Fun facts!

[Magicat]

President Jimmy Carter was alive for 40% of the US’ existence.

President Jimmy Carter's message on behalf of humanity recorded in the Voyager Golden Records.

Spoiler: would you like to know more?

 

[RiceofSkywalker]

In the 6th century AD, one of the two lead architects of the Hagia Sophia, a guy named Anthemius, lost a lawsuit against his neighbor Zenon, who had obstructed his bedroom window with some large construction.

So, Anthemius got creative. He dug out a basement beneath Zenon's house, built a bunch of rudimentary steam boilers, and connected them to the foundation piers of Zenon’s house. Every time Anthemius turned on his boilers, Zenon's house would tremble, sending him outside into the streets, raving like a madman about earthquakes that only he could feel.

Anthemius didn’t just invent one of the first practical steam-powered machines—he also pioneered lighting systems, all to mess with Zenon. He even wrote a treatise (which survives to this day) about a system of mirrors he'd use to redirect sunlight into Zenon’s house, just to screw with him.

~Nabbed from Anthony Kaldellis' A Cabinet of Byzantine Curiosities: Strange Tales and Surprising Facts from History's Most Orthodox Empire, 2017

 

[AnOminous]

In the 6th century AD, one of the two lead architects of the Hagia Sophia, a guy named Anthemius, lost a lawsuit against his neighbor Zenon, who had obstructed his bedroom window with some large construction.

As autistic as this sounds, this is a kind of lawsuit that has existed for millennia and anyone who has taken property law remembers these "ancient lights" doctrine cases, where neighbors have a bitter rivalry because one of them built some construction on their property that blocked the sunlight the other guy had grown to enjoy.

One example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheeldon_v_Burrows (note: the person claiming light rights lost).

But these went on for centuries. I almost admire this Anthemius dude for literally inventing two inventions just to fuck with the guy who stole his light. Fuck this Zenon guy, what an absolute faggot. He had it coming.

 

[Plantation Barbie]

The same audio sample was used by both Silent Hill and Britney Spears.

Preservetube archive since Youtube is being weird:

 

[RiceofSkywalker]

this is a kind of lawsuit that has existed for millennia

It was a widespread enough problem in the Byzantine Empire that, as Procopius of Caesarea tells us, Justinian instituted the Aerikon, the "tax on air", which was a fine imposed on those who did not keep a minimal distance between buildings and other constructions. Access to natural sunlight and fresh air was probably even more important back then, when even a mild respiratory disease or mildew problem could easily lead to death.

Of course, as with all taxes/fines, the rich just paid them and then ignored the law anyway, but that's a tale as old as time.

 

[Wot Zit Too Yah0996]

Christopher Lee was a step-cousin of Ian Fleming, and was one of the inspirations for 007, due to his service in World War 2, which makes it fittingly cool in a nerdy way, that he went on to be Mister Scaramanga in the film version of The Man With the Golden Gun. Gus March-Phillips, also active in the war, was also an inspiration for 007. Some of you lot might know him as a result of The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare.

The end credits are actually sad, as pretty much everyone, true to what really happened, excluding March-Phillips' missus, perished in 1943. He, himself, left behind a daughter, I believe.

I just looked, and Gus actually died in 1942. I'm fairly sure that virtually the rest of his crew croaked in '43, though.

(Then future) Sir Christopher in 1943.

And another image.

And here's the Gurkha unit he served with.

A photograph of Gustavus Henry March-Phillips, who, in a naval mission called Operation Postmaster, helped sabotage German, Italian, and Spanish forces. Well, him and his motley crue, which included his Jewish spy (future) wife, got them to fuck off out of Fernando Po (which, in more recent years, was renamed Bioko. It's an island in Equatorial Guinea), for lack of better ways of describing it.

 

[Roast Chicken]

There are microscopic mites that live exclusively on the skin of humans - they are called Demodex Folliculorum and they inhabit the hair follicles and oil glands on your head, neck and chest. They are completely harmless and your nails will do nothing, stop that.

