With irony equal to that of the unsinkable Titanic drowning on her maiden voyage, the Swedish warship, Mars, called “the Matchless,” was set afire, her armament exploded, and she sank during her first major sea battle. Lost for nearly 450 years, Mars has recently been found in the Baltic Sea, and archaeologists are giddy with the discovery. In the 1560s, […]

Zack D asks: Is it true that the terracotta army soldiers are all unique? More than two thousand years ago, the man who unified China, established a single system of writing and currency, and began construction of the Great Wall, ordered that a 20 square mile underground city, to be later filled with the finest treasures and protected by thousands […]

During World War II, Nazi engineers designed and built a number of revolutionary super or “wonder weapons” (wunderwaffe), including a wide array of aircraft, guns and ships. Among these weapons is a mysterious small, round tank named the Kugelpanzer (literally meaning “spherical tank”). This odd little tank was never seen in the European theater, and very little is definitively known […]

Sitting in the heart of London since long before anyone can remember, theories regarding the London Stone range from Roman ruin, to Druidic icon to a talisman of good fortune. Although many point to John Stow’s Survey of London (1598), where he sets the 10th century as the first mention of the stone in print (he claims he found a […]

In the third decade of the third century CE, climate issues, civil war, economic depression and plague combined to seriously destabilize the Roman Empire. Beginning a fifty-year period where leadership of the empire passed between at least 26 men was the short reign of perhaps the largest emperor of Rome, Maximinus Thrax. Born Gaius Julius Verus in about 173 CE […]

The following is an article from Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Imagine that you lived in ancient times and wanted to answer some of life’s big questions: How did we get here? What are those lights in the sky at night? Why do I poop? And, for our purposes here: How the heck do plants grow out of the ground!? Well, […]

The following is an article from Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader As 1972 approached, President Richard Nixon started to get more and more concerned about his coming reelection campaign.   He became convinced that his political adversaries weren’t just opponents-they were “enemies” and had to be stopped. He and his advisers compiled this list of 20 public figures who they felt could […]

Water was in short supply in England during the summer of 1976. Officials understood as early as September 1975 that water levels would be low the next year thanks to 1975 being the fifth driest year of the 20th century in the region. While an average of 278 millimeters, or nearly 11 inches, of rain fell on England between May […]

Although crime in England’s capital was on the decline in the mid-19th century, thanks in part to the relatively recent formation of the London Metropolitan Police Force in 1839, fear of crime was a persistent, reoccurring issue thanks to a few instances of robbery and murder, and, of course, the news media. In particular, the so-called “garrotting” cases, where someone strangles someone else, […]