Teaching is a thankless job. After working years to earn your degree, you must then deal with rambunctious kids who couldn’t be less interested in learning. Worse, the pay rates for this hardship are mediocre at best. These hurdles are enough to drive anyone crazy. Writers sometimes take notice of that.

Fiction has given us numerous nutty teachers over the years. Their insanity usually lies in their behavior or curriculum. They might have some bizarre quirk to their deliveries, or they could impose tyrannical rules on pupils. Then again, they may just have some strange hobbies on the side. All of these traits affect their students, often injuring or traumatizing them beyond repair. These crimes would naturally lead to teachers losing their licenses in real life. In fiction, though, their loony lessons are just fun to watch.

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10 Professor Trelawney

“Colorful” is the word for most teachers at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Even by that standard, though, Professor Trelawney is a fruity figure. The Divination teacher specializes in predictions through tea leaves, palm reading, and star gazing. She’s basically a glorified fortuneteller. Suffice it to say, she probably sees stars on a daily basis.

Trelawney is the very image of a crazy cat lady. Her unkempt hair, thick glasses, and chaotic wardrobe are enough to drive most people off. The rest have to put up with her neurotic noises and random asides. She regularly predicts misfortune on her students, delivering her prophecies in the most ominous ways possible without a care for their feelings. This professor is truly in her own little world.^[1]

9 Mr. Crocker

In all fairness, Mr. Crocker’s craziness emerges outside the classroom in The Fairly OddParents. That’s not to say that he shirks his duties, though. He thoroughly enjoys handing out failing grades to his students, taking great pleasure in their misery. It doesn’t matter if they do well or not; he has a ready supply of “F” grades stashed in his desk. Of course, his true passion lies elsewhere.

More than anything, Crocker believes in fairy godparents. He’s so passionate in his belief that he manically shouts about their existence to anyone who’ll listen. More directly, he concocts countless evil schemes to track and capture the magical creatures. These plans get increasingly ridiculous with every failure. Granted, he’s right about fairies being real, but his deranged demeanor doesn’t convince anyone.^[2]

8 Ms. Frizzle

This teacher isn’t mean or oppressive, but she more than makes up for those traits through child endangerment. Ms. Frizzle is an energetic soul. She believes in a hands-on approach to education, rejecting the sterile dullness of the classroom in favor of daily field trips. That prospect sounds exciting, but these journeys aren’t just walks in the park.

Driving the eponymous Magic School Bus, this wild woman takes her students to fantastic locales they can only dream of. One day, they might dodge dinosaurs in prehistoric times. Another day, they could swim through a person’s bloodstream. These scenarios are obviously dangerous, but the impending death of her students doesn’t seem to bother Ms. Frizzle at all. She just laughs off every peril without a care in the world. That’s not the attitude you want for the person watching your kids.^[3]

7 Ms. Bitters

Invader Zim crafts a demented world to begin with, but arguably, the greatest terror lies in school. Ms. Bitters is a haunting presence. She appears and disappears from the shadows, and she looms over students like a lanky vulture. She seems more wraith than human, making it impossible to relax in the classroom. Believe it or not, she only gets more unsettling as you get to know her.

“Bitters” is as good a name as any. This teacher utterly despises children, and she has no qualms about saying so. Nothing would please her more than for them to die horrible deaths. The kids even theorize that she descends from a species of flesh-eating insects. That certainly tracks with the bugs crawling over her face, and it comes to a head in the characters’ nightmares, where she’s a shape-shifting bug queen who consumes kids. Whether the rumors are founded or not, Ms. Bitters is ominous enough to terrify the titular alien tyrant. That’s saying a lot.^[4]

6 Walter White

Hardship can warp the best men. Instructors are no exception to that rule, as Walter White learns in Breaking Bad. This chemistry aficionado teaches at J.P. Wynne High School, but it’s far from an ideal position. Disrespectful students and financial problems regularly demoralize him. The nail in the coffin comes from a terminal cancer diagnosis. These woes push White over the edge.

Upon discovering his former pupil’s drug business, Walt decides to get in on the action. His chemistry expertise lets him make the best crystal meth around. Unfortunately, the inherent danger means he must take increasingly drastic measures to survive. These events morph him into a ruthless killer. Soon, the humble teacher becomes the region’s leading drug lord. Talk about a career change.^[5]

5 Jin Kuwana

Bullying harms kids the world over, but it can also affect teachers. Such is the case with Yu Kitakata. In Lost Judgment, his classroom is the site of merciless mocking. The instructor brushes it off as normal, but the targeted boy eventually attempts suicide and winds up in a coma. The whole incident demonstrates inexcusable negligence on Kitakata’s part, resulting in a guilty conscience and his unceremonious firing. Sadly, he learns the wrong lesson from the ordeal.

Changing his name to “Jin Kuwana,” the former teacher goes on the warpath. He ruthlessly exacts vigilante justice against Japan’s bullies and anyone who sanctions it. He even helps disgruntled parents torture and kill the tormentors without batting an eye. As an added insult, he blackmails his comatose student’s bullies to aid in his crusade. The tale is a classic case of fighting fire with fire.^[6]

4 Ra’s al Ghul

This immortal warrior wants to make the world a better place. Ra’s al Ghul leads an elite group of fighters with the sole intention of achieving that goal. He teaches them the ways of hand-to-hand combat, ninjutsu, and deception. Certain continuities even position him as Batman’s master. His centuries of knowledge and experience are invaluable sources of learning. Unfortunately, what he uses these gifts for is less than ideal.

The villain’s method of saving the world often lies in genocide. He’s willing to purge large portions of humanity to restore the planet’s purity or restart a failing society. What’s worse is that he imbues this warped worldview into his pupils, creating a doomsday cult with unparalleled skills as killers. The cherry on top is the Lazarus Pit. Bathing in its mystical waters helps Ra’s maintain his youth, but it also robs him of what little reason he has. A megalomaniac is dangerous at the best of times, but an immortal one is a disaster waiting to happen.^[7]

3 Miss Trunchbull

Given that she stems from a Roald Dahl tale, Miss Trunchbull is naturally twisted. The headmistress of Crunchem Hall Elementary School hates kids with every fiber of her being. She despises them so much that she denies ever having a childhood. Even the most well-behaved individuals—the titular Matilda—are pure evil in her eyes. Don’t think she doesn’t act on those impulses.

Trunchbull abuses her students in the most ludicrous ways. One moment, she might force a heavyset boy to eat an entire chocolate cake. In another scene, she swings a girl around by her pigtails and tosses her like a hammer throw. These punishments are equal parts horrific and cartoonish. What’s worse is that they’re entirely unfounded. Trunchbull tortures these kids purely out of spite.^[8]

2 Darth Sidious

The Sith aren’t exactly the nicest guys. Even so, Darth Sidious is the pinnacle of evil. Throughout the Star Wars saga, he works to subjugate the galaxy under his own brand of order. It doesn’t matter how many people he has to kill. He gladly slaughters those who resist and enslaves those who don’t. What’s more is that he takes pleasure in his sadistic actions, laughing maniacally at his own misdeeds. Equally demented is how he treats his allies.

Sidious uses and loses people without remorse. He trains several Sith apprentices, imparting the secrets of the Dark Side and commanding them to carry out his Machiavellian schemes. Not only does he delicately play on their fears, but he sometimes indoctrinates them from a young age. Planting those seeds makes these students supremely loyal, but their master doesn’t hesitate to dispose of them once they outlive their usefulness. Keep in mind, it’s the Jedi who discourage attachment, yet this Sith Lord couldn’t be more selfish if he tried.^[9]

1 Everyone at James K. Polk Middle School

It pays to have a few pointers in your teenage years, especially in a school as unhinged as this. Ned’s Declassified School Survival Guide is a chaotic show. That chaos comes down to cliques, bullies, assignments, and lunches. All these aspects are a cut above real life. Oddly enough, though, the greatest obstacle lies in the classroom.

James K. Polk Middle School has numerous nutcases on its staff. Examples include a woodshop teacher who cut off his own hand, a science teacher who performs explosive experiments, and a gym coach who loves seeing kids hurt each other. With these guys in charge, any moment can turn a routine class into a horror show. On the one hand, it ensures that kids pay attention. On the other, it risks scarring them for life. Then again, that’ll happen at some point anyway, so why not start early?^[10]

Everyone wants the adrenaline rush, no one wants to find the adrenaline. Well, I’ve found it for you. Strap into your 5-point harness and hold on tight.

10 Air Combat USA

At the top of every kid’s wish list, at some time or another, are the words “fighter pilot.” Air Combat USA is an opportunity for adults to actually be one, with a full day’s experience in aerobatics and dogfighting. You spend some time in a preflight briefing learning about the aircraft, an S1A1 Marchetti SF260, and your tactical maneuvers. The Marchetti is an Italian plane that can perform unlimited aerobatics. It also allows your instructor to sit right next to you while you fly, instead of behind you. Thanks to this setup, you will have the controls 90 percent of the time.  You even get your own flight suit, helmet, and parachute! You’ll take your aircraft up with the help of your instructor and practice some of the maneuvers you learned in preflight.

When you feel like you know what you’re doing, the dogfight begins. There’s an electronic tracking system on the planes that will give you sound effects, and will cause smoke to trail from the tail of the enemy plane when you’ve hit your target. They also include cameras from different angles of the flight (including one from the gun sight). When you land, you get to see your flight from the other plane’s perspective and go over it all with your instructor. To keep reliving your day (and to show off to your friends), you can keep the video footage. They also offer the opportunity to let you bring a friend, so that you two can fly against each other. 

9 Covert Ops Miami

You know what’s also on wish lists everywhere? Being the ultimate soldier. And this adventure doesn’t mess around. Held near Miami, Florida, Covert Ops is your chance to learn all of the counter-terrorism skills your brain can hold. There’s a scaled-down two-day adventure, or a four-day one if you’re feeling hardcore. In both you’ll have weapons training (pistols) followed by the use of Krav Maga (a form of martial arts developed in Israel and designed to seriously mess somebody up) to disarm your enemy in close combat. You’ll also learn how to shoot from moving vehicles and identify an ambush attack. If you think you can handle the four-day adventure, you’ll learn all of these skills more in-depth, as well as learning additional skills like military gas training, combat first aid, close-quartered battle techniques, vehicle take-downs, and assault rifle handling and use. Basically, you learn to be a badass. Both adventures have missions for you to carry out on the final day.

