Trivia Thread!

[Berzelmayr]

The names Ginsburg, Ginsburgh, Ginsberg, Ginzberg, Ginzburg and Gainsbourg all refer to the Swabian-Bavarian town Günzburg.

Günzburg (surname) - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[Erestor Arcamen]

What happened to the 5th?

Found this on Wikipedia: - content warning, Wikipedia has one disturbing image of the dead homeless guy

Green was convicted of attempted murder with a prison sentence of a minimum of 10 years,[11] while the other four accomplices were sentenced to death and were executed by electric chair at Sing Sing in Ossining, New York.

 

[Erestor Arcamen]

In the late 1880s, an unidentified young woman was pulled from the River Seine in Paris. A pathologist at the morgue was so struck by her peaceful expression that he made a plaster death mask of her face. The mask became a fashionable decoration in Parisian homes for decades. Then in 1958, when a Norwegian toymaker was asked to create the first CPR training mannequin, he used her face as the model. She became Resusci Anne, the most kissed face in history, pressed to the lips of hundreds of millions of people learning to save lives.

 

[Berzelmayr]

On 17 June 1939, the last public execution happened in France. Christopher Lee, who was then seventeen years old, witnessed the event. Nearly half a century later, he portrayed headsman Charles-Henri Sanson in a 1989 French TV drama about the French Revolution, in which his character made frequent use of the device.

Eugen Weidmann - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[Erestor Arcamen]

Edmund Kemper, the 6'9" "Co-ed Killer" who brutally murdered ten people (including his own grandparents and mother), spent years in prison recording thousands of hours of audiobooks for the blind.

He didn't just do it as a passing hobby. He was highly dedicated and became the director of the prison's "Volunteers of Vacaville" program. Over several decades, he recorded over 5,000 hours of literature. He narrated all kinds of books, from Pet Sematary and Star Wars to Flowers in the Attic.

Because he was highly intelligent and had a very deep, calm, articulate voice, he was incredibly popular among the visually impaired community. He actually received multiple awards for his work.

So there are thousands of people out there who grew up listening to a warm, soothing, fatherly voice reading them classic stories, completely unaware that the reader was a serial killer.

 

[Squint-eyed Southerner]

Well, everyone should have a hobby!

 

[Berzelmayr]

In 2012, French student Anaïs Bordier saw a YouTube video of an American actress, Samantha Futerman, who looked exactly like her.
Anaïs looked into it and found they had both been born in South Korea on the same day, in the same year, and in the same city.
The only difference was that Anaïs had been adopted by a family in France, while Samantha had been adopted by a family in the United States.
She reached out online, and the two eventually took a DNA test.
It confirmed they were identical twins, separated as babies and raised on opposite sides of the world without knowing the other existed.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twinsters

 

[Erestor Arcamen]

Carlos Kaiser had a professional football career in Brazil from the mid-1980s to the late 1990s, playing for clubs including Flamengo, Botafogo, and Fluminense. The twist: he almost never actually played. Kaiser was a con artist. He was handsome, charismatic, and a fixture of Rio's nightlife. He would get signed to clubs through connections and smooth talking, then fake injuries during training so he'd never have to appear in a match and reveal that he was terrible. When one manager finally forced him to come on as a substitute, Kaiser ran to the stands and started a fight with a fan so he'd be sent off before he had to touch the ball. He survived for over a decade this way.

 

[Erestor Arcamen]

In the court of Queen Elizabeth I, the Earl of Oxford accidentally let out a fart while bowing to the Queen. He was so mortified he left England and traveled abroad for seven years. When he finally returned, the Queen greeted him: "My lord, we had quite forgot the fart."

 

[Berzelmayr]

Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy was an extra in La révolution française, an international production in 1989 for the 200th anniversary of the Revolution.

 

[Erestor Arcamen]

In 1810, a 22-year-old London prankster named Theodore Hook bet a friend he could make any house the most talked-about address in the city. He spent six weeks sending thousands of letters summoning tradespeople and dignitaries to 54 Berners Street. On the appointed day, chimney sweeps arrived at dawn, followed by hundreds of coal wagons, bakers with wedding cakes, piano deliveries, the Governor of the Bank of England, the Duke of Gloucester, and the Lord Mayor in full regalia. Hook watched from a window across the street and was never caught.

 

[Deimos]

In 1810, a 22-year-old London prankster named Theodore Hook bet a friend he could make any house the most talked-about address in the city. He spent six weeks sending thousands of letters summoning tradespeople and dignitaries to 54 Berners Street. On the appointed day, chimney sweeps arrived at dawn, followed by hundreds of coal wagons, bakers with wedding cakes, piano deliveries, the Governor of the Bank of England, the Duke of Gloucester, and the Lord Mayor in full regalia. Hook watched from a window across the street and was never caught.

I would have put him in the stocks in the public square...

