In 1386, a pig was executed in France. In the Middle Ages, a pig attacked a child who went to die later from their wounds. The pig was arrested, kept in prison, and then sent to court where it stood trial for murder, was found guilty and then executed by hanging.
John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, founding fathers and the 2nd and 3rd Presidents of the United States respectively, died within hours of each other on July 4, 1826 - the 50th anniversary of the adoption of The Declaration of Independence. Adams' last words were "Jefferson lives", unaware that his old friend had died earlier that day
The South African railway once employed a baboon, who was bought in 1881 by an operator that lost their legs to a train. An official investigation was initiated after a concerned member of the public reported that a baboon was observed changing railway signals at Uitenhage near Port Elizabeth. After initial skepticism, the railway decided to officially employ Jack once his job competency was verified. The baboon was paid twenty cents a day, and half a bottle of beer each week. In his years of service, he is reported to have never made a single mistake.
Complete with a duplicate Champs-Elysées and Gard Du Nord, a “fake Paris” was built by the French towards the end of WWI. It was built as a means of throwing off German bomber and fighter pilots flying over French skies.
Cleopatra’s reign was closer to the moon landings than the Great Pyramid being built. The Egyptian royal reigned from 51 BC to 30 BC, roughly 2,500 years after the Great Pyramid of Giza was built and roughly 2,000 years before the first lunar landings in 1969.
The late Michigan Rep. John Dingell served in Congress for approximately 24 percent of the time since the American Revolution. He's the longest-serving member of Congress in history. Dingell took office in 1955, and would retire in 2019 after 59 years.
The only President and Vice President not elected to the office was Gerald Ford. Using the 25th Amendment, President Richard Nixon appointed Ford as Vice President after Spiro Agnew resigned from the position. Nine months later, President Nixon resigned and Gerald Ford rose up in his place.
Alexander the Great died at only 32, having created an empire from the Balkans to Pakistan However, his corpse didn’t show any signs of rot or decomposition for a whole six days. Modern-day scientists believe Alexander suffered from the neurological disorder Guillain-Barré Syndrome. They believe that when he “died” he was actually just paralyzed and mentally aware. Basically, he was buried alive.
If you look at the coliseum these days you’ll notice how the stone exterior appears to be covered in pockmarks all across its surface. Whilst you might assume this is just degradation of the material due to its age, it is actually because it was originally clad almost entirely in marble. The reason for the pockmarks is, after the fall of Rome, the city was looted and pillaged by the Goths, who stole every piece of marble from the full structure. The holes in the stone are from where the iron clamps and poles attaching the marble cladding to it have been ripped out.
Prior to the Battle of Tsushima, the Russian Empire spent seven months sailing their baltic, black sea, and arctic fleets across 18,000 nautical miles to merge with their pacific fleet to face the Japanese. This combined fleet which had been assembled from across continents was then promptly obliterated by the Japanese in a decisive engagement, down to nearly the very last ship. It was one of the most catastrophic naval defeats in human history, being compared at the time to Trafalgar.
Different cultures have distinct but subtle mannerisms that are trained out of spies before field work. A commonly known example is how Americans count on their fingers starting with the index fingers, whilst Western Europeans start with the thumb (like in Inglourious Basterds). Another is that Americans have a unique tendency to lean on things rather than standing still when idle, often with one foot stuck out further than the other. The CIA specifically works to remove things like leaning, slouching, and general demeanor. They also train Americans not to shuttle their fork back and forth while eating as a giveaway.
When writing episodes of the show "Ben 10", the writers couldn't keep their expansive lore straight and consistent so they consulted the fan-made wiki. Unfortunately, some things written on the wiki were completely made up and had no source. As a result of the writers reading the wiki, these made up things made it onto the show itself and became canon. And now, the Ben 10 wiki has a page titled "Longstanding Misinformation" which lists all the incorrect information that entered the show and became canon.
55% of the world's population aged 15 and older can't swim.