8 Stock Up

It’s time to put up or shut up in your own stock car race at Talladega Superspeedway in Alabama (or one of eight other tracks across the country). All cars are Sprint Cup Series racers. You’ll go through a ground school, learning about the racetrack, the cars, and track safety. After you get suited up in your jumpsuit, helmet, and HANS device and are given your raceway orientation, you’ll head out onto the track with about eight other cars. The cars can top out around 275 kph (170 mph), and both drafting and passing are absolutely allowed. You will not be required to follow a pace car. You can bring friends down to try and fill the grandstand, but in the long run, you’ll only be reliving your race in your mind on Monday morning as you sit in traffic on the way to work. (Although it’s probably cooler than what the guy next to you is thinking about.)

7 World War II Underwater

In the middle of the Pacific, a part of the Caroline Islands in Micronesia, lies the protected body of water of Truk Lagoon (also known as “Chuuk Lagoon”).  Once considered “Japan’s Pearl Harbor,” the location was a main base for the Empire of Japan during World War II. Everything from aircraft carriers to destroyers to submarines was anchored at this site. American forces attacked the location on February 17, 1944 during Operation Hailstone, lasting two days and taking the Japanese completely by surprise. They had moved some larger ships out to sea, but many were still anchored in Truk. After an attack involving subs, ships, and aircraft, the battle ended in the defeat of Japan. The Americans sunk 12 warships and 32 merchant ships, and destroyed 249 aircraft. The number of wrecks and the clear, warm waters make Truk Lagoon a scuba diver’s paradise. 

One of the greatest ways to experience as much as possible is aboard the dive ship the SS Thorfinn, which covers more than 70 dive sites in the area—mostly ships, but also airplanes and even a sub. Wreck depths vary from the surface all the way down to below 60 meters (200 ft). Several of the larger ships carry some cool cargo, too: Things like tanks and Jeeps still sit in the cargo holds. You can swim right through the ship and see many of the rooms and artifacts that were left when they sank. Many of the shells and munitions are still considered “live,” so be prepared. If you’re a diver and a history nerd, this could be an awesome opportunity. 

6 Heli-Intense

Crave speed and deep powder runs? Ever wanted to ski or board down the open face of a mountain? Telluride Helitrax can hook you up. Located in the San Juan Mountains, they have 200 square acres of varied terrain accessed by a Bell 407 helicopter. You can ski from 3,050–4,115 meters (10,000–13,500 ft) of elevation, each run dropping 305–915 meters (1,000—3,000 ft). Each day of heli-skiing allows at least six runs, giving you a massive amount of vertical skiing, with most runs ranging from around double-blue to double-black grade. Telluride hooks you up with all the stuff you’ll need: food, water, avalanche beacons, safety equipment, and powder skis and poles. If you’re a boarder, you have to bring your own board, preferably the biggest one you’ve got. This is not for the faint of heart; you should be an “advanced-intermediate or above” skier (“advanced,” for snowboarders), in pretty good shape, and already be pretty confident with black diamond runs. You’ll ski in a group of four to five, with one guide. If you’re feeling crazy, they offer two- or five-day heli-skiing trips to run you into the ground.

5 Basic Instincts

Always watch Doomsday Preppers but don’t know if you would actually survive? Or wonder why Bear Grylls drinks his own pee? The BOSS course just might be for you. BOSS is the Boulder Outdoor Survival School in Boulder, Utah. It offers a bunch of different options for courses you can take to learn and use primitive and traditional survival skills. This school doesn’t just teach it, they make you live it.

Take, for example, the most intensive and challenging course they offer: the 28-Day (“Standard”) Field Course. You’ll work with up to 11 other students using nothing but a knife, water bottle, blanket, and poncho. You can hike about 25–50 kilometers (15–30 mi) each day. You’ll learn skills while on the move, including primitive skills like how to build fires and shelter, purify water, and even how to select edible and medicinal plants. You’ll go through a course about “large-game processing” using, generally, a sheep (you don’t have to watch if you don’t want to) but you do need to learn how to prepare and store the meat. You’ll also have what they call a “solo,” when you’re put into a site to create and use your new skills to live on your own. You get to have an expedition that lets you (and your class) travel without an instructor. There’s a very mysterious “Final Challenge” on the curriculum, but your guess is as good as mine. The best news of all? Going through the course usually has you losing 10–30 pounds by the time you’re done.

4 Get Mushy

Seriously, you’ve never driven your own Alaskan dog sled team? Get with the program. The Golsovia Lodge Mushing Trip out of St. Michael, Alaska, may be just what you need to open your eyes. The company was founded by Jerry Austin, who made it to the Iditarod Hall of Fame. For the Golsovia trip, you’ll mush for up to 40 kilometers (25 mi) each day, including one leg that goes over 6.5 kilometers (four miles) of ocean ice to an abandoned Eskimo village, and another leg that covers 11 kilometers (seven miles) uphill. You’ll get to stay at lodges or heated tent camps with your dogs each night. And if you’re going to have a sled dog team, you might as well really bond with the group.

3 Scenario Paintball

If you want to practice saving the world, it’s time to check out some scenario paintball events in Indiana. Scenario paintball is a theme-based game with missions to complete, usually relating to the military or law enforcement. Hundreds of people show up to play. This place has 11 fields with cool names like “Cambodia,” “Omaha Beach,” and “Jungle,” plus an indoor arena. Their grounds include towns, woods, towers, forts, and different vehicles as part of their games. They also have special missions covering things like “search and rescue” and “demolitions.” Paintball extras like grenades, rocket launchers, and tanks could make appearances. And no, “tanks” is not a typo.

2 Skydiving And White Water Rafting

Coming out of Millinocket, Maine, you’ll find the Jump and Raft, a combination of two fantastic adventures: skydiving and white water rafting. You can opt for the two-day adventure package (one on each day) or take each individually. The tandem skydiving starts with a 30-minute ground school where you learn the basics. The jump takes place right near Mount Katahdin, giving you some fantastic scenery to take in on the way down. You jump from 3,350 meters (11,000 ft) with your instructor safely strapped to your back, giving you a freefall of almost a full minute, flying towards Earth at 195 kph (120 mph), then a nice five- to nine-minute glide once you pop your chute. Rafting takes place on the Penobscot River and is rated as Class V rapids (the most dangerous is Class VI). You’ll hurtle through 21 kilometers (13 mi) of chutes and holes, and tackle rapids with extreme names like “Exterminator.” Gear up.

1 One Tough Mudder

Number one on this list is not just an ultimate adventure, it’s an ultimate challenge. It requires mental, physical, and emotional strength you probably never even knew you had. Are you up for it? Created by a member of the British Special Forces, the Tough Mudder challenge event is a 16–19 kilometer (10–12 mi) obstacle course created to test endurance, stamina, strength, and teamwork. It is not a race, although you can time yourself for bragging rights. (The average Mudder gets through in about 3.5 hours.)

The true accomplishment comes from just completing and overcoming the course itself. There’s an entire training “boot camp” designed to prepare you for what you’ll face. Mud comes stock with everything, and obstacles include things like low-crawling through long pipes and under barbed wire, swimming through icy water (called the “Arctic Enema”), and running through strands of wire charged with 10,000 volts of electricity. You’ll also climb insanely high walls, crawl under nets, drag tires, and jog through flames to cross the finish line. Everyone who makes it to the end gets a free beer. Tough Mudder raises money for the Wounded Warrior Project, a charity offering help and recovery services to injured military vets. Events take place across the US, the UK, Australia, and Germany. If you feel like you’re a tougher Mudder than the others, you can go on to enter the World’s Toughest Mudder competition and spend 24 straight hours running obstacles, if you somehow didn’t already punish your body enough.

Life under Mao Tse–tung was strange and brutish. While he was chairman of China, he introduced some policies that didn’t work well and that eventually killed an estimated 45–75 million of his own people. Under the feverish sway of Mao’s cult of personality, people in China got a little weird—and there are some lesser-known stories from Mao’s rule that you’d never imagine.

10 Mao Sent Mangoes To People, And They Went Crazy

In 1968, a Pakistani foreign minister gave Mao a gift: a cart full of mangoes. To the minister, this was probably nothing more than a simple gesture. But in China, it sparked a wave of complete insanity.

Mao gave the mangoes to a few people on his propaganda team, and they reacted as if Mao had just dragged an angel down from Heaven and dropped him on their doorstep. The People’s Daily wrote an article saying that “tears swelled up in their eyes” with the joy of getting a mango and that they “cried out enthusiastically and sang with wild abandonment.”

A textile factory put their mango in a shrine and had workers pass by and pay respects to it when they entered. When the mango went bad, they made a replica of the mango and kept it in the shrine so that no worker would have to start their day without giving thanks for the mango.

9 A Man Was Executed For Comparing Mangoes To Sweet Potatoes

As most Chinese people had never seen a mango before, the experience was life-changing for every single person honored enough to behold this juicy tropical fruit. That is, every person except for one.

A dentist got the chance to see a mango in person and somehow was not impressed. He denounced the mango as being similar to a sweet potato, which made the people furious.

The dentist was arrested on charges of “counterrevolutionary speech.” He was sent to prison and, shortly after, executed for the crime of saying mangoes kind of look like sweet potatoes. Nobody ever dared to scoff at mangoes again.

8 Stamp Collecting Was Made A Crime

Mao tried to put an end to every hint of bourgeoisie in his country. Sometimes, this meant putting an end to corrupt businesses and wealthy landowners. Other times, it meant tearing up children’s stamp collections.

Reportedly, Mao hated stamps. He viewed collecting them as a bourgeois pastime and, when the Cultural Revolution began, banned his people from keeping stamps in any collected form.

The ruling stayed in place until Mao died, and it took until he was gone before Chinese hobbyists could openly show off the stamps they’d slipped off envelopes. Ironically, the effect of Mao’s ban is that stamps from the Cultural Revolution are now among the most prized and sought after in the world.

7 Students Were Encouraged To Beat Their Teachers

The Communist Party of China encouraged its people to “clear away the evil habits of the old society” and tear down the old ideas of their forefathers. Although there’s no proof they ever explicitly said that meant “beat your teacher to death,” that’s definitely how people took it.

In 1966, students in at least 91 separate schools dragged their teachers into the streets and beat them until they decried their corrupt ways. In some instances, the students splashed ink on the teachers’ clothes and hung boards on them with their names crossed out with red X’s. Then the students beat these teachers with nail-spiked clubs and burned them with scalding water, often until they died.

