Some of our history we learn as facts, which give us some knowledge but often without perspective. Other things we learn as anecdotes passed along without much evidence behind it, often stories that grew further from the truth as time passed. And as you know, history is colored by who teaches it, and from which perspective.

Read all 25 pictofacts with things you might know (some of them have been covered here at Neatorama) and some thing you didn't know, at Cracked.

Have you heard about the chess diet? It's not simply "barely moving," as the title indicates. Grandmasters do their best to keep in shape for upcoming tournaments, but when they sit down to competition, they are working out even while they appear to to do nothing but think.  You might be surprised at how many calories the world's best chess players expend doing what they do.  

The 1984 World Chess Championship was called off after five months and 48 games because defending champion Anatoly Karpov had lost 22 pounds. "He looked like death," grandmaster and commentator Maurice Ashley recalls.

In 2004, winner Rustam Kasimdzhanov walked away from the six-game world championship having lost 17 pounds. In October 2018, Polar, a U.S.-based company that tracks heart rates, monitored chess players during a tournament and found that 21-year-old Russian grandmaster Mikhail Antipov had burned 560 calories in two hours of sitting and playing chess -- or roughly what Roger Federer would burn in an hour of singles tennis.

Robert Sapolsky, who studies stress in primates at Stanford University, says a chess player can burn up to 6,000 calories a day while playing in a tournament, three times what an average person consumes in a day. Based on breathing rates (which triple during competition), blood pressure (which elevates) and muscle contractions before, during and after major tournaments, Sapolsky suggests that grandmasters' stress responses to chess are on par with what elite athletes experience.

To combat the depletion, the world's top chess players are very particular about the calories they consume, both during competition and the rest of their time. Read about the physical demands of chess at ESPN. -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Vysotsky)

NASA's Juno probe caught an amazing picture of a solar eclipse on Jupiter. You can imagine how huge an area the Jovian moon Io is covering, yet the path of totality would be tiny in relation to Jupiter itself. Io is the fourth-largest moon in the solar system, and revolves 350,000 kilometers (217,000 miles) from Jupiter's cloud tops. -via Boing Boing

(Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Kevin M. Gill)

The PAC dance team at Walden Grove High School in Sahuarita, Arizona, gave us a Wizard of Oz dance routine and a Harry Potter dance routine that really impressed us in previous years. They've set our expectations pretty high, and still came through with a production featuring the heroes and villains of the Marvel Cinematic Universe for this year's homecoming assembly. -via Digg

The Annals of Improbable Research awarded their 2019 Ig Nobel Prizes on Thursday evening in a ceremony at Harvard's Sanders Theatre. These are bestowed every year for research that makes one laugh, and then makes one think. The most attention-grabbing winner was a study called "Thermal Asymmetry of the Human Scrotum," in which the temperature of the male subjects' left testicle was compared to the temperature of the right testicle. The Anatomy prize went to Roger Mieusset and Bourras Bengoudifa for their efforts. Continue reading for more winners.

On Wednesday, burglars tripped an alarm at the Dallas County Courthouse in Iowa. Police found two men in the courthouse, who offered a completely reasonable excuse for their presence. They said they had been hired by the state court administration to test courthouse security, and they were just doing their job. A likely story., They were hauled off to jail. However, Justin Wynn and Gary Demercurio had told the truth.

“The company was asked to attempt unauthorized access to court records through various means to learn of any potential vulnerabilities,” the statement read. “SCA did not intend, or anticipate, those efforts to include the forced entry into a building. SCA apologizes to the Dallas County Board of Supervisors and law enforcement and will fully cooperate with the Dallas County Sheriff’s Office and Dallas County Attorney as they pursue this investigation.”

The state court administration had contracted cybersecurity firm Coalfire, for which Wynn and Demercurio worked. They apparently thought any tests would be in the realm of digital security, and never considered alerting the police. Oops. The two men were released under a $50,000 bond. Read more on the story at Gizmodo.