The reason Star Wars refers to its fast travel as “jumping to hyperspace” rather than something like “light speed” is because hyperspace is technically a different dimension. It’s almost analogous to the nether in Minecraft, where you can travel the same speed but move significantly further compared to the overworld. This is why hyperspace routes exist; they’re not just safe passages through open space, they’re literally channels through dimensional spaces. As a result, a hyperdrive malfunction while in hyperspace actually might not drop you out of it. It is a recorded phenomenon that you can become trapped in hyperspace, forever lost in a dimension you cannot navigate without a computer and hyperdrive. This is only one of the other dimensions that exists, with the other major one being “other space” which plays a prominent role in the Star Wars tabletop game.
The mine of Bou Craa, under Moroccan occupation within the western sahara region, uses an automated conveyor belt to transport phosphate to El Marsa on the coast. The conveyor belt is 100 kilometres (62 mi) long, making it the longest in the world, and the wind that blows powder from the phosphate makes the trail of the belt visible from space.
So many trees were cut down by the early Greek civilizations (pre Rome) for building ships that much of central Greece remains barren of trees to this day. Similar situations exist elsewhere; Denmark planted a massive amount of oak trees in around 1807 for use in 200 years to rebuild their navy after a British naval victory. To forego the known effects of large naval programs, nations had dedicated forests set aside for naval construction, many of which still exist but no longer serve the same functions. France has its Forêt de Bercé which has provided beams to reconstruct the spire of Notre-Dame Cathedral, Sweden has an oak forest on the island of Visingsö, the UK has Trafalgar Oaks, and the U.S. has a Naval Live Oaks Reservation in Florida.
Starting with Catherine the Great, no ethnic Russian would rule Russia until Gorbachev in the late 1980s. All Russian Tsar’s came from aGerman lineage beginning with Catherine, Lenin was Chuvash, Stalin was Georgian, Kruschev and Brezhnev were Ukrainian, and Andropov was a cossack. Even Gorbachev was half Ukrainian.
The book Hatchet has a complicated time line because it actually branches. The author wrote the first book, and the sequel, then wrote a "what if" story about what would happen if the main character never got rescued at the end of the first book. It turned out that story was way better, so the "what if" story got two sequels. This means that the final two chapters of the original book are non-canon. The "canon" story is to read the first 18 chapters of 'The Hatchet' without reading the final chapter or epilogue, skip 'The River' and read 'Brian's Winter', then read 'Brian's Return' and 'Brian's Hunt'.
During the American Civil War, San Marino proposed a republican alliance with the United States, and the government made American President Abraham Lincoln an honorary citizen. He accepted the offer in a letter dated May 7, 1861, saying that the republic proved that "Although your dominion is small, your State is nevertheless one of the most honored, in all history. It has by its experience demonstrated the truth, so full of encouragement to the friends of Humanity, that Government founded on Republican principles is capable of being so administered as to be secure and enduring."
There was a short lived Italian political party (1944-1948) called the Italian Unionist Movement that wanted Italy to become a part of the United States, under an ideological framework that the United States should annex every other democratic and free nation into a United States of the World, making Washington DC the capital of humanity. One of the founding members genuinely said this quote word for word, "With a federation of the United States, Italy and some other nations, and a lot of atomic bombs, there would be no wars. This would solve all of Italy's problems."
An often understated effect of monopolies is the delaying of innovation with massive societal shifts. A lot of times we talk about how a large monopoly can make a product cheaper, but they also are incentivized to kill any progress in their field. AT&T was arguably the largest monopoly the US ever had, and there were a bunch of examples of this. They internally created the answering machine in the 1940s, but it was killed for fear it would discourage business calls if they could be recorded, delaying the technology until the 1970s. Similarly, they had a working and relatively reliable cellphone in the 1970s, but thought it would kill their business model by making their billions of dollars of physical infrastructure worthless, so they killed it and delayed cellphone adoption an additional 20 years until Motorola got it in the 1990s.
75% of all tornadoes occur within the United States, with 100% of the high tornado risk zones being in the US.
Alexander Kerensky, head of the Russian Provisional Government in 1917 after the abdication of the Tsar and before the Soviets took power, ended up at Stanford University. He taught graduate classes in Russian history, and contributed to their archive on Russian history. When he eventually died in 1970, local orthodox churches refused to grant him burial rites as they saw him as being largely responsible for the Bolsheviks taking over, so he was flown to be buried in London in a non-denominational cemetery. Also interesting about him, during the Russian Civil War he supported neither side, as he opposed both the Bolshevik regime and the White Movement.