By the end, 18 educators had been killed by their students and many more had committed suicide over the humiliation. Meanwhile, Mao sat back and ordered his security not to interfere with what the students were doing. He didn’t let the army try to restore order for a full two years.

6 The Great Wall Was Torn Down For Building Materials

During the 1970s, the Chinese government realized that it didn’t need to waste so much money on building materials for housing. After all, the longest wall in the world was just sitting there taking up space. With another chance to destroy an old relic, they encouraged people to start dismantling the Great Wall for the spare bricks.

Villagers living near the Great Wall tore parts of it down and then worked the bricks into their homes. Even the government tore down whole sections and used the parts to build a dam.

The Great Wall eventually became a heritage site, and the area was protected. To this day, though, there are still a few houses with great chunks of history holding up their walls.

5 Tigers Were Declared An Enemy Of The People And Nearly Eradicated

In 1959, Mao got fed up with tigers. After farmers in China were attacked by animals, Mao announced that tigers—along with wolves and leopards—were “enemies of the people” and should be destroyed.

The Communist Party sparked a number of “anti-pest” campaigns that encouraged people to seek out and kill predatory animals. In just a few years, the Chinese had slaughtered nearly 75 percent of the world’s population of South Asian tigers and brought these animals to the brink of extinction.

4 The Red Guard Wanted To Make People Go On Red Traffic Lights

The Red Guard was on a constant lookout for anything that might be counterrevolutionary. In September 1966, some of them noticed something insidious—people were stopping their cars when they saw red traffic lights.

Since red was the color of the party, the group decided that stopping on red and driving on green was “obstructing the progress of revolution,” and they marched to demand an end to it. From then on, the men declared, they would force people to drive on red.

Fortunately, the Red Guard was stopped by China’s Premier Chou En-lai before they could put their plan into motion. Premier Chou sat the men down and assured them that stopping on red symbolized how the party “guarantees the safety of all revolutionary activities.” An onslaught of riots and traffic accidents was just barely avoided.

3 People Were Arrested For Owning Ties

According to writer Liang Heng, you could get into trouble in Mao’s time just for dressing well. Liang recounts a story in which his father was nearly sent to prison because he was found in possession of a tie.

Members of the Red Guard had broken into Liang’s home and were searching through his father’s things when they found a tie. A Red Guard held up the tie and announced that it was “capitalist.” When Liang’s father was found to own a suit and cuff links, he was denounced as a “stinking intellectual,” and then his clothes and books were gathered together and burned.

Liang’s father escaped imprisonment by agreeing to state that burning his possessions was “a revolutionary action” and a good thing. Still, he didn’t emerge unscathed. The Red Guards took his radio and a month’s salary as payment before leaving his home.

2 People Cannibalized Each Other To Show Their Dedication To The Party

In Mao’s China, cannibalism was a major problem. According to some reports, some of the students who killed their principals ate the dead bodies as a way of celebrating their triumph over counterrevolutionaries. A government-run cafeteria also allegedly displayed the bodies of traitors on meathooks and served their flesh for lunch.

The worst cases were in Guangxi Province. In the late 1960s, at least 137 people were killed and eaten in that province alone. These bodies were usually shared with others, suggesting that there were likely thousands of people who committed cannibalism.

While there’s almost no doubt that starvation was part of the reason this happened, the people who did it didn’t see themselves as desperate. The acts of cannibalism were touted as a way of showing just how feverishly dedicated a person was to the cause of the party. If you were willing to eat China’s enemies, they figured, no one could say you were taking the cause lightly.

1 Mao Tried To Gift 10 Million Women To The US

In 1973, in Mao’s later years, he sat down with Henry Kissinger, hoping to negotiate a bilateral trade agreement with the United States. At first, Kissinger reportedly tried to keep the conversation on serious topics, but Mao’s mind was on other things.

Mao told Kissinger that China was a “very poor country” and had little to offer in a trade agreement—except, that is, for women. He offered to send 10 million women to the US, saying that he had them in excess and that they only caused problems.

As Mao riffed on about how women were ruining the country, one of his party members warned him that, if his words got out, “it would incur the public wrath.” The dying Mao, though, was getting old and tired. He didn’t seem too worried.

“I’m not afraid of anything,” the chairman said between heavy coughs. “God has sent me an invitation.”

Ask any kid in almost any country, and they’ll tell you who Big Bird is. But how well do we really know our feathered friend? On the surface, he’s a lovable character from Sesame Street who stands 249 centimeters tall (8’2″)^[1] and sports orange feet the size of snowshoes. But there are many sides to this famous fowl. In fact, hidden behind all those feathers is a bird brain full of remarkable notions like how to say the alphabet as one big word or how to bid farewell to a special friend.

After 50 years of appearing on the most popular children’s show ever, you’d think we’d know Big Bird inside out, but he still has a few surprises up his sleeve. For instance, Big Bird hobnobs with Darth Vader and the Queen of England. He wields major political clout and once took out a presidential candidate without even lifting a feather. On top of that, he has survived multiple attempts on his life! Not to count our chicks before they’re hatched, but we think you’ll like these fun facts about the flightiest member of the Sesame Street gang.

10 He’s Not Real (Shhh, Don’t Tell the Kiddies)

Yes, it’s true, there’s a person inside that yellow suit. The man who brought Big Bird to life is Caroll Spinney, a puppeteer who met Jim Henson in 1962.

Although Spinney’s childhood years were rocky (a loving mother was overruled by an abusive father), he was still able to convey the wonder and delight of childhood through Big Bird. In an odd-couple pairing, Spinney also voiced Oscar the Grouch.

Maneuvering the bird costume is no easy task. The puppeteer stands upright and raises his right arm to elevate big bird’s head. He moves the mouth with his hand while controlling the eyes with his little finger. The right arm is hooked to the left by a string, and when the left is moved, the right moves in tandem. Big bird’s suit weighs 4.5 kilograms (10 lb), his head is 1.8 kilograms (4 lb), and according to writer Louise Gikow, the heat inside the suit can be “unbearable.”^[2]

As the puppeteer is completely enclosed in the costume and cannot see, he must wear a TV monitor strapped to his chest. Spinney called this his electronic bra. He also taped his script to the monitor, which means he was reading, watching the monitor, and operating all parts of the costume while trying to walk and not trip over carpets, TV cables, and so on. If all of this sounds like a lot to do at one time, you’re right.

In October 2018, Caroll Spinney, age 84, retired from Sesame Street. He turned the character of Big Bird over to his understudy, Matt Vogel.

9 The Fam

It only makes sense that Big Bird should be part of a big family.^[3] He was raised by his Granny Bird, but there’s an occasional reference to a Mommy and Daddy, along with a sister named Esmeralda. Big Bird flew Granny’s coop when he was still a chick, and the next time anyone saw him was on Sesame Street. Apparently, he prefers the seamy side of the ‘hood, since he built his nest next to the trash of Oscar the Grouch.

Some of Big Bird’s relatives include Uncle Slim, a cowbird from Wyoming, and a grandfather who reportedly is an emu. Big Bird has approximately 15 different cousins who are mentioned in various story lines. There’s an identical twin cousin named Herman, Cousin Bubba from the North Pole, and a surfer cousin, Floyd, who lives in Los Angeles. There’s also a baker cousin, a policeman, and a fireman, to name a few.

Big Bird’s human family includes Gordon, Luis, Maria, Bob, and Mr. Hooper. As for Muppet neighbors, over 1,000 have come and gone since the show first aired in 1969. While no one ever says why Big Bird left home in the first place, it’s clear to his millions of fans—who wouldn’t want to live on Sesame Street?

8 The Stunts

Since Big Bird is a stand-alone character able to interact with his environment, the producers of Sesame Street have involved him in all kinds of antics.^[4] Big Bird can roller-skate, ice-skate, dance, sing, write poetry, draw, ride horseback, and even ride a unicycle.

Given the complexity of walking in the suit, one wonders how it’s possible for Big Bird to roller-skate or ride a unicycle. These are skills some people can’t master at all, much less while wearing a giant costume with enormous feet (and don’t forget that the puppeteer is holding his hand up over his head while basically blindfolded).

The Sesame Street staff is actually rather close-mouthed about how it’s all done, and Spinney is modest about his acrobatic skills. When asked about the unicycle stunt, he said, “As for the unicycle, I don’t know how to ride one. It’s the suit, it’s all the suit.” If the test of a great performer is one who can make the impossible look easy, then Spinney fits the bill.

7 Accosted And Stabbed!

Stabbed? Or so it seemed. Sesame Street was doing a live show for a large audience of children. Producers had begun to experiment with the new technology of wireless microphones, and Big Bird had one in his suit. Staffers were unaware they had to clear a channel, and to everyone’s surprise, the mic picked up the voice of a trucker on his CB radio making evening plans with his girlfriend. Before it got too R-rated, the feed was killed, and someone stuck a regular mike through Big Bird’s costume. Problem solved? Not really. To the children’s horror, it looked like Big Bird had been stabbed in the heart.^[5]

Spinney recalled another upsetting incident in the 1970s where Big Bird was attacked. Slated to perform a live show for 6,000 people at Georgia Tech University, Spinney left the suit in an empty storeroom while he went for lunch. Later, as he lounged in the grass outside, Spinney noticed several ROTC members walking away with large yellow feathers tucked in their hats. Alarmed, he raced back to the storeroom and discovered that Big Bird had been accosted. Not only were there several bald spots in the suit, but one eye had been wrenched out in an unsuccessful attempt to take it as a souvenir.

Spinney was heartbroken, feeling like he’d left his child in harm’s way. He vowed to be more careful in the future.

6 Space Age Brush With Death

It was the 1980s, and the US space program was in full swing. Hoping to interest the general public (and distract from the huge cost of the shuttle program) NASA proposed a new marketing idea where an ordinary citizen would be launched into space. Then someone thought of inviting Big Bird!

When the civilian astronaut program was announced, NASA received 11,000 applicants, including Walter Cronkite and Tom Brokaw, but the happy idea of the goofy yellow bird floating in zero gravity would not go away. While Caroll Spinney never applied for the job, he was contacted by NASA and asked to orbit the Earth as Big Bird.^[6]

After some hesitation, Spinney finally agreed, but as it turned out, Big Bird was just too big to fit in the confined space, and the plan was scrapped. Schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe was ultimately chosen to be on Space Shuttle Challenger.

Fast-forward to January 28, 1986. It seemed the entire US, including millions of schoolchildren, were glued to their TV sets. Spinney and his wife were among the audience and held hands as Challenger lifted into the air. The excitement turned to horror as Challenger exploded, killing all seven people inside.

