History Facts

The Olympic tradition of athletes mingling at the closing ceremony came from an anonymous suggestion!

After all the friendly and sometimes not-so-friendly competition during the Olympic Games, they end with a communal closing ceremony. While the opening ceremony is tense with competition between countries, the closing ceremony is much more laid back. Athletes from across the world, finally done with their events, mingle with one another.

This was not always the case though. This tradition began with the 1956 Olympic Games. These Games were held in Melbourne, Australia during the height of the Cold War. Obviously, political tensions were running high. A number of countries protested the Games or forbid their athletes from mingling with athletes from other countries. Fights broke out and it appeared that the Games were a failed effort.

The International Olympic Committee and the Organizing Committee then discovered an anonymous letter written by a 17-year-old Chinese boy. He was surprised that the athletes were not allowed to mingle with each other during the closing ceremony and explained that the best part of any sporting event was the celebration afterwards. When the committees instituted this change, the Melbourne Games became known as the Friendly Games.

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Guy Debord published his first book with a sandpaper cover so that the books next to it would be destroyed!

Guy Ernest Debord was a French Marxist theorist and a passive aggressive book murderer. His first published work was an artist’s book made in collaboration with Danish artist Asger Jorn. This book is most famous for it's cover, a dust jacket made of heavy-grade sandpaper.

The two authors wanted to book’s cover to be made from an unconventional material that would tarnish the coverings of the books next to it when it was pulled from a book shelf. They contemplated sticky asphalt and glass wool before settling on sand paper.

Because nothing sticks it to the bourgeoisie more than ruining the hard work of fellow underemployed and underappreciated authors.

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Columbus correctly predicted an eclipse to get natives of Jamaica into giving him food and supplies!

The stars were obviously in his favor the day Columbus and his restless crew stumbled upon the north coast of Jamaica after nearly 2 years of sailing. The native inhabitants, who at this point had had too experience with European travelers, refused to provide them with food.

Desperate for answers, Columbus leaved through some astronomical tables and found that it had been predicted that there would be an eclipse of the moon on February 29th 1504. There was some uncertainty as astronomical predictions were sometimes untrue and the times provided for it's start and end were for Nuremberg, Germany.

However, at this point, Columbus was so desperate that he yolo’ed and told the natives that through an interpreter that if they did not cooperate with him, the moon would disappear from the sky on the following night. And amazingly enough, it did.

Sufficiently frightened, the natives begged for Columbus’s mercy and he said he could consult his deity about returning their moon back to them. He went back into his cabin and returned after the eclipse had finished, taking credit for both switching off and then switching back on the moon.

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A group of journalists formed a secret society whose only purpose was to make references to an 'occult hand' whenever possible!

This is what happens when you put a bunch of drunk journalists together late at night. In 1965, Joseph Flanders, wrote regarding a farmer who was shot by his own family when he came back home late at night; “It was as if an occult hand had reached down from above and moved the players like pawns upon some giant chessboard.”

Amused by this purple prose, his colleagues decided to celebrate it by forming the Order of the Occult Hand while they were hanging out at a local bar. The name sounds pretty hardcore, but all they ever did was sneak the phrase “as if an occult hand had” into magazine articles. The phrase crept it's way into various publications. Some uses of it:

• "As if an occult hand had slipped over his shoulder to assist, the little plastic shelf slides back into the machine and begins to whirr."
• "It's as if an occult hand had reached out and intentionally destroyed your data."
• As if an occult hand moved her to action, she discovered the intercom worked both ways."

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In the prehistoric times, there was a flightless bird that ate horses!

We may laugh at the flightlessness of birds like ostriches and penguins nowadays but you did not want to mess with their oldest ancestor, Phosurhacida. Aka: The Terror Bird. It was the largest species of predators in South America between 62 million to 2 million years ago.

They were roughly 3 to 10 feet tall and munched on small mammals. They used their massive beaks to either pick up prey and slam them into the ground or inflict precision strikes on critical body parts. Archeologists say that this species left the world at about the same time we got here.

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