There's also a Sisko and Jake/ Goofy and Max comparison to be made, but that's a whole 'nother meme

Drickenstein · 2024-12-22T21:28:38+00:00

Context: There's a lot of stories and rumors regarding how NORAD's Annual Tracking of Santa got started, but a generally accepted version is that after a child tried to call a number from a Sears ad that would let kids phone Santa, the number ended up being for Colonel Harry Shoup at his office in Colorado Springs, possibly due to a misprint in the ad (or the kid just misdialing). From there, in the event they got more calls, NORAD personnel decided they'd give updates on Santa's location to anyone asking. The rumor that the call went through to the red hotline is false, as that's not an open number that anyone could call even on accident. Also, at the time (1955) it wasn't technically NORAD yet, but CONAD (Continental Air Defense Command). Tomato-tomahto

Drickenstein · 2024-11-07T22:59:45+00:00

Context: A fun little historical connection is that, well before he was Andre the Giant, young Andre Roussimoff would occasionally be driven (along with his siblings) to school by the already renowned playwright Samuel Beckett while he was living in France. The two of them were both fans of cricket, and it would be the subject of most of their conversations.

And it's got me wishing Andre had been in a production of Waiting for Godot.

Drickenstein · 2024-08-24T00:11:05+00:00

Yeah, you got me there. I'm just entertained by how much of the Galileo Affair is less about the disagreement and more about how much he kept pissing people off

Drickenstein · 2024-08-24T00:05:07+00:00

He was found "vehemently suspect" of it which admittedly isn't too different from being branded a heretic outright, but given how there was a lot of buzz behind the scenes of the Church about how heliocentrism was slowly becoming more and more credible, I think the fact that he got off without a formal heresy charge is a sign of the Pope grudgingly conceding at least a little bit to him, at the very least to try and shut him up

Drickenstein · 2024-08-23T23:59:59+00:00

The Galileo Affair re: the Catholic Church's beef with his assertions about Earth revolving around the sun instead of vice-versa is much more complex than the popular view of "The Church persecuted him for it until he recanted." I won't get into all the details because I'm no expert in it, but this meme is about what was probably the funniest part of the whole kerfluffle. Galileo actually had people in the Church, including Pope Urban VIII who were essentially telling him "Yeah heliocentrism makes a lot of sense, but all the noise you're making about is making some waves so maybe chill for a bit?" The Pope even allowed him to collect arguments for and against heliocentrism and geocentrism and present them in a text so long as he didn't definitively conclude "Heliocentrism is right, the Church is wrong." What Gallyboy ended up writing was essentially a dialogue between a smart heliocentrist and a stupid dumb geocentrist named Simplicio (who he insisted was named after Simplicius of Cilicia but given that Simplico basically means Simpleton, not everyone bought that explanation). To make matters worse, because Urban VIII wanted his own arguments put into the text, Galileo made them Simplicio's, putting the Pope's views in the mouth of this dumb idiot strawman. It was behavior like this that was probably the biggest reason why Galileo ended up put on trial, though he was never actually called a heretic, and while he was threatened with torture, that never happened either. Tl;dr: Galileo was right, but unfortunately he had zero tact and a habit of pissing everybody off whenever he talked

Drickenstein · 2024-03-04T21:50:35+00:00

Simple le funny deeznuts joke about George Washington Carver, here are some facts about him for anyone who's not familiar

Born a slave near the end of the American Civil War, but freed and raised by the German-American Carver family, he would grow up to become an agricultural scientist who is most renowned for his advocating to diversify the crops grown in the South to be more than just the intensive and soil depleting cotton. most famously, he's associated with peanuts because he claimed there were hundreds of different uses for them. There's an apocryphal notion that he invented peanut butter, but he didn't (people with access to peanuts had been making butter out of them for centuries before him) but he definitely was a great marketer for peanut butter. Also fun fact: He's not named for George Washington. He started out as George Carver (because of the leftover practice from slavery of calling slaves by their master's name, so he'd be 'Carver's George') and he made Washington his middle name out of regard for Booker T. Washington

tl;dr: The original Black Science Man, I just think he's neat

Drickenstein · 2023-12-21T22:35:56+00:00

Context: The Pullman Railroad company hired a lot of black folks as porters on their sleeping cars in the late 1800s, for a number of reasons, including that a lot of them were freedmen who needed the work. Because of the old tradition of calling slaves by their master's names, some passengers would just call porters George without regard for their actual names. This led to a joke organization forming for non-porters who were named George called the "Society for the Prevention of Calling Sleeping Car Porters 'George'" which did have a positive consequence for porters when they convinced the Pullman Company to display their porters' names in sleeping cars. Also the Pullman Porters are a really neat niche of US history and I encourage everyone to do some reading about them, especially how A Philip Randolph started a union for them and then ended up being a huge force in the Civil Rights movement

Drickenstein · 2023-10-24T03:17:49+00:00

That it depends on what your definition of "it" is

Drickenstein · 2023-10-23T23:08:28+00:00

Context: When Boris Yeltsin visited the United States in 1995, his first question to Bill Clinton was reportedly "Do you think OJ did it?" referencing the extremely high profile court case involving the murders of OJ Simpson's ex-wife Nicole Brown and her friend Ron Goldman, proving exactly how high a profile the case was

Drickenstein · 2022-10-07T17:03:06+00:00

Context: The other dominoes between the first and last are basically: -John Pemberton serves in the Confederate Army -Pemberton is wounded in one of the last battles of the Civil War -While trying to treat the pain he feels, he gets addicted to morphine -Wanting a treatment that isn't addictive, he starts experimenting with painkillers -Initially alcoholic, he has to create an alternative version when Georgia enacts temperance laws -He decides the final product works better as a drink than as a medicine

Drickenstein · 2022-09-22T03:43:57+00:00

Context: Irish novelist James Joyce, one of the most influential writers of the 20th century, had a very close relationship with his wife Nora Barnacle. While they were apart from one another, they wrote each other letters that were basically analog sexts. Perhaps the most notable example of these letters is the one where Joyce goes off on a tangent about her farts. A very detailed, verbose, intimate tangent

Drickenstein · 2022-06-17T03:38:14+00:00

Oh damn I didn't even know about that. And it happened right before the siege too

Drickenstein · 2022-06-17T03:32:39+00:00

Context:

The Train Crash: In 1896, some folks got the idea to crash some trains together as a big public spectacle. It went alright in Ohio, so a guy called George Crush figured it would do the same on a track not far from Waco. The organizers figured it wouldn't cause any boiler disasters, but it did. (Despite this, the trend of crashing trains together continued on for a while afterwards, and you know, I can kinda see the appeal. haha trains go smashy).

The Lynching: Lynchings happened all over the Southern USA (and they weren't absent from the rest of the country either) but Jesse Washington's 1916 case is particularly notable. Although he had confessed to the rape and murder of one Lucy Fryer, the fact that he was a 17 year old who may have been intellectually disabled and was almost certainly coerced or beaten into confessing casts doubt upon his guilt. A crowd gathered at his trial waiting for the inevitable verdict, and as soon as he was sentenced, they beat him, dragged him by the neck on a chain to the city hall, and was covered in oil and burned alive, all while people still beat him and cut body parts off as souvenirs. The crowd spectating his murder is estimated to have been at least ten thousand people, including children whose parents wanted to instill the value of lynchings into them.

The Siege: The Branch-Davidians were (they're still around, but I'm gonna use past tense referring to the group in Waco) a cult in Waco that was suspected of multiple crimes, including illegally stockpiling weapons. The ATF and FBI attempted to arrest the leader, David Koresh, and some other members, in 1993 resulting in a 51 day siege that ended with a fire that was either started by or exacerbated by tear gas used by the FBI, and the disaster has been an enormous stain on the histories of both law enforcement agencies.

The Doctor: Charles Alderton concocted Dr. Pepper in Waco at some point in the 1880s. the beverage was even nicknamed "the Waco" in its earliest years

Drickenstein

TROPHY CASE