As a PR plan, this was the worst possible outcome, or was it? Having a beloved teacher involved in this tragedy was bad enough, but what if it had been Big Bird?

5 Globe-Trotter And Spy

Big Bird is the ultimate jet-setter and has traveled the world doing concerts, live shows, and book tours. He’s been to Australia, Japan, all over Europe, and even spent three weeks on location in China while filming his special, Big Bird in China.

According to Caroll Spinney, during the filming, their translators were convinced that the Sesame Street crew were spies and submitted reports on everything they did.

Another of Big Bird’s favorite gigs is making guest appearances with various orchestras. Most memorable was Big Bird’s evening with the Boston Pops, where maestro Arthur Fiedler stepped aside and let the big yellow bird conduct.^[7]

4 Big Bird’s A-List

A celebrity in his own right, Big Bird has hobnobbed with A-listers from all walks of life. He has visited the White House multiple times and appeared with at least six president’s wives, most famously waltzing with Michelle Obama in the produce section of a supermarket. He has appeared on countless TV shows, including The Ed Sullivan Show, Hollywood Squares, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, Extreme Makeover, and Saturday Night Live.

Other celebrities who’ve swooned over this fine-feathered fowl, include the Queen of England, Darth Vader, NSYNC, Lin-Manual Miranda of Hamilton fame, the Dixie Chicks, and the Rockettes.^[8] Big Bird takes it all in stride and is just as happy to hang out with the kids who come to play on Sesame Street.

3 Don’t Mess With The Bird

For a fluffy yellow bird who’s eternally six years old, Big Bird has a lot of political clout. It was 2012, and then-governor Mitt Romney was running for president of the United States. He was doing quite well until he ran afoul of Big Bird.

During a debate with Barack Obama, Romney detailed his plan to reduce government spending. One idea was to cut funding to PBS, on which Sesame Street airs.

Romney said to moderator Jim Lehrer, who also worked for PBS: “I’m sorry, Jim. I’m going to stop the subsidy to PBS. [ . . . ] I like PBS. I love Big Bird. I actually like you, too. But I’m not going to keep on spending money on things we have to borrow money from China to pay for.”^[9]

While cutting spending is always a great platform, the reference to Big Bird was a mistake. People who grew up on a steady diet of Sesame Street felt an immediate stab of anguish. Social media blew up with memes and snarky comments about the coldhearted politician who wanted to kill Big Bird. The focus of the debate shifted from a serious and somewhat wonky discussion of political issues to a media frenzy featuring pictures of a forlorn Big Bird holding a “Will Work for Food” sign.

Of course, comedians and late-night hosts had a field day, and while Romney tried to be a good sport, the damage was done. In the end, Romney lost the election to Barack Obama. Was it Big Bird’s fault? We’ll never know, but it’s a good guess that Romney would like a do-over day.

2 On Dying

Mr. Hooper was one of Big Bird’s favorite people. While somewhat curmudgeonly, the storekeeper loved his fluffy yellow friend and was always good for a birdseed milkshake.

When Will Lee, the actor who played Mr. Hooper, died of a heart attack in December 1982, the shocked staff of Sesame Street were not sure how to handle it.^[10] Did Mr. Hooper move away or have a sudden change of appearance? The final decision was to make this a teaching moment and address the fact that death is part of life.

The “Farewell Mr. Hooper” episode was one of the most heartfelt of the Sesame Street shows, winning universal praise as well as daytime TV awards. According to Spinney, “It was one of the best things we ever did.”

In May 1990, Jim Henson died unexpectedly from pneumonia. His memorial service in New York City featured Big Bird singing Henson’s signature song, “Bein’ Green.” In a touching tribute to his beloved boss, Spinney managed to get through the song, but there wasn’t a dry eye in the place. Life magazine later described the moment as epic and almost unbearably moving.

1 Species Of Origin

What kind of bird is he, anyway? That’s hard to say, as even Big Bird seems confused. Despite the efforts of expert researchers, his exact species remains a mystery, and answers to the question have been contradictory.

During a 1976 appearance on Hollywood Squares, host Peter Marshall asked Big Bird what kind of bird he was. “I’m a Lark,” Big Bird replied. In 1981, while appearing on Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, Big Bird said he was a “golden condor.” During 1987’s A Muppet Family Christmas special, Ma Bear refers to him as a huge canary, while the Swedish Chef declares Big Bird is a type of turkey, named “Gobbla Gobbla Humungo.” According to the 1998 book Sesame Street Unpaved, Big Bird’s scientific name is Biggius canarius (presumably again implying him to be a form of canary).

Big Bird has also been called a homing pigeon and a Rockin’ Robin after his performance of the eponymous song. He has additionally been pegged as a cassowary, an ibis, and a crane by various people.^[11] Finally, the fact that Big Bird can’t fly is attributed to his Grandpa, who is an emu. Said Big Bird, “Emus can’t fly, but they can run. Every fall, he ran south for the winter.”

In the end, specifics don’t matter. Big Bird makes people happy. He loves everyone, and everyone (well, maybe not Oscar the Grouch) loves him. The Bird has been around for almost 50 years and has no plans to retire. As you read this, Big Bird and his writers are no doubt hatching new and even more exciting adventures to captivate the next generation of kids.

Geanie is a writer by trade and a wanderer by nature, and she loves to combine the two activities whenever possible. You can follow her adventures at Library Lady Travels.

It’s always hard to be on the receiving end of criticism, especially if you’re an artistic type of person. You may pour your heart and soul into your work, only to have someone with possibly no talent trash your masterpiece publicly.

Although most people can take criticism reasonably well, some people completely snap after reading a few harsh words. The following people harassed, stalked, and even assaulted people who dared to leave a negative review.

10 Richard Brittain

Richard Brittain was delighted with early reviews of his novel, The World Rose. He claimed that critics loved his book, comparing him to Dickens, Shakespeare, and Rowling. Only a few “idiots” and “teenagers” gave him bad reviews.

Paige Rolland despised Brittain’s novel. She read several pages and declared that she was bored out of her skull. Rolland wrote a lengthy review of the book in which she criticized every aspect of the novel, including the cover, the price, the plot, Brittain’s writing style, and Brittain himself.

Rolland’s critique infuriated Brittain. He used Facebook to track her down, and then he traveled over 640 kilometers (400 mi) to the grocery store where she worked. Brittain entered the store, grabbed a wine bottle, and hunted Rolland down.

He spotted the young woman stacking shelves in the cereal aisle, and when she bent down, he smashed the wine bottle over her head. Rolland briefly lost consciousness. When she awoke, Brittain was gone. Rolland was taken to the hospital where she received several stitches in her scalp.

Brittain was caught on the store’s security cameras, and he was arrested. He had a history of assault, and the judge sentenced him to 30 months in prison.^[1]

9 Marisol Simoes

Elayna Katz ordered jambalaya at Mambo Nuevo Latino, and she asked the server to leave olives out of the meal. When Katz received her food, she noticed that it was laced with olives. She sent the dish back and asked for another.

The restaurant complied. However, when Katz received her check, she was charged for both dishes. Katz complained and left her business card with a note asking the owner to call her. She received no response. So she posted a negative review of the restaurant, lambasting the slow, rude service and the problem with her order.

Marisol Simoes, the owner of the restaurant, was furious. She took Katz’s personal information from the business card and created an email account in Katz’s name. Simoes used the email address to send messages to Katz’s employers. The emails said things like: “I am open to anything—couples, threesomes, and group sex. Am especially into transsexuals and transgenders (being one myself). I am . . . a tiger in the bedroom.” Simoes used similar phrases when she impersonated Katz on a dating website.

The harassment continued for two years until Simoes was found guilty of libel. She was sentenced to serve 90 days in jail, work 200 hours of community service, receive mandatory counseling, and attend an anger management course.^[2]

8 Joon Song

Michelle Levine visited gynecologist Joon Song for an annual visit which was supposed to be covered by her insurance. However, she soon received a bill for $427. Song had charged her for an ultrasound, a new patient visit, and several procedures that Levine claimed never happened.

Levine tried to complain to the doctor’s office, but nothing happened. She decided to take her anger to several review sites. Levine criticized the doctor’s “very poor and crooked business practice,” and she wrote that the visit caused her emotional distress.^[3]

Two weeks after she posted the reviews, Levine received an email from the doctor’s lawyers. Song was suing her for $1 million in damages plus legal fees. Song claimed that Levine had complained of pelvic pain and that he had tried to treat it. Levine maintained that she had only wanted a physical.

During the ensuing court battle, Levine claimed that Song and his lawyers had posted her entire medical record, including notes about her mental health, her bills, her insurance information, her driver’s license, her birthdate, and her home address.

7 Diane Goodman

Sean C. visited San Francisco’s Ocean Avenue Books, and he thought the store was a total mess with books piled everywhere. When he got home, he wrote a review on Yelp criticizing the clutter. He also recommended that the owners close for a few days to clean and organize the store.

Sean’s review angered Diane Goodman, the owner of the bookstore. She began to send Sean threatening and insulting messages: “Goodbye p—y boy and I will be contacting your employers . . . you are a stupid person . . . you look like an idiot.” Sean reported her to Yelp, who canceled her profile. Goodman made another account, and she continued to harass Sean. He reported her, and her account was canceled again.

Goodman used Sean’s account to find his home, and she showed up at his front door. She tried to force her way into his house, but Sean fought back and pushed her out. They wrestled, and she fell down a couple of steps. Sean slammed the door closed and called the police. Goodman was cited for battery and taken for a mental health intervention.^[4]

6 Kathleen Hale

Kathleen Hale’s publisher sent out copies of her novel, No One Else Can Have You, to book bloggers for their opinions. Reviewer Blythe Harris really did not like the book. She wrote, “This is one of the worst books I’ve read this year.” Then she added, “I think this book is awfully written and offensive; its execution in regards to all aspects is horrible and honestly, nonexistent.”

Harris disliked the way the story depicted statutory rape, PTSD, and domestic violence.

Hale became obsessed with Harris and began stalking Harris’s Instagram and Twitter. Hale spent weeks looking through the reviewer’s profiles and following Harris’s conversations about the book. Hale began to suspect that Harris was using a pseudonym, and she paid for an online background check. She discovered that Harris had provided the site with a fake name, age, and occupation, and Hale became determined to find the real critic.

