WHAT REALLY HAPPENED TO THE "MARY CELESTE

There's nothing quite as creepy as a ghost ship, and perhaps the most famous of all is the Mary Celeste. Captained by Benjamin Briggs, the merchant ship left New York on November 1872. In addition to Briggs, the Mary Celeste carried his wife, his infant daughter, several sailors, and around 1,700 barrels of alcohol, all heading for Italy.

According to Briggs' diary, the trip was pleasant, but before they made it to Europe, something unusual happened. The Mary Celeste was discovered sailing along without a single person aboard. However, the lifeboat was gone, and there was a strong rope running from the ship into the sea. While the hatch doors had been removed, there weren't any other signs of distress. The Mary Celeste looked good as new. Tragically, no one ever found Captain Briggs or the crew. Some historians have blamed waterspouts for their disappearance, while others have considered pirates, giant waves, or mutinous sailors. But there's little evidence to support those theories.

However, 19th century investigators did find something strange. Of the 1,700-odd barrels on board, nine were empty. Not only that, but those nine barrels were made of red oak, while the others were made of white. So, what's the significance there? Well, as Brian Dunning of Skeptoid explains, white oak is watertight, whereas red oak is porous. It's likely that 300 gallons of alcohol seeped out of those red oak barrels and began evaporating in the ship's hold. Worried the alcohol might explode, the sailors tried venting the room by removing the hatch doors, but to no avail.

Desperate, everyone gathered in the lifeboat, but not before tying the raft to the Mary Celeste. That way, they could trail along from a distance, and not worry about the larger vessel sailing away. Unfortunately, before they could make a plan to deal with the alcohol, it seems the rope was accidentally sliced in two. The Mary Celeste quickly floated off, leaving ten terrified humans lost in the Atlantic Ocean.

Real inspiration behind snow-white and seven dwarfs

There were also not one, but two, real women that might have inspired the story as well. According to Eckhard Sander in his book “ Schneewittchen: Marchen oder Wahrheit?”  (Snow White: Is It a Fairy Tale? ) The inspiration for Grimms’ version was  Margarete von Waldeck , a German countess born to Philip IV in 1533. 

At the age of 16, Margarete was forced by her stepmother, Katharina of Hatzfeld to move away to Wildungen in Brussels. There, Margarete fell in love with a prince who would later become Phillip II of Spain. However, her father and stepmother disapproved of her relationship as it was ‘politically inconvenient’ and the girl mysteriously died at the age of 21, apparently having been poisoned. Historical accounts point to the King of Spain, who opposing the romance, may have dispatched Spanish agents to murder Margarete.

Where did the imagery of dwarfs come in?  Margarete’s father owned several copper mines that employed children as quasi-slaves. The poor conditions caused many to die at a young age, but those that survived had severely stunted growth and deformed limbs from malnutrition and the hard, physical labor. As a result, they were often referred to as ‘poor dwarfs’.


Another possibility according to a study group in Lohr, Bavaria, is that Snow White is based on  Maria Sophia von Erthal , born on June 15, 1729 in Lohr am Main, Bavaria. She was the daughter of an 18th century landowner, Prince Philipp Christoph von Erthal and his wife, Baroness von Bettendorff.


After the death of the Baroness, Prince Philipp went on to marry Claudia Elisabeth Maria von Venningen, Countess of Reichenstein, who was said to dislike her stepchildren.  The castle where they lived, now a museum, was home to a ‘talking mirror’, an acoustical toy that could speak (now housed in the Spessart Museum). The mirror, constructed in 1720 by the Mirror Manufacture of the Electorate of Mainz in Lohr, had been in the house during the time that Maria’s stepmother lived there. The dwarfs in Maria’s story are also linked to a mining town, Bieber, located just west of Lohr and set among seven mountains.

Why Nazi experimented on twins

Nazi doctor Mengele's Gruesome Experiments on Twins

From May 1943 until January 1945, Nazi doctor Josef Mengele worked at Auschwitz, conducting pseudo-scientific medical experiments. Many of his cruel experiments were conducted on young twins.

