Tarzan was an early inspiration for the character of Superman.

It’s not too much of a surprise if you really think about it; both are muscular, age-less men who defend innocent unremarkables from evil plots, and still manage to get and hold on to a beautiful girlfriend (although Disney only managed to recruit one of them). Tarzan was the hero in the 1912 pulp novel Tarzan of the Apes by Edar Rice Burroughs. 

Superman was the brainchild of high school friends Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster. The duo tried selling their stories to magazines in order to escape Depression era poverty but were usually rejected. In 1932, Siegel wrote the short story “Reign of the Superman” in which Superman was a powerful villain seeking world domination. 

The story appeared in Science Fiction: The Advance Guard of Future Civilization Issue #3 with artwork by Shuster. In 1933, Superman underwent a bit of a career shift; Siegal re-wrote the character as a superhero, and went on to produce a string of Superman comics that are still marveled at today. 

When asked about his inspiration, Siegal named Tarzan as an early influence. Yes, the “King of the Apes” evolved into the spandex-wearing, cape flourishing, defender of Metropolis. 

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Reggie Jackson nicknamed a bat boy for the Oakland A's "Hammer" because of his purported resemblance to Hank Aaron and that bat boy would later assume the rap name "MC Hammer."

What hasn’t MC Hammer done? Stanly Kirk Burrell was found outside the Oakland A’s stadium by team owner Charlie Finley dancing around for tips to buy tickets to the game. He recruited the 13 year old as a batboy for the Oakland A’s. 

Legendary Reggie Jackson nicknamed Burrell “Hammer” because he resembled Hank Aaron. Burrell wanted to become a professional baseball player, but ended up joining the Navy. While in the Navy he worked on his rapping skills. 

He was honorably discharged from the Navy and MC Hammer was born. He released an independent album in 1987 called Feel My Power which sold 60,000 albums. In 1988, he signed on to Capitol Records and rereleased the same album as Let’s Get It Started. 

The following album released in 1990 was Please Hammer Don’t Hurt ‘Em. It was this album that made MC Hammer a household name. He made a couple more albums, but nothing hit it big like Please Hammer Don’t Hurt ‘Em did. MC Hammer eventually became a preacher and had six children with his wife of 23 years.

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Contrary to popular belief, an asteroid field would be very simple to navigate.

Anyone who’s ever watched TV thinks that working your way around an asteroid field involves agility and coordination, so that you can dodge giant hulks of man-killing rock every second, as well as assaults from the alien space ships that are on your tail. It turns out though, that the experience is less like an unfavorable game of dodgeball and more like a stroll around the park. 

The average distance between asteroids in the field is 100,000 miles, and most objects in this field are actually quite tiny. If you add up the mass of all the asteroids in our solar system’s asteroid belt, it’s only 4% the mass of our moon. 

In fact, about ½ of the mass comes from just four asteroids; Ceres, Vesta, Pallas, Hygiea. Scientist’s hypothesize that it’s actually impossible for that a Hollywood-esque model of an asteroid belt, with debris and collisions galore, to even exist. 

NASA estimates that the odds of one of their probes actually hitting an asteroid are about one in a billion. So if you can tolerate the lack of oxygen, water, food, temperature control, or human habitation, a road trip around the asteroid belt would actually be pretty smooth. 

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"Basket case" used to refer to quadruple amputees.

Today, we use basket case to mean someone who is crazy, or psychologically hopeless. It turns out the actual definition can be traced back to World War I. The phrase first came along as a slang term during World War I. It referred to quadruple amputees, or those who had lost all four limbs. 

The reason for this is that soldiers who lost all their limbs were carried away in baskets. This wasn't because of a shortage of stretchers, but because if they had been carried on stretchers, they would have been too prone to falling out. 

To be fair, this wasn't a very common occurrence. But since then, the definitions have broadened to refer to anything whose function is impaired. Still, the most common usage is in mental illness, specifically in cases where someone is incapable of behaving naturally. 

Basket case has also referred to a country that can't pay its debts, an abandoned vehicle stripped of its parts, or simply an eccentric person. 

Though the term was never exactly politically correct, thanks to the euphemism treadmill we mentioned in an earlier article (http://www.omg-facts.com/Language/What-we-consider-politically-correct-tod/51508), calling a quadruple amputee a basket case is today pretty rude.

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During the Cold War, the US distributed maps that made the USSR and Vietnam seem larger, closer and more "menacing."

This is a practice known as cartographic propaganda. As the name implies, it is the creation of false maps with the goal of achieving a result similar to traditional propaganda- here, generally creating a feeling of fear of the Soviet Union. The difference between this and regular map distortion is really just the function. 

If a map is distorted for cartographic purpose (like a map with the north pole at the center) and makes landforms appear closer together or shaped differently as a result, it’s generally not thought of as propaganda. 

It’s only really cartographic propaganda if there is an intended political purpose behind it, and where there is no cartographic reason to make the geography appear untrue to form. One of the most frequently used means of successfully doing this was by presenting the countries of the world on a flat surface map. Whenever a map is placed on a flat surface, it becomes distorted because of the round shape of the planet. 

It’s very difficult to portray all of the geography of the world to scale in this way (this is why Antarctica sometimes looks gigantic on these maps). This distortion was utilized in cartographic propaganda to portray the USSR not to scale and make it seem much larger, without making it very obvious that it wasn’t true to size. 

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