Arachnids have what's called an open circulatory system, this means their "blood" doesn't move strictly within a closed set of vessels like ours does. Their hearts just kinda drip body fluid into other parts of the arachnid, and it seeps back into the heart through slits on the heart itself. And that's how sort of how they move. It's called arachnid locomotion. They squeeze this body fluid into their legs to extend them and take a step, then they squeeze their little arachnid muscles to pull the leg back, which propels them forward, moving the 1st and 3rd legs on one side of the body, and the 2nd and 4th on the other near simultaneously. Essentially, they're using hydraulics in each leg.
The opening text crawls from Star Wars were painfully tedious to shoot in the original trilogy. This is because, like most effects in those movies, they were shot without digital effects. The text was on one big cel on the floor they slowly panned the camera on. They had to redo the shot every time the camera went ever so slightly off center.
There was going to be a scene in The Room where Johnny was meant to drive a car, and then the car just starts flying for no reason. When Tommy Wiseau was asked why the car would be flying by the rest of the crew, his response was, "Maybe Johnny is Vampire." That was his only explanation.
There was a secret society of American journalists who, from 1965 to 2006, slipped the phrase "it was as if some occult hand..." into articles. This all started when one guy used the phrase in an article and his friends thought it was so hilariously out of place that they all started using it. They called it the Order of the Occult Hand and all it did was put a random metaphor into as many news articles as possible. It drove their editors crazy but they kept doing it. They apparently picked a new phrase in the early 2000s, which has not been revealed yet.
The concept of the Lord of the Rings, as it is presented to a reader, is that the characters of Bilbo and Frodo chronicle their journey's in a large book. This, along with other information Bilbo recounts from his time with the elves, makes up a book called "The Red Book of Westmarch". It then canonically was made into a few copies, one of which was later discovered as a manuscript by Tolkien and translated. Therefore, it's intended that the Lord of the Rings world eventually becomes the modern world and Tolkien is the person passing on the historical recounting of that time.
Marx (on behalf of the International Working Men’s Association) wrote a direct letter to Abraham Lincoln to proclaim his support for Lincoln’s cause and the pride he felt for the place the US was in the world (keep in mind that Marx saw capitalism as a step to socialism which would lead to communism, he was not opposed to capitalist nations in the short term). Lincoln’s office wrote back a thank you letter, though it was shorter and penned by his ambassador (it was still a direct letter and not just a default reply).
The sword in the stone and Excalibur from King Arthur stories are not the same sword. The sword in the stone is something Arthur is said to have pulled out when he was younger, cementing his right to the Britons. Excalibur was much later, obtained from the lady of the lake as an adult when he needed a more powerful weapon.
The last descendant of Genghis Khan to rule a country was Sayyid Mir Muhammad Alim Khan, the Emir of Bukhara (modern day Uzbekistan), who was overthrown by the Red Army of the Soviet Union in 1920. This was 800 years after Genghis Khan had invaded Bukhara.
In the Star Wars prequels, the separatist cause is largely defined by opposition to stunted bureaucracy and undemocratic representation. So why were so many of the largest intergalactic conglomerates, such as the Techno Union, Trade Federation, and Inter-Galactic Banking Clan involved? Simply put, the separatist movement was actually composed of everyone Palpatine wanted out of power for the empire. Since he was going to play both sides of the war and pick the winner, he manipulated all the things that would hold him back to be on the losing side. By having the pro-democracy and small government advocates serve as the political face, he could justify eroding local autonomy and dissolving powers of the senate as a backlash. By having the galactic corporations on the losing side, he could justify nationalizing them and seizing their assets. As an example, the companies once held by the Techno Union would go on to become the government wing responsible for the small arms of the stormtrooper core, the tie series fighters, and the super star destroyers. Had the corporations been on the republic side, they would have kept their freedom and cost Palpatine in having to make contracts with them rather than controlling them outright.
