New Coke
Joe Piscopo: I don’t need SNL, I can be a movie star!
The US pulling back at Berlin and letting the Soviet Union in, splitting up Europe for a long time.
Gold chains, Afros, tight-ass pants, and shoes that were way damn too high- but enough about Drew Carey! No, seriously- most of the fads of the 70s.
Lincoln deciding he was a fan of John Wilkes Booth’s acting.
Columbus did not discover America, he was merely the first to do so on behalf of the Spanish government. Obviously there were millions of native Americans here. The Vikings had discovered it before that (and made settlements) and Irish monks had too. There is also some rumor that fisherman from Bristol knew about the “new world” but never bothered to tell anyone.
-Crusades
-The Somme mass infantry walk accross the trenches
-Treaty of Vesailles which caused WWII
-Hitler not annilating french and British troops at Dunkirk
-Mussilini thinking it was a good idea to march 50000 troops accross the egyptian desert
-Rommel going on holiday just before an allied attack in Africa
-D-day training exercises (where we lost thousands of troops)
-Rommel going on holiday just before the D-day landings
-Me 262A not being developed and produced fully (since B-17s would have been eaten alive by her)
-operation market garden in Arnhem
-Japan going ahead with the attack plan of Midway even though they knew they were compromised plans
-Korean war
-Vietnam
-Pol pot being head of Khamir Rouge
-Argentina invading the Falklands
-Jimmy Carter using special forces to try rescue hostages
-Saddam invading Kuwait
-the Bomb in Dr Strangelove
-B2 bomber
-The Euro
-Jeffrey Archer lying in court under oath
-those dumb people who go swiming when there are sharkwarnings on TV and radio
-that prat who thought he was using a fake gun pretending to shoot himself in the head
Considering the (large) number of times speaking Esperanto has gotten me laid (I kid you not), I would have to disagree with you here.
The US never “pulled back” from Berlin. There was never any point when American troops were closer to Berlin than the Soviets were.
Whoosh me if I missed a joke here, but Booth wasn’t performing in the play Lincoln was watching when he was killed. But there was a major mistake made here; Lincoln’s bodyguard down in the lobby decided that he could safely duck next door for a beer and be back before the play ended. Who’d ever know?
As a test engineer I often used to quote Ariane 5, the most expensive bug I’ve ever heard of.
Jack Mingo’s How the Cadillac got its Fins tells lots of business stories about fotuitous mistakes like Post-it-Notes.
Uh, would you care to elaborate on that?
I remember reading that the Jari Project was one of the most relentless, money-losing debacles of the 20th Century. Had it succeeded, who knows how much of the rain forest would be left today?
Either I missed it, or all these posts and nobody mentioning Watergate? The stupidest thing is getting caught.