Life on Mars

In 1877, a frumpish Italian fella by the name of Giovanni Schiaparelli literally had his panties in a twist over a major event.  He was so excited that he swore off alcohol and narcotics for weeks before hand to ensure his faculties were all in tip top shape.  Hell, the man even quit drinking coffee because he was worried it would give him the jitters.  So what was he so excited about?  Why the planet Mars being super close to Earth of course.  Oh yeah, I probably should’ve mentioned that good old Gio was in charge of Italy’s biggest observatory, and that said observatory had just installed a brand spanking new high powered telescope.  Now you’re probably sarcastically saying whoopee-dee-doo, but let me tell me you, it was definitely an alignment of factors sure to get any astronomer all hot and bothered.    

Anyways, on a crisp September night, Geo pointed his new toy at the red dot in the sky, pressed his eye against the telescope’s lens, and perceived a whole other world in detail never before imagined.  Gio spent the entire night scribbling notes and drawing maps, revealing a Martian surface made up of dark and light patches crisscrossed by numerous deep channels.  Reeling from such a heady experience, Gio soon after wrote a scientific paper about his observations that was eagerly read by astronomers from around the world.  This of course required a lot of translation, which was of course where the problem began.  When the paper was translated into English, the translator took the Italian word for channel, which is canali, and translated it as canal, probably because they wanted to hurry up and get done so they could get laid or something.  When the astronomers of the time noticed the mistake, they had a good laugh about it, then went back to staring at the stars.  It was only a small mistake, hardly anyone ever read astronomy papers, and those who did weren’t stupid enough to think anything of it.

Enter Percival Lowell.  Percy was a rich kid with an interest in math.  He graduated from Harvard in 1876 and was considered to be an up and coming fellow, what with his boatloads of cash.  However, instead of doing anything math like at all, he instead ran a cotton mill for six years and then traveled to Japan and Korea.  His initial vacation became a stay of several years, which probably had nothing to do with the fact that it was common at the time for women to walk around topless in both countries.  Either way, he wrote some pretty good books about his experiences.  Such was Percy’s life until one day he happened upon an astronomy paper by our old friend Gio, describing the “canals” of Mars.  Percy, upon seeing the word canals, came to the conclusion that there must be life on Mars and dedicated the rest of his life to proving it.  

Now for some strange reason preeminent astronomers had no interest in letting some random rich guy use their telescopes to prove his crackpot theories based on a typo.  Undeterred, Percy used his family’s money to build his own observatory in Arizona in 1894.  Thus situated, he began spending every night studying the red dot in the sky.  Squinting through one of the most powerful telescopes in the world, he was amazed to see straight lines stretching thousands of miles across the Martian surface.  He reported his findings to the astronomers who replied in various ways which boiled down to calling him an idiot.  Still undeterred, Percy wrote a series of books about his findings describing a mythical Martian society building massive canals in a desperate attempt to save their civilization on a dying world.  I’ll let you guess which theory the public went wild about.  Did you guess the one put forward by the top scientists?  Well, if so, then you my friend have no clue how the world works.  The public went crazy for Percy’s books, and life on Mars became a widespread belief which spawned countless books, radio shows, and films for half a century.        

For his part, Percy moved on from Mars and began studying Venus, which lo and behold, seemed to have canals as well.  Fun fact, astronomers staring through high powered telescopes often begin seeing the veins in their own eyes.  Percy was basically drawing maps of his own eyeball.  Though every member of the scientific community who was not a crackpot thought Percy was nuts, he continued to promote his theories about Martian societies for the rest of his life.  His later years were spent searching for an imaginary planet, creatively named Planet X, and marrying his secretary, though afterwards he still made her work as his secretary.  Percy died in 1916 from a stroke brought on by kicking his butler down a flight of stairs.  His theories were not fully debunked in the public eye until NASA started sending probes to Mars in the 1960's and found it to be pretty much just a big red rock.

Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Percival_Lowell_observing_Venus_from_the_Lowell_Observatory_in_1914.jpg

Little Napoleon

During the early 19th century, Napoleon Bonaparte was known as the greatest strategic genius in history and the scourge of Europe.  As Emperor of France, he conquered nearly the entire continent, ruling with an iron fist, striking terror in the hearts of his enemies, and forcing the metric system down everybody’s throats.  A tactical and military mastermind, Napoleon was thought undefeatable on the battlefield.  So feared was Napoleon that his enemies were forced to resort to making up rumors that he was super short, he was actually of average height, in a last ditch attempt to get their soldiers to quit shitting themselves.  It took nearly twelve years of continual warfare for the combined powers of Europe to finally defeat Napoleon, after which they kicked his ass off the French throne and exiled him to the remote isle of Elba in the Mediterranean Sea.  However, soon after Napoleon escaped from Elba, returned to France, retook the throne, and started one last war to regain his former glory.  Unfortunately for Napoleon, but probably okay for the rest of the world, this final war did not go well.  Distracted by a severe case of hemorrhoids, Napoleon was unable to fully apply his tactical genius, resulting in his resounding defeat at the Battle of Waterloo.  Hence the world was saved from having to speak French.       

Not wanting to deal with anymore Napoleon style bullshit, the British again exiled the former emperor, this time to an even more remote tiny butt fuck nowhere island in the South Atlantic called Saint Helena.  It was literally the furthest thing from anything.  There, Napoleon was forced to live in a drafty house on a damp windswept cliff, because when you’re the defeated conqueror of all of Europe, creature comforts aren’t exactly just handed out.  The shitty living conditions did little to help Napoleon’s health, but it did win him the sympathy of the local doctor, who wrote countless letters to the British asking for them to improve things.  All of these letters were ignored, and for reasons that can only be described as obvious, Napoleon fell ill after five years and died.  What exactly he died of is still speculated about today, probably because if you’re a good doctor you don’t end up living on the remotest island in the world.  Anyways, Napoleon’s dying wish was that he be buried in his beloved France.  However, the British were less than keen with this whole idea, probably because they were still pretty bitter about the twelve years of war.  They instead forced the former most powerful person in the world to be buried in a pauper’s grave on St. Helena.  This didn’t sit well with the local doctor, who thought that treating Napoleon in such a way was complete bullshit.  Not really having many options, since again he was a shitty doctor on an island in the middle of nowhere, he decided that at the very least a small part of Napoleon’s body should be smuggled back to France.  Now one might think a finger or toe would do the job, but for reasons that have been lost to history, which is probably for the best, the doctor decided that the best part of Napoleon to send back was his penis.    

So begins a strange tale that is not often taught in history classes.  The doctor gave Napoleon's newly severed dick to an acquaintance who happened to be Corsican monk soon to travel back to Europe.  The hand off was undoubtedly an awkward moment.  How exactly the monk smuggled the dick is also lost to history, but again, it’s probably better this way.  Unfortunately, when the monk arrived home to the island of Corsica, he was soon after murdered due to a blood feud between his family and another, which was pretty common on Corsica at the time.  The monk’s belongings, including the penis, were given to his next of kin, who instead of freaking right the fuck out, decided to keep it.  Again, Corsica was a pretty weird place.  From there, Napoleon’s dick became a treasured family heirloom, passed from father to son like some kind of fucked up pocket watch.  The penis stayed on Corsica for a hundred years until 1916, when needing money, the family sold it to a British collector.  Just like how you pawned your grandmother’s ring to buy an X-Box.    

The charm of owning the dick of a well-known historical figure must have worn off rather quickly, because the British gentleman then sold it to a rare book dealer in 1924, because rare books and dicks are totally the same thing.  The penis was shipped to the United States where the dealer, not content with hoarding Napoleon’s dick for himself, put it in a museum in New York.  The reviews were not exactly positive, what with the penis looking like a small piece of old jerky by this time, and most consisted of ribald remarks about how short it was.  Nothing honors the dead quite like laughing at the size of their severed genitals.  This lasted until 1977, when a leading urologist, deciding that the display was less than respectful, purchased the dick for $125,000 in today’s money.  He then put it in a briefcase and hid it under his bed in New Jersey, only whipping it out from time to time to show off to his friends.  The urologist died in 2007, and since then the dick has been in the hands of his daughter.

Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Napol%C3%A9on-t%C3%A9te-couronn%C3%A9e-Jacques-Louis-David.jpg

Stranger Than Fiction

The reign of Nicholas II, the last czar of Russia, was not exactly a good time for the Russian royal family.  Not only did Nicky have to deal with World War I, a communist revolt, and his wife Alex being a spoiled pain in the ass, but to top it all off his only son, and therefore heir to the throne, had hemophilia.  Now in layman terms this meant that if Nicky’s son got even a single cut, he was in danger of bleeding to death.  It was a fun side effect of the fact that pretty much every member of Europe’s royalty was inbred as fuck.  Now Nicky did also have four daughters, but this being sexist Imperial Russia, they didn’t really count.  As would be expected given such a situation, Nicky and Alex were of course all sorts of freaked out.  Alex was especially freaked out since, unlike her husband, she didn’t have the distraction of being the autocratic ruler of the largest country in the world.  With laser like focus, Alex did everything she could to try and find a cure for her young son.  However, no matter how many doctors she had examine him, every single one had the same answer, the condition was incurable.  With no one else to turn to, Alex began seeking the advice of mystics and other such crazy people who claimed they were wizards.

Enter Rasputin, the most crazy eyed bastard you've ever seen in your life.  Though Rasputin was widely known as a smelly drunk with a food filled beard, he was also known as a mystical monk who could perform miracles.  Through some kind of trickery, Rasputin managed to give the appearance that his mystical arts helped ease the symptoms of the Russian prince, thus winning him the gratitude of the boy’s parents.  However, this gratitude soon after turned into Nicky and Alex asking for Rasputin’s advice for pretty much everything, because being an illiterate foul smelling magic man obviously makes you qualified to run a country in the middle of a war.  For obvious reasons, this did not sit well with many members of the Russian government.  It probably didn’t help that Rasputin was reputed to have a giant dong, which rumors claimed he was throwing around willy-nilly in the government officials’ wives.  Eventually the husband of Nicky’s niece, a man named Felix Yusupov, decided that something needed to be done.  However, this being Felix’s first murder and all, the assassination of course did not go well.  In the course of a night, Felix poisoned Rasputin twice, shot him several times, maybe cut off his giant dong (there’s a lot of disagreement on this one), and finally tied him in a sack and drowned him in an icy river.      

The removal of Rasputin did little to help things in Russia.  Less than a year later the Russian monarchy was overthrown by the communists, eventually leading to the establishment of the Soviet Union after a confusing and blood filled civil war.  Since Nicky and his family were somewhat in the way, they were unceremoniously shot in the woods.  Felix, being better at escaping than murdering random mystics, managed to flee the country with his wife to France.  Now an exile, Felix spent most of his time throwing away what money he had living an overly exorbitant lifestyle and bragging to anyone who would listen how he had killed Rasputin.  He was pretty much a guy with really only one interesting thing about him, and by god, he wanted everyone to know about it. 

Fast forward fifteen years into the future.  MGM studios, feeling that enough time had passed for it to be classy to make a movie about someone’s murder, decided to make a film about Rasputin and his influence over the Russian imperial court.  Of course, it being Hollywood and all, they decided to jazz up the story a bit by suggesting that Felix, who had been cleverly replaced by a character named Paul for some reason, killed Rasputin because the mystic had been putting his massive dong in Felix’s/Paul’s wife.  This little addition rather pissed off Felix and his wife, mostly because Rasputin had never even met the woman.  Always being in need of a little extra cash, the couple sued MGM for libel.  After a ridiculously lengthy trial, MGM was eventually ordered to pay Felix and his wife a huge settlement.  Not wanting to get sued again, from that day forward MGM, and all the other studios, started putting a disclaimer on all their films.  You know the one, where it says the movie is purely fictional and that all resemblances to people living or dead is purely coincidental.  So yeah, that’s where that came from.   

Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Grigori_Rasputin_1916.jpg