It’s not held every year, rather every few years and there’s no set schedule — there was a twenty year gap at one point simply because no sailing club issued a challenge. The last one, the thirty-sixth, was held in March 2021 (yes, during the COVID lockdowns, but it was in New Zealand), and they’re currently in the run-up to the thirty-seventh. And if you haven’t seen what they’re sailing these days, you’ll be in for a bit of a shock.
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Wow. He must be mistaken for the famous David Attenborough all the time!
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Your wish is granted! It was done again in 2022 by a combined effort of 4 Houston Astros pitchers against the Philadelphia Phillies.
Another Olympic fact I find interesting is that originally, there were medals awarded for artistic achievements as well as athletic ones. In fact the founder of the modern Olympics, Pierre de Coubertin, won a gold medal for literature in 1912 for his poem Ode to Sport.
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And Austria has only ever won one gold medal at the Olympics- for architecture.
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And here’s the recording.
4.05pm: On and on they go. Soon they will sprout beards and their hair will grow down their backs, and their tennis whites will yellow and then rot off their bodies. And still they will stand out there on Court 18, belting aces and listening as the umpire calls the score. Finally, I suppose, one of them will die.
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That’s uh, awfully macabre.
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Also a fun fact: one (ancient) Olympic athlete won his event posthumously, in the sport of pankration. The opponent found themself unable to keep going and conceded, only then realizing that Arrhichion had carked it mid fight.
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That’s the British for you. What, they’re still going at it? Still alive? Well, that’s brilliant. Let me know how it turns out. I’m popping round the pub.
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2:45pm: …I’m off out for a spell to grab a sandwich and see the sights, though rest assured the kind folk at Guardian Towers will keep this blog ticking over in my absence in case anything momentous occurs. Back shortly …
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Good morning, and welcome to another edition of creepy, macabre, and disturbing history facts, brought to you by Random Facts Woman™! Buckle up kiddies, and keep the brain bleach nearby… you might just need it.
- So a lot of people know about Nazi atrocities during WWII, but the details of the worst of the worst of them, Josef Mengele, are seriously disturbing, especially if you’re a twin. Mengele performed his “experiments” on 732 pairs of twins at Auschwitz, to study inherited genes as well as attempting to prove Jewish/Roma people were genetically weak. Survivors of said experiments remember children having organs and limbs removed without anesthesia, other children being murdered and then dissected, and others being injected with diseases. Mengele also allegedly threw a newborn infant into an oven once because it wasn’t a twin, and would force people with dwarfism and Roma people to have sex with each other. He escaped to Argentina following the war and reportedly died there in 1979.
- Speaking of WWII atrocities, let us not forget Japan’s Unit 731, who conducted absolutely atrocious experiments on (mostly Chinese) prisoners of war, trying to determine just how much the body can withstand before death. Many of the perpetrators of these horrific experiments were granted immunity by the U.S. government in exchange for the results of their experiments, which means we now know how to treat frostbite, among other things, but the jury is out on how reliable the results are, since the proper scientific method wasn’t used. Nor, apparently, was a little thing called human compassion…
- And after the war in Romania, there were the horrors that occurred at Pitesti Prison between 1949-1951, where the Communist Party tortured, humiliated, and killed multiple political prisoners, most of whom were young anti-communist students captured by the Soviets. One particular experiment conducted by guards and even other prisoners involved having the victims “unmask” themselves and become supporters of the Communist Party, which apparently involved forcing the prisoners to renounce all religious beliefs, consume feces, and even torture each other at the behest of their captors.
- And lest you think this was confined solely to Russia/Germany/Japan, oh let me tell you; the US is not spared. Holmesburg Prison in Pennsylvania was the location for horrific dermatological experiments conducted on the prisoners for more than two decades by Dr. Albert M. Kligman. Kligman exposed the prisoners to carcinogenic compounds, radioactive elements, diseases, and infections like herpes, and more. Most of the prisoners involved were paid small amounts for this, but most did not understand what they were consenting to. While this ended in the 1970s, that isn’t remotely close to the end of illegal medical testing on prisoners; in 2021, it’s been alleged that high doses of ivermectin (i.e. the “miracle” drug touted without evidence by wrong-minded people during the pandemic) were tested on four inmates in an Arkansas prison who had COVID without informing them what medicine they were receiving.
- Oh, and let’s not forget the Tuskegee Study where scientists studied syphilis in 600 black men, none of whom were told they had syphilis and none of whom were given penicillin, a readily available and effective treatment for the disease. That “experiment” lasted 40 years until the 1970s and only ended because the Associated Press broke a story on it. The last member of that study died in 2004; the government didn’t even apologize to those involved until 1997.
- And to round out the horrible things the US government has done, there’s also the STI experiments conducted in Guatemala in the 1940s, conducted on over 5,500 prisoners, sex workers, soldiers, children (as young as one), and psych patients. Over 1,300 of those were purposefully infected with syphilis, gonorrhea, or chancroid; only a few received treatment.