Hale found Harris’s address, rented a car, and went to the blogger’s home. She peered into the woman’s car and home before she decided to leave without knocking. Hale called Blythe’s workplace several times and pretended to be a fact checker, demanding an explanation about Harris’s real identity. Harris ended the call and blocked Hale on Facebook and Twitter.^[5]

5 Zhang

Xiao Li ordered clothes online, and she complained when her order had not been shipped after several days. The seller, Zhang, was furious at his lowered rating, and he began sending Xiao threatening messages, including death threats.

Zhang finally shipped the clothes, and Xiao waited at the delivery spot to pick them up. While she looked at her phone, Zhang attacked her. He kicked and slapped Xiao repeatedly and knocked her to the ground. After she fell, he ran away.

Xiao was taken to the hospital where she was treated for bruises, cuts, a concussion, and a broken elbow. While she was lying in the hospital bed, she received another message from Zhang saying that he had traveled from Suzhou—more than 800 kilometers (500 mi) away—so that he could “teach her a lesson.” He also warned her that he could attack again.^[6]

Police arrested Zhang, and his seller’s profile was deleted from the shopping website.

4 Andrew Szakaly

Katrina Arthur planned a weekend getaway for her and her husband at the Abbey Inn, which advertised a private stay in the southern Indiana woods. They checked into the hotel and walked into their room. There, they were hit with the stench of sewer. The couple soon discovered that the air conditioning did not work, the water pressure was poor, and the bed’s sheets were loaded with hair and dirt.

The Arthurs went to the front desk to complain, but no one was there. Neither of them could find a single employee anywhere. They tidied up the room themselves, tried to ignore the room’s smell, and attempted to get some sleep. The next morning, they put their room key in a drop box and left.

The hotel emailed Arthur and asked her to leave a review. She complied and left a scathing assessment that she felt was completely honest. A month later, she received a letter from Andrew Szakaly, who claimed that her review was false and had caused “irreparable injury” to the inn. He threatened to sue her for libel unless she took down the review. She deleted it.^[7]

A few days later, she checked her bank statement and discovered that the hotel had charged her an extra $350 in damages. Arthur discovered that the hotel had a policy in place that allowed them to charge customers for negative reviews. Arthur contacted the Indiana attorney general, who sued Szakaly.

Szakaly stopped the $350 punishment policy, and a new manager plans to buy the hotel.

3 Owner Of A Barbecue Shop

Yu ordered barbecue chicken and beef for her and her friends. She did not like the food and complained on the food delivery site the next morning: “[The food is] expensive, not properly packed and not fresh. The portion size was average. I have never had barbecue meat that tasted so bad.”^[8]

Later that evening, she received a call asking if she was the one who had made the review. Yu said she was, and the caller hung up. Later that evening, seven or eight men armed with clubs crashed into her mah-jongg parlor and began questioning, harassing, and threatening her.

Yu’s husband heard the noise and rushed to help his wife. The men brutally beat him before they left. Yu and her husband were taken to the hospital. Yu was treated for broken bones, and her husband was transferred to the ICU with serious brain injuries.

Police called the barbeque restaurant’s owner, who admitted to sending the brutes after the couple. He explained that the late-night food delivery business was extremely competitive and it was worth it for him to get the review taken down.

2 Norman Auvil

Diana Walley went to the Daybreak Diner for a birthday meal. However, the employees told Diana, who was disabled and had once fallen in the restaurant, that she could not be inside the diner without another person with her. Diana left the restaurant in tears.

She told her daughter, Monica, what had happened. Monica called the diner and spoke with several workers about her mother’s visit. Unsatisfied with their response, she left a negative review on Facebook in which she claimed that the restaurant workers were “unnecessarily rude.” Monica also launched a social media campaign against the diner, alleging that they had mistreated her mother because of a disability.

Michael Johnson, the diner owner’s son, was furious at the Walleys. He had hoped to inherit the diner, and the Walley family’s actions were hurting the business. He and his roommates, Jesse Martin and Norman Auvil, were sitting around their home drinking when they decided to get revenge. Martin was able to figure out Monica’s identity from her Facebook post, and he found her address.^[9]

The trio drove to the Walley house with the intent to vandalize the home. Johnson parked outside the house, and Auvil pulled out a gun and fired three shots into the home. One of the bullets pierced a window, and it missed Kenneth Walley’s head by a few inches. (Kenneth was married to Diane Walley.)

The trio’s car was caught on surveillance cameras, and they were soon arrested.

1 Yang

Taiwanese blogger Liu visited a restaurant where she ordered dried beef noodles and a couple of side dishes. She was not impressed with the restaurant or its food, and she wrote an article criticizing both. She claimed that the food was too salty, the place was unsanitary because there were cockroaches, and the owner was a bully who let customers park their cars haphazardly, leading to traffic jams.

Several of Yang’s customers read the blog, and they asked if the article was true. Yang grew angry at Liu, and he sued her for libel. The court ruled in Yang’s favor. They claimed that Liu’s article was libelous because she had only tried one meal and she was not familiar enough with the menu to declare the food salty. They did rule that her criticism about cockroaches was factual, although health officials did not find conditions to be as unsanitary as Liu had described.

Liu was sentenced to 30 days in jail, given two years’ probation, and fined 200,000 New Taiwan dollars to compensate the restaurant’s owner for lost business.^[10]

When we find ourselves wandering through an art gallery, perusing the many different styles and disciplines on display, we often make snap judgements about what we like and what we don’t like. Those judgements we make, we tell ourselves, are based on our very own tastes. We look, we evaluate and then, confident in our thinking process, we pronounce the painting, drawing or sculpture to be bad, good, great or a masterpiece. It’s a simple, straightforward process. We know art when we see it. Case closed.

Turns out, the process of appreciating art is much more complicated than that. There are numerous strange, subtle forces that make us embrace some art, push other art away or magically transform non-art into art. Here are 10 fascinating examples.

SEE ALSO: 10 Great Easter Eggs Hidden In Works Of Art

10 Being Told

Fact: Simply Being Told That Something Is Art Changes Our Response To It

Recently, a group of Dutch scientists, from Erasmus University in Rotterdam, conducted a series of experiments. A total of 24 student volunteers were hooked up to an EEG—which measures electrical activity in the brain—and asked to evaluate a series of pictures for likability and attractiveness. Half of these pictures were of something nice and half were of something awful. The students were also told that some of the pictures were art and some were pictures of actual events.^[1]

What the scientists found was that when the students were told that a picture was a work of art, their emotional response was, “…subdued on a neural level.” In other words, when confronted with what we are told is a work of art, we distance ourselves from it to be able to, as lead researcher Noah Van Dongen puts it, “…appreciate or scrutinize its shapes, colors and composition…”

9 Where It’s Shown

Fact: Where The Art Is Displayed Affects Our Appreciation Of It

A work of art is a work of art. Observed up on a gallery wall or in somebody’s garage, that same painting should be able to be appreciated in the same way in either environment, right?^[2]

In 2014, a simple experiment was conducted by a team at the University of Vienna. In that experiment, two groups of volunteers took in an art exhibition—one in a museum and one in a laboratory. A Mobile eye tracking device captured each participant’s viewing time in both places. Afterwards, they were asked to rate each artwork based on, “…liking, interest, understanding, and ambiguity scales.”

The results showed that galleries and museums do matter. Participants in the museum environment viewed each of the individual works of art for a longer time, liked them more and found them more interesting.

Summing up, the team from the University of Vienna concluded that, “…art museums foster an enduring and focused aesthetic experience and demonstrate that context modulates the relation between art experience and viewing behavior.”

8 Hunter-Gatherer Instincts

Fact: The Hunter-Gatherer Era Differentiated What Men And Women Find Aesthetically Pleasing

Next time you disagree with a member of the opposite sex on the aesthetic value of a painting it might just be because, once, long, long ago, men hunted animals and women gathered nuts and berries.^[3]

So says Camilo J. Cela-Conde and his colleagues. They hooked up 10 female students and 10 male students to a MEG—which measures the brain’s electrical currents and the magnetic fields it creates—and showed them each hundreds of pictures of artistic paintings, natural objects, landscapes and urban scenes.

They found that when visually evaluating a work of art, men’s brains show stimulation on the right side only, while women’s brains show stimulation on both sides.

From the data they collected, the authors of the study concluded that male and female differences in the appreciation of aesthetic beauty might be tied to the different roles each had during the time of the hunter-gatherer society.

Men hunting needed to “…process a large landscape” and because of this are, “…more comfortable in open configurations and larger art works.” On the contrary, women gathering would, “…seek out nuts and berries and find the same static patch each day” and because of this, “…would be more comfortable and would like small spatial configurations…”

7 Exposure

Fact: We Prefer The Art That We Are Exposed To More Often

Ever dislike a song, the first time you hear it, but grow to like it after listening to it a few more times? That experience has a name.^[4]

The “mere-exposure effect” is the experience one has when one begins to like things merely because they are repeatedly exposed to it.

James Cutting, a psychologist at Cornell University, showed his students artistic examples of impressionism for a very brief blip of time—2 seconds. Some of those works of art were considered classics and some were not—though, qualitatively, they were very close. The works of art that were not considered classics were shown 4 times as much.

The results were surprising. The students preferred the non-classics to the classic works of art. A control group still gave the edge to the classics.

6 Electroshock Therapy

Fact: Jolting Your Brain With Electricity Enhances Our Love Of Classic Art

Zaira Cattaneo at the University of Milan Bicocca and her team took 12 people and asked them their opinion of a series of paintings. The twist was that they asked these people before and after they either zapped their brain with a small amount of current or merely pretended to zap them.^[5]

The part of the brain that received the jolt, in this experiment, is known as the DLPFC or the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. This part of the brain processes emotions.

Surprisingly, the people who received the zap rated paintings that contained regular everyday moments more highly.

Neurologist Anjan Chatterjee, at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, believes that zapping the DLPFC may, “…improve your mood.”

This is why Zaira hopes that, someday, this method may help those suffering from anhedonia—a condition in which people are incapable of experiencing pleasure.

5 Ambiguity

Fact: The More Ambiguous A Work Of Art The More We Like It

We crave clarity. When we shop, we want to see a clearly printed price tag for the item we wish to purchase. When we drive, we want to see clearly printed signs that tell us how fast we can go and when to stop.^[6]

When it comes to art, though, we ache for ambiguity.

A study was conducted featuring 29 people who ranged in age from 18-41 and had zero art or art history training. They were shown photos of ambiguous works of art done by Rene Magritte and Hans Bellmer.

The results were fascinating, “The higher the participants assessed the ambiguity of a stimulus, the more they appreciated it.”

