Fun facts!

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An officer of the Royal Navy during WW2, Cmdr Ian Forbes (1919-1992), holds perhaps the most unenviable record of the war - the only person in the war to survive four ships sinking under him.
  • HMS Bittern (sunk during the Battle of Norway, 1940)
  • HMS Prince of Wales (sunk off Malaya by the Japanese, 1941)
  • HMS Grasshopper (sunk during the Fall of Singapore, 1942)
  • HMS Stronghold (sunk during the Battle of the Java Sea, 1942)
On top of this he survived three years of starvation and torture aboard a Japanese prison ships until the end of the war.
 
In 1945 a British Indian/nepalese force moved into Vietnam to accept the surrender of the Japanese, release French PoWs and re-establish french colonial authority.

They found that the Viet Minh had taken nearly complete control of Saigon, though the Viet Minh were initially friendly to the Brits. re-establishing french control lead to a small war which saw the British re-arm the French PoWs and the Japanese occupying force and fight together against the commies.

After 6 months the Viet Minh lost around 2700 (to the allies >200) had been pushed out of the region and no longer able to pose a threat to the allied cause.

 
When you compress colorless oxygen gas, it first turns into a blue liquid and then into a deep ruby-red crystal.
 
UnimportantFarmer said:
Not even closed doors as he liked to share Victoria Justice et al feet pics on Twitter, probably all deleted recently, which was his only activity for a long while.
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Suddenly all those sketches on all that and Icarly that focused on feet make wayyyyy too much sense.



Insomniac games got their name from all the late nights the dev teams would put into development and programming.

Bella Lugosi only played Dracula one other time after his iconic 1931 performance as the character.

Planned Parenthood was founded by a white woman who was openly racist and believed in using birth control, including termination of pregnancies to enforce eugenics.

The joker card was added to what is commonly called the "French deck" of playing cards during the American civil war.

The oldest known board game was a game from ancient Egypt called senet. But we don't know exactly how it was played as the rules were passed by word of mouth and we're eventually lost to time.
 
Jasonfan89 said:
Suddenly all those sketches on all that and Icarly that focused on feet make wayyyyy too much sense.



Insomniac games got their name from all the late nights the dev teams would put into development and programming.

Bella Lugosi only played Dracula one other time after his iconic 1931 performance as the character.

Planned Parenthood was founded by a white woman who was openly racist and believed in using birth control, including termination of pregnancies to enforce eugenics.

The joker card was added to what is commonly called the "French deck" of playing cards during the American civil war.

The oldest known board game was a game from ancient Egypt called senet. But we don't know exactly how it was played as the rules were passed by word of mouth and we're eventually lost to time.
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Margaret Sanger was herself hostile to abortion in the main, supporting the prosecution of abortionists and writing against it. Privately and in some writing her opposition was more mixed. Given the most abortions are of black babies, proportionately anyhow, her opposition, if she was somehow still living would likely be the old 'personally opposed' scam espoused by Democrats in the past.
 
Lonely Grave said:
An officer of the Royal Navy during WW2, Cmdr Ian Forbes (1919-1992), holds perhaps the most unenviable record of the war - the only person in the war to survive four ships sinking under him.
  • HMS Bittern (sunk during the Battle of Norway, 1940)
  • HMS Prince of Wales (sunk off Malaya by the Japanese, 1941)
  • HMS Grasshopper (sunk during the Fall of Singapore, 1942)
  • HMS Stronghold (sunk during the Battle of the Java Sea, 1942)
On top of this he survived three years of starvation and torture aboard a Japanese prison ships until the end of the war.
Click to expand...

"Do you fellas know why they call me Nine Lives?" is something you don't want to hear the captain say when heading out to sea.
 
The deadliest maritime disaster in American history was the explosion of the Sultana on April 27, 1865. The Sultana was a Mississippi riverboat that was transporting liberated Union prisoners of war back from southern POW camps like Cahaba in Alabama and Andersonville in Georgia. The officer in charge of the operation was corrupt and took a large bribe from the boat's owners to book passage for as many prisoners as he could fit onto the boat. The Sultana had a maximum capacity of 376 passengers, but 2,137 prisoners were loaded in Vicksburg, Mississipi for a trip up the river to St. Louis. The boat was so overcrowded that the decks were starting to bow inwards, and had to be braced with large planks. At 2:00 AM on the morning of the 27th, three of the boat's four steam boilers exploded due to faulty maintenance, unleashing a massive cloud of steam that cooked many of the passengers alive and quickly reduced the boat to a burning wreck. To make matters worse, the water in the river was spring snowmelt from up north and deadly cold. Many of the prisoners jumped into the river and died of hypothermia before being rescued. The total number of dead is unknown, but estimates range from 1,168 to 1,547.
 
