Mike A. asks: I was recently playing the game Tomb Raider & I got to thinking about the trope of the booby trapped or puzzle in an ancient ruin. We see it in comics, movies like Indiana Jones, & games. Is this pure fantasy or were there ever there traps, puzzles, or just intricate mechanical mechanisms from the ancient world […]
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Jill T. asks – Would you be able to explain what happens to peoples money and property if they end up going to jail forever? Prison, by design, is a place where a number of your rights are either stripped away or are severely limited in some manner. The right most pertinent to the topic of conversation today is the […]
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Jared asks: Why do racehorses have such weird names? Who picks them? In the world of horse racing, the name of a given horse is considered to be almost as important as its ability to run. Thanks, in part, to a large number of rigid rules put in place by the the various governing bodies of the sport, picking a […]
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Prior to WW2, knowing that they couldn’t compete with the numbers of the US navy, the Imperial Japanese Navy quietly authorised the construction of the two largest battleships by weight ever seen in warfare- the Musashi and her sister ship, the Yamato. The origins of these two behemoths can be traced back to Japan’s 1934 withdrawal from the League of […]
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The pilot community, on the whole, is surprisingly close-knit, with fellow pilots seemingly always willing to extend a helping hand to their winged brethren. This is seemingly the case even during war amongst pilots otherwise trying to kill one another, as illustrated previously in our article on the real Red Baron and in the subject of today’s article- that time […]
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Few companies have a rivalry as fierce and longstanding as PepsiCo and Coca-Cola and in their never ending battle for soda market dominance each company has gone to some spectacular lengths to screw over the other. Arguably the most fiendishly genius move of all was one made by Coca-Cola in the early 1990s- a move that basically involved intentionally releasing […]
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Kathy B. asks: Why do we call white people Caucasian? Throughout history a variety of ways to scientifically classify different groups of humans have popped up, most notable to the story today being a system suggested by pioneering social scientist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, often considered the “father of scientific anthropology.” Building upon other’s classification schemes, including Carl Linnaeus and Christoph […]
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Travis T. asks: Why do Americans say “math” and other English speaking countries say “maths”? Aluminium or aluminum, zee or zed, and removing u’s from certain words or not- among the many discrepancies between American and British English, perhaps none conjures as much religious fervor as math vs. maths. So which one is correct? Well, really neither is technically more […]
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Mike L. asks: What is the chemtrail smoke behind airliners? So called “chemtrails,” though more technically known as contrails, first appeared behind planes going all the way back to the earliest days of high altitude flight. One of the earliest known surviving references of such occurred when an American soldier by the name of Captain Ward Wells observed a peculiar […]
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Mark H. asks: Is it true diplomats can get away with murder because of diplomatic immunity? While the idea of some form of diplomatic immunity has existed seemingly as long as there have been humans banding together in some form, the modern rules surrounding this were originally laid out in 1961 at the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, with to […]
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If you were to ask a group of experts in various entertainment segments to point to a single year as the greatest in medium’s history, you’d likely get a slew of different answers with different rational. For example, when it comes to film, there’s no clear agreement between critics and film buffs about a particular year you can point to […]
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Today, Snoopy can be found on coffee mugs, greeting cards and blimps, and even has his own amusement park. But Charlie Brown’s lovable black and white spotted dog wasn’t always mainstream. In fact, when the comic strip first appeared in the 1950s, the dog and his Peanut friends were considered, to quote Time Magazine’s David Michaels, “the fault-line of a […]
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Kerri G. asks: Is it true that Rick Astley only made like $10 from Rickrolling? To begin with, for anyone who’s somehow managed to avoid the more than a decade old phenomenon of Rickrolling, in a nutshell this involves tricking someone into clicking on a link that takes them to the video for the relentlessly upbeat and infinitely cheesy 1980s […]
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Scott L. asks: Can you really just go online and order a bride/wife from some other country? Seems like this can’t really be a thing because of immigration laws, right? While people have been sending messages back and forth to arrange marriages sight-unseen throughout history, the slightly more modern concept of mail-order brides is generally considered to have originated during […]
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Jeremy A. asks: How many hamsters running on electricity generating wheels would it take to provide enough energy for an average American household? Would this be cheaper than coal electricity? While the question of hamsters powering homes may seem a bit farcical, it should be noted that at one point humans did specifically breed a certain type of dog for […]
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Sarah M. asks: What happens if you renounce your citizenship but don’t belong to another country when you do it? It turns out, renouncing your citizenship to a given nation is generally a fairly simple affair in many nations of the world. It doesn’t even usually cost that much. For example, in the UK- fittingly for a country stereotypical known […]
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There are generally three things everyone knows about Garfield- it’s all about a cat that hates Mondays, loves lasagna, and that it’s not really that funny. While the latter point may seem subjective, according to Garfield creator Jim Davis, the point of Garfield was never for the comic to be hilariously funny, but rather be relatable and, with that accomplished, […]
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We’ve just launched a new children’s educational channel called Kid’s Quest Learning (click here to view). To run the channel we’ve brought on board someone with a Bachelors of Science in Mathematics and Education, a Masters of Arts in Education, and an Education Reading Endorsement for grades K-12. She also has 12 years of teaching experience in Kindergarten and First […]
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