(Image credit: Jimmy Emerson, DVM)

A Pennsylvania urban legend about a green man, or "Charlie No Face," has been circulating in western Pennsylvania since the 1950s. It seems like just a campfire story, but there's a kernel of truth behind it. Simon Whistler has the real story. He also explains goosebumps.  

A list of reader-submitted wedding catastrophes includes much drunkenness, desertion, police intervention, infidelity, and vomiting, plus one fart and one fire, although they aren't in the same story. No wedding is perfect, but few are as awful as these. Take the one where the knot was to be tied in a public park.

"My husband and I attended an outdoor wedding at a public park in town. When we arrived the police and coroner's van were there, surrounded by the wedding guests. Apparently a homeless man had sought shelter behind the lattice surrounding the bottom of the gazebo floor and had DIED several days before. It was June in Missouri and the stench was horrible! So...they proceed to move the wedding to a field on the OTHER side of the park, and although everyone was shaken up they decided to proceed.

The preacher was in the middle of the vows and one of the groomsmen interrupted and said, 'John, I'm sorry but you can't marry Sherilynn. I love her and she's pregnant with my baby.' Wow. Then the groom proceeds to yell at his bride (not)-to-be that she was a cheap whore. Then one of the guests STANDS UP and yells at the groom, 'Serves you right, you bastard! You've been screwing my sister for a year!' Yep. —Sarah Taylor, Facebook

Believe it or not, several of the stories could actually be worse than that. While some may be made up, they are all fairly believable, if cringeworthy. Read 33 such wedding tales at Buzzfeed.

(Unrelated image credit: wordjunky)

The Insight Investment Astronomy Photographer of the Year competition has announced its 2019 winners. The competition, now in its 11th year, is a collaboration between the Royal Observatory Greenwich, Insight Investment, and BBC Sky at Night Magazine. There are many categories, and the winner in the People and Space category is shown above. Titled “Ben, Floyd and the Core,” it features British photographer Ben Bush and his dog Floyd underneath Mars, Saturn, and the galactic core of the Milky Way. See the overall winner and the top photos in the various categories at Gizmodo. 

(Image credit: Ben Bush)

Have you ever seen something like this? Maybe in an antique store, or maybe in a china cabinet of someone's home? This is called an epergne, and it was very popular during the Victorian era. It's strangely fancy, but what was it for?

They first appeared around the 17th century. The name originates from the French noun épargne, meaning “savings”, as it ‘economised’ space on the dinner table by regrouping several hors d’oeuvres and decorations into one apparatus. Meaning: its centre bowl could bear fruit, while its arms tentacled out with mini vases of flowers, candles, sweets, and whatever your heart desired. That’s the classic blueprint, at least, as they’ve varied throughout the years. You know an epergne when you see one, though. Trust us.

See a wide variety of epergne designs at Messy Messy Chic. Whether they deserve a comeback is a matter of opinion, and I would say, no thanks.

It’s a whole new world #NFID20 pic.twitter.com/hxsTICBNjG

— Kamilla Baybayova (@kamii__bb) September 12, 2019

The idea of high school students needing to carry ID only came about when schools grew too large for every student to be known, for safety reasons. My old high school is still too small to need them. North Farmington High School in Michigan has over 1200 students, but they are still pretty easygoing about student IDs. It's an annual tradition there for seniors (who the staff know pretty well by then) to dress up and pose as pop culture characters for their ID photos!

wakanda forever! #nfid20 pic.twitter.com/fIYfTMwtvm

— myaaa (@WatkinsAmya) September 12, 2019

Remember the creepy clown scare of 2016? Even before that, there was a viral clown that you may have missed. In 2014, a surveillance video of a clown hiding under a child's bed caused a stir. As strange as that was, the truth is even stranger: the parents hired Wrinkles the Clown to pull off the stunt and scare their daughter into behaving. Wrinkles is a retired Florida man who will appear as a creepy clown for any reason you want to pay for, and became national news after the bedroom video went viral.

