Uncle Scoopy's world-weary musings about naked celebrities, sports, humor and other important, manly things.
This was supposedly assembled with objective data from 23andMe.
Frankly, this smells like some bullshit to me. The women of Colombia are in the “large” category, while Ecuador’s belles are in the “small” range. That imaginary line between the two countries must be powerful!
Bolivia, not so far away, fell into the “very small” category with some Asian nations.
I won’t say these categorizations can’t be true, because stranger things are true, but they don’t seem likely.
These are always fun to read about, although hellish to live through.
You can’t really quantify insanity, but these were some loonies, to be sure. Were they crazier than Vlad Tepes, Olga of Kiev, The Zhengde Emperor, Qin Shi Huang, Erik the allegedly 14th, etc? I don’t know how to measure that.
As usual in lists like these, there are failures in fact-checking.
Here are two examples that I know off the top of my head (suggesting that there are many others that would be noticed by professional historians, or with some research):
Caligula’s famous horse was named Incitatus, not Invictus
“Little Boots” threatened to make the horse a senator or consul, but never followed through, perhaps because death intervened (per Cassius Dio), or perhaps because he was just taunting the senators and never intended to do it. Caligula did pamper the horse outrageously. Historian Aloys Winterling, author of “Caligula: A Biography,” argues that insanity isn’t the only logical explanation for such behavior. Winterling suggests that many of the emperor’s more outrageous shenanigans, including his treatment of Incitatus, may have been designed to humiliate the senators and other aristocrats. By threatening to bestow a high public office on his horse, Caligula aimed to show the elites that their work was so meaningless an animal could do it.
Promoted from the comment area.
Comment:
I’m not buying the “testing of a bullet proof vest”. A bullet can still break ribs from the force. You wouldn’t just have a dude shooting you from ten feet away. Like, maybe it was a marketing gimmick “test”.
Response (expanded):
It’s fair to say it was a marketing gimmick, but the photo is real, and so is the incident. The photo is found in the Library of Congress, labeled Sept. 13, 1923. The photo shows an employee of the Protective Garment Corp named W.H. Murphy demonstrating his company’s product. The shooter, Joseph Stehlin, also an employee of that corporation, fired two shots.
The incident was covered by a local D.C. newspaper. Murphy and Stehlin also staged a duel at point-blank range, from which they emerged unscathed. On September 13, the evening newspaper ran a photo of that encounter, which had taken place that same morning in Potomac Park, so the LOC seems to have its facts straight.
After that demonstration, Murphy allowed a uniformed policeman named O.W. Reese to fire one shot from an even shorter distance.
Sergeant Reese was not part of the staged demonstration, and used his own service revolver, so there could have been no trickery involving blanks or fake pistols. Murphy presented Reese with his own bullet, suitably flattened.
==============
There are other pictures available of men being shot from still shorter distances. To demonstrate his own patented vest, an inventor named Leo Krause would let people shoot him from inches away. He allegedly was shot 4,000 times without being injured. I hope he sold a lot of vests.
Not only would I not volunteer for Leo’s job, I would even have been afraid to be the shooter. I don’t know the physics of those vests, but I’d be worried about the bullet or fragments ricocheting back at me. Of course, my cowardice is legendary (I euphemistically refer to it as “prudence”).
Here is an interesting article from Atlas Obscura: “The Story Behind the Bulletproof Photo Craze. Men shot each other all the time, it seems, for publicity photos in the 1920s.”
The offending beer was called “thin, flavorless, and odd smelling.”
So it’s sort of like the Macaulay Culkin of beers.
Anheuser-Busch pulled nine of the bottom sixteen spots, while Miller took four more of those places.
I was beginning to wonder why none of mine are ever answered. Man, God is strict
— and so specific.
As Latka might say, heaven is a tough town.
Also:
Dog walking is a clear crime. The bans include both dog walking and driving with dogs.
If I lived there, I would pretty much be the Al Capone of Iran. Based on their rules, I’ve committed five to ten dog-related crimes per day since I was a child. (And probably at least a dozen daily non-canine crimes.)
And the worst part is that I can’t even pray for forgiveness because of that dog hair rule.
I like the list, but I have two comments:
1. Yes, that is the first Ronald McDonald (I just realized that his original nose was a cup), but the article failed to note that the part was then played by Willard Scott, future celebrity weather reporter.
Man, those french fries look gnarly. The food may not have improved since then, but the food photography definitely has.
Sidebar: When I worked at McDs in the 1960s, we used to receive deliveries of potatoes that needed to be peeled, washed and shaped in the rear sinks. Today the restaurants receive their french fries pre-cut, in a frozen and partially cooked state, from a central processing plant.
2. That is a picture of a B-29, but it’s not a picture of the Enola Gay dropping the atomic bomb. How could it be? First, the picture was taken from another plane at a higher altitude. No such observers existed over Hiroshima that day. Second, the explosion beneath it was obviously from a bomb dropped earlier by another plane in front of the pictured one. Third, the Enola Gay didn’t have a damaged engine.
It’s an official Army Air photo, and was described by the Associated Press as follows:
Official 21st Bomber Command photo, with its No. 3 engine out, this Tinian-based U.S. Army Air Forces B-29 Superfortress continues its bombing run over Osaka, Japan, on June 1, 1945.
That assault on Osaka was quite a raid.
From Wikipedia:
On the first day of June, 521 B-29s escorted by 148 P-51s were dispatched in a daylight raid against Osaka. While en route to the city the P-51D Mustangs flew through thick clouds, and 27 of the fighters were destroyed in collisions. Nevertheless, 458 heavy bombers and 27 P-51s reached the city
Everyone knows at least a little bit about the atomic bombings, but the pre-atomic air raids of Japan are really only remembered by history buffs these days, even though the major Japanese cities had been bombarded for months before Hiroshima, with vast sections devastated by incendiary and other bombs. The Japanese estimated that the firebombing of Tokyo alone killed 105,000 people in one night. That’s more than the first-day deaths at Hiroshima, and more than the total number of deaths attributed to the atomic bomb that hit Nagasaki.
The red Hyundai Elantra pulled up just behind and to the right of a United Airlines jet parked at Terminal 1, Concourse C, around midday on May 17, ultimately stopping alongside the jet.
I decided to fact-check one of the most incredible stories on the list, that of Rukhsana Kausar, the farmer’s daughter who killed a notorious terrorist and drove off his cell.
While some of the details are exaggerated, the story is essentially true. She attacked the terrorist with an axe, then grabbed his gun and killed him, whereupon she and her brother drove off the terrorist’s gang.
One of the other women on the list, Lyudmila Pavlichenko, was well known even on our side of the Atlantic for her heroism against the Nazis. Woody Guthrie wrote a song about her.
“I no longer love Tesler”
Bad break-up of the day:
Wait! I’ve seen this movie already –
Steven Colbert pointed out: “I’m starting to worry that two narcissistic megalomaniacs with a total inability to see value in other humans might have a hard time making friends”
This one is not a joke: Trump suggested cutting all of Elon’s government contracts, without thinking that Elon is basically America’s space program. Elon promptly reminded him of that fact by saying he could decommission the Dragon spacecraft, which would basically strand everyone in the International Space Station.