"One nation, under God" isn't a centuries-old relic, it was added as recently as in 1954. E Pluribus Unum is what our Founding Fathers chose, which translates to 'out of many, one'. It refers to one whole thing created out of many things; in the case of the country, the people unified to create a nation.
In 1967, Australia's prime minister vanished by going swimming in the ocean and never coming back. His body was never recovered. Australians fondly named a swimming pool in his honor, and America named the USS Harold E. Holt after him. The Holt was somewhat ironically sunk for training exercises thirty years after its commissioning.
The white on the Serbian flag represents breast milk, and I’m not joking.
The place where Mussolini was hanged in 1945 after the fall of the Italian fascist regime is now a McDonald’s.
In a 1977 Speech in Warsaw, U.S. President Jimmy Carter's translator mistranslated several remarks, stating that President Carter had abandoned the U.S never to return, and that he wished to get to know the Polish people 'carnally'. Aka, "People of Poland, I'm here to fuck and I'm not leaving".
When the Roman Empire was reformed after the crisis of the third century, it was divided into a tetrarchy, a rule of four. There would be two emperors and two successors. This was the split that created the western empire and the eastern empire, which eventually led to enough decentralization between them that they were essentially two separate states. In this system, the two emperors were known as Augustus, and their heirs were called Caesars. The word Caesar as a title (derived from Julius Caesar) evolved etymologically to mean emperor in many languages, such as Kaiser in German and Tsar in Russian.
The catholic bishop of the diocese of Orlando Florida is also the bishop of the moon, because of an obscure piece of church law that says any new land discovered becomes a part of the diocese that the expedition left from. The rocket in 1969 that landed on the moon left from that diocese, and the bishop at the time was so geeked out that he introduced himself to the Pope as “Bishop of the Moon”.
Seeing as how empires are a tier up from kingdoms/nations, the formation of the German Empire did not dissolve the Kingdom of Prussia, who remained within the Empire along with other Kingdoms such as Bavaria and Hannover. After ww1, the Free State of Prussia remained within the Weimar government of Germany with it's own leadership (effectively a state), and even under the Nazis remained it's own administration. Prussia as a nation was not dissolved until February of 1947.
In debt to German bankers, the Spanish allowed them to set up a small colony (after the fall of the Aztecs but before the fall of the Incas). They built houses on stilts along the northern coast of South America, leading for it to get the nickname Klein-Venedig; “Little Venice”, or Venezuela.
You can use a public figure's likeness for parody without their permission, but if you ask someone to play themselves and then they say "no" then it puts it in different legal territory and you can't do it. For example, if you wanted to have Robert Downey Jr as a one off bit character in your show, voiced by a impressionist, you can do that, but if you ask RDJ to voice himself and he refuses you have to scrap the whole thing even if you wanted to fall back to an impressionist.
The lore of the Sharknado series is that an ancient shark god waged war on humans, which they learn after finding his artifact under Stonehenge. Sharks can evolve indefinitely under whatever circumstances they are exposed to, ie if they end up at a nuclear power plant they’ll evolve to nuclear sharks, if in space they’ll stop needing to breath. There’s an elite brotherhood of shark assassins led by a cyborg woman. The tornados are alive and move with sentience. There are space lasers which destroy tornados, but the sharks and tornadoes obviously evolved to resist them over the years. The main characters son in born through the gills of a shark. The Sydney opera house is a battle station to fight tornadoes. At the end of sharknado 5 the entire planet is destroyed, and the son comes back from the future to have them time travel and go save everyone. This is the only scene his son appears in. They travel to the first scene in sharknado 1 and prevent the series from happening.
Starting in 1967 from the Six Day War, Egypt blocked the Suez Canal with mines, debris, and scuttled ships to prevent use by Israeli forces. Ships from West Germany, Sweden, France, the United Kingdom, Poland, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, and the United States became trapped in a salt lake within the canal until 1975. This group of ships became a sort of micronation for a time; they had movie nights on the Bulgarian ship and attended church on the West German ship. They had their own postage, Olympics, and clubs. Keep in mind that Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Bulgaria were still Iron Curtain nations, but the crews of all the ships became good friends and compatriots that still meet up today.
