Browsing: The Bizarre

A Brief History On January 4, 1903, Thomas Edison’s company filmed the execution of Topsy the Elephant, the largest purported casualty in the “War of the Currents”!  The big argument over whether to use alternating current as championed by Nikola Tesla and George Westinghouse or direct current as championed by Thomas Edison had already been decided in favor of alternating current  a decade before Topsy became an afterthought and legend of the Current Wars. Digging Deeper Digging deeper, we find Edison, the most prolific inventor of all time (electric light, phonograph, motion pictures, etc.) had been engaged in a bitter struggle with rival…

A Brief History On December 31, 1993, transgender person Brandon Teena was raped and murdered.  Teena’s tragic life and death served as the inspiration for the 1999 major motion picture Boys Don’t Cry, starring Hillary Swank. Digging Deeper Digging deeper, we find 21-year-old biologically female Brandon Teena living as a man in Nebraska. Having been born a girl and named Teena Brandon, Brandon exhibited transgender tendencies as an adolescent and despite her mother’s denial and consternation continued to progress that way through high school, ending up expelled only 3 days before graduation. Living as a man under the transposed name,…

A Brief History On December 29, 1916, possibly the most cracked clergyman of all time finally met his doom, having been poisoned, shot, and drowned, thereby rivaling Blackbeard for the claim of bearded bad-ass who most went out “like a boss”! Digging Deeper Digging deeper, we find the last royal court of Russia in the middle of turbulent times indeed, tangled in the morass of the First World War (or, at the time, The Great War) and the country on the brink of revolution. In addition to the horrible political situation, the royal family (Romanov) of Czar Nicholas II had…

A Brief History On December 27, 1964, the Cleveland Browns won the NFL Championship, by itself not that earth shattering, but it marked the end of an era. Digging Deeper Digging deeper, we find the Cleveland Browns at that time as the most successful NFL franchise, having won the highest percentage of their games. Winning the All America Conference title all 4 years of its existence (a football league not affiliated with the NFL), the Browns joined the NFL in 1950 and continued their winning ways.  The Browns played in every championship game from 1950 to 1955 and won three…

A Brief History Is December 26th the Most Wacked Date in History?  So many disasters occurred we can not even include them all! Digging Deeper Digging deeper, we find our cracked odyssey starting in 1846 in the Sierra Nevada mountains, where the Donner Party, close to death from starvation and freezing, resorts to cannibalism to survive!  At least they apparently waited for their food to die on its own and did not murder each other. In 1862, the U.S. conducted its largest mass hanging ever, when 38 Native Americans are hanged from a single scaffold!  Incredibly, it could have been worse! …