Anxious to make a name for himself, Mengele searched for the secrets of heredity. The Nazi ideal of the future would benefit from the help of genetics, according to Nazi doctrine. If so-called Aryan women could give birth to twins who were sure to be blond and blue-eyed, the future could be saved.

Selection of twins

As the unsuspecting people were herded off the train and ordered into separate lines, SS officers shouted "Zwillinge!" (Twins!) in German. Parents were forced to make a quick decision. Unsure of their situation, already being separated from family members when forced to form lines, seeing barbed wire, smelling an unfamiliar stench — was it good or bad to be a twins?

Some mothers tried to hide their twin, but the SS officers and Josef Mengele searched through the surging ranks of people looking for twins and anyone with unusual traits.

While many twins were either announced or discovered, some sets of twins were successfully hidden and walked with their mothers into the gas chamber.

About 3,000 twins were pulled from the masses on the ramp, most of them children. Only around 200 of these twins survived. When the twins were found, they were taken away from their parents.

Daily life of twins

Each morning, life for the twins began at 6 o'clock. The twins were required to report for roll call in front of their barracks, regardless of weather conditions. After roll call, they ate a small breakfast. Then each morning, Mengele would appear for an inspection.

Mengele's presence did not necessarily cause fear in the children. He was often known to appear with pockets full of candy and chocolates, to pat them on the head, talk with them, and sometimes even play. Many of the children, especially the younger ones, called him "Uncle Mengele."

The twins were given brief instruction in makeshift "classes" and were sometimes even allowed to play soccer. The children were not required to do hard work or labor. Twins were also spared from punishments, as well as from the frequent selections within the camp.

Experiment on twins

The table of contents of a document from the Nuremberg military tribunals prosecution includes titles of the sections that document medical experiments revolving around: food, seawater, epidemic jaundice, sulfanilamide, blood coagulation and phlegmone.

Some of the children, now elderly, have little memory of the experiments, others have memories that may not be 100% accurate.

Jona Laks says Mengele removed organs from people without anaesthetic, and if one twin died the other would be murdered. Vera Kriegel says that he killed people with an injection to the heart, and then dissected them.

She remembers being ushered into his laboratory. "I was looking at a whole wall of human eyes. A wall of blue eyes, brown eyes, green eyes. These eyes they were staring at me like a collection of butterflies and I fell down on the floor."

The first experiment she was subjected to involved being kept in a small wooden cage with her sister and being given painful injections in her back - she doesn't know why, but thinks it may have been an attempt to change the colour of her eyes.

In another experiment, she says, the pair of them and more than 100 other twins were given injections of bacteria that cause Noma disease - an infection of the mouth or genitals, which causes boils and often turns gangrenous.

Some twins became feverish, and some died, she says. She also remembers Mengele reacting angrily when twins went missing - once when this had happened she stared him out to prove he could not completely dominate her.

Mengele usually used one twin as a control and subjected the other to everything from blood transfusions to forced insemination, injections with diseases, amputations, and murder. Those that died were dissected and studied; their surviving twins were killed and subjected to the same scrutiny.

Twin studies had helped scientists like Mengele’s mentor justify what they saw as necessary discrimination against people with “undesirable” genetic characteristics—Jews, Roma people, LGBTQ people, people with disabilities and others. But the twin experiments that had helped create the eugenics movement would, ironically, lead to the downfall of eugenics itself. 

For eugenicists like Mengele, identical twins like the Mozes sisters were the perfect research subjects. Since they share a genome, scientists reasoned, any physical or behavioral differences in twins would be due to behavior, not genetics. Eugenicists held genetics responsible for undesirable characteristics and social conditions like criminality and poverty. They believed that selective breeding could be used to encourage socially acceptable behavior and wipe out undesirable tendencies.

Eva Mozes Kor, a Holocaust survivor and a Mengele twin, chose to forgive the Nazis

For Eva, life as a Mengele twin meant sitting naked for hours and having her body repeatedly measured and compared to Miriam’s. She withstood injections of an unknown substance that caused severe reactions. “As twins, I knew that we were unique because we were never permitted to interact with anybody in other parts of the camp,” she later recalled. “But I didn't know I was being used in genetic experiments.

