We have proof that kids have never paid attention in school. For example, in Novgorod around 1250 A.D. a six year old boy named Onfim (later called Anthemius of Novgorod) was supposedly practicing his writing and basic arithmetic. Much of what archeologists have found were doodles of him being a heroic knight
who hunted down his teacher, who was a horrible monster
These were buried in a waste pile, where they were rediscovered by archeologists. They are a treasured part of Slavic history and there is now a statue of him in his hometown.
These don’t look too dissimilar to things I’d doodle when I was 6. Interesting how kids always kinda draw the same.
It’s fascinating the stages children through in drawing. It says a lot about how the young mind develops. The “head with arms and legs” stage seems universal, and amusing.
these mind formations last into adulthood and artists have to train to see and reproduce what’s actually there instead of what their brain is throwing up.
There’s an easy way to test this with your own mind, you take a simple photograph of a face and do your best to reproduce it with whatever artistic talent you have. You have to give it a solid effort though.
Then you rotate the photograph upside down repeat the process trying to reproduce exactly what you see.
It’s like a parlor trick because for most people the upside down image, which doesn’t trigger the brain to draw it’s idea of a face, comes out looking passably good even if their right side up copy is shite.
I learned this from a drawing book when i was learning to draw and it blew my mind!
I bet this was the medieval version of Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes
There was an infamous conman in my country by the name Sülün Osman. He has managed to con people by claiming to sell the Galata Bridge itself. After he was caught, his defense was “As long as there exists idiots that believe I can sell the bridge, I will keep selling this bridge.”
The most interesting thing is that he wasn’t the only one. A guy who called himself Victor Lustig did the same thing with the Eiffel Tower.
The Emu War
There’s a lot to choose from, but it’s early so I’ll bring up the three separate historically significant Defenestrations of Prague. Defenestration is the act of tossing someone out of a window.
I mean once it’s happened twice it must become a cultural thing so the third one is inevitable
One started the 48 years war! I remember that from highschool. What were the other two?
TBH I kinda forgot the rest of it, since the fact there were three and they had such an unusual theme was the interesting part. Pre-modern history can seem a bit repetitive to me, it’s one group of aristocrats trying to knock off another group ad infinitum. I prefer to read about technology, culture and common life, where it’s known.
Looks like the first one was proto-protestant rebels, and sparked a religious war. The second was a coup against a Hungarian king who was getting too powerful for the defenestrator’s tastes, and featured the defenestration of already dead bodies, 'cause why not.
More people have been thrown from windows in Prague since the third one you were thinking of, but none of them has really caught on as an event. It was sometimes Russian assassins, or course.
There are lots of great answers here so I want to post something entirely silly and much much more recent:
About 8-9 years ago someone on Reddit transcribed and revised the entirety of Edgar Allen Poe’s The Raven to instead be about an Emu.
For the life of me I have never been able to find it again.
Oh great. First, the Emus won a war against Australia, greatly boosting their egos. And later on, they started censoring their mention online.
In other news… there seems to be a bird in my backyard that keeps taping on my backdoor window.
The oldest recorded words from any woman living in (what is today) Scotland are someone telling the empress of Rome, to her face, that they fuck better than her
I had to look that up, it’s just too good to pass.
(Cassius Dio, contemporary historian) tells us that the empress teased her companion (the wife of Argentocoxos, a Caledonian chief) by saying that Caledonian women indulge in a sexual free-for-all, sharing their beds with different men while making no attempt to conceal their adultery. To a respectable aristocratic lady like Julia, such brazen promiscuity would indeed have seemed worthy of comment. We then see the wife of Argentocoxos swiftly responding with what Dio calls ‘a witty remark’ of her own:
“We fulfil the demands of nature in a much better way than do you Roman women; for we consort openly with the best men, whereas you let yourselves be debauched in secret by the vilest.”
A bit further below, however
The consensus view among present-day historians is that he simply invented the speech quoted above.
Sauce - https://senchus.wordpress.com/2019/08/14/julia-and-the-caledonian-women/
“Mad” Jack Churchill, who fought in the Second World War with a longbow, a basket-hilted Scottish broadsword, and a set of bagpipes.
The only confirmed bow and arrow kill of WW2!
That North and South Korea maintain a fax line between their countries… which they use almost exclusively to send threats and insults to each other.
Also related to North Korea, the hilarious fact that Dennis Rodman, former NBA player, is so well liked by the Kim family that he’s basically a diplomat to North Korea, or at least the one they turn to when things really start going badly.
Proof: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2013/12/20/north-and-south-korea-exchange-faxes-threatening-to-attack-each-other/ https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/north-korea-sends-fax-threatening-strike-south-korea-without-notice-flna2d11781034 https://www.wsj.com/articles/BL-KRTB-4721
Another fun fact about North Korea: They have their own Linux Distro by the name Red Star OS, which has its 3.0 version leaked to the Internet, while the newest known version is 4.0.
My observations while trying out the leaked 3.0 are:
*It is a fedora derivative,its package manager made me think it’s something close to CentOS 6.3.
*It’s visuals are really similar to Mac OS. Perhaps the state official behind this project really liked Mac?
*Every piece of software installed has its credits removed, they have help prompts that refer to them being made in some sort of university.
*It leaves strange markings to created files. I couldn’t understand what they do exactly, but I assume it could be used to track the computer that made the files.
*Their browser does not support https, and does not have English support at all.
*Packages intended for developers aren’t installed by default, doesn’t have a remote repository but instead was intended to be installed with a physical media drive.
*Just for fun, I tried to request the Linux kernel’s source code that the developers behind used, as it’s licensed by GPL. I was unsuccessful; which means this is the first time a state sponsored software is violating GPL.
Report to the FSF so they can help you sue North Korea.
