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The Christmas party that stopped a world war They defied the orders of their superiors, laid down their rifles, and celebrated Christmas with the enemy in No Man's Land.
On Christmas Eve 1914, when WWI was well underway, soldiers lay in their trenches ready for the enemy to attack. But soldiers on the both sides of the Western Front had misgivings about killing their fellow man on a day that celebrates Peace on Earth. These men defied the orders of their superiors and for a day laid down their rifles and celebrated Christmas in No Man’s Land. Through the eyes of British, French, and German soldiers we see how fragile it was, and how brave these men were to celebrate peace in a time of war. “What a different sort of Christmas Eve” On Christmas Eve 1914 a young…
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Medieval gambling: high stakes games in the Middle Ages The folly of many, and suppressed whenever authorities felt the gentry were impoverishing themselves. It nevertheless flourished.
15 unintentionally offensive domain names (gone very sexual) All time classics in naming fails that have gone decidedly sexual.
10 absurd inventions that prove you should never drink while inventing These are all real inventions and the illustrations are taken directly from their official patents.
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How close did we actually come to Fallout’s nuclear future? Nuclear cars, robots, mutants, the atom-bomb apocalypse... where did Fallout’s grim retro-futurism come from, and how close did we come to a Fallout future?
Before you even had the first Fallout game out of its jewel case, the game hit you square in the face with its vision of the nuclear future. On page three of the manual – styled as the Vault Dweller’s Survival Guide – you found this image, and immediately understood just what this world you were about to visit was like. Unlike the fantasy RPGs that defined the genre at the time, this was a game about the future-that-wasn’t: a 1950s sci-fi imagining of the Cold War, complete with mushroom clouds, underground cities and grinning, all-American propaganda. Fallout‘s ruins of post-war America were a love letter to the golden age…
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The true history of absinthe, and the reason it was banned for 100 years The drink has a colorful history involving everything from medical miracles to murder.
How one man blew a 500k settlement on booze and prostitutes The story of how I got hit by a Dodge minivan and pissed away 500k on booze, whores, and designer furniture in an epic adventure.
10 great educational video games for history buffs Jokes about Battlefield's wokified WWI soldiers aside; for today's games, historical authenticity is a selling point. Learning has become fun.
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10 spectacular Darwin Awards of the medieval age The Darwin Awards are annual and don't concern themselves with historical (ig)noble sacrifices. Let's correct that injustice.
The Darwin Awards were created in the 1980s to honor those individuals who made the ultimate sacrifice to protect humanity’s gene pool. That is, they died in such an extraordinarily idiotic manner that their deaths actually significantly raised the quality of the DNA passed on to the next generation – as per Charles Darwin’s theories on natural selection. But the Darwin Awards are annual, only concerning themselves with candidates who have expired within the last year. This leaves a vast array of figures throughout history who have gone unrecognized for their (ig)noble sacrifice. This hardly seems fair. Of course, there’s a lot of history to cover, so in the interests…
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6 World Wars you’ve probably never heard of Why they happened and why they were forgotten.
Too freaky to fake? 5 legendary TV curses One might be tempted to dismiss this as the inevitable result of an industry that attracts famewhores and the mentally ill. Then again...
7 hilariously stupid self-defense systems that will get you killed dead As long as there’s an Internet, there’ll be people utterly incapable of defending themselves – especially against people saying “Buy this, it’ll totally help you defend yourself!”
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6 World Wars you’ve probably never heard of Why they happened and why they were forgotten.
The War of the Sixth Coalition (1812–1814) In the War of the Sixth Coalition (March 1813 – May 1814), a coalition of Austria, Prussia, Russia, the United Kingdom, Portugal, Sweden, Spain and a number of German States defeated France and drove Napoleon into exile on Elba. After the disastrous French invasion of Russia of 1812 in which they had been forced to support France, Prussia and Austria joined Russia, the United Kingdom, Sweden, Portugal and the rebels in Spain who were already at war with France. The War of the Sixth Coalition saw major battles at Lützen, Bautzen, Dresden, and Leipzig. Ultimately, Napoleon’s earlier setbacks in Russia and Germany proved to…
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The (many) unsexy reasons you would never want to be a male porn star Getting paid to have sex on camera with hot girls is wildly overrated, and we’ll tell you why.
10 mysterious caves and tunnels nobody can explain Ancient goblin caves, underground pyramid secrets, Victorian crime dens, and even Satanic tunnels under a preschool. Let's go cavin'.
Why Hollywood gets World War II so wrong Hollywood liberals see World War II as the last morally unquestionable war but so often get their facts wrong.
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Why Hollywood gets World War II so wrong Hollywood liberals see World War II as the last morally unquestionable war but so often get their facts wrong.
While only 130 movies have been made about World War I, there have been 1,300 made about the World War II. Hollywood liberals see it as the last morally unquestionable war, and so are keen to return to it again and again, replete with its feel-good factor. Two of the most extraordinary episodes from WWII are to be released as new movies, which should fill historians and movie buffs with a mixture of delight and trepidation. The first is the daring killing of SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich in May 1942 on a hairpin bend on his daily journey to Prague Castle by the heroic Czech sergeants Jan Kubis and Jozef Gabcik.…
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Cruel and unusual: history’s most disturbing medical treatments Let's be grateful for how far healthcare has come.
5 reasons Santa Claus is clearly a villain When you take an investigative lens to his seemingly flawless image you find more than a few bone-chilling pieces of evidence to the contrary.
Vampires have nothing on the sinister blood-drinking fairies who inspired them Long before Dracula ever hit the shelves, Scottish folklore painted the first image of a vampire-like creature and it was terrifying.
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How I survived a year of SHTF in 90s Bosnia No electricity, no food, no running water, no law. In a now legendary forum thread, a user named Selco tells preppers about his experiences and what he and his family did to stay alive.
In September of 2011, a user named selco joined the forums at SurvivalistBoards.com and posted “my shtf expirience-wartime,” a thread that would since become legendary in survivalist communities and beyond – in fact, you frequently see people reference it to this day in communities like 4chan and reddit. In it, Selco details his experience of living in a besieged Bosnian town of 50 to 60k people during the Bosnian War (1992-1995). The siege took away everything modern humans take for granted and tested with extreme brutality Selco’s and his community’s ability to survive. But what is so interesting about this war story is that it was told to a group…
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10 absurd inventions that prove you should never drink while inventing These are all real inventions and the illustrations are taken directly from their official patents.
11 unintentionally funny local TV commercials Whether it’s poor acting or ridiculous dialogue, local commercials are sometimes so bad they are unintentionally hilarious.
The weird underbelly of Texas: 10 of the Lone Star State’s oddest sights Everybody's heading to Texas these days. Make sure you experience these weird places with unlikely histories and even weirder people.
