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TehBamski@lemmy.world to Asklemmy@lemmy.ml · 1 year ago

What ridiculous history fact is your favorite?

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What ridiculous history fact is your favorite?

TehBamski@lemmy.world to Asklemmy@lemmy.ml · 1 year ago
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  • pelespirit@sh.itjust.works
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    1 year ago

    That one of the US presidents died from eating too many cherries.

    https://www.grunge.com/630116/how-cherries-are-tied-to-president-zachary-taylors-death/

  • RandomVideos@programming.dev
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    1 year ago

    A double agent was so good, he won medals from both the UK and Germany during WW2

    • cynar@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      The fact they passed on legit information on d day, is still mind blowing. They relied on delays on the German side to make the information out of date by the time it would arrive. The German radio operator not being on station to receive it just made it funnier.

  • Elaine Cortez@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    Australia started a war with emus and lost

    • ASeriesOfPoorChoices@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      and the movie just came out.

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9uI9IjmZ93M

  • ShaunaTheDead@fedia.io
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    1 year ago

    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

    • CaptainBasculin@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • ShaunaTheDead@fedia.io
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        1 year ago

        Wow that’s interesting! Gotta be at least in the running for the rarest Linux distro ever

        • CaptainBasculin@lemmy.ml
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          1 year ago

          There exists state sponsored Linux distros for various reasons. As far as i can recall China, India and Turkey has their distros available publically. I also remember reading about a distro Russia was working on, but I don’t remember what happened to it. Could be a project to use internally by Russian govt.

      • theshatterstone54@feddit.uk
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        1 year ago

        Report to the FSF so they can help you sue North Korea.

  • LeadersAtWork@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • TehBamski@lemmy.worldOP
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      1 year ago

      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.

    • tamal3@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Upvoted bc i want someone to find and share it.

      • LeadersAtWork@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Good luck. It wasn’t a post, it was a top level comment and I have a dim memory of it only being slightly related to the post topic.

  • raoul@lemmy.sdf.org
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    1 year ago

    Napoleon’s penis

    • NickwithaC@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      … Whyyyyy?!

    • hungryphrog@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      1 year ago

      W H A T

    • QuarterSwede@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Risky click but worth it.

  • call_me_xale@lemmy.zip
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    1 year ago

    San Francisco had an emperor.

    (He even suggested the construction of a bridge or tunnel between San Francisco and Oakland on the other side of the bay, predicting the existence of the Bay Bridge and Transbay Tube!)

    • HobbitFoot @thelemmy.club
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      1 year ago

      And the city just humored him.

    • Notyou@sopuli.xyz
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      1 year ago

      Hey, that dude was in West of Loathing. Now I know he was a real dude.

  • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • bionicjoey@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      I mean once it’s happened twice it must become a cultural thing so the third one is inevitable

      • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
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        1 year ago

        True!

    • tamal3@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      One started the 48 years war! I remember that from highschool. What were the other two?

  • BlowMe@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Rasputin having such a massive cock that Boney M had to made a song about it.

    • Bhaelfur@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      But the ladies begged, “Don’t you try to do it, please!”

  • Wugmeister@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    1 year ago

    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 The mighty horseman Onfim on his steed. who hunted down his teacher, who was a horrible monster Onfim and several other horsemen chase down the evil Writing Teacher. 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.

    • MonkderDritte@feddit.de
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      1 year ago

      Teacher has threw it on the trash. 😂

      • Wugmeister@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        1 year ago

        Imagine how his teacher feels. The little shit doodles all through his class, and who do we build a statue of? The kid‽

    • hungryphrog@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      1 year ago

      I bet this was the medieval version of Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes

    • SilentStorms@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      1 year ago

      These don’t look too dissimilar to things I’d doodle when I was 6. Interesting how kids always kinda draw the same.

      • cynar@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        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.

  • breckenedge@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Germany could have disavowed the Zimmerman Telegram and avoided or postponed the U.S. entering The Great War, but they fucking owned that shit.

  • The Infinite Nematode@feddit.uk
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    1 year ago

    Dinosaurs existed on the other side of the galaxy!

    As in, it was so long ago that Earth has done half of a great cycle since then.

    • AdNecrias@lemmy.pt
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      1 year ago

      Was finding the number odd (expecting a longer orbit) but looks like the solar system has already orbited the center of the milky way 18 to 20 times. Imagine that much change in earth in 20 years.

  • Thavron@lemmy.ca
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    1 year ago

    “Mad” Jack Churchill, who fought in the Second World War with a longbow, a basket-hilted Scottish broadsword, and a set of bagpipes.

    • Lad@reddthat.com
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      2 months ago

      deleted by creator

      • FippleStone@aussie.zone
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        1 year ago

        Allegedly German soldiers said that they didn’t shoot him because they assumed he’d lost his mind, and took pity on him

    • Captain Aggravated@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      And after the war he went on to become an early pioneer in surfing!

    • Random Dent@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      The only confirmed bow and arrow kill of WW2!

  • kbin_space_program@kbin.run
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    1 year ago

    End of the bronze age. Have a set of letters between citystate rulers, one writing that help is urgently needed as seaborne invaders have been spotted nearby and his military is off with the hittite empire.

    The response back, in modern slang amounts to “lol ur fucked.”

    • ArcticPrincess@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      Sounds amazing. Could you provide a link or at least enough names that I can google it?

      • callouscomic@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        Appears to be referencing this story:

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Bronze_Age_collapse#:~:text=In response to a plea for assistance from the king of Alasiya

      • kbin_space_program@kbin.run
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        1 year ago

        Its from the book 1176 BC by Eric H Cline.

  • callouscomic@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    A dude had heard about some other kind of god, and so he randomly looked up at the sky and basically said “if you let me win this battle, I will convert my entire country”…

    …and he won, and so Roman Catholicism was born cause he said so.

    Later, some dude was like “screw your catholicism, I don’t like my wife any more, I’ll go make my own church with hookers and blow and divorce my wife,” and so the Church of England was made cause he said so.

    I may have oversimplified these stories but pretty sure that’s about it.

    • Nis@feddit.dk
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      1 year ago

      Your version makes more sense 😃

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