The biggest and the best entertainment extravaganzas were staged by Roman emperors who had the power and the wealth to do so. And the audiences were fairly bloodthirsty. The spectacles included chariot races, animal killing, executions, and gladiator fights. For around 200 years, women participated in those fights, and their bouts were often highlighted as the main event.

We don't have a lot of documentation on these female gladiators, and there's not even a Latin word for them, but we know they existed. Most were probably slaves, but there is some evidence that upper class women also participated, which was an even bigger draw. People disapproved of such behavior among higher-status women, but they also went to watch them fight each other. A woman who voluntarily became a gladiator was essentially throwing her reputation away, and that was worth watching, especially since they often fought topless and without a helmet to prove that they were indeed women. Read what little we know about the women gladiators of ancient Rome at Atlas Obscura.

Once upon a time, a bachelor's degree mostly meant that this person has a well-rounded education and can stick with a project for years at a time. That was a leg up in almost any job, no matter what subject the degree was in. Now it's too much of an investment to take any kind of risk. 

In the latest of Cracked's Honest Ads series, we learn the costs and benefits of a college degree. It can be quite a shock to the average 18-year-old to confront the costs and the debt they may have when they graduate. But once the dream is punctured, there are plenty of options for higher education. This scenario is a private college with a good reputation (except for Roger Horton's name on it). Students who are prepared for the college search ahead of time know that community college can get you quite a few credits for much less money, and a public university will cost less than a private school. For most careers, which school you go to matters little as long as it's accredited. But the real difference in a student's ability to pay back a student loan is whether they graduate, and whether the career they study for is something the world really needs.

Pictured above is William E. Dickey, the winner of the 1904 Olympics in the swimming event known as the plunge for distance. He doesn't look like a typical Olympic athlete because the plunge for distance was not a typical Olympic event. In fact, it was called the most boring sport of all time. The 1904 games were the only Olympics that the sport appeared in, and the only competitors were five Americans. But it was part of the competitive swimming scene in the US for decades.

The plunge for distance was a kind of competitive floating, to see how far an athlete could drift without any exertion after diving into a body of water. This particular act was made easier by extra body weight, as fat makes one more buoyant. It was taken seriously by those who competed, but for spectators, it was exceedingly dull, and the sport died out in the 1920s. Frank Parrington holds the world record in the plunge for distance at 86 feet 8 inches, a record that will stand forever. BBC Future talked to Parrington's grandson, Dave Parrington, head diving coach at the University of Tennessee, about the erstwhile sport of the plunge for distance.  -via Damn Interesting

(Image source: Missouri History Museum)

I once knew someone who had a screened-in party room at their house, and behind it was another screened-in room with a bed! It was a sleeping porch, used when it was too hot inside. This one caught breezes from three sides. Sleeping porches are one of many methods people used to keep cool before air conditioning became common. Pictured above is the freestanding sleeping porch President Taft had installed on the roof of the White House in 1910.

Evaporating water has been used for cooling for thousands of years, especially in dry areas. But it was used in the swampy city of Washington DC in 1881 after President Garfield was shot. His room in the White House was rigged with a device that blew air through wet fabric cooled with ice, and lowered the temperature by 20 degrees. It went through half a million pounds of ice over two months until Garfield died of his wounds.

Read about these and other clever methods that people used to keep cool in hot weather at Smithsonian.

You take all the standard tropes of a space adventure movie and put them together to make a parody. You shoot it in your apartment with a budget of zero and a cast of one playing all the parts. How good could it possibly be? In this one, it all comes down to the acting, and the zero-gravity effects, which were done only through acting. Oh yeah, there's one video effect, an illustration of product placement with a candy bar.

I saw a three-minute video on reddit and thought it was was quite good, and in fact was posted on the subreddit Best of the Internet. But I didn't post it here because I didn't know who made it. Then a friend pointed me in the right direction, and it turns out the full movie is nine minutes long and had a different ending. It was made by writer and actress Caroline Klidonas. Klidonas started posting vignettes on on TikTok during the pandemic lockdown that became full-blown productions. You can find quite a few of Klidones' full-length parodies at YouTube. -Thanks, Carol!   