At the time of Hernan Cortes’s conquest of Aztec people, the city of Tenochtitlan was likely one of the largest cities on planet earth. At between 200k-400k population, only Paris, Vienna, and Constantinople might have rivaled it. It was also five times the size of London.
The British remaining in the war after the fall of France actually had a lot to do with the anticipation of how the war would eventually line up. British and Polish code breakers had figured out the eventual invasion of the Soviet Union, and Britain was convinced that eventually Germany would blunder and drag the Americans into the war. That’s why they constantly showed up on every front; for example the British sent troops to Greece despite knowing the fight was doomed. They wanted it to be clear that they were the lighthouse of democracy in Europe, and that America would have a righteous ally if they ever came to bear. They also were never really afraid of Germany invading the home islands, so figured at worst they could force Germany to a stalemate by waiting for their economy to crash. The strategy of the Churchill government therefore was just to hold on until the Soviets and Americans ended up involved.
In Transformers: Age of Extinction, a 20 year old man shows the father of a 17 year old girl a laminated card of a Texas State law to justify him being in a sexual relationship with the 17 year old girl. This actually happens in the movie. And the law in question doesn’t even apply. It’s still statutory. There’s no reason for her to be 17. This is genuinely just fucked up idk what to say. Why does he carry that in his wallet? Why does the 2nd/3rd main character group have to be in an illegal relationship? Why did Michael Bay want this included in the movie?
For all intents and purposes, Persia and the Persian Empire are made up names. The people in modern Iran have pretty much always referred to the land as Iran, Iranshahr, Iranzamin, or Arya. Persia was coined by the Greeks, and came from the small area of Pārsa where Cyrus the Great of the Achaemenid dynasty emerged and over whom he first ruled (before he inherited or conquered other Iranian Kingdoms). As such, no state has ever existed pre-colonial influence that referred to itself as Persia.
St. Peter's Basilica is estimated to have cost money of an equivalent purchasing power to around 30 billion dollars in modern USD to construct. For reference, the Burj Khalifa cost around 2.1 billion adjusted for inflation. 30 billion USD is also close to the annual GDP of Honduras.
One of the most critical and therefore monitored pieces of NYC infrastructure is actually about three hours north of the city. New York City today has no sources of clean drinking water, as the east river is not a river (it's a tidal estuary) and the Hudson gets pushed against by the ocean. As such, they secured control over significant watersheds in the Catskills to build reservoirs, which transport the water over one hundred miles every single day through one of two aqueduct systems. The Catskill Aqueduct, finished in 1916, has been compared to the Panama Canal as a marvel of engineering despite being built by a city rather than a superpower. Two decades later, the Delaware Aqueduct was constructed as one singular tunnel between up state New York and the city. Still today, a century later, it remains the longest tunnel on planet earth. It has often been said that this process, which does not filter the Catskill water besides the bare necessities, is what makes NYC water and it's biproducts (pizza, bagels) so good.
West Germany’s capital city was the small city of Bonn, not Berlin or Frankfurt or Cologne or Munich. This was initially because they set up a temporary capital there while the other cities had been heavily bombed. There was also concern that moving it to a major city would look permanent, whereas they wanted it to symbolically remain temporary to establish that one day they would reunite with the east and return to Berlin. Bonn was also conveniently not under military occupation, since Britain had agreed to withdraw their troops from the area because money. When East and West Germany reunified in the 1990s, there was a vote on whether the capital should remain in Bonn or move to Berlin. Most West German politicians preferred keeping it in Bonn, but by 18 votes the East German politicians managed to tip Berlin into being the capital.
The Marquis de Lafayette was not only an important figure to the American revolution, but to the French one as well. To this point, he was at one point offered the place of Emperor of France, to which he politely declined.
The Eiffel Tower has been painted nearly twenty times. It’s been shades of red, yellow, brown, and grey, but has never been painted black.
Lanai, the sixth largest island in the Hawaiian chain, is 98% owned by Larry Ellison, co-founder and chairman of Oracle Corporation and the fourth richest person in the world.