Tsutomu_Yamaguchi was on a business trip to Hiroshima on the morning of August 6, 1945, when the first atomic bomb dropped. While he would eventually lose some hearing as a result of the explosion, he was mostly unharmed and went home...

to Nagasaki just in time for the bomb to drop there, which he also survived. Although he had some radiation-related sicknesses, he lived until the age of 93 when he died in 2010.
 
This is one of the saddest facts I've heard. The question goes: if there was a Christmas truce on the western front why wasn't there one on the eastern front? The answer is simple, the Germans and the Russians had different calendars. Many Russian soldiers tried to start an Easter truce but they were shot at and captured because the Germans didn't know it was Russian Easter.
 
Here's some Power Rangers facts.
  • The Black Ranger in Operation Overdrive is a theft in the show, but his actor stole a poster that would've been sold to sick children at the first Power Rangers convention in 2007.
  • RPM's show runner did not like the way Go-Onger was portrayed, so he made it darker and edgier.
  • Time Force is the only series in the franchise to ever receive a Emmy nomination, which was mainly for sound.
  • In Lost Galaxy, the character Kendrix (Valerie Vernon) was killed off two-thirds through the season, marking the first time that a Ranger was killed off in the series. Kendrix was written out of the show as Valerie left the show for a while to be treated for leukemia. Her treatment was successful and she returned for the season finale. This particular season of Power Rangers has been noted to be the most expensive production of the series to date.
  • This is spoilers but Beast Morphers is a sequel to RPM
 
In Spain exists an expression called "El coño de la Bernarda" (translated means "The pussy of Bernardine). This refers to the semi legendary figure of Saint Bernardine, a woman who performed miracles, mostly to allow women to get pregnant again and to get bountiful crops, thanks to the holy powers of her pussy. It was written that after her death, many people went to her grave several months afterwards and they found the body completely rotten except for her cunt, which was in mint condition.
 
If you've ever seen caligula and in particular the infamous scene with his uncle tiberius. It's partly based on a true story.

Emperor tiberius had what was called the villa jovis or village of jupiter on the island of Capri in southern Italy. Which he lived at for ten years from 27 ad to 37 ad in a semi retirement out of fear of an assainatation. And while the stories of orgies and freaky stuff going on are often exaggerations told by various sources including slander by the Senate and later propaganda by anti Roman sentiment from early Christians. There is some truth to it. Thought no more decedent or debaucherous than any other Roman of high status in his Life.
 
The universe does funky and unexpected stuff. Notably, it began to expand at an accelerated rate about 5 billion years ago. This acceleration is conventionally chalked up to dark energy, but cosmologists don't know why the cosmic acceleration began when it did. In fact, one explanation with a modicum of traction is that the timing has to do with life. The dark energy didn't become significant until enough time had gone by for life to take hold on Earth.
 
If you like laughing at foreign nerds getting worked up over inconsequential shit, Japanese Undertale fans had a war with one another over how one of the characters addresses themselves in the fan translations, and then threw a colossal fit complete with a hashtag when the official translation used something completely different.

Japanese has a bazillion different ways you say I/Me/My based on your identity and whomever you're speaking with, and in the fan translations, Sans would refer to himself with either "ore" (male, neutral) or "boku" (male, young). In the official translation, they went with "oira", which makes him sound a little redneck. That made Japanese fans go REEEEEEEEEEEE, or rather, レーーーーーーーーーー
 
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Archeological findings in what would be old Babylon, some times in temples and some sacred ground acheologists would find small bristle jars with a small amount of acid in them and two copper wires. Upon further examination of these, they found out that these were very rudimentary but working batteries created thousands of years ago.

The purpose of these crude batteries was simple and hilarious. Babylonian priests would carry these with themselves and have the copper wires of the batteries run along their arms. This way, when they shook someone's hand, they would give them a very light electrical discharge that would make people believe that the priests had divine powers that coursed through their bodies.
 
Thanks to Mark Felton on Youtube I just learned about Saturn the alligator who was taken from the wild in Mississippi in 1936 and sent first to Germany then at the end of the war to Russia. He only died this year at the age of 84.


If you are looking for videos on lesser known parts of military history the channel is worth a look.

Some of the recent videos I thought were particularly good:
The allied strike to assassinate German tank command after D-Day

A 1916 German air raid over London

Just how completely blatant Argentina was about attracting Nazis, and their money, after the war
 
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