At Auschwitz, Dr. Josef Mengele injected dye into the eyes of children to see if he could permanently change their color. He also famously tried to create conjoined twins by stitching his patients together.

Cleopatra and the pearls

WHY CLEOPATRA DRANK THE COSTLIEST PEARL

Cleopatra and Marc Antony made a bet over whether the Egyptian queen could spend a small fortune on a single meal.

Cleopatra won the wager after drinking a cocktail made with a dissolved pearl.

Once assumed to be a legend, Cleopatra's concoction has been demonstrated to be possible.

Cleopatra, the last queen of Egypt, might have indeed drunk a pearl cocktail in a gulp, an experimental study has concluded.

Legend has it that, in order to show her wealth and power, Cleopatra VII (69 B.C. - 30 B.C.) made a bet with her lover -- the Roman leader Marc Antony -- that she could spend 10 million sesterces on one meal.

"She ordered the second course to be served. In accordance with previous instructions, the servants placed in front of her only a single vessel containing vinegar. ... She took one earring off, and dropped the pearl in the vinegar, and when it was wasted away, swallowed it," Roman naturalist and philosopher Pliny the Elder (23 - 79 A.D.) wrote in his Natural History.

Indeed, the pearl was not just any pearl. Pliny called it "the largest in the whole of history," a "remarkable and truly unique work of nature" worth 10 million sesterces.

Although the account was considered credible in antiquity, modern scholars have dismissed the story as fiction.

Giving ancient sources the benefit of the doubt, classicist Prudence Jones of Montclair State University in New Jersey experimented with vinegar and a five-carat pearl to find out whether the acetic acid concentration is sufficient to dissolve calcium carbonate.

Source:seeker

Ever wondered who created toothpaste or introduced three course meals?

He lived more than a thousand years ago and graced the courts of Harun Al Rashid in Baghdad (Iraq) and Abd-Al Rahman II in Cordoba, Al Andalus (Spain). Abul Hasan Ali Ibn Nafi (789-857 AD), a freed slave of Kurdish descent, was known to the world as Ziryab (Zaryab) or Blackbird for his dark complexion and melodious voice.  Blackbird was much more than just a musician

Blackbird's voice made him a living legend. He knew 10,000 songs and tunes by heart. He used his influence in the Caliph's Court and Cordoba. He founded a music school that was radical for its times. The school was open to talented singers of all classes. Based on the musical traditions of Baghdad, Blackbird encouraged experimentation and improvisation. He created rules that govern the nuba, the classical music of Al Maghrib (Libya, Morocco, Algiers and Tunisia). Ziryab developed 24 separate nubas- each for the 24 hours of a day, matching the Ragas of Hindustani Classical Music. The 24 nubas (suites) were instrumental in the development of Church music that later became what is now known as Western Classical Music. Even more! The guitar as we know today was exported from Arabia to Europe initially in the form of the lute (Oud). Ziryab added a fifth pair of strings (G). Later developments lead to the Flamenco Guitar.

In gastronome and fashion Ziryab's legacy is unmatched. Improvising Baghdad recipes, he revolutionized the dining table of Al Andalus.  Desserts like Guirlache, a mixture of walnuts, honey and sesame is still popular in Spain. Zalabia is thought to be a forerunner of Jilebi or Jilapi. The French three-course meal is Ziryab's innovation. As a starter, soup, preferably asparagus; then comes the main dish; followed by desert in sweets, fruits and nuts. Ziryab also introduced crystal glasses and leather furniture to the dining table.

Oud, grandfather of Spanish guitar

Ziryab was the Sultan of Style. He developed the world's first toothpaste. He introduced the concept of using salt to wash clothes. He popularized shaving among men with hair designs that were his. For women Ziryab developed various designs of tying hair in bangles. He also started shaping eyebrows. Not only in music and food, Ziryab also experimented in perfumes. Some of the French fragrances can be traced back to Ziryab. He was also the first to introduce a dress code for men and women that was based on the four seasons of the year.  Blackbird's story goes on. Through Indian and Baghdad astrologers, he introduced Chess to the Cordoba Court from where it spread throughout Europe.

