Giuseppe Marco Fieschi built this gun to be dangerous. A former soldier and lifelong criminal, Fieschi hatched a plan to assassinate King Louis-Philippe of France in 1835. He pondered that old saying, "You come at the king, you best not miss." Not having that much confidence in his aim, Fieschi built a gun with 25 barrels to spray destruction on the monarch. The gun, later named the Infernal Machine, was designed to fire all 25 barrels at once. Fieschi positioned himself, along with the gun, on the third floor of a Paris building while the king performed his annual review of the Paris National Guard. What could possibly go wrong?

Regarding Fieschi's plan, everything went wrong. The Infernal Machine was dangerous to everyone in the Paris street and to Fieschi himself. The scene that day, as described by Amusing Planet, could have been a comedy if it weren't for so many people being killed. That eventually included Fieschi himself, who was executed for his crimes, along with two accomplices. The destruction was so profound that it's a wonder they were able to reconstruct the Infernal Machine well enough to display it in a museum.    

(Image credit: Parisette)

Tigers are revered in Bhutan, but they still try to stay away from humans whenever possible. In 2018, a large male tiger was observed hanging around the outskirts of the nation's capital, Thimphu. The tiger appeared listless and unafraid of humans. Tigers are nocturnal, but here it was in daylight, so something was definitely wrong with this tiger. Officials from Bhutan's Nature Conservation Division sent a unit out to find the tiger. A wildlife veterinarian flew in from Cornell University, concerned that the tiger might be suffering from canine distemper, which could spread to other tigers in the dwindling population of Bhutan. A local veterinarian thought the tiger might be suffering from a tapeworm that had been observed in local yaks.

It didn't take all that long to locate and capture the tiger, but figuring out what was wrong with it was another story. Read about the sick tiger and the conservationists who worked to solve the mystery at Atlas Obscura.

The History Channel series Vikings ran for six seasons and proved to be quite popular. Now Netflix is launching a sequel series called Vikings: Valhalla, to premiere Friday. The new series is set a hundred years after Vikings ended, and centers around Leif Ericsson, his sister Freydís Eiríksdóttir, and Harald Hardrada, who is Freydis' lover and Leif's close friend. All are historical characters, but Vikings: Valhalla is heavily fictionalized. You know Leif Ericsson, but who was Harald Hardrada? He was the king of Norway, a world traveler, and died while trying to invade England. Smithsonian calls him "perhaps the most interesting Viking in history."

Before you watch Vikings: Valhalla, you might want to learn what is historical about the series. For one thing, Ericsson and Hadrada were not quite contemporaries, so their relationship is just for the show. Ericsson was more of an explorer than a warrior, but he does give us a familiar name to orient us for the series. The battles depicted in the show are mostly historical, but somewhat out of order and fought by different people. You may be surprised at the appearance of a Black character among the Vikings, but Viking settlements were more multicultural than you may have realized, although not at all egalitarian. Read an overview of the action in Vikings: Valhalla and how it measures up with the historical timeline at Smithsonian.

Conan O'Brien's talk show on TBS was simply called Conan. It ran from 2010 to 2021. Jack Black was a frequent guest, and in this video explains that his first talk show appearance was on Late Night with Conan O'Brien. So O'Brien asked that Black be his final guest on the final episode of Conan, to air on June 24, 2021. Black wanted to go out with a bang, and came up with a great idea for a pre-taped skit in which he would be injured. It was all planned, except for the very real injury. That's why Black hobbled onto the stage for the final Conan segment wearing a medical boot. The plans went out the window, and O'Brien and Black winged it through the show.

Yesterday, after months of sitting at home, Black posted a video to explain the entire story behind his Conan experience. And since the bit was being taped, there's plenty of video evidence. There are plenty of funny lines, but you'll really get a kick out of the ambulance driver. We are glad to see that Black has recovered, and has grown a beard fit for a wild man. -via reddit

The question at AskReddit was for teachers: "What was the best excuse for being late that turned out to be true?" Oh, there are some great answers. The chickens were blocking the road. The bus blew up. My goat followed me and I had to take her back home. But the most highly-rated answer was pretty involved. It wasn't the student who was late, but an assignment.

I'm an English professor, and one year a pretty good student showed up without one of his 2 major term papers. He explained that his safe had been stolen by a contractor who was working on their house. His laptop was in the safe, and that's where his paper was. I genuinely believe him because he been a really good student.

But that's just the beginning of the story. The student investigated the theft himself, and ended up in a crack house bribing prostitutes. Then the Secret Service got involved because of counterfeiting. But the most important contents of the safe were recovered. It's a story you just have to read. And then the list gets into the funnier side.

"Sorry Bohemian Rhapsody came on just as I parked." - My art teacher when he was about 5:55 minutes late.