If you are someone who claims to enjoy solitude then you are a liar because you are never truly alone.

Look, look at your friends:

 

[Wot Zit Too Yah0996]

I

There are microscopic mites that live exclusively on the skin of humans - they are called Demodex Folliculorum and they inhabit the hair follicles and oil glands on your head, neck and chest. They are completely harmless and your nails will do nothing, stop that.

If you are someone who claims to enjoy solitude then you are a liar because you are never truly alone.

Look, look at your friends:

View attachment 6811395
View attachment 6811396
View attachment 6811398

If I can't feel, see, or hear 'em, then I am not counting it (I'm ALONE. Not really, I live with family members).

 

[Plantation Barbie]

During the 9/11 attacks an eye dog named Roselle managed to escort her owner down 78 floors. The descent took a full hour and the pair made it safely out seconds before the building collapsed.

 

[Nick Obre]

They are completely harmless

Unless they overpopulate, in which case they can cause all sorts of skin conditions.

 

[Meat Target]

Ancient Roman coins have been dug up in North America, suggesting that Vikings were not the first Europeans to discover the New World.

 

[Plantation Barbie]

German chocolate cake is named after baker and chocolate maker Samuel German. It has nothing to do with Germany.

 

[Bothriolepis]

Ancient Roman coins have been dug up in North America, suggesting that Vikings were not the first Europeans to discover the New World.

While the first part of this is true, the conclusion that they represent ancient contact between Europe and the Americas extrapolates a whole lot from very little material evidence. It's more likely that they were brought over by tourists, soldiers, or coin collectors at some point in the last two centuries.

Something interesting that we  do know about the activity of the Vikings in North America, though, is that the failed settlement in Vinland wasn't their last journey West of Greenland. The records they kept are, unfortunately, rare, fragmentary, and written for reasons other than documenting their expeditions. Mention of a ship visiting Markland (a locality that we know from other sources was probably in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago), however, does show up significantly after the most reliable dates for Viking constructions at the L'Anse aux Meadows site in Newfoundland. This ship was mentioned only because it sank, with no commentary that would imply it was otherwise remarkable, which suggests that these trips weren't particularly rare. It's possible that they continued right up to the collapse of the Norse colonies in Greenland, when the lack of a safe stepping stone coupled with the harsher climate conditions of the Little Ice Age probably made it too expensive and dangerous to justify.

There's also a decent chance that career fishermen in the North Atlantic made it within site of the East Coast of the continent during the first part of the Early Modern Period. They had both the sailing technology, and the skills they would have needed to reach the rich fishing grounds over the Flemish Cap and Georges Bank, and would have probably found them independently given enough time. Unfortunately, they also had a heavy incentive to hide the location of a virgin fishery that, even after centuries of heavy exploitation, can still draw people out into the treacherous fall and winter weather where Nor'Easters intensify over the Gulf Stream. Without the education they would have needed to know that there were no easily accessible accounts of the new coastline they'd found, they would have probably just assumed everyone knew about it because...well, everyone who  they knew had at least some vague idea that there was something out there. Very few of them were literate enough to keep detailed written accounts of their trips, and even those who could write wouldn't have been setting out to give an identifiable location for any land they came across out at sea. Realistically, even if we did come across the journal of an Atlantic-traversing fisherman who could write well enough to record an actual narrative, we might never know what he was talking about. The ship's itinerary could be too fragmentary to figure out where it was when it sighted land, the author could have mistaken the coast for a well-known landmass, or the distant shape of a foreign shore the crew knew to be inhabited by strange people speaking an unknown language might have just seemed less interesting than a big-ass swordfish cutting someone's leg open and spilling the contents of their femoral artery all over the deck. Fishermen would have had no real reason to make routine landings along what are now the Maritime Provinces and New England, since trade with the Native tribes would have been risky and difficult, with only minimal pay-off. Because of that, searching for archeological remnants of the few boats forced to ground is like looking for a possibly non-existent needle in a thousand miles of haystack. Except, the haystack is actually a narrow strip of land between the ocean and the Blue Ridge that forms one of the highly-urbanized cores of modern Western Civilization, so most of it's already been sifted through by people who couldn't tell a needle from a twig, large parts of it have been destroyed altogether, and people have buried most of it under suburbs and skyscrapers.