Now Wrinkles is the subject of a horror film, set to hit theaters on October fourth. This one should give Pennywise a run for his money in the creep competition, because this movie is a documentary. -via Mental Floss

Before the Panama Canal was built, ships traveling from the Atlantic to the Pacific went around the tip of South America, through the Drake Passage. During the Age of Exploration, they only went through during the Southern Hemisphere's summer months, because the cold storms during the rest of the year gave the rocky passage the nickname the sailor's graveyard. In 1741, the British navy sent the HMS Wager on a mission that was delayed so long that the ship found itself in the midst of the Drake Passage in April.

Aboard Wager, veteran ship’s gunner John Bulkeley was the officer of the watch, overseeing the ship’s navigation in the midst of a violent storm. The sky was a wet, howling tempest, the sea undulated with mountainous swells. Wager’s timbers creaked and her sails thrashed as the air and ocean conspired to smash the ship to pieces. Bulkeley had seen a lot of storms in his day, but nothing like this. One ocean swell—the largest he had ever witnessed—swept over the ship and briefly submerged Wager and her 160 crew in frigid water, washing Bulkeley across the quarter-deck.

Wager had entered the Drake Passage about a month earlier. She had been accompanied by seven other Royal Navy ships, all part of a secret squadron on a wartime mission heading for Patagonia on the west coast of South America. A principle hazard in sailing westward in the Drake Passage is that the winds and currents are powerful, relentless, and moving in exactly the wrong direction. Temperatures are frosty in autumn at such a southern latitude, and precipitation is nearly constant. In the era of sailing ships, the Drake Passage was a perilous venture even for a robust vessel manned by an intrepid crew in the calm season—a collection of characteristics that utterly failed to describe HMS Wager.

Wager’s speed and maneuverability were compromised due to the loss of a mast in the storm. Her captain was dead, her acting captain was bedridden, and many of the men were deathly ill. Wager had lost contact with the other ships of the squadron, having fallen hopelessly far behind. And her crew’s troubles had only just begun.

Everything that could have possibly gone wrong with the mission did go wrong, both before and after the ship wrecked. Yet some survivors made it back to England to tell the story. Read the saga of the HMS Wager in a thrilling account by Alan Bellows at Damn Interesting.

KFC is no stranger to bizarre promotions- remember the prom corsage that included a piece of chicken? Their newest venture is a collaboration with game developer Psyop called I Love You, Colonel Sanders! It includes an anime version of the Colonel as a young man, nevertheless sporting his signature white hair and goatee. The actual young Harland Sanders looked like this. The game involves a lot of chicken, too. A description from Steam includes the game trailer.

I Love You, Colonel Sanders! A Finger Lickin’ Good Dating Simulator follows you, a promising culinary student, as you try to date your classmate, Colonel Sanders. Throughout your journey, you’ll be faced with life-changing decisions that will affect your chances of friendship and love. But be careful! Your choices have real consequences with real animated characters’ feelings at stake.

Do you have what it takes to survive culinary school? Will Colonel Sanders choose you to be his business partner? Or maybe even so much more? Find out in the most finger lickin’ good dating simulator ever created—a game that KFC actually made.

The game will be available for free beginning on September 24. -via Uproxx

Photographer Laurenda Marie Bennett accompanied Megan and Luke to the great outdoors to take pictures after their wedding. The bride was carrying a lovely bouquet of roses that apparently smelled good. It drew the attention of a young deer, who was so tempted that he came right up to the happy couple and joined the photo session! Bennet kept shooting, and talked to Bored Panda about the incident.

“The bride wanted photos over in a field on the same grounds as her ceremony and reception, so we headed that way after dinner for their golden hour photos. Well, it was very overcast that day and we didn’t have a true golden hour, but what happened instead trumped that pretty light we were hoping for.”

Read the story and see more pictures from the wedding shoot.

(Image credit: Laurenda Marie Photography)