Read 40 of those stories in a ranked list at Bored Panda.

(Image credit: Flickr user William Murphy)

The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 was the most destructive flood in US history, affecting 630,000 people and leading to structural changes in the engineering of the Mississippi River. Kansas Joe McCoy and Memphis Minnie wrote a little song about it in 1929. You are probably more familiar with the 1971 version of the song by Led Zeppelin. That's the version covered by a couple of dozen musicians from all over the world, including Stephen Perkins of Jane's Addiction, Susan Tedeschi, Derek Trucks, and Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones.

"When the Levee Breaks" is about a terrifying natural disaster, and evokes our concern about unusual weather patterns, accelerating disasters, and environmental degradation brought on by climate change. This is the latest project from Playing for Change (previously at Neatorama), an organization that aims to connect the world through music. Read more about this video at their website. -via Digg

In the spring of 1918, families in Petrograd (now St. Petersburg, Russia) were suffering from a lack of food due to transportation challenges in the wake of World War I and the October Revolution. So they sent 782 of the city's children to the Ural Mountains in the south, to a summer camp run by a charity called the Union of Cities. There they were caught between Russian and Czech fighters and could not leave- they spent the winter at camp. Aid workers from the Young Men's Christian Association (yes, the YMCA) found the children and helped them evacuate further east, to Siberia. There, the children fell into the care of the American Red Cross at Vladivostok. Then the Japanese invaded Vladivostok, and took the children to sea. For reasons that aren't all that clear, they didn't go west through the Indian Ocean, but sailed east to the US, around through the Panama Canal, and then the children spent some time in New York City. They didn't return to their parents in Petrograd until January of 1921! What they thought would be a summer in the mountains turned into a trip around the world, which you can read about at Messy Nessy Chic.    

(Image source: Library of Congress)

Alfred Hitchcock seemed to have had an obsession with stairs. Staircases are featured prominently in many of his films, which stands out because a person going upstairs or downstairs, or just generally moving from one place to another, is the kind of thing that most filmmakers would skip to save time. For Hitchcock, it may have been an excuse to film actors from strange angles. Or maybe it represents the character's journey. Or maybe it was a way to build tension. When asked about those scenes, Hitch said, "Stairs are very photogenic."

Max Tohline compiled 39 staircase sequences from 39 Hitchcock films and named it Alfred Hitchcock’s 39 Stairs. Yes, the movie The 39 Steps is in there. The films used in this supercut are listed at the vimeo page. This video is less than three minutes long, because the compilation is shown twice.

Tohline points out that Hitchcock's very first film, The Pleasure Garden from 1925, opened with a staircase scene, and his final film, Family Plot from 1976, ends with a shot of a staircase.  -via Kottke

Before the 20th century, some scientists thought that humans arrived in the New World around 1000 BCE or so. It was only when the Folsom Site near Folsom, New Mexico, was excavated that evidence of Native Americans were found that confirmed they were here during the last Ice Age. That might never have happened without George McJunkin.  

George McJunkin was born enslaved in Texas and became a cowboy after the Civil War. He was also a self-taught archaeologist and naturalist who was always on the lookout for bones and artifacts in the scrublands of New Mexico, where he managed a ranch. In 1908, a heavy rain flooded the arroyos. Surveying the damage, McJunkin noticed bones that had been unearthed by floodwaters washing away the soil. They were bison bones, much larger than any existing bison. He took some samples of what turned out to be an extinct species that died out at the end of the last Ice Age. McJunkin died in January 1922. He didn't live to see the Folsom site excavated and studied, but he spent the last 14 years of his life trying to convince others of its importance. There is some question about exactly who found the arrowhead embedded in the bison bones of the extinct species, but that discovery reset the narrative over the historical timeline, showing that humans were in New Mexico at least 11,000 years ago.

Read about the life and discoveries of George McJunkin at Sapiens. -via Atlas Obscura

A well-trained Jedi is supposed to master all his Force powers, but when you've learned workarounds to stumble your way through life, isn't that considered a success? Jake Groundsaunter isn't much of a Jedi. He can't fight his way out of a paper bag. The only danger from his lightsaber is to himself. And his diplomatic skills are nil. But he has mastered one important Force power, and that's all he needs. This video contains NSFW language, and an ad that you won't even see coming. The consensus is that we need a series to keep track of Jake Groundsaunter's mishaps. Apparently his real power is making us laugh just enough to want to see more.  -via reddit

Every year, there is one name that breaks out for new babies that was either never used before or extremely rare and becomes the thing for that year, for both boy and girl babies. Nathan Yau at Flowing Data dug up those unique names that became trendy for either sex in each year since 1930 in the US. Some of those trendy names grew in popularity over the years, but the longer they stay around, the less "trendy" they are. You can look at the year and figure out why for a lot of them. Delano is obviously for president Roosevelt, Jermaine came along with the Jackson Five (because the name Michael was too established to be trendy). Lavar trended the year Roots debuted. Leonidas wasn't a thing until the 2007 movie 300 was, and no one named a baby Kylo before 2016. What I don't understand is how Tammy, Denise, and Hazel made the chart for boy's names.  

