On the afternoon of March 18, 1925, residents of southeastern Missouri watched with dread as a line of pitch-black storm clouds gathered on the horizon. As torrential rain and hail began to fall, a cluster of 12 sinister funnel clouds snaked their way down to the ground and began moving northeast, into neighbouring states of… Read More »
In the pantheon of worst humans to ever human you will find no shortage of bastions of awful. Hitler probably has the most collective conscious panache, but at least he had the decency to bravely, and with no regard for his personal safety, infiltrate the Hitler bunker and then put a bullet through the cranium… Read More »
Winning a big ticket lottery very often isn’t all that it cracked up to be and despite a windfall of cash, a surprising number of winners have gone on record as saying winning the lottery was the worst thing that ever happened to them. And some could never end up saying it because of the… Read More »
Modern entertainment such as movies, fictional books, and TV shows aren’t exactly known for accurately depicting how things may or may not go or have gone in the real life scenarios that they depict. From injecting substances directly into your heart a-la Pulp Fiction or The Rock, to Yarr’ing pirates, let’s just say there’s a… Read More »
While Ben Franklin was remarkably successful in keeping elements of his private life very private to the point that historians can only speculate about much of it, despite having a common law marriage, he was, shall we say, noted for his overt and unabashed love of women and their company, particularly if they were educated-… Read More »
In the pantheon of figures that dominated American History around the the time the traitors to the British crown cast off their Kingly shackles, Thomas Jefferson is perhaps one of the most prominent names remembered today, only equalled by the likes of scientist, philosopher, and statesman Ben Franklin and revolutionary General and later first President… Read More »
On October 4, 1957, an R7 rocket lifted off from Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan, carrying Sputnik I, the world’s first artificial satellite. This historic feat stunned the West and pushed the Cold War into a terrifying new phase, for if the R7 could launch a satellite into orbit, it could also place a nuclear warhead anywhere… Read More »
Ah, the joys of vehicle ownership! Traffic jams! Construction! Costly insurance! Speed traps! Searching endlessly for parking! Having the check engine light come on just as you were about to buy that new game system and having the mechanic charge you thousands of dollars for parts and labour… and, of course, the greatest joy of… Read More »
Ah, immortality, previously only for the gods and individuals with a fetish for chopping each other’s heads off. In more modern times, science is coming closer and closer to both identifying the tapestry of things that cause humans to grow old, and slowly but surely taking the first steps into finding ways to delay and… Read More »
While many think of the so-called “Dark Ages” as a time of profound ignorance and superstition, in reality, medieval people knew far more about the world than popular history typically gives them credit for. But did any medieval map ever have the classic phrase “Here be Dragons”? Let’s find out as we delve into the… Read More »
When the sun scorches the earth, when incandescent air burns your lungs, and especially when that glucose curve dips at 10, 2 and 4 in the afternoon … well, there is nothing better than grabbing an ice cold bottle of a very special soft drink- its purple-ish label covered in beads of cooling moisture. I… Read More »