What the participants found was that the ambiguous art triggered, “…flashes of understanding as they studied the work, which they found enjoyable even if it didn’t unlock all of its secrets.”

Echoing those comments, researchers also found that, “…subjective solvability of ambiguity was not significantly linked to liking, and was even negatively linked to interest and (emotional involvement).”

4 No Info Please

Fact: Providing Information About A Work Of Art Diminishes Our Appreciation Of It

More information does not lead to more enjoyment—at least when it comes to art.^[7]

Psychologist Kenneth Bordens of Indiana University-Purdue University, Fort Wayne, recently wrote about a study where 172 undergraduate students—with little to no art smarts—looked at two paintings and two sculptures in one of four styles. Those styles were—Impressionist, Renaissance, Dada and Outsider.

Initially, each student was handed a broad definition of art and a card indicating the style a particular work represented. Then, half of them were handed even more information, including: a definition of that style, a short look at where that style came from and what artists who worked in that style set out to achieve.

Then, using a scale from 1-7, Students had to rate how much they liked each work and how closely it lined up with their personal idea of art.

The study showed that, “Providing contextual information led to participants perceiving examples of the various styles of art as matching less well with their internal standards than when no contextual information was presented,”

Bordens thinks that the extra information provided about some of the works of art may have led to “greater conscious processing” on the part of the participants which may have made them, “more critical.”

3 Abstraction? Sacré Bleu!

Fact: We Appreciate Abstract Art More In A Foreign Language Context

There is a term in psychology called Psychological Distancing. It refers to the, “…subjective space that we perceive between ourselves and things.”^[8]

Elena Stephan, Department of Psychology, Bar-ilan University, Ramat-Gan, Israel and her colleagues studied psychological distancing and how it related to the appreciation of art.

They argued that a foreign language may create enough of a psychological distance to move an individual, “…away from the pragmatic everyday perception style and enhance appreciation of paintings.”

In the end, they found that abstract art was appreciated more deeply in a foreign language context than in a native language context.

2 Patterns

Fact: Seeing Patterns In A Work Of Art Is Our Sweet Spot

Our brain loves patterns. An ability to recognize patterns is so important that it played a big role in helping our Neanderthal ancestors survive.^[9]

Not surprisingly then, recognizing patterns actually gives us a pop of pleasure via our brain’s opioid system.

Jim Davies, a professor at Carelton’s Institute of Cognitive Science, says patterns are crucial in our appreciation of art. “If we don’t see a pattern…we rapidly get bored with it.”

1 Mona Lisa . . . Yawn

Fact: The Mona Lisa Only Became A Masterpiece After It Was Stolen

Absence makes the heart grow fonder.

Whether true or not, absence certainly helped boost the profile and popularity of a certain Leonardo Da Vinci painting.

Though difficult to imagine now, there was a time when interest in the “Mona Lisa” was, “…relatively minimal.” So, what accounts for its now legendary status? The tireless work of art historians? Re-evaluation by art critics of the early 1900s? Da Vinci’s ancestors? No, all it took was a construction worker and a few of his buddies.^[10]

Sleeping overnight in the Louvre, Vincenzo and his friends awoke the next morning, Monday August 21, 1911, dressed themselves in workman’s smocks, grabbed the painting and then split via a back stairwell.

The “Mona Lisa” was so uncelebrated that it took 26 hours before someone noticed the painting was missing.

Newspapers around the world announced the theft with big front page headlines. The walls of Paris became crowded with wanted posters. People flocked to police headquarters. Songs were written about it. Through this process, high art became mass art and the people fell in love with Da Vinci’s now universally adored masterpiece.

So, the “Mona Lisa” owes much of its renown and appreciation to an obscure 5′ 3″ Italian construction worker whose brothers called a nut. Strange but true.

It’s been a while since a new Jason movie featured on the big screen or a green and red striped jersey brought terror to our dreams. While those horrors have been left behind in their own era, a host of new scary movies exist to keep us shivering. And as with most movies, the fan theories follow close behind. WARNING: spoilers ahead!

SEE ALSO: Top 10 Must-See Recent Genre-Defying Horrors

10The Cabin in the Woods

You would be forgiven for thinking of The Cabin in the Woods as the horror movie starring Thor and the hot doctor from Grey’s Anatomy. This popular horror film surprised audiences in 2011 with its fresh approach and massive plot twist at the end.

However, not all viewers were convinced that the twist at the end was all it seemed to be. A fan theory has it that Chris Hemsworth’s character, Curt Vaughan, was in on the plot from the beginning. Proof of this theory is presented in the fact that Curt is the one who gets the group of friends to go to the cabin. Curt is also the only one who doesn’t choose a summoning object down in the basement.

More ‘proof’ indicates that Curt knew his girlfriend Jules had to die first according to the rules, so he made sure to get her alone so the zombies could kill her. It is also thought that Curt would have been given the title of ‘hero’ if he played along with the Facility.^[1]

9The Texas Chain Saw Massacre

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre 1974 classic horror is one of the creepiest movies on this list. The killer, Leatherface, dons a mask made of human skin and runs around with a chainsaw and an insatiable bloodlust. Not to mention the Leatherface character is based on real life murderer, Ed Gein.

As such, it has always been assumed that Leatherface is a man, but a Reddit fan theory has it that the crazy murderer might in fact be a woman. Proof of this is said to be the way the killer applies lipstick and blusher to another mask. Leatherface also goes mental when the freezer is tampered with and makes very high-pitched sounds for what is supposed to be an above-average sized man. It is also alleged that since Leatherface prepared the food and probably ‘decorated’ the creepy house depicted in the movie, he is probably a she.^[2]

8Halloween

The most recent Halloween movie was a huge box office hit in 2018. In it, Michael Myers allegedly crashes the bus he was being transferred in, to return to Haddonfield to kill a bunch of people. He also goes after Laurie Strode, who has turned her house into a fortress.

Eagle-eyed viewers were quick to notice something off about Laurie, however. While sitting in her truck, drinking, she waits for the bus to leave for the maximum-security prison. She then pitches up at a family dinner drunk and starts crying. A fan theory has it that is wasn’t fear causing her to react like that, but guilt. The theory goes that Laurie, and not Michael, was the one responsible for the bus crash. It is also said that her almost non-reaction to the news report on the crash is a further indication that she planned the whole thing. Why would she do such a thing? Well, because she had been waiting for her fight with Michael for 40 years and wasn’t about to be unprepared for when he arrived at her house.^[3]

7 Us

Michael Myers has also been tied to the popular 2019 horror movie Us. The sequel to Get Out has spawned quite a few fan theories including one that says Michael is a Tethered and was swapped with a clone and trapped for 60 years.

Not only has Jordan Peele, writer and director of US, referenced Halloween during several interviews about his movie, he also mentions the rabbits that feature in the film and how if you should put a rabbit brain in a human body, you’d end up with Michael Myers. What further gets the theory going, is that Michael doesn’t talk, but rather grunts much like the Tethered in Us. Also, in Halloween Resurrection it is revealed to viewers that a tunnel system runs under the Myers house linking to the basement and ultimately enabling the clone swapping.

Moreover, Michael’s psychiatrist, Dr Loomis, tracks him using a ‘Rabbit in Red’ matchbox and describes his patient as not having a soul. Which pretty much describes the Tethered.^[4]

6 Hereditary

Hereditary is arguably the most disturbing entry on this list. There is bleakness and gore and shock value all culminating in a terrifying reveal involving a demon king named Paimon.

Fans were quick to come up with theories involving aspects of the movie, such as linking it to Midsommer (another disturbing horror flick by Hereditary director: Ari Aster). The theory says that since both movies feature cults, they must play out in the same universe. Some fans are also convinced that the couple walking past Annie in Hereditary is the one and only Dani and Christian from Midsommar.

Another popular theory supported by many fans says that none of the horrifying things in the movie, such as Charlie’s decapitation, actually happened. Instead it was the manifestation of both Annie and Peter’s mental disorders.^[5]

5 A Quiet Place

A Quiet Place took what we knew about horror and turned it on its head. Featuring silent characters and monsters reminiscent of the Demogorgon in Stranger Things, this movie made for a unique cinematic experience. Many movie-goers reported feeling uneasy throughout the movie because of the ongoing silence.

In the movie, the monsters are extremely sensitive to noise and attack anyone that makes a sound (as is evident in the very disturbing scene with the little boy and the toy rocket). Hence the silent characters.

These monsters, if one goes by the newspaper clipping on the wall, came from outer space when a meteor hit Earth. However, some fans think that is only a red herring and the creatures are in fact biological weapons left over from WWIII. Others believe that the only way the creatures could have spread so fast if they did indeed crash in only one spot in Mexico, is with the help of the meteor impact. If they had crashed during the spore stage of their lifecycle the impact would have sent the spores flying to the upper atmosphere where they would have caught a ride to locations all over the US.^[6]

4 It Follows

When it comes to psychological horrors, It Follows is a great example of how to do it properly. Rated 96% on Rotten Tomatoes, most reviewers agree that this movie is truly frightening without trying too hard or relying on tired jump scares.

The plot of the movie centres around a curse in the form of a shape-shifting entity passed on to Jay Height after she has casual sex with a guy in the backseat of his car. She then must pass on the curse to another man, otherwise she will be killed by the entity that presents itself in the form of the loved ones of its victims. And so on and so forth.

A twisted theory appeared on Reddit that says the young people in the movie, running from the sinister shapeshifter, were kidnapped from different decades by demons and sent to Hell. On Earth, they had been replaced by changelings. This would mean the monster that follows Jay in the movie, is just another inhabitant of Hell. And the monster doesn’t choose its own form, but rather the victim determines its shape by what may have happened to them in the past such as abuse, rape, attempted murder etc. Since Jay has suffered a sexual assault, the monster chasing her takes the form of a naked woman.^[7]

3 The Babadook

The Babadook is yet another psychological horror that features a creepy kid and even creepier monster. When labor pains overtook Amelia, her husband drove her to the hospital only to get into an accident. Her husband didn’t make it and the movie follows Amelia’s struggle to cope with being a single parent. She reads a book about the Babadook to her son but starts feeling uneasy with the content, especially when her son claims that the Babadook haunts him at night. Amelia then tears up the book and throws it in the bin.

The book shows up on their doorstep, glued back together, and things take a turn for the worse in the household. It seems that the Babadook possesses Amelia with her voice changing during fits of rage. She also kills their dog and eventually goes after her son. When she vomits up black goo, it seems that the Babadook has lost, but instead it runs to the basement where it seems to be fed maggots by Amelia at the end of the movie.