 

[Deimos]

Saw this on reddit Post about Serling's TZ series:

As Martin Grams relates in “The Twilight Zone: Unlocking the Door to a Television Classic”, Serling and his wife decided to celebrate the sale of TZ to CBS with a weekend in Vegas. Grams writes:
Carol had great luck at the tables and was winning. Rod, meanwhile, became completely hyper-focused on a single "one-armed bandit" (slot machine).
Serling spent roughly 60 straight minutes aggressively feeding coins into the machine, losing consistently. At around 3:00 AM, while standing at the machine, he realized how easily an obsession could consume someone who lacked his self-control.

"I got this idea about three o’clock in the morning in a Las Vegas gambling casino. I’d been about sixty minutes battling a one-armed bandit, and I got the feeling of what an extension of this kind of weakness might be to somebody a little different than I am … making an assumption, of course, that there is someone weaker than I in this nefarious area."

He went back to his room and wrote about his experience.
It would later become a teleplay and then finally the screenplay for the TZ episode "The Fever."

 

[Squint-eyed Southerner]

 

[Deimos]

View attachment 48600

Serendipity at its best 🙂

 

[Deimos]

I am a member of the National Association of Scholars (NAS).
Every month the NAS sends out a Newsletter.
In this month's Newsletter (among other newsworthy items):

"Daniella Santoro, an adjunct professor of anthropology at Tulane University, was cleaning up the leaves and overgrown vines in the backyard of her house in New Orleans, when she came across a square marble slab. It was engraved, which suggested it was a gravestone, but the engraving was in Latin.
Santoro turned to a colleague at Tulane . . . who translated the inscription, which begins "To the spirits of the dead . . ."
It was the marker of a Roman soldier, Sextus Congenius Verus, who died at age 42, 1900 years ago.

New Orleans is not well known as a first-century colony of the Roman Empire, so it seemed likely that the stone had traveled from Verus' resting place.

The good news spread, and museum authorities in Civitavecchia, Italy, recognized the marker as one that had gone missing from their collection in 1944.
The story appears to be that American G.I. , Charles Paddock Jr., looted it and brought it to New Orleans as war booty. It resided in a display cabinet for many years until a subsequent owner exiled it to the garden. The FBI is arranging its shipment home."

 

[Erestor Arcamen]

On May 9, 1864 during the Battle of Spotsylvania Court House, Major General John Sedgwick, commander of the Union Army's VI Corps, was directing the placement of an artillery battery. The battery and his staff came under fire from Confederate sharpshooters, and as they scattered Sedgwick said to them "What? Men dodging this way for single bullets? What will you do when they open fire along the whole line? I'm ashamed of you, dodging that way. They couldn't hit an elephant at this dist--" whereupon a Confederate bullet blasted through his left cheek and out the back of his head.

 

[Erurávennë]

Did you know that Rome was pronounced Room even up until the 1800s?

 

[Erestor Arcamen]

In regards to the number of combinations you can shuffle a standard deck of 52 playing cards (aka 52!):

Start by picking your favorite spot on the equator. You're going to walk around the world along the equator, but take a very leisurely pace of one step every billion years. The equatorial circumference of the Earth is 40,075,017 meters. Make sure to pack a deck of playing cards, so you can get in a few trillion hands of solitaire between steps. After you complete your round the world trip, remove one drop of water from the Pacific Ocean. Now do the same thing again: walk around the world at one billion years per step, removing one drop of water from the Pacific Ocean each time you circle the globe. The Pacific Ocean contains 707.6 million cubic kilometers of water. Continue until the ocean is empty. When it is, take one sheet of paper and place it flat on the ground. Now, fill the ocean back up and start the entire process all over again, adding a sheet of paper to the stack each time you’ve emptied the ocean.

Do this until the stack of paper reaches from the Earth to the Sun. Take a glance at the timer, you will see that the three left-most digits haven’t even changed. You still have 8.063e67 more seconds to go. 1 Astronomical Unit, the distance from the Earth to the Sun, is defined as 149,597,870.691 kilometers. So, take the stack of papers down and do it all over again. One thousand times more. Unfortunately, that still won’t do it. There are still more than 5.385e67 seconds remaining. You’re just about a third of the way done.

To pass the remaining time, start shuffling your deck of cards. Every billion years deal yourself a 5-card poker hand. Each time you get a royal flush, buy yourself a lottery ticket. A royal flush occurs in one out of every 649,740 hands. If that ticket wins the jackpot, throw a grain of sand into the Grand Canyon. Keep going and when you’ve filled up the canyon with sand, remove one ounce of rock from Mt. Everest. Now empty the canyon and start all over again. When you’ve levelled Mt. Everest, look at the timer, you still have 5.364e67 seconds remaining. Mt. Everest weighs about 357 trillion pounds. You barely made a dent. If you were to repeat this 255 times, you would still be looking at 3.024e64 seconds. The timer would finally reach zero sometime during your 256th attempt.

 

[Deimos]

We're doomed.