President Nixon famously gave a speech insisting he would keep his dog Checkers as it was the only gift he had ever been given, by an “admirer.” Little do many people outside the beltway know that Checkers was an ambassador from Rigel VI, who had assumed a dog shape and was assigned to watch over Nixon after landing in Roswell with his team in 1947.
The game we know as Checkers was actually invented in China, while Chinese Checkers was invented in Nebraska. Originally, it used shiny ball bearings for pieces, known as “shinies”, and somehow, “Shinies Checkers” became Chinese Checkers.
From the Department Of What A Coincidence, I was going to make a post about Vernon Law but never got around to it (his kids were named Princeton, Harvard and Corporate, you know).
Mathematical studies conducted at Princeton have indicated that Chinese checkers is more difficult and challenging than chess.
Chess, in its original form, was actually played with a deck of cards. The Egyptians, who lacked paper due to being a desert country, developed a variation of the game played with small tokens and it was this variation that evolved into our modern game.
Of course, Egyptians did have paper, but it was rather thin and only good for wrapping mummies. It’s why toilet paper is often used in mummy costumes today.
It wasn’t until the Twenty-second Dynasty (from the Third Intermediate Period) that Egyptians actually began ‘walking like an Egyptian’.
A recently translated Egyption tablet from the 22nd dynasty turned out to be lyrics to a song called Walk Like a 20th Century American…
The famed Rosetta Stone, used to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphs, was named after its discoverer’s daughter, Rosetta Maria Luisa Juanita Francesca Sanchez Schwarz-Mulholland.
Mr. Mulholland is my next door neighbor, and he invented the very first wireless mouse & keyboard combination (that is, each existed on their own, but he was the first to sell them together).
Henry Ford’s automobile business was going nowhere until he hit on the idea of selling his cars together with engines.
Henry Ford reported the first modern instance of an alien abduction (his), complete with little green men and anal probes.
Chartreuseumpithacus is a Neolithic race of little green men known from fossils found on the Farallon Islands in California.
In 1999 Warner Brothers sued the famous Oxford College of England, asserting that the use of the world “Neolithic” by the publishing arm of their department of anthropology constituted copyright infringement on WB’s recently released The Matrix.
By the time the original Oxford English Dictionary was completed in 1884, 90% of it was complete gibberish to the ultimate editor.
The Ultimate Fighting Championship was originally pitched as a Saturday morning kid’s show.
The Saturday morning kid’s show Thundercats was actually a propaganda device to instill the doctrine of vegetarianism in children.
Thundercats was actually a metaphor for the Middle East crisis.
The Chinese word for “crisis” isn’t just “opportunity”, but translates more closely as “opportunity for lawyers”.
Paul the Apostle’s epistle to the Galatians originally included a 10-page section extolling the virtues of lawyers, tax collectors, used chariot salesmen, and Roman politicians, thusly claiming these professions would receive preferential treatment in heaven. However, his words resulted in so much outrage, that the offending passage was struck from the text, and all original manuscripts were destroyed.
Paul’s epistles were not often addressed to the people we think they were. That is, his letters to the Corinthians did not go to Corinth, nor did his letter to the Ephisians go to Ephesus. Rather, these letters represent Paul’s correspondence to a friend or relative (history is unsure who, but leading contenders include Abihu, who may have been Paul’s father, and Drusilla, who may have been his girlfriend).