Ferdinand Porsche was not only the founder of Porsche, but the head engineer of Volkswagen. While you may know that Volkswagen worked with Nazi Germany, what you may not know is that it was Nazi Germany. It was a company created and owned by the Nazi regime as a project to create affordable cars for every day Germans. The name Volkswagen literally means people's car (or folks wagon). The design settled on by the engineers and Hitler to be the perfect one for the German people? The famous Volkswagen Beetle, which remained in Volkswagen marketing from 1938 to 2003. Porsche founded his own company later, though not before being imprisoned for crimes against humanity involving slave labor by France.
Jára Cimrman is a fictional Czech person characterized as a universal genius, and one of the greatest Czech playwrights, poets, composers, teachers, travelers, philosophers, inventors, detectives, mathematicians, and sportsmen of the 19th and early 20th century. Playing along with the pretense of his real existence is part of his characterization, and the entire nation of Czechia is in on it. My personal favorite tidbit on him is that it is said when Graham Bell invented his telephone, he found 3 missed calls from Jára Cimrman upon making his first connection. In 2005, Jára Cimrman won a public vote to find The Greatest Czech (only the fact that he is fictional prevented him from actually winning).
The song Take Me Home, Country Roads by John Denver is probably not based on West Virginia, but on west Virginia. The scenery in the song is primarily from Virginia proper, and while the “blue ridge mountains” and “shenandoah river” do partially exist in West Virginia, it’s only for tiny slivers compared to the majority in Virginia itself. But to make it more interesting, John Denver almost certainly had never been to West Virginia when he recorded the song, and one of the two writers had never really been there either. Said writer originally wanted to write the song about winding roads taking you home in his birth state of Massachusetts, but West Virginia just fit the cadence better.
On their private jet flight right after winning the 1999 NBA finals, the San Antonio Spurs had a StarCraft LAN party rather than the typical celebrations. In a famous photo from the plane, you can even see their trophy sitting casually to the side while they play.
For a month after the Tsar was overthrown, the Russian provisional government and the Petrograd Soviet were both working in the same building despite being ideological enemies who were both preparing to dislodge and destroy the other. They would end up being the main powerbases of the Russian civil war shortly.
In 1537 at the beginning of the colonization and abuse of the native populations of the Americas, Pope Paul the 3rd released the Sublimis Deus, an official document that decreed that any and all attempts to steal land from, enslave, or force convert the native population was considered gross and antithetical to Catholic morals and dogma, even describing the colonel powers doing it as satellites of satan himself.
The founder and leader of the first British fascist organization was Rotha Lintorn-Orman, a masculine presenting and almost certainly bisexual or gay woman who reportedly participated in drunken orgies and was a heavy substance abuser.
In dnd, most prominently the Forgotten Realms, Elves are exceedingly androgynous due to Corellon's influence. Elves do not have secondary sexual characteristics, so Elf boobs are not canon. They used to be, but over the editions Elves have gotten more androgynous. Drow are the exception to this dynamic since they are removed from Corellon's influence and under Lolth's. Drow boobs are canon. However, it’s worth noting that most of the community just ignores race descriptions anyway to suit their vision. For example, most Tieflings are actually said to usually be human adjacent skin colors, with red as the most common non-traditional one, but the community likes their rainbow colored Tieflings so much that the default skin color for Tieflings is nonexistent.
The Germans suffered roughly the same number of casualties in the battle of Stalingrad as they did on the entire western front, and the number of Soviet casualties in Stalingrad was twice that of Germany.
The Austro-Hungarian Empire, also called Austria-Hungary, had no flag. Unlike the United Kingdom's relationship between Scotland, Wales, England, and Northern Ireland, the nations of Austria and Hungary were for all intents and purposes separate political entities. They shared a common foreign policy and had the same ruler, but they were really a crown union more than a united pluralist state. As such, when giving them a flag historians will typically use the Austro-Hungarian naval flag, which simply took the Austrian and Hungarian flags and stapled them together.
Because Austria voted to join Germany before world war 2 and the vote was considered to be fair and not coerced, Austria was treated as part of Germany in occupation and divided into the zones of control as well. The city of Vienna was also split into four parts like Berlin. However, the powers did not want a strong Germany and so strongly backed Austrian nationalism and separated them from a greater German state as soon as possible. Austria was reunited after promising to both sides to remain perpetually neutral and not join any faction.
