Collection of Insane and Fun Facts
In Turkey, there is still a saying “küfelik olmak”, it means “needing to be carried home in a basket” and it means you are too drunk. These people were called küfeci. To be so drunk you couldn’t walk was called küfe. Apparently, is was a well known thing in Turkey.
History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes. In September 1918 San Francisco suffered from Spanish Flu pandemic. Initial mask wearing was good — around 80 percent.
By November cases were down, and public health officials recommended re-opening the city.
A picture of a giant robot helping Russia revolutionaries storm the winter palace in 1917, was accidentally used in an Australian history exam. Some students wasted time in trying to figure out what the giant robot was, thinking it was a statue of a Russian politician or a battleship.
The British developed a fondness for gin in their Indian Colony, where those posted there added a dollop of gin to the quinine they took as a preventative for malaria to make it more palatable. It apparently carried over when they returned home, and became the well-known Gin & Tonic.
In 1988 the final history exams for more than 53 million Soviet schoolchildren were cancelled because much of the history they had been taught were lies.
Despite some claims to the contrary, drive-in movie theaters in the United States are not making a comeback. In 2017 there exist about 330 operating drive-in theaters in the United States, down from a peak of about 4,000 in the late 1950s. In 1980, there were over 2400.
Ancient Greek historian Polybius came up with a cyclical theory of government (anacyclosis), where governments start off as monarchies, the final stage is ochlocracy, when a democracy degenerates into chaos and mob-rule. Then the cycle resets itself.
Over a hundred years ago, virtually every American city had public streetcars that people took to work. That includes cities we don’t think of as hubs for mass transit today, like Atlanta, Raleigh, and Los Angeles. Today, just 5 percent of U.S. workers commute via via public transit.
A study about class differences in 18th & 19th century England, showed that on average, a wealthy 16-year old boy was 8.5 inches taller than a poor 16-year old boy, as a result of malnourishment and living standards.
In 1917 you could order a belt-fed machine gun from a Sears catalog: “Machine guns are used largely by police organizations, home guards and municipalities in case of riots.”