- Oh you thought we were done? Not a chance; there’s also the tests the government ran to discover how unsafe radiation was as they began developing the atomic bomb. Tests were run on “terminally ill” (yeah; most of them were not remotely terminal) patients who were exposed to different radioactive elements to see what would happen and how long it would stay in their blood. Most patients were not even aware of the exposure; one of them, Albert Stevens, had been misdiagnosed with cancer when he just had an ulcer, but he was exposed to so much radioactive material that he became known as the most radioactive person alive due to the amount of radiation in his body (6,400 rems). He somehow survived and lived to 79, but was never told that he had been exposed to plutonium or that he did not, in fact, have cancer.
- Moving on from the experiments to the just downright creepy; Eva Peron, noted wife of the then president of Argentina Juan Peron, died of cancer, but her story doesn’t end there, and it’s… not pretty. Juan tried to build a monument to his wife after her death to display her body, but when he was forced into exile after a coup Eva’s body was shuttled around being stored in trucks, military locations, even behind a cinema while they tried to find a place to bury her where she would not become a revolutionary symbol. Eventually her body came into the possession of Major Arancibia who… had relations with her corpse, eventually shooting his own wife in the throat when he was discovered. After that, the corpse went to Colonel Carlos Eugenio de Moori Koenig, who also had feelings for Eva’s body… and then ordered his men to pee on her corpse when it didn’t return his affections. Eventually however her body made its way back to Juan, who by then had remarried, but he and his wife proceeded to display her body on their dining room table, where his wife Isabel would comb her hair and even lie down next to her. Eventually, Eva was finally buried, and her corpse is resting in a fortified mausoleum, with a trap door and fake coffins to distract from the real coffin.
- It gets worse; ever hear of Carl Tanzler? If not, be glad… Carl worked at a Florida hospital but would often tell others about the beautiful dark-haired woman he constantly dreamed about… until one day his “dream” girl came to the hospital. He was convinced Maria Elena Milagro de Hoyos was his dream woman and that they would spend their lives together… until Maria tragically died from tuberculosis, which at the time was nearly always fatal. Tanzler paid for a magnificent stone mausoleum for his lost love… that he possessed the only key for, and he would visit her corpse nightly. Eventually Tanzler wasn’t satisfied with the nightly visits and proceeded to take Elena’s body back to his home, where he used wax, plaster, silk, and piano wire to refurbish her body, and he kept her body for seven years. And yes, he did do what you’re thinking of to her body… Eventually Tanzler was found out, arrested, and tried… but as he was past the statute of limitations for his crimes, he was let go. Elena was reburied in an unmarked grave so he could not find her again despite asking for her body back, and Tanzler spent the rest of his days with a life-size effigy made of Elena instead.
- The people of Pompeii, that city that was buried in ash after the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD, often didn’t die instantly. Most of them died in the 15 minutes following the explosion and suffocated from the burning ash and gas. That’s bad enough, but there are others who’s heads literally exploded from the temperature of the gas. Ouch.
- Women used to give birth standing (or squatting) upright. What changed, you ask? Why King Louis XIV. In the 1600s he popularized the practice of giving birth lying down because he wanted to be able to see his children being born better. No word on whether there was a more… perverted reason to watch his children being born.
- After the explosion of reactor four in Chernobyl, there is one body that could not be retrieved; that of Valery Khodemchuk. His remains are still inside the building and have never yet been found. If this were a horror movie, I’d be looking out for a radioactive skeleton stumbling around, trapped in the darkness….
And I believe that is a surfeit of disturbing historical facts. Tune in next time, when Random Facts Woman™ presents more facts she finds on the internet!
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The medals of the 2024 Paris Olympics and Paralympics each contain a slice of the Eiffel Tower.
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There is a “banned” movie about Unit 731, and the events in the movie are all based on actual atrocities.
Man Behind the Sun, IIRC
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Your browser search history has probably landed you on some sort of watchlist after some of these posts.
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That list is a good reminder of why we need to beware of revisionist “history”.
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I’m a writer. My search history the past couple of days has involved.
1937 Colt .38 match specials
modern Berette M9s
vintage shoulder holsters
birdcage elevators
1940 men’s and women’s fashions.
1940s era vehicles
You get the idea. My FBI agent is well entertained. LOL!
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By now they’re pretty sure you are Bonnie Parker.
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Oh, I’ve had search histories that are far more disturbing.
(hides My Little Pony fanfiction library)
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Those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it.
Those who don’t want to teach history hope to repeat it.
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Oh that’s for what I’m currently working on.
In the past I’ve looked up things like how to make fertilizer bombs, how to build a nuclear weapon, various diseases and plant based cures, aspects of astrophysics, laser technology.
I’m sure I’m on a list.
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Newp. Get most of them from articles where someone else did the research.
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