“Stone walls do not a prison make, Nor iron bars a cage;” These are the much quoted first lines of the final stanza of Richard Lovelace’s poem ‘To Althea, from prison.’ Richard Lovelace was one of the dashing young cavalier’s of the English civil war and is classed with the metaphysical poets. Sent to prison for presenting a royalist petition in support of pro-royalist bishops he used the time to compose this, his most famous poem....
While these rifles were a good increase in firepower for the people of the Old West starting in the 1830s, they had some very noticeable drawbacks. For all variants, there was a leak of the gases of firing at the front of the cylinder and a corresponding drop in muzzle velocity. For the double-action variants, as the cylinder cycled for each shot the just-fired tube had a tendency to send hot gas at the hand of the firer....
We start this list with the worst case of man-eating lions in History. It was not a single man eater, but an entire pride that preferred human flesh over any other kind of food. It happened in 1932, in Tanzania near the town of Njombe. A large pride of lions went into a particularly brutal killing spree. Legend has it that the lions were being controlled by the witch doctor of a local tribe, named Matamula Mangera, who sent them into rampage as revenge against his own people after being deposed of his post....
Recent Changes The biggest change lately has been the addition of a user profiles viewing page. Everyone can now view user profiles for anyone that has signed up on the site. The profiles contain user data (which you can fill in on your profile page – link at the top right of every page), as well as most recently rated posts and your last five comments. Check out my profile for a demo....
Cities can survive most natural disasters, but being flooded under meters of water is usually a death sentence. On the other hand, being submerged can often protect their ruins for future generations better than the open air, resulting in some spectacularly preserved monuments like Shi Cheng in China, often called the “Atlantis of the East.” Others fare less well. Their former residents watch as they are buried in sand or slowly reclaimed by the sea....
The term “missing” can encompass a variety of scenarios, from children that have run away to a child that has gone missing under a set of unknown circumstances to children that either family members or strangers have kidnapped. Regardless of the circumstance behind a child’s disappearance, each passing day, month, and year leaves the family with more questions than answers, especially when there are no solid leads or clues about the child’s whereabouts....
10The Greenbrier GhostMurder Victim Helps Convict Her Husband On January 23, 1897, 23-year-old Zona Heaster Shue died under mysterious circumstances at her home in Greenbrier County, West Virginia. Strangely, by the time a doctor arrived, Zona’s husband, Erasmus “Trout” Shue, had already moved her body from the downstairs area to the bed and dressed her. Throughout the next few days, Trout displayed some bizarre behavior over his wife’s passing, but since the cause of death was initially believed to be heart failure, no one suspected foul play....
And yet exceptions exist to every rule about the color of animals. Every so often, a specimen gets a mutation that changes its whole appearance. The creature may stand as a weird anomaly or may even go on to form a whole new subspecies. 10 Brown Panda Bears The great panda has just one subspecies, and that’s the brown panda bear. It’s also known as the Qinling bear after its home in China’s Qinling mountains....
10Our System For Measuring Time Sometime in the early second millennium B.C., the Babylonians invented their number system, and its influence still affects us to this day. Because of a limited amount of symbols (they only had two, along with their indicator for zero), they had to innovate, creating a system where one column indicated multiples of 1, one column indicated multiples of 60, and one column indicated multiples of 3,600....
10Communications Network Webs are used to catch bugs—that’s like Spiders 101. But for the most part, arachnids have poor eyesight. So to know whether a bug is trapped in the web, or whether it’s just a carelessly flicked cigarette butt, spiders have to be able to read the different types of vibrations. Their web is like a giant harp, whose plucked strings sing of terrified moths and doomed ants. Some ground-dwelling spiders even set up their webbing to act as an alarm system....
10The Longest-Lived Stars How long can a star live? First, let’s define a star’s lifetime as how long it does nuclear fusion, because the corpse of a star can hang around long after nuclear fusion ends. The way stars work, the less massive they are, the longer they tend to live. The stars with the smallest mass are the red dwarfs. They can be anywhere from 7.5 to 50 percent of the Sun’s mass....
10 The Bathroom Break That Saved a President Even more than most presidents, Lyndon B. Johnson has a fairly mixed legacy. He is responsible for both groundbreaking domestic achievements like the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Acts of 1965 and foreign fiascos like escalating the Vietnam War. Whether Johnson reshaped American society for better or worse is up to debate, but he almost did not do anything at all....
Rossini’s overtures were popular with cartoonists, as were Liszt’s Hungarian rhapsodies and Brahms’ Hungarian dances. In cartoon-land, Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata became synonymous with quiet, moonlit scenes, while the opening notes to his Fifth Symphony were used to introduce Nazis during World War II. The final movement of Liszt’s Les Preludes frequently introduced some cartoons. Any favorites you’d add to this list? Enjoy! Music: Rossini’s William Tell Overture Made before the William Tell Overture became identified as The Lone Ranger’s theme, The Band Concert features bandleader Mickey leading an outdoor performance....
10 Pigeon Phone In February 2017, guards at a Brazilian prison captured a pigeon carrying a mobile phone. Officials from Sao Paolo’s Franco da Rocha prison believe the bird was attempting to smuggle the contraband communication device to an inmate. Guards were alerted when they spotted an inmate attempting to catch the pigeon. A pouch containing a mobile phone and a battery was found firmly attached to the bird’s body. Prison officials do not know for whom the phone was intended....
10Plastic Rice If there’s one food that should be impossible to counterfeit, it would be rice. But the Chinese did it anyway. China’s fake rice is also called plastic rice. It’s made from potatoes, sweet potatoes, and synthetic resin molded into the shape of real rice. The faux rice was commonly sold in Chinese markets, especially in Taiyuan in Shaanxi Province. The rice remained as hard as stone even after it was cooked and did not digest easily....
Ice-cream Girl [Source] Speechless [Source] WTF?! [Source] Such Humility [Source] Chucky’s Sister [Source] Car Hood [Source] His Royal Highness [Source] Coffee Machine [Source] Lifesize Superman [Source] Scary [Source] Read More: Facebook Instagram Email
10Gainesville Meth Arrest Ashley Huff was arrested on July 2, 2014 in Gainesville, Georgia while riding in a car. She spent two days in jail, then was released on the condition that she go to drug counseling. When she failed to go to her necessary appointments, she was arrested again. However, a large contributing factor to Huff’s decision not to attend some of her counseling sessions may have been the fact that she had been wrongfully charged....
This planet’s seas are vast, mysterious, and impregnated with the primal beauty of an exploding star, a world both dangerous and sublime. Nobody looks at an ocean and says, “I’ve seen better.” Every piece of undersea life offers something spectacular hidden in a barnacle-encrusted niche well beyond the searching eyes of normal mortals. But if you look in the right place at the right time, magic happens. 10 Jellyfish Lake One of the world’s most surreal marine migrations happens every single day on an uninhabited island in the South Pacific....
There are certain parts of the world that are known for certain things—and Roswell, New Mexico, is no different. When most people think of Roswell, the first things that pop into their mind are extraterrestrials and UFOs. Believers have been flocking to Roswell for years, hoping to catch a glimpse of a flying saucer. And that’s why it makes perfect sense to build an amusement park in the middle of town....
Today, we are looking at murder mysteries with an international flavor. All these crimes are decades or even centuries old. The chances of ever finding out the truth about them are very slim, but who knows? Maybe they’ll be featured one day on a new list about cold cases finally solved after years of waiting. 10 The Family MurdersAustralia In the late 1970s and early ’80s, five young men were murdered in Adelaide....
