This Day In History: December 22, 1956 Gorillas are intelligent animals that live together in small groups, usually led by a single male silverback. The first gorillas kept in captivity were held in stark, concrete cages with metal bars. Lacking any stimulation or entertainment, they became bored and depressed. Needless to say, this wasn’t a prime breeding environment. As such, […]
Read more
In the Swedish town of Gävle, about 100 miles north of Stockholm, residents have been erecting a giant straw goat in the town center since 1966. The Gävle Goat, also known as the Yule Goat and the Gävlebocken, may be a massive Christmas decoration, but there is never any guarantee that it will still be standing for the holiday. That […]
Read more
The following is an article from Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader To date, the Make-A-Wish Foundation has fulfilled the wishes of more than 250,000 kids with life-threatening illnesses. Here’s the story of the wish that started it all. DIAGNOSIS In 1977 an Illinois woman named Linda Greicius made a trip to Phoenix, Arizona, to spend time with her mother, who had […]
Read more
Jeremy R. asks: What do the little buttons on Darth Vader’s suit do? It’s said that the best villains are the ones where you know almost nothing about them. However, thanks to the Star Wars Expanded Universe, we know almost everything about Darth Vader, even how he poops, and he’s still consistently voted to be one of the greatest cinema […]
Read more
If you’ve noticed the fewer number of articles being published the last couple weeks on TIFO, this post is the cause. 🙂 It now holds the record for the longest time spent researching and writing any single article on TIFO by a very good margin. It turns out there are an awful lot of Star Wars “facts” commonly repeated all […]
Read more
This Day In History: December 18, 1892 Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky was riding high from the success of his ballet The Sleeping Beauty when he was commissioned to compose a double-bill program for Imperial Theatres- an opera and a ballet. This included Tchaikovsky’s last opera Iolanta and The Nutcracker, choreographed by Marius Petipa, who collaborated with Tchaikovsky on The Sleeping Beauty […]
Read more
In this video from our YouTube channel (click here to subscribe), we take a look at the origin of one of the most popular songs of all time, “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” and the 13 year old girl who popularized it. To make sure you don’t miss out on many more videos like this, be sure and subscribe to […]
Read more
If you’ve never seen A Knight’s Tale, the cliff notes version of the story is that Heath Ledger’s character, William Thatcher, pretends to be a knight to compete in various jousting competitions across Europe for fame, fortune, and the love of a woman. Since Thatcher is a peasant, in order to be able to compete, he claims to be a […]
Read more
This Day In History: December 15, 1892 Jean Paul Getty, more commonly known as J. Paul Getty, was born on December 15, 1896 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The son of a self-made man, George Getty (a blue collared laborer turned lawyer turned oil prospector), J. Paul Getty used a business loan from his father to go on to create a global […]
Read more
In this video from our YouTube channel (click here to subscribe), we take a look a look at the fascinating and unlikely origin of one of the most popular Christmas stories of all time. To make sure you don’t miss out on many more videos like this, be sure and subscribe to our new daily channel! If you liked this […]
Read more
Ron L. asks: Did George Washington’s doctors kill him with their treatments? After the Revolutionary War, George Washington looked forward to a quiet retirement as a gentleman farmer in Virginia. But this was not to be as he was repeatedly called back to serve the needs of the new nation he helped create. When he was called to serve as […]
Read more
The following is an article from Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Throughout most of history, if you lost a limb, the replacement of choice was a wooden peg (which only looked cool if you were a pirate). But that all changed after a young soldier lost a leg in the Civil War and refused to take his injury lying down. WALKING […]
Read more
In this video from our YouTube channel (click here to subscribe), we take a look at why you definitely shouldn’t keep a goldfish in a small, featureless fish bowl by themselves. To make sure you don’t miss out on many more videos like this, be sure and subscribe to our new daily channel! If you liked this video, you might […]
Read more
Characterized by a remarkable return of mental faculties and sometimes physical skills to terminal patients who were thought to have lost such abilities, Terminal Lucidity, while extraordinary, is also a very real and extremely mind boggling phenomenon that has largely been ignored by modern scientists, despite references to it going all the way back to Hippocrates. A relatively recent term, […]
Read more
This Day In History: December 11, 1978 There were many groups that wanted the Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi gone from Iran in 1978, and they were rallying around Ruhollah Khomeini to replace him as head of the government. Born in 1902, Khomeini was a scholar and cleric who earned the title of Ayatollah after rigorous religious study. In addition to […]
Read more
Christmas music, for the most part, tends to be both non-offensive and fairly generic- two things you can’t really say about the song, Killing in the Name by rap metal band, Rage Against the Machine, which somehow managed to become the 2009 UK Christmas #1 thanks to the efforts of a couple who was really annoyed with the coveted spot […]
Read more
This Day In History: December 10, 1963 On December 10, 1963, Frank Sinatra received a phone call from a group of co-conspirators who had been holding his son, Frank Jr., hostage since December 8th. They demanded a ransom payment of $240,000 (about $1.8 million today), which Sinatra paid immediately. It was a bizarre crime to say the least. The kidnapping […]
Read more
While Danny Trejo might not be a name as many people would recognise as say, Tom Cruise, with over 300 film credits to date since his acting debut in the mid-1980s, not to mention his distinctive hard-as-nails look, he’s certainly one of the more recongisable faces in Hollywood. Unlike most, however, Danny’s trail to becoming one of the hardest working […]
Read more