A fan theory has it that the Babadook is a physical manifestation of Amelia’s hatred for her son, since she gave birth to him on the same day her husband died. When the Babadook is heard making weird noises in the movie, Amelia’s rage is evident, giving more weight to this theory. Another theory says that it is not rage, but Amelia’s intense grief that brings the Babadook to life.

A very popular theory claimed that the Babadook is gay, which was eventually acknowledged but not entirely confirmed by filmmaker Jennifer Kent.^[8]

2 Carrie

Carrie is a lesson on the consequences of bullying. And a very disturbing movie to boot. Carrie started out as Stephen King’s first published novel that spawned a film in 1976 and then a remake in 2013.

As with most Stephen King novels and movies, there are many theories surrounding the plot. In this case the main theory seems to be that Matilda, the main character in the novel of the same name by Roald Dahl, grows up to be Carrie.

After Miss Honey and Matilda move to Chamberlain, Maine, they change their names to Margaret and Carietta. Much like Carrie’s mother, Honey/Margaret becomes very religious which leads to Matilda/Carietta hiding away her telekinetic abilities. Which then leads to the start of the story of Carrie, according to theory. This would essentially mean that Matilda is the prequel to Carrie. More proof that these two stories take place in the same universe comes in the form of a car named Christine (another Stephen King title), which is a 1958 Plymouth Fury sold by Matilda’s father. The car caused the death of a passenger, leading to Matilda’s father being arrested and Miss Honey and Matilda’s move to Maine.^[9]

1 IT

The craziest theory by far, on this list anyway, is the one that connects Disney’s Mary Poppins and Stephen King’s IT. Considering that Mary Poppins is a sweet lady that flies around with an umbrella and IT is a killer clown, it might seem ridiculous. However, the theory points out that Poppins and IT share a similar power. They are able to tap into children’s innermost thoughts, whether it be for good or evil.

Both movies feature a young boy named Georgie. While Poppins returns to Cherry Tree Lane after 25 years and relies on children’s joy to keep her energy levels up, IT returns to Derry every 27 years and uses the fear of children to keep his power levels up. In both movies, the children’s encounters with IT and Poppins seem to fade from their minds. Not to mention, Poppins and IT both seem to like dancing. The final thread connecting these two movies comes during the scene where the characters in Mary Poppins grab balloons and float away. Since “floating” and “balloons” are synonymous with IT, the theory seems plausible to many viewers.^[10]

Most of our favorite websites and phone apps started off much differently than they appear today. If things had gone according to plan, you would be logging onto YouTube to find that date instead of Tinder or whatever app or website you currently use.

Want to plan a meet-up? You would think Instagram. Or, you just have a thing for comparing people’s photos? That would have been Facebook’s turf. How about if you wanted to know if the person you are about to call was available? You would use WhatsApp for that. The first version of WhatsApp did not even have instant messaging capability.

However, it appears that while the founders made their plans, fate often had other things in stock for them. Many founders watched as their initial plans flopped with only a small part of it becoming successful. Others like eBay, just watched them transform into some new products.

SEE ALSO: Top 10 Disturbing Facts About Facebook

10 YouTube Was A Dating Site

Today, YouTube is a hotbed of videos about almost anything. Curiously, it was intended as a platform to allow users meet prospective spouses at the time it launched in 2005. At the time, its founders, Jawed Karim, Steve Chen and Chad Hurley, wanted users to upload videos of them talking about what they wanted in a potential partner.

In keeping with their intentions, the founders used the slogan, “Tune in, Hook up” as the tagline of their website. No one uploaded any video though. Not even when the founders offered to give $20 to any woman who uploaded a video. The founders later decided to allow people upload videos about anything.

Jawed Karim, one of YouTube co-founders, broke the ice when he uploaded an 18-second video of himself at the zoo. As at the time of this writing, the video, titled “Me At The Zoo”, has over 79 million views with 3.8 million comments.^[1]

Related: 10 Disturbing Channels From The Weird Part Of YouTube

9 Instagram Was Created For Meet-ups

Instagram was founded by Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger in 2010. It was not the photo-sharing social media site, as we know it today. It was not even called Instagram. It was called Burbn—after bourbon whiskey.

The naming was deliberate. Systrom—who singlehandedly founded Burbn—loved bourbon whiskey and thought it was cool to name his product after it. Besides, the name was in keeping with its purpose. Burbn was built to plan meet-ups. Users could check in at any place they visited, make plans with friends to revisit the place in the future and later post photos of the meet-up.

Burbn soon flopped because it was just too complex to use. Meanwhile, Systrom noticed that users were often more interested in sharing photos of their meet-ups than in using the other features. He brought Mike Krieger on board and they both developed what would later become Instagram.

The duo planned Instagram as something in between Facebook and Hiptasmatic, which were the two top photo-sharing sites at the time. Hiptasmatic had good filters but terrible photo sharing capability. Facebook was the opposite. Instagram would have both.

Systrom did not forget the lesson he learned from the failure of Burbn either. He made sure Instagram was as simple as possible. To achieve this, they removed everything else from Burbn except the photo sharing, commenting and like tools. Now you know why Instagram has a clean and easy-to-use interface.^[2]

Related: 9 Sinister Facts About The Dark Side Of Instagram [WARNING: Disturbing]

8WhatsApp Was Supposed To Be A Phonebook With Attitude

WhatsApp founders, Jan Koum and Brian Acton did not know they had created a messaging app at the time they released the first version of WhatsApp in 2009. Two years earlier, the two future billionaires, resigned their jobs at Yahoo to tour South America. During that time, they applied for jobs at Facebook but did not make the cut.

In January 2009, Koum acquired an iPhone. Then he thought about creating an app that would allow people to have a status update beside their names. The idea was to allow people to send information to prospective callers about whatever was happening to them. The updates could be anything. Like the user’s location or “battery low” when the user’s phone was about to die.

Koum named the app WhatsApp because it sounded like What’s Up. However, it never gained traction and Koum even considering quitting for a while. WhatsApp only became a hit after Apple introduced push notifications in June 2009. Push notifications allowed users to receive an instant notification whenever someone changed their status.

Koum soon realized that WhatsApp users frequently updated their status to communicate with themselves as if it were an instant messenger. He returned to the drawing board and WhatsApp version 2.0 was released soon after.^[3]

Related: 10 Final Messages From People Facing Certain Death

7 Wikipedia Almost Showed Ads

Wikipedia is the online warehouse of information about everything under—and above—the sun. You will find almost everything there. Even other encyclopedias that have been around for centuries are no match for its repository of information.

Wikipedia owes its success to its users. It depends on people to create all of its content for free. But the lack of in-house writers does not mean Wikipedia does not have some overhead costs. It needs to pay its programmers, hosting and fund some other running costs. And how about those lawsuits that will often pop up here and there? You cannot avoid lawsuits when you run a website like Wikipedia.

This means Wikipedia needs to make money somehow. The founders, Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, planned to generate money from paid adverts that would be displayed on the site. The sort of thing you see on almost every website today. Larry and Sanger hoped to make enough to cover salaries and hosting, even if they did not make a profit.

Fortunately for information seekers, Wikipedia went the non-profit route when Sanger left in 2002. Wales decided he would never show ads. He would raise money from donations instead.

The management of Wikipedia was taken off Bomis, which managed it at the time, and handed to the Wikimedia Foundation. The for-profit Bomis and the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation are both owned by Jimmy Wales. In keeping with its new intentions, the website switched its domain from the .com domain it used at the time to the .org it currently uses.^[4]

Related: Top 15 Funny and Bizarre Wikipedia Pages

6Ebay Was Created For Buying And Selling Pez Dispensers

Plans for what would later become eBay began sometime in 1994 when Pierre met his then-girlfriend and current wife, Pamela Wesley. Pamela was a collector of Pez dispensers. For the unaware, Pez is a brand of candy. The Pez dispenser is a small container that releases one candy at a time.

Pamela had complained to Pierre about her inability to find people wanting to sell their dispensers. Omidyar got some ideas and on Labor Day (September 4) 1995, launched a small shopping area on his personal website. Pamela and other Pez dispenser collectors used the mini site to meet dealers who were willing to sell their dispensers.

However, Pierre soon noticed that people were showing up to sell everything from dolls to household items. Five months later, Pierre’s shopping mini site was worth $3 billion with over 2 million users. The website had become so big that he had to move to its own dedicated domain we call eBay today.^[5]

Related: 10 Bizarre eBay Auctions

5 Facebook Was For Comparing Pictures

On October 28, 2003, Mark Zuckerberg launched a website he called Facemash. Considered the predecessor of Facebook, Facemash required users to click a button to determine which of the photos of two people was hotter.

To get his first users, Mark hacked into Harvard University’s database to steal photos used on students IDs. The website only lasted for a few days before the management of Harvard University shut it down. Mark was considered for expulsion but was saved when Harvard dropped charges.

Four months later, on February 4, 2004, Mark returned with a second website he called TheFacebook. It was almost like Facemash but with features to allow users meet new people. The photo comparison feature was also removed. Like Facemash, TheFacebook was initially limited to Harvard University students but gradually extended to other colleges, high schools and later, basically anyone.^[6]

Related: 10 Ways Facebook Makes You Smarter

4 Flickr Was Supposed To Include A Chat Room

Flickr was founded by couple, Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake in 2004. While the couple had always intended Flickr as the image sharing and hosting site as we know it today, it was not supposed to be all about photos. The original plans included a chat room.

Butterfield and Fake first unveiled what would later become Flickr at the O’Reilly Emerging Tech Conference, San Diego, on February 10, 2004. Flickr was still in development at the time. It was not even their main product. Their primary product was a virtual game titled “Game Neverending”. Flickr was their side project.

The couple later decided to focus on the photo sharing and hosting program when they discovered its potential. However, they removed the chat capability. Meanwhile, Game Neverending never got past the development stage.^[7]

Related: 10 Strange But Interesting Early Photography Fads

3 We Are Supposed To Send Tweets Via SMS

Twitter was called Twttr at the time it was founded in 2006. Twttr is pronounced “Twitter”, just like Twitter. It is the brainchild of Jack Dorsey even though Noah Glass, Biz Stone and Evan Williams would later step in as co-founders. Dorsey planned Twitter as a social media site that could only be updated via SMS.