This makes the idea of early 15th century Irishmen catching cod off Cape Cod almost the polar opposite of ideas about Pre-Norse contact based on buried Roman coins. With the coins, we have what technically counts as archeological evidence for the theory, but our knowledge of what was realistic at the time means we'd need something much more substantial to make it seem plausible. With fishing voyages to Georges Bank, we neither have any archeological or literary evidence, nor can we believably expect to find any unless we get ridiculously lucky. The capability and motives were there, though, so there's a decently high chance it happened.

 

[Buttigieg2020]

South Korea’s population pyramid has inverted.

 

[Plantation Barbie]

The last widow of a civil war veteran passed away in 2020.

 

[demicolon]

The last widow of a civil war veteran passed away in 2020.

I wanted to call bullshit but it turned out they were all little girls married to old farts. Yuck.

 

[Plantation Barbie]

I wanted to call bullshit but it turned out they were all little girls married to old farts. Yuck.

The final woman's name was Helen Viola Jackson and according to her their marriage was completely on paper. 17 year old Helen and her father had been helping their elderly neighbor (93 year old James Bolin) with his daily chores for some time. Bolin wanted to pay young Helen back for taking care of him so he offered her his military pension. Helen agreed to sign a marriage contract, and during their short union she lived with her parents full time and did not change her last name. James would die 3 years later, and Helen never applied for his pension. She states that shortly after James's death, his daughter found out about her and threatened to destroy her reputation if she claimed his pension.

 

[RiceofSkywalker]

Captain John Saris was an English sailor in the 17th century and head of the first East India Company trading mission to Japan. During this mission, he also conducted diplomatic business for England, meeting the first (retired) Shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu as well as the second Shogun of Japan, Tokugawa Hidetada. He brought Hidetada a silver-plated telescope as a gift from James I of England, the first telescope to be gifted outside Europe. In return, Hidetada gifted James I two suits of Samurai armor.

But that's not the interesting part here. You see, when Saris came back to England, port officials at Plymouth took note that his ship stayed in port for longer than expected and notified the East India Company that their dude might've done some trading of his own and was possibly unloading private cargo. At first, company leadership thought nothing of it, but upon further prodding decided to eventually audit the cargo of Saris' ship.

So, what did they find? Why, that Saris had smuggled a whole bunch of hentai from Japan. You see, during his travels, he was so enamored with woodblock prints of Japanese porn, that he just had to bring his new collection back home to England.

So the English did the only sensible thing they could: they burned the whole collection and dismissed Saris, ending his seafaring career for good.

tl;dr: First East India Company trading mission to Japan brought back the first stash of hentai to reach the West.

 

[cactus]

So, what did they find? Why, that Saris had smuggled a whole bunch of hentai from Japan. You see, during his travels, he was so enamored with woodblock prints of Japanese porn, that he just had to bring his new collection back home to England.

They left that part out of Shogun.

 

[glue eater]

Six SS soldiers, led by Fritz Klingenberg got separated from their forces when Nazi Germany invaded Serbia. The seven men, who were joined by a drunk German tourist on the way, made their way to Yugoslav capital Belgrade. Klingenberg went to talk to the mayor, who raised a white flag, due to Klingenberg bluffing that he was leading a massive army and they were just negotiators. When the rest of the Germans appered much later to find the city already held by Klingenberg, his superiors got angry at him for acting on his own, but he laconically asked if they should give the city back. Eventually he was awarded Knight’s Cross for capturing the city with 6 soldiers.