If you were to tell a story about a late partygoer, you could mean someone who arrived long after the party started, or you might mean someone who died at a party. These very disparate uses of the word "late" can be confusing without the proper context. The reason that the word has two meanings goes back to the early use of "late" (pun intended). In the 15th century, the word was used to mean "recently." You can understand that by the phrase "of late." There are many examples that are now considered archaic, but we still use a form of it in phrases like "the latest comic from Randall Munroe." When referring to someone who died, the term "late" was originally only used for someone who passed away so recently that it might be news. But we strayed from that, and now say "the late Richard Harris," even though he died more than twenty years ago.

So the "behind schedule" definition has survived, and the "dead" meaning has been altered, but the in-between definition that meant "recently" has mostly fallen away. Read a rundown of how the word "late" has evolved over time at Mental Floss. Now, as far as the use of the phrase "the late, great..," that seems to have come about just because it rhymes and is therefore fun to say. -via Strange Company

(Image credit: Roman Eisele)

With today's all-volunteer armed forces, we might forget how common military service once was. Throughout most of the 20th century, young men could expect to be called up for World War I, World War II, the Korean War, or the Vietnam War. In between wars, service was seen as a useful bridge to manhood, or to see the world, or to learn job skills. So it wasn't odd to see half the houses in your neighborhood occupied by a veteran and his family. The language they brought back from their service could be colorful, but even when it wasn't, these veterans retained a lot of jargon that fellow veterans would understand, and soon those terms were used by everyone. We know what these terms mean, but we don't know how they came about. Weird History looks at a whole bunch of everyday phrases and idioms we use that you might not know came from the military, as far back as the Revolutionary War.   

I can't vouch for how accurate these stories are. Commenters at YouTube are especially upset about "balls to the wall," which they contend predates aviation.

Charles Byrne was born in Ireland in 1761 and grew to be seven and a half feet tall. This made him two feet taller than everyone around him. As word of the "Irish Giant" got around, Byrne decided to go to London and make a living off his unusual stature, because there were plenty of people who would pay to see a giant. And there was a also surgeon who would pay to have a giant. John Hunter was that surgeon, as he was also an anatomist who had dissected many human bodies to study them. Hunter made no secret that he would like to take possession of Byrne's body when the time came, to further his scientific knowledge.

Byrne was in control of how he was exposed during his life, but the thought of being dissected and then displayed after death horrified him. Even though he was a young man, his health began to deteriorate. The giant let it be known that he didn't want John Hunter anywhere near his body if he were to die. Byrne died at age 22. He had already made plans for his friends to bury him at sea, with weights to keep his body submerged so that the anatomist couldn't get to him. We don't know for sure how his plan went awry, but Hunter indeed ended up with Byrne's body. He dissected it for four years and then Byrne's skeleton went on display for hundreds of years -until 2023. Read about the restless corpse of the Irish Giant at ABC. -via Strange Company

(Image credit: Maggie Jones)

The classic tale of the magic carpet from One Thousand and One Nights is completely separate from the story of Aladdin, but we all know what we saw in the 1992 Disney movie. The YouTuber who goes by Alladin Skylab was inspired by watching Aladdin as a child and now is experienced in flying ultralight planes, paragliders, wingsuits, and hang gliders. But now he has truly recreated that childhood dream by fashioning a colorful carpet to act like a wingsuit! Watch him base jump from a high mountain (does anyone recognize the location?) and soar on his own magic carpet just like Aladdin! Lucky for us, he has a drone following him to catch the action. How is he going to land on that kind of terrain? For that, he pulls out another of his flying skills. You can see more of Aladdin Skylab's stunts at TikTok. -via Nag on the Lake

Richard Harris was known to my generation for playing King Arthur in the movie Camelot. You may know him better as Albus Dumbledore in the first two Harry Potter films. He relinquished the role when he died in 2002 of Hodgkin's disease. Harris had been staying at the Savoy Hotel in London while his condition swiftly deteriorated. He was eventually carried out in a stretcher and sent to the hospital. As he was carried past hotel guests, he yelled, "It was the food!" That had to cause some panic among those who had dined there. As far as we know those were Harris's last words.

But he wasn't alone in using his last words as a joke, or to confuse people, or to get back at someone. Read about five men whose last words were a first-class example of trolling. It's likely they didn't know those would be their last words, but they were nevertheless clever.