Twitter would quickly run into problems with this model. Workers at Odeo—a podcasting business founded by Williams and Stone—who were beta testing the app, saw their phone bills increase by hundreds of dollars.

This was clearly due to the massive amount of text messages they sent. One employee spent over $400 on SMS in one month. Odeo even started picking up the SMS bills of workers that used the service. Twitter later switched to an all-web program at the time it launched, as the SMS model was clearly unsustainable.^[8]

Related: Top 10 Ridiculous Instances Of Censorship In Pop Culture

2 FaceTime Was To Allow Users To Make Phone Calls From Their Macs

In 2007, Roberto Garcia assembled some Apple staff to develop a program codenamed Venice. Venice was supposed to allow iPhone users to make voice calls from their Macs. However, the program soon stalled and the team moved to other things.

A year later, Garcia morphed Venice into Game kit, an iPhone program that allowed users to video chat while playing online games. He and his team were successful this time. Game kit itself was added to Apple’s social gaming app, Game Center, in 2009.

However, the video calling feature of the Apple Game Center (the former Game kit) was later spun-off to create the first version of FaceTime.^[9]

Related: Top 10 Most Important Apps Of The Decade

1 Amazon Only Sold Books

Amazon sells practically everything these days—from pins to houses (literally houses . . . not just building materials) and home appliances. Interestingly, Amazon had very humble beginnings. It was founded in 1995 to sell books. Just books and nothing else. The only thing it ever sold outside books were music CDs, but even those were considered a secondary product.

Amazon primarily sold books for three years until 1998 when Jeff Bezos started to expand. On August 5, 1998, the New York Times reported that Amazon had acquired Junglee Corporation, an ecommerce and software company that operated a price comparison website and online marketplace. Think of Junglee as the Amazon of 1998.

Amazon also acquired Planet All, an address book and social networking site with 1.5 million users. Amazon itself had 3.1 million users at the time. At the same time, Amazon revealed it would also allow third party vendors to advertise their goods on its site.^[10]

Related: Top 10 Bizarre Things You Can Buy on Amazon

The Habsburgs were one of Europe’s greatest royal dynasties. Over the centuries, branches of the family ruled countries as diverse as modern Germany, Spain, Slovakia, Peru, Mexico, and Croatia. They were Holy Roman emperors and heads of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and it was the assassination of one of their clan, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, that started World War I.

In short, this great dynasty shaped not just modern Europe, but the history of the entire world. Oh, and they did it all while being certifiably insane.

10 Leopold I Loved Weird Blood Sports

In the 17th century, it was expected that royals would show their manliness by killing animals. Most chose to do so by organizing hunting parties, but Leopold I was different. The Holy Roman emperor wasn’t content with simply shooting animals. He had to kill them in the craziest way possible.

One of Leopold’s favorite “sports” involved getting his courtiers to wrap a live fox in a blanket. Leopold would then arrange a gang of dwarfs to beat the helpless creature with sticks until it was dead.

Killing animals at a severe disadvantage seems to have been Leopold’s specialty. At various times, he used falcons to hunt herons and had deer submerged in a deep pool before shooting them one by one with a crossbow. But the prize for craziest Habsburg blood sport probably goes to Rudolf II, who used cheetahs to hunt in the streets of Prague. Speaking of Rudolf . . . 

9 Rudolf II Was A Crazy Alchemist

Rudolf II was the last Habsburg emperor to base his court in Prague. This is probably because he absolutely trashed the dynasty’s reputation while there. Despite being Holy Roman emperor, Rudolf was less interested in ruling than he was in turning himself into a wizard.

A fervent occultist, Rudolf believed in some deeply strange stuff. He thought he was on the verge of discovering a philosopher’s stone and granting himself eternal life. He hired famous alchemists like the wife-swapping Englishman John Dee to turn metal into gold and consorted with mystics like Nostradamus, who wrote horoscopes for him.

On top of that, Rudolf liked to collect mystical and occult objects. He has even been linked to the ancient Jewish legend of the Golem, with the mythical beast supposedly being created on the streets of Prague.

8 Franz Ferdinand Shot Anything That Moved

Before he became famous as the beginning of World War I, Archduke Franz Ferdinand was famous for killing any animal he saw. A passionate hunter, Franz traveled the breadth of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, unleashing bullet-based death on its fauna. On a single day in the 19th century, he killed 2,140 animals. By the time he met his end at age 51, it was estimated that he had personally shot nearly 300,000 living creatures.

The vast bulk of this insane number was taken up by pheasants, partridge, and deer. Deer particularly caused a problem, since Franz liked to hang his hunting trophies. By the end of his life, his estate at Konopischt had 100,000 dead deer on its walls, and visitors were in constant danger of being impaled on their antlers. He even kept two elephants he’d shot as a gigantic wastepaper bin and a glorified ashtray, respectively.

7 Karl I Made The Worst Peace Deal In History

Today, the Habsburgs are known for allying their Austro-Hungarian Empire with Germany in World War I, but they were far from the Kaiser’s closest allies. As the war dragged on, new emperor Karl I (aka Charles I) secretly contacted France to secure a peace treaty. His efforts have been described as possibly the worst attempted peace deal in history.

Karl was desperate not to have his empire divided after the war was over, so he opened negotiations by essentially promising the French anything they wanted. This led the French prime minister, Georges Clemenceau, to realize that the Austro-Hungarians must be so weak that their armies would soon collapse. Rather than respond to Karl’s overtures, he published his message, destroying the last traces of morale in the empire.

Not only was such a public rejection a body blow for Karl, but news of it inevitably got back to the kaiser, almost costing Karl his only ally.

6 The Entire Family Was Hopelessly Inbred

The Habsburgs lived in a Europe where royal possession was decided by inheritance. If one of their number married into a new family, they might wind up having to split their insanely vast territory with another group of royals. Their simple solution for this was to inbreed like mad.

Leopold I, for example, married his own niece, Margaret Theresa of Spain, and insisted that she call him “uncle” while being intimate. It was common for Habsburgs to shack up with cousins or aunts, and marrying outside the family was frowned on.

Predictably, this did not end well. The line of the dynasty that ruled Imperial Spain and its colonies in the New World came to an abrupt end when Carlos II turned out to be a genetic basket case. Physically disabled, mentally impaired, and infertile, Carlos died childless in 1700. Habsburg rule of Spain expired with him.

5 The Entire Family Was Hopelessly Deformed

The dangers of inbreeding go beyond madness and infertility. In a family as hopelessly twisted as the Habsburgs, it can manifest itself physically. From paintings, it’s clear that the entire family was woefully, freakishly deformed.

This deformity came in the form of the dreaded “Habsburg Jaw.” Family members all tended to have a hugely pronounced underbite and chins that looked like aircraft landing strips. Charles V had the jaw so bad that he couldn’t eat in public. If Leopold I was outside when it rained, his mouth would fill with water. Carlos II was physically incapable of either speaking or eating solid food.

As Simon Winder pointed out in Danubia, the Habsburg men could at least grow beards to hide their prominent chins. The women were doomed to forever have their deformities on display.

4 Ferdinand I Was A Genuine Idiot

Although inbreeding was common in Europe’s royal families, rarely did affected children ascend to the throne. Ferdinand I was the exception. In 1835, he became emperor of the Habsburg Lands, despite having the mental age of a child.

Ferdinand was too impaired to figure out how to open doors. He found signing his name impossible. One of his favorite activities was to put a wastepaper basket on his head and roll on the floor. At one point, he refused to believe that an eagle he saw was real because it only had one head, and the eagle on the family crest had two.

Despite his difficulties, Ferdinand ruled for over a decade before being deposed in a coup in 1848. One of his last known utterances as ruler came when he heard that the people of Austria were in open revolution. “Are they allowed to do that?” the amiable idiot asked.

3 Maximilian Was Tricked Into Ruling Mexico

In 1863, Mexico’s elite conspired with Napoleon III of France to replace the liberal Mexican president Benito Juarez with a French puppet. All they needed was an idiot to act as their figurehead. That idiot was Ferdinand Maximilian.

A minor Habsburg, Maximilian was, by all accounts, a friendly guy—and also naive. When Napoleon told him that the people of Mexico had voted him their emperor, he apparently believed it. Setting sail for the New World, Maximilian arrived as Mexico’s new leader in 1864. Almost immediately, the country plunged into civil war.

Unbeknownst to Maximilian, French troops were using his ascension as an excuse to eliminate President Juarez, but Juarez fought back. By 1867, he’d driven the French from his country. Apparently believing he was popular, Maximilian refused to join their retreat, saying that he wanted to stay with his new people. His “people” responded by executing him.

2 The Whole Family Was Plagued By A Creepy Curse

In 1848, Emperor Franz Joseph executed a group of Hungarian rebels. One of them was the son of Countess Karolyi, who placed a curse on Franz Joseph. That curse would be blamed for the horrific tragedies that beset the family from then on.

Franz Joseph barely escaped an assassination attempt, while his wife was murdered by an Italian anarchist. His son died in a murder-suicide pact with his lover. Another Habsburg fell off a horse. Another burned to death in a house fire. Two committed suicide. One vanished on the high seas, never to be seen again.

Others went mad. After Mexican “emperor” Maximilian’s death, his consort spent 30 years in an insane asylum. For seven decades, the family was plagued with misery, culminating in the assassination of Franz Ferdinand. His death triggered World War I, which would lead to the dismantling of the entire Habsburg Empire.

1 Their Last Member Is On The Path To Sainthood

Remember Karl I, the guy who tried to make that terrible peace deal with France? Although he stepped down as emperor in 1918, ending the royal Habsburg line, his story isn’t quite over yet. He’s well on his way to becoming a Catholic saint.

Currently known as Karl the Blessed, he’s considered a prime candidate for future sainthood. In 2008, the Catholic Church attributed a second miracle to him, meaning that he may soon be canonized.

If so, he would likely become the first saint in history to have authorized the use of chemical weapons. (The Austrian forces used chlorine gas in World War I.) Still, it would make a fittingly bizarre end to this strangest of lineages. Only emperor for two years of his life, Karl I may yet go down as the longest-revered of all the Habsburgs.

Ah, ketchup—that wonderful and delicious condiment that Americans love. We love it so much that, on average, we consume about three bottles per year, with kids and teens gobbling the most. Thirsty and want to break a world record? Drink a bottle very quickly. The fastest time to drink a 120-milliliter (4 oz) bottle of ketchup is 32.37 seconds. German TV reporter Benedikt Weber drank it through a straw February 17, 2012 at Chong’s Diner in Nuