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[Nattfare]

Example: Aeschylus was an Ancient Greek playwright. He is referred to as the father of tragedy but it is believed that this refers instead to his form of death. He was killed on a bright sunny day during which the sheen from his balding head demonstrated a sufficiently hard surface to a passing eagle who was clasping a tortoise. The eagle dropped the tortoise on poor Aeschy's head killing him and the tortoise. 
 
This is a problematic rendition of history as it voids the literary meaning of tragedy but it is an example of bizarre that I would love to know more about so post your weird history.
 
Please please please (I will sacrifice my first born for) no political commentary. Plz

This happens in Terry Pratchett's "Small Gods" too.

[Fiddles dee dee]

This happens in Terry Pratchett's "Small Gods" too.

 

Pratchett has a heap of references to the Classical period in Discworld, I love re-reading and finding more of them. His works are playgrounds for me. 

[Eternal Phoenix]

Vlad the Impaler ate people

 

Never heard that before. He was rumoured to drink people's blood and he is where the inspiration for Dracula came from.

[Nattfare]

Never heard that before. He was rumoured to drink people's blood and he is where the inspiration for Dracula came from.

He also fought back the Turks at one point and got exiled after I think.

[Fiddles dee dee]

"I tell you, Wellington is a bad general, the English are bad soldiers; we will settle the matter before lunch time." - Napoleon at the battle of Waterloo.

 

Coincidentally, the battler of Waterloo is incorrectly named. The battle occured at Plancenoit which is about 4 miles from Waterloo. 

[Beerfish]

Example: Aeschylus was an Ancient Greek playwright. He is referred to as the father of tragedy but it is believed that this refers instead to his form of death. He was killed on a bright sunny day during which the sheen from his balding head demonstrated a sufficiently hard surface to a passing eagle who was clasping a tortoise. The eagle dropped the tortoise on poor Aeschy's head killing him and the tortoise. 

 

This is a problematic rendition of history as it voids the literary meaning of tragedy but it is an example of bizarre that I would love to know more about so post your weird history.

 

Please please please (I will sacrifice my first born for) no political commentary. Plz

I was wondering why those damn Eagles keep dropping tortoises on my head!

[Beerfish]

Son your puns must improve!

 

Another example is that in an attempt to deter Romans from invading, Carthaginians catapulted live snakes at Roman ships. 

I see a movie in the works starring Sameual L. Jackson for that one.

[Beerfish]

Canada’s name comes from a misunderstanding between Jacques Cartier and some Iroquois youth who were pointing out a village (for which they used the word “Kanata”). They were actually trying to identify the small area which is present day Quebec City, but Cartier used the similar-sounding word “Canada” to refer to the whole area

[Aimi]

"I tell you, Wellington is a bad general, the English are bad soldiers; we will settle the matter before lunch time." - Napoleon at the battle of Waterloo.
 
Coincidentally, the battler of Waterloo is incorrectly named. The battle occured at Plancenoit which is about 4 miles from Waterloo.

 
Wellington was obnoxious about naming battles. The story goes that he stayed at Waterloo the night before and named it after that, as was his custom.

It would've been much better, in my opinion, to go with the Prussian name for the battle. The role that Wellington and the British played is well known; his Dutch and Belgian troops' role is less well known, and the role of Prussian forces is something that most British, given their modern antipathy to Germans, would much rather forget. But it's incontestably true that Wellington's army only managed to hold its ground against the French because the Prussians marched to the sound of the guns and joined the fight, even at the cost of abandoning part of their army. Napoleon's final defeat came about because the Allies worked together: Britain, Prussia, and the Netherlands.

(There are some very snide comments I could make about Wellington's own generalship and his decided lack of interest in making the same sorts of sacrifices for his allies, but let that go.)

Appropriately enough, the battle was not too far away from the inn of La Belle Alliance, where Napoleon kept his headquarters. Blücher, the Prussian commander, thought that it was an appropriate way to celebrate the allied victory, and the battle was in fact known as Belle Alliance in Germany for decades. Clausewitz, who was a staff officer in the Prussian III Corps during the campaign, wrote it up as the Battle of Belle Alliance in Vom Kriege. But the British successfully popularized Waterloo instead, and the battle has gone down in popular memory largely as a victory won by the British - or even by the English - over the French.

You could make a whole thread about embarrassingly ironic things said by generals before battles or campaigns, though.

Like Erich Ludendorff, the operations chief for the German army late in the Great War, who planned the spring 1918 offensives. At a planning session beforehand, he said, "Don't talk to me about 'operations'. We'll just blow a hole in the middle. The rest will follow of its own accord." Unfortunately, that ended up being precisely the problem. Ludendorff's army managed to blow several holes in the middle of the Entente's lines, but because of poor operational planning and Ludendorff's propensity to try to seize whatever objective he fancied at the time, the German army repeatedly missed chances to put the campaign away for good, and eventually lost out to the Entente.

[mybudgee]

I  this thread 

 

[Das Tentakel]

Wellington was obnoxious about naming battles. The story goes that he stayed at Waterloo the night before and named it after that, as was his custom.

It would've been much better, in my opinion, to go with the Prussian name for the battle. The role that Wellington and the British played is well known; his Dutch and Belgian troops' role is less well known, and the role of Prussian forces is something that most British, given their modern antipathy to Germans, would much rather forget. But it's incontestably true that Wellington's army only managed to hold its ground against the French because the Prussians marched to the sound of the guns and joined the fight, even at the cost of abandoning part of their army. Napoleon's final defeat came about because the Allies worked together: Britain, Prussia, and the Netherlands.

(There are some very snide comments I could make about Wellington's own generalship and his decided lack of interest in making the same sorts of sacrifices for his allies, but let that go.)

Appropriately enough, the battle was not too far away from the inn of La Belle Alliance, where Napoleon kept his headquarters. Blücher, the Prussian commander, thought that it was an appropriate way to celebrate the allied victory, and the battle was in fact known as Belle Alliance in Germany for decades. Clausewitz, who was a staff officer in the Prussian III Corps during the campaign, wrote it up as the Battle of Belle Alliance in Vom Kriege. But the British successfully popularized Waterloo instead, and the battle has gone down in popular memory largely as a victory won by the British - or even by the English - over the French.

To some extent events in the 20th century, mainly WWI and II, are to blame - they left Germany discredited and led to Anglo-American dominance in the western world. Alternative accounts lost out, or became somewhat culturally isolated (the French views, for instance).
You can also trace this in Dutch popular views on Waterloo - before World War I the role of the Prussians was regarded as pretty crucial, later it became more of a Wellington versus Napoleon thing - even the Dutch-Belgian role became quasi-forgotten.

Regarding British ' scholarship' (Siborne et al) concerning Waterloo, try starting a discussion with a Dutch or Belgian (usually Flemish) Napoleonic historian or re-enactor, and take pleeeeeeeeenty of time .

[Undead Han]

 

 

Coincidentally, the battler of Waterloo is incorrectly named. The battle occured at Plancenoit which is about 4 miles from Waterloo. 

 

The Battle of Bunker Hill during the American Revolution has a similar problem.

 

The battle was mostly fought on Breed's Hill, which is the next hill over from Bunker Hill. 

[Jorji Costava]

Two entirely unrelated bits:

 

1. Immanuel Kant is generally regarded as one of the greatest philosophers who ever lived, but he was also possibly the most boring human being to have ever lived. He never left his home town of Königsberg, Germany, and never married. It was said that residents could set their clocks to when he would take his morning walks, so rote and monotonous was his routine. Kant only ever skipped his morning walks when when he was reading Rousseau's Émile.

 

2. Taking a complete left turn, the First and Second Liberian Civil Wars (which are heavily intertwined with the Sierra Leone Civil War) are among the most strange (and also horrifying) conflicts ever to have taken place. After the first Civil War, Charles Taylor, running on the campaign slogan "He killed my ma, he killed my pa, but I'll still vote for him," became the president of Liberia. He is now imprisoned for life at the Hague for his complicity in war crimes that took place both in Liberia and in Sierra Leone.

 

It was also common during these wars for the various warlords to take on odd pen names, like "General Bin Laden," "General Rambo," "General Butt Naked," etc. These names were used to intimidate their enemies, and also make it hard to identify them after the conflicts had ended. Cannibalism was also not uncommon during these conflicts, partly as a means of intimidation, partly as a result of ritualistic beliefs about the eating of flesh being a way to acquire supernatural powers, and perhaps partly due just to the scarcity of food.

[Lunch Box1912]

Creation Myth
Xerox PARC, Apple, and the truth about innovation.

BY MALCOLM GLADWELL

The mouse was conceived by the computer scientist Douglas Engelbart, developed by Xerox PARC, and made marketable by Apple.
CREDIT PAUL ROGERS
In late 1979, a twenty-four-year-old entrepreneur paid a visit to a research center in Silicon Valley called Xerox PARC. He was the co-founder of a small computer startup down the road, in Cupertino. His name was Steve Jobs.

Xerox PARC was the innovation arm of the Xerox Corporation. It was, and remains, on Coyote Hill Road, in Palo Alto, nestled in the foothills on the edge of town, in a long, low concrete building, with enormous terraces looking out over the jewels of Silicon Valley. To the northwest was Stanford University’s Hoover Tower. To the north was Hewlett-Packard’s sprawling campus. All around were scores of the other chip designers, software firms, venture capitalists, and hardware-makers. A visitor to PARC, taking in that view, could easily imagine that it was the computer world’s castle, lording over the valley below—and, at the time, this wasn’t far from the truth. In 1970, Xerox had assembled the world’s greatest computer engineers and programmers, and for the next ten years they had an unparalleled run of innovation and invention. If you were obsessed with the future in the seventies, you were obsessed with Xerox PARC—which was why the young Steve Jobs had driven to Coyote Hill Road.

Apple was already one of the hottest tech firms in the country. Everyone in the Valley wanted a piece of it. So Jobs proposed a deal: he would allow Xerox to buy a hundred thousand shares of his company for a million dollars—its highly anticipated I.P.O. was just a year away—if PARC would “open its kimono.” A lot of haggling ensued. Jobs was the fox, after all, and PARC was the henhouse. What would he be allowed to see? What wouldn’t he be allowed to see? Some at PARC thought that the whole idea was lunacy, but, in the end, Xerox went ahead with it. One PARC scientist recalls Jobs as “rambunctious”—a fresh-cheeked, caffeinated version of today’s austere digital emperor. He was given a couple of tours, and he ended up standing in front of a Xerox Alto, PARC’s prized personal computer.

An engineer named Larry Tesler conducted the demonstration. He moved the cursor across the screen with the aid of a “mouse.” Directing a conventional computer, in those days, meant typing in a command on the keyboard. Tesler just clicked on one of the icons on the screen. He opened and closed “windows,” deftly moving from one task to another. He wrote on an elegant word-processing program, and exchanged e-mails with other people at PARC, on the world’s first Ethernet network. Jobs had come with one of his software engineers, Bill Atkinson, and Atkinson moved in as close as he could, his nose almost touching the screen. “Jobs was pacing around the room, acting up the whole time,” Tesler recalled. “He was very excited. Then, when he began seeing the things I could do onscreen, he watched for about a minute and started jumping around the room, shouting, ‘Why aren’t you doing anything with this? This is the greatest thing. This is revolutionary!’ ”



Window based interface personal computer with a mouse and eithernet in 1979. Way to miss the boat Xerox.

[TheClonesLegacy]

While I'd like to talk about Caligulas war on the Sea.

There's not alot of evidence to support that actually happening (Though it's not out of the question. Caligula had problems)\\

 

I'll instead contribute The Great Emu War

Yes. Really.

[Das Tentakel]

Here’s a little tidbit of World War II history I read about long ago. For a long time I questioned its veracity, but recently I was able to read a relevant publication in the papers of the historical society of the town of Haaksbergen near the Dutch-German border.

 

Back in World War II, the Germans overran the Netherlands in 1940 while on their way to defeat the French and British forces. While convenient for the German army, it was a bit of a shock for the Dutch who, while not exactly fond of the Nazis, mostly regarded the Germans as more or less good neighbours and family, so to speak.

That sentiment was more or less reciprocated (in fact, the Nazis, while not saying so openly for diplomatic reasons, really considered the Dutch and the Flemings as Germans who had to be ‘gently coaxed back into the Reich’). One of the German acts to curry favour with their long-lost cousins was quickly releasing all the (circa 350,000) Dutch POW’s.

 

By 1943, however, the Germans were clearly beginning to lose the war. They needed manpower for their armies and replacement labour in their factories. So they announced that the former Dutch POW’s would be transported off to Germany to work there.

In may of 1943 this led to massive strikes in the Netherlands. One of the towns affected was the little border town of Haaksbergen, which had a significant textile industry.

 

Relations between Dutch and Deutsche had already soured, and there was no more talk of being ‘Mr. Nice Neighbourly Nazi Cousin’ on the German part. In the neighbouring region of Twente (north of Haaksbergen) they shot some workers pour encourager les autres.

 

So too in Haaksbergen; the town was a bit of a rural backwater, and the people there were still starting the strike as their colleagues further north had already stopped. A German police officer by name of Schatz (which can mean ‘honey/darling’ in German as well as – minus the Z – in Dutch) took it upon himself to break the strike swiftly and decisively. He went to Haaksbergen with his unit and ordered the director of the local textile factory to get everybody working again. The director was given a mere handful of hours to gather hundreds of workers who were scattered all over Haaksbergen and the surrounding countryside. The director got most of the people in time, but not everybody and Lieutenant Schatz (maybe the man was bothered by his ‘softie’ name?) decided to make an example and picked a number of men and girls at random from the assembled workers. The girls were released later in the evening and had to walk 20 km from the SS barracks in the frontier town of Glanerbrug to Haaksbergen, but the men were transported off to the city of Hengelo up north for ‘trial’. What happened next is a bit confusing, but en route the truck transporting the men stopped, the men were ordered out and most were shot in the street. Two men escaped, a 40 –year old father of six and a young man of 18.

The 40-year old guy later returned to work, worried that if he didn’t, his family would suffer reprisals. He was arrested and later ‘killed while trying to flee’. The young man went underground, survived the war and died at a reasonably old age in 1999.

 

Here’s the ironic part. The name of that lone survivor? Herman Göring…

[Dermain]

You're telling me that the Scottish DIDN'T moon the English?

 

You're telling me there was ACTUALLY A BRIDGE AT STIRLING?!

 

YOU'RE TELLING ME NOBODY CRIED "FREEEEDOOOOOOM?"

 

MY LIFE HAS BEEN A LIE!

 

Lindybeige has an entire ranting video (with poor audio due to it being shot outside) about the issue.

 

I found it quite amusing, but I haven't seen Braveheart (which is probably a good thing).

 

Did they even have Scottish accents in the film?

 

Here’s a little tidbit of World War II history I read about long ago. For a long time I questioned its veracity, but recently I was able to read a relevant publication in the papers of the historical society of the town of Haaksbergen near the Dutch-German border.

 

Back in World War II, the Germans overran the Netherlands in 1940 while on their way to defeat the French and British forces. While convenient for the German army, it was a bit of a shock for the Dutch who, while not exactly fond of the Nazis, mostly regarded the Germans as more or less good neighbours and family, so to speak.

That sentiment was more or less reciprocated (in fact, the Nazis, while not saying so openly for diplomatic reasons, really considered the Dutch and the Flemings as Germans who had to be ‘gently coaxed back into the Reich’). One of the German acts to curry favour with their long-lost cousins was quickly releasing all the (circa 350,000) Dutch POW’s.

 

By 1943, however, the Germans were clearly beginning to lose the war. They needed manpower for their armies and replacement labour in their factories. So they announced that the former Dutch POW’s would be transported off to Germany to work there.

In may of 1943 this led to massive strikes in the Netherlands. One of the towns affected was the little border town of Haaksbergen, which had a significant textile industry.

 

Relations between Dutch and Deutsche had already soured, and there was no more talk of being ‘Mr. Nice Neighbourly Nazi Cousin’ on the German part. In the neighbouring region of Twente (north of Haaksbergen) they shot some workers pour encourager les autres.

 

So too in Haaksbergen; the town was a bit of a rural backwater, and the people there were still starting the strike as their colleagues further north had already stopped. A German police officer by name of Schatz (which can mean ‘honey/darling’ in German as well as – minus the Z – in Dutch) took it upon himself to break the strike swiftly and decisively. He went to Haaksbergen with his unit and ordered the director of the local textile factory to get everybody working again. The director was given a mere handful of hours to gather hundreds of workers who were scattered all over Haaksbergen and the surrounding countryside. The director got most of the people in time, but not everybody and Lieutenant Schatz (maybe the man was bothered by his ‘softie’ name?) decided to make an example and picked a number of men and girls at random from the assembled workers. The girls were released later in the evening and had to walk 20 km from the SS barracks in the frontier town of Glanerbrug to Haaksbergen, but the men were transported off to the city of Hengelo up north for ‘trial’. What happened next is a bit confusing, but en route the truck transporting the men stopped, the men were ordered out and most were shot in the street. Two men escaped, a 40 –year old father of six and a young man of 18.

The 40-year old guy later returned to work, worried that if he didn’t, his family would suffer reprisals. He was arrested and later ‘killed while trying to flee’. The young man went underground, survived the war and died at a reasonably old age in 1999.

 

Here’s the ironic part. The name of that lone survivor? Herman Göring…

 

Ah, the "poor" Lieutenant must have been afraid of what would have happened if word spread that he killed Reichminister Herman Göring. Which is probably the only reason that Herman Göring was allowed to remain alive. He was probably allowed to escape after his identification was verified. If only more people shared the misfortune of sharing the names of prominent Nazi's during that time.

[Decepticon Leader Sully]

^ i can.

 

Ok

the Romans had a godess named calva.. the godess of balld women.

while male Baldness was considered a sideffect of brain death... sexists. lol.

 

US soldier Harry S Truman kept his battalion guns fireing till the last seconds of the 1st world war.

nearly 30 years later he was the US Presedent and ordered the Dropping or the bombs on Hiroshima.

it could be said he fired the last shots in both wars in a way.

 

Pirates of the Carabean character Barrbossa is based off two brothers 

Aruj and Kher-a-din Barrbossa who were both turkish Pirates. 

 

Thomas Jefferson, Jhon Adams and James Monroe all died on the 4th of july. 

[Decepticon Leader Sully]

Vlad the Impaler ate people

Actualy he ate while people died arround him.

one storry has a soldier vomiting due to the smell.. lord Tepesh had him impaled on a pike above the family.. as to avoid the smell.  

he did however feed children to there perents according to one sorce.

another has 3 monks being held captive.

each were starved and one by one they were taken before him and asked. 

"what will happen to me once i die?"

the 1st played to his ego and told him he would go to heven.. he was killed.

the 2nd angeraly yelled at him and cursed his name. he was impaled.

the 3rd.. was let go no one knows what he said. 

 

strangely there was a Romanian eurovision song contest entery about rasputin by Boney em in 1973.

[Beerfish]

The names of Popeye's four nephews are Pipeye, Peepeye, Pupeye, and Poopeye!

[Decepticon Leader Sully]

The names of Popeye's four nephews are Pipeye, Peepeye, Pupeye, and Poopeye!

His freind Wimpy was the inspiration for the burger chain.