🇫🇷 Kevin Piette, paraplégique depuis un accident, est entré dans l’histoire aujourd’hui en portant la flamme olympique avec son exosquelette ! 👏

🎥 wandercraftofficialpic.twitter.com/HTy5MrYE6Z

— Le Média Positif 🍀 (@LMPositif) July 23, 2024

The Olympic torch relay has been going on since April, when the flame was lit at Mt. Olympus in Greece. It is a traditional honor to carry the torch, and many athletes, political figures, and celebrities of all kinds have done it. As the torch nears the Olympic Opening Ceremonies in Paris, the more prestigious the torchbearers are. The torchbearers this year will include Snoop Dogg. The final torchbearers who lights the Olympic flame is still a mystery, and it's always a parlor game to guess which host nation superstar athlete it will be by process of elimination.

French athlete Kevin Piette is one of the 2024 torchbearers. Piette became a paraplegic 11 years ago, and will compete in the Paralympics in tennis. He is also a "test pilot" for the French company Wandercraft that developed the Atalante X, a self-balancing walking exoskeleton designed to be used by people with disabilities. Tuesday, Piette became the first Paralympian to participate in the torch relay wearing an exoskeleton.

Piette's Instagram post expressed his pride and gratitude to those who came out to show support (in French). -via Laughing Squid

A rogue planet is a celestial body that is not tethered by gravity to a star, but rather roams through space on its own. It may have once orbited a star, but was knocked off their trajectory by another object, or pulled away by another star, or may possibly be the remnant of a star system that exploded. It may be even possible that planets can form without ever being in orbit. We don't know much about them because astronomers have only detected rogue planets in the 21st century, and then only indirectly. 

But more recent data suggest that rogue planets are way more common than previously thought. Current estimates say that there are an average of seven free-floating planets for every star in the Milky Way galaxy! We just can't see them because they emit no light and only rarely cause a shadow. But they are out there, moving between star systems, colliding with other bodies, and sneaking through the darkness. Our newer, more powerful telescopes are expected to shed light, so to speak, on these so-far invisible planets. Read about the search for rogue planets at IEEE Spectrum. -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Chris Gunn/NASA)

Fatboy Slim gave us an unforgettable video in 2001 with his song "Weapon of Choice" featuring Christopher Walken dancing solo through a Marriot hotel. Twenty-three years later, the students of St Wilfrid's Catholic School in Crawley, West Sussex, England, made their own version to celebrate the end of the school year. The star is their head teacher Michael Ferry. The school also posted a side-by-side comparison with the original to show how close they are.  



The school couldn't compete with the expensive special effects in the latter part of the original, so that's where having a volunteer chorus line comes in handy. This goes to show that there are still people having fun the internet these days.  -via Metafilter

I bought something this morning and had to choose between different versions from different vendors. The reviews of every one were awful. I eventually realized that most people who are happy with a product do not bother with a review at all, and everyone who has a problem will write one. But some people are born writers and love to tell a story. Linda wrote a review of Bic for Her Retractable Gel Pens.

I got these pens partly because people made fun of the fact that they were for women. I got them to write anti-feminist articles. Really I thought if I bought them I might actually get good at things like vacuuming and washing dishes and decorating. The pens work great but I'm still not very good at homemaking. Dang.

The funnier the product, the better the story. Sean C. bought some Liquid Ass fart spray, or at least told an amazing story about fart spray.

Got stopped by the police. I already knew why he got me (speeding) but of course, I was gonna ask him why he stopped me. I don’t have any extra money to give them so I decided to test my luck and humor. About a week ago, I purchased some fart spray and tried it on my wife, but wanted to see just how far I could push it. The bottle says to squirt about 2 sprays. Well as the policeman walks toward my vehicle I sprayed about 5 squirts. He gets to my window and asks me to get out. I said I can’t! He immediately stops in his tracks and he says lawd...what’s that?

That's just the beginning of the story that gets more ridiculous as it goes. Read that review in a roundup of 26 priceless customer product reviews at Bored Panda.  

(Image credit: Amazon)

Did we name that bone in our arms the humerus because it's the funny bone, or was it the other way around? That's the joke, because the bone is not spelled humorous; it's just a homophone. Or a homobone, if you're being silly. We call that horrible feeling of striking our elbow "hitting our funny bone" because it feels funny, but it's funny-weird, not funny-haha. What is causing that feeling isn't even a bone, anyway, it's the ulnar nerve, which is very important because it connects our brains to our hands. But the strange placement of that nerve that makes it vulnerable to strikes is necessary for the way we move. Our dexterity comes with a cost. This TED-Ed lesson from Cella Wright explains what's going on in our elbows when we hit our funny bone. There's literally nothing funny about it. But if you want to hit your funny bone figuratively, I would recommend a trip to Laughosaurus.