I love how the girls chart begins with Marlene, Harlene, and Sharleen. Scarlett (1939) and Sabrina (1954) were from movies. Samantha and Tabitha trended with the series Bewitched. Coretta, which trended in 1968, is the name of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s widow. Rhiannon, Evita, Alanis, Charlize, and Coraline are right where you'd expect. See both charts and read about the trends at Flowing Data.  

(Image credit: Tamaki Sono)

If your education is anything like mine, you learned a lot more about ancient Egypt from movies and Sunday school than you ever learned in history class. Along the way, you may have picked up some lore about the pharaohs and the fabulous artifactual legacy they left behind that just isn't true. Mental Floss is here to set us straight on some common misconceptions about Egypt. For example, there is a story handed down that Napoleon Bonaparte shot off the Sphinx's nose. Or ordered cannon fire to that end, anyway. I'd never heard that one, but it's not true. We do have other, more plausible explanations for the missing nose.

Another misconception about the Sphinx is that its body has always been visible. Not so. The body was actually covered in sand for an indeterminate period of time—likely thousands of years—until the 1800s. Despite attempts, it wasn’t until archeologist Selim Hassan dug it out in the 1930s that it was fully visible in modern times.

The painting above is from 1801, which shows the Sphinx buried in sand, but the appearance of the nose is based on speculation. Read more on the Sphinx, and five other debunked myths about ancient Egypt at Mental Floss. You can also see the list in a video if you prefer.

In a previous post, we learned the difference between a "town" and "not a town" in the United States. England was only mentioned briefly, in that there is no unincorporated land there, meaning every place is already a town or a city. So what's the difference between a town and a city? Yeah, once again the answer depends on where you are. Each nation has their own way of distinguishing a town from a city -or else they don't even bother. In the US, it's usually a size thing, which is only legally defined in 20 states. I had heard that in England, you had to have a cathedral to be designated as a city, but according to Tom Scott, that is no longer true, if it ever was.

There doesn't seem to be any real world difference between town and a city in England, anyway. In this video, Tom chronicles a comedy of errors that caused Rochester's accidental decline from a city, which it had been for 800 years, to not even a town anymore. The place itself has not changed. It's just bureaucracy, but the loss in status seems to be rather embarrassing.  

Every city must balance the time and effort of a snow-removal system with the odds of ever having to use it. Montréal gets an average of 82 inches (208 cm) of snow every year. In a city of four million people, that means a lot of street plowing. But Montréal isn't like other cities that plow the streets and push the snow up in big banks on the sidewalk and across driveways to linger for months. Here, snow removal is serious business.

In Montreal, a blizzard is a call to action. With a budget of nearly $180 million and a staff of over 3,000 workers, the city is poised and prepared to manage and remove it all. Once snow begins accumulating, a multiphase operation begins to unfold across the city’s 19 boroughs. Between roads, bike lanes, and sidewalks, the city clears over 10,000 km - roughly the distance between Montreal and Beijing.

Montreal doesn’t just push snow to the curb with plows - instead, snow is picked up by a fleet of trucks and transported up to one of 28 snow dump sites across the city. Throughout a typical winter, roughly 300,000 truckloads of snow are transported - a volume of about 12 million cubic meters.

The city even has a complex system for dealing with the snow it gathers up- it is treated as wastewater to avoid polluting the water supply with salt and road grime. And there's another system for removing parked cars from the streets before plowing. Read a surprisingly interesting writeup on how a city that prioritizes snow removal has perfected its protocols at The Prepared. -via Metafilter

I got a 1947 recipe for "Spice Cookies" (that turned out to be gingersnaps) from a screenshot on reddit. It called for a half cup of spry, which confounded me until I searched around and found that Spry was once a popular brand of shortening. If anyone in my family had written that recipe down, it would have said Crisco. But that's not the only danger in using vintage recipes. An inordinate number of grandmas jotted down recipes for people who know how to cook, and don't bother mentioning you need to refrigerate cookie dough because everyone knows that!

If you're using a recipe from a hundred years ago, you may see confusing fractions without a slash. If you see "1-2 cup of water," you should know that is very different from "1-2 cups of water." You might also see the terms gill, saleratus, slow oven, or butter the size of an egg. These are translated for you, along with other tips on how to read obsolete directions in heirloom recipes at Newpapers.com. Now imagine a hundred years from now that someone found a recipe you jotted down, and they cannot figure out why you wrote "click here." -via Strange Company