favorite: Amanda McKitterick Ros, a writer of twee purply romantic novels with alliterative titles such as Irene Iddesleigh, Delina Delaney, and Helen Huddleston. Widely claimed to be the worst author in history, the woman never met an adjective she didn't like or a metaphor she couldn't run straight into the ground. Here's a quote. Try to guess what the hell she's talking about!

She tried hard to keep herself a stranger to her poor old father's slight income by the use of the finest production of steel, whose blunt edge eyed the reely covering with marked greed, and offered its sharp dart to faultless fabrics of flaxen fineness.

Spoiler: Translation

"Since she didn't want to borrow money from her father, she became a seamstress."

Notable trolls include Mark Twain, Aldous Huxley, C.S. Lewis, and J.R.R. Tolkien, the last two of which used to have parties where people took turns reading aloud from her books until they started laughing--kind of the Oxford answer to "The Eye of Argon."