There are not too many Ziryabs in history. This was possible not only because of his immense talent, but also because Al Andalus was one of the most tolerant civilizations of its time. It was this tolerance that brought the best out of its citizens. Due to unfortunate events in history, Ziryab and many other luminaries who shaped not only the Iberian Peninsula, but also influenced a lot of Europe as we see it today have been forgotten. Next time you have a three course meal in a French Restaurant, silently smile as you raise your crystal glass.

Source : Britannica

Guillotine was a fun event

The guillotine is by far one of the most gruesome methods of execution. Also known as: Madame la Guillotine, la Dame (the Lady), la Veuve (the Widow), le Rasoir National (the National Razor), and Louisette, the guillotine is synonymous with ‘the Terror’ of the French Revolution,

People booed after witnessing the first public guillotining

Many people turned up at Place de Grève (now place de l’Hotel de Ville, Paris) out of curiosity on April 25, 1792 to witness the first public execution using the new mechanized device. Nicolas Pelletier had been sentenced to death for theft and violently resisting arrest. The crowd was not at all impressed with the anti-climactic swiftness of the blade. In a few seconds, it was ‘game over’, and they felt cheated out of a few hours of entertainment. (Normally public executions included torture and hanging.) The crowd wasn’t won over by the ‘modern machine’ and they booed executioner, Charles-Henri Sanson

During the height of the first French Revolution, executions were so frequent in Paris that they attracted large crowds. People even brought their children to witness these events, and industry popped up around the scaffolds. There were food booths and leaflets were printed listing the names of the condemned as macabre souvenirs. (Kind of like French Revolution-execution Pokémon. ‘Got to catch them all’?) A group of older ladies called ‘les Tricoteuses’ (the knitters) would spend the whole day knitting while watching the blade crash.

Some fervently patriotic ladies actually wore guillotine earrings, and miniature working guillotines were a hit with both adults and children alike.

The dancing plague (or dance epidemic) of 1518 was a case of dancing mania that occurred in Strasbourg, Alsace, (now modern day France) in the Holy Roman Empire in July 1518. Around 400 people took to dancing for days without rest and, over the period of about one month, some of those affected collapsed or even died of heart attack, stroke, or exhaustion.

Events

The outbreak began in July 1518 when a woman, Mrs. Troffea, began to dance fervently in a street in Strasbourg.This lasted somewhere between four and six days. Within a week, 34 others had joined, and within a month, there were around 400 dancers, predominantly female. Some of these people would die from heart attacks, strokes, or exhaustion.One report indicates that, for a period, the plague killed around fifteen people per day.However, the sources of the city of Strasbourg at the time of the events did not mention the number of deaths, or even if there were fatalities.

Historical documents, including "physician notes, cathedral sermons, local and regional chronicles, and even notes issued by the Strasbourg city council" are clear that the victims danced. It is not known why these people danced, some even to their deaths.

As the dancing plague worsened, concerned nobles sought the advice of local physicians, who ruled out astrological and supernatural causes, instead, announcing that the plague was a "natural disease" caused by "hot blood". However, instead of prescribing bleeding, authorities encouraged more dancing, in part by opening two guildhalls and a grain market, and even constructing a wooden stage. The authorities did this because they believed that the dancers would recover only if they danced continuously night and day. To increase the effectiveness of the cure, authorities even paid for musicians to keep the afflicted moving. The strategy was a disaster; after those policies were applied the illness underwent a dramatic growth. Performing dances in more public spaces facilitated the spread of the psychic “contagion”.

Historian John Waller stated that a marathon runner could not have lasted the intense workout that these men and women did hundreds of years ago.

Theories

Modern theories include food-poisoning caused by the toxic and psychoactive chemical products of ergot fungi, which grows commonly on grains in the wheat family (such as rye) that was used for baking bread. Ergotamine is the main psychoactive product of ergot fungi; it is structurally related to the drug lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD-25), and is the substance from which LSD-25 was originally synthesized. The same fungus has also been implicated in other major historical anomalies, including the Salem witch trials. However, Waller in the Lancet argues that "this theory does not seem tenable, since it is unlikely that those poisoned by ergot could have danced for days at a time. Nor would so many people have reacted to its psychotropic chemicals in the same way. The ergotism theory also fails to explain why virtually every outbreak occurred somewhere along the Rhine and Moselle Rivers, areas linked by water but with quite different climates and crops".Waller speculates that the dancing was "stress-induced psychosis" on a mass level, since the region where the people danced was riddled with starvation and disease, and the inhabitants tended to be superstitious. Seven other cases of dancing plague were reported in the same region during the medieval era.

This could have been a florid example of psychogenic movement disorder happening in mass hysteria or mass psychogenic illness, which involves many individuals – small groups to almost 1000 people – suddenly exhibiting the same bizarre behavior. The behavior spreads rapidly and broadly in an epidemic pattern. The sufferers are primarily adolescent females.This kind of comportment could have been caused by the elevated levels of psychological stress, i.e. the despair caused by the intensely ruthless years (even by the rough standards of the Middle Ages) the people of Alsace were suffering.

Source:weiki

'The last supper' painting by Leonardo da Vinci

WHO WAS THE BETRAYER?

The Last Supper specifically portrays the reaction given by each apostle when Jesus said one of them would betray him. All twelve apostles have different reactions to the news, with various degrees of anger and shock. From left to right, according to the apostles' heads:

Bartholomew, James, son of Alphaeus, and Andrew form a group of three; all are surprised.

Judas Iscariot, Peter, and John form another group of three.

Jesus

Apostle Thomas, James the Greater, and Philip are the next group of three

Matthew, Jude Thaddeus, and Simon the Zealot are the final group of three.

Peter looks angry and is holding a knife pointed away from Christ, perhaps foreshadowing his violent reaction in Gethsemane during Jesus' arrest. He is leaning towards John and touching him on the shoulder, perhaps because in John's Gospel he signals the "beloved disciple" to ask Jesus who is to betray him.

The youngest apostle, John, appears to swoon and lean towards Peter.

Thomas is clearly upset; the raised index finger foreshadows his incredulity of the Resurrection.

James the Greater looks stunned, with his arms in the air. Meanwhile, Philip appears to be requesting some explanation.

Both Jude Thaddeus and Matthew are turned toward Simon, perhaps to find out if he has any answer to their initial questions.

Source:weiki

“Burst of Joy”, 1973 that wasn't actually!

Burst of Joy is a Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph by Associated Press photographer Slava "Sal" Veder, taken on March 17, 1973 at Travis Air Force Base in California.

The photograph came to symbolize the
End of United States involvement in the Vietnam War, and the prevailing sentiment that military personnel and their families could begin a process of healing after enduring the horrors of war.

Col Robert L. Stirm being reunited with his family, after spending more than five years in captivity as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam. Stirm was shot down over Hanoi on October 27, 1967, while leading a flight of F-105s on a bombing mission, and was not released until March 14, 1973.
  The centrepieceof photograph is Stirm's 15-year-old daughter Lorrie, who is excitedly greeting her father with outstretched arms, as the rest of the family approaches directly behind her.

Sad story behind the picture

The photo was the perfect prelude to a “Happily Ever After” story which included hardship, love, desperation, and homecoming. However there is more behind the scenes of this photograph.

Three days before Stirm returned home from Vietnam, he arrived in the Philippines for evaluation. An Air Force chaplain handed him a letter. His wife was ending their relationship. “I have changed drastically–forced into a situation where I finally had to grow up,” the letter said. “Bob, I feel sure that in your heart you know we can’t make it together–and it doesn’t make sense to be unhappy when you can do something about it. Life is too short.”

Upon his return to the states, the couple tried to work out their marriage, but within a year, the couple divorced.

Stirm remained in the military before retiring as a colonel in 1977 and settling in Foster City, California. He remarried but divorced again while his ex-wife Loretta remarried and moved to Texas.

Of the famous photograph, Stirm said, “I have several copies of the photo but I don’t display it in the house.” He does reiterates what he likes about the photograph, “I was very pleased to see my children—I loved them all and still do, and I know they had a difficult time—but there was a lot to deal with.”