In 1936, Oswald Mosley and the British Union of Fascists went to march in London, especially in areas with large Jewish populations, shouting antisemitic slogans. Anti-fascists, including communists, anarchists and British Jews showed up in surprisingly huge numbers and beat the fascists into a pulp. Among those antifascists was a very large number of Irish workers, who remembered how Jews helped their children and families during a dockyard strike in 1912. When the Irish workers had gone on strike for their rights, Jewish community members had stepped in to feed the family’s of workers who could not long afford to go without pay. This is especially relevant because Mosley expected the Irish to support him, even appealing to them by speaking in favor of the reunification of Ireland. This event is known as the Battle of Cable Street and is seen as the end of British fascism in this form.
In the Lord of the Rings movie, the time from the scene where Bilbo leaves the Ring and goes to live with the Elves to Gandalf returning to look for it with Frodo happen so quickly that you’d be forgiven for thinking only a few months have passed. The actual time between Bilbo leaving and Gandalf explaining to Frodo what the Ring is was 17 years.
The value on shields in breath of the wild and tears of the kingdom is not durability, it is a value called the attack guard. Each shield has a hidden durability, and the game calculates how many points of durability it loses per enemy hit by taking the damage number of the attack and weighing if it is more or less than the attack guard value + 10. If the attack guard + 10 exceeds the attack damage value, the shield will only take one point off its total durability number. The royal guard shield has a guard of 84, but only 14 durability points. So even though the score is high enough to exceed most attacks, it will still break from fourteen hits. Now, the durability removed by a hit over the attack guard + 10 is then calculated by the formula A-10-G=P, in which the guard rating and guard value is removed from the enemies attack output to get the points loss. 1-5 loses 2 points, 6-10 loses 3, 11-15 4, etc. Wooden shields and royal guard shields have almost the exact same durability number, but wooden shields shatter instantly against a lynel hit because the attack guard is instantly bypassed to hit the internal durability directly.
Sharks don’t make sounds. Across 400-500 species, no one has ever found an organ even capable of producing sound.
The test pilot of the USAF’s first jet fighter dressed as a gorilla to mess with other pilots. While flying the still unknown experimental P-59 jet airplane, he would join formation with unsuspecting pilots flying propeller-driven fighters and to their surprise, wave at them while wearing a gorilla mask, bowler hat, and cigar, and then fly away leaving them behind. Pilots who were exposed to his prank were convinced by Air Force psychologists that they hadn't really seen the gorilla flying the plane, "because everyone knows you can't fly without a propeller."
In some Viking martial arts and combat techniques their shields were deliberately made soft/weak enough to be penetrated so that enemy swords would get stuck. This often meant they could twist their shield in a way to either pull the sword from their opponent’s grasp, or stagger them.
In 1845 79 people died in a bridge collapse that happened because a large crowd had gathered to watch a clown in a bathtub be pulled up a river by four geese.
The town of Boring (Oregon, US) established relationship with village of Dull (Scotland, UK) in 2012; the following year they were joined with the Shire of Bland (New South Wales, AU) to form the League of Extraordinary Communities.
The iconic Eye of Sauron from the LOTR films is an original idea and didn’t come from the book. In the LOTR book, the Eye of Sauron is an insignia worn by Sauron’s minions and spies; implying that hes always watching but he does not have a giant tower with a flaming eye.
The United States nuclear program spent about a decade and 92 million dollars attempting to recreate/reverse engineer a material they themselves invented and was absolutely critical to nuclear weapon production. One facility made the material called Fogbank, and there were no real records kept due to how classified it was. When the facility shut down, everyone who knew how to make it gradually forgot or died over thirty years. Fogbank is assumed to be an aerogel, a light yet strong type of gel material. It's likely an interstage between fission and fusion. Essentially, the outside public has concluded that Fogbank is probably the material which is heated within the warhead to be hotter than the core of the sun, which triggers the nuclear fusion reaction in an internal bomb. They reconstructed the literal entire original facility, and created a new version... which failed. Eventually, they did manage to recertify it. The last refurbished nuclear bomb was delivered in 2018.