The main issue he has with the famous photo is not the situation in which it was created – the return of a POW who endured unimaginable hardships – but of the woman in it. “In some ways, it’s hypocritical, because my former wife had abandoned the marriage within a year or so after I was shot down,” Stirm recounts. “And she did not even have the honor and integrity to be honest with the kids. She lived a lie. This picture does not show the realities that she had accepted proposals of marriage from three different men. . . . It portrays (that) everybody there was happy to see me.”

The four children see the photograph in a different light. They all have the picture mounted in their houses. “We have this very nice picture of a very happy moment,” Lorrie says, “but every time I look at it, I remember the families that weren’t reunited, and the ones that aren’t being reunited today—many, many families—and I think, I’m one of the lucky ones.”

Source: weiki, history daily

The Time Julius Caesar Was Captured by Pirates

In 75 BCE a band of Cilician pirates in the Aegean Sea captured a 25-year-old Roman nobleman named Julius Caesar, who had been on his way to study oratory in Rhodes. As the story is related in Plutarch’s Parallel Lives, the capture was a minor inconvenience for Caesar but very bad luck for the pirates.

From the start, Caesar simply refused to behave like a captive. When the pirates told him that they had set his ransom at the sum of 20 talents, he laughed at them for not knowing who it was they had captured and suggested that 50 talents would be a more appropriate amount. He then sent his entourage out to gather the money and settled in for a period of captivity. The pirates must have been dumbfounded. It’s not every day that a hostage negotiates his ransom up.

Caesar made himself at home among the pirates, bossing them around and shushing them when he wanted to sleep. He made them listen to the speeches and poems that he was composing in his unanticipated downtime and berated them as illiterates if they weren’t sufficiently impressed. He would participate in the pirates’ games and exercises, but he always addressed them as if he were the commander and they were his subordinates. From time to time he would threaten to have them all crucified. They took it as a joke from their overconfident, slightly nutty captive.

It wasn’t a joke. After 38 days, the ransom was delivered and Caesar went free. Astonishingly, Caesar managed to raise a naval force in Miletus—despite holding no public or military office—and he set out in pursuit of the pirates. He found them still camped at the island where he had been held, and he brought them back as his captives. When the governor of Asia seemed to vacillate about punishing them, Caesar went to the prison where they were being held and had them all crucified

'536' The worst year to be alive

In A.D. 536, Europe had a terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad year

It started when a mysterious fog swept over the continent, veiling the sun in a blue haze and casting Europe, the Middle East and parts of Asia into darkness 24 hours a day, for 18 months. Falling temperatures ushered in the coldest decade of the past 2,000 years, crops failed from Ireland to China, and famine ran rampant. Those who endured the long, cold night faced even harsher times in the years to come; in A.D. 541, an outbreak of bubonic plague known as Justinian's Plague scythed through the Mediterranean, killing up to 100 million people.

Evidences

The Byzantine historian Procopius recorded of 536, in his report on the wars with the Vandals, "during this year a most dread portent took place. For the sun gave forth its light without brightness ... and it seemed exceedingly like the sun in eclipse, for the beams it shed were not clear".

The Gaelic Irish Annals record the following:

"A failure of bread in the year 536 AD" – the Annals of Ulster
"A failure of bread from the years 536–539 AD" – the Annals of Inisfallen
Further phenomena were reported by a number of independent contemporary sources:

Low temperatures, even snow during the summer (snow reportedly fell in August in China during the Northern and Southern dynasties, which caused the harvest there to be delayed
Crop failures
"A dense, dry fog" in the Middle East, China and Europe

Drought in Peru, which affected the Moche culture

It has been conjectured that the changes were due to ashes or dust thrown into the air after the eruption of a volcano (a phenomenon known as "volcanic winter"). or after the impact of a comet[14] or meteorite.The evidence of sulfate deposits in ice cores strongly supports the volcano hypothesis; the sulfate spike is even more intense than that which accompanied the lesser episode of climatic aberration in 1816, popularly known as the "Year Without a Summer", which has been connected to the explosion of the volcano Mount Tambora in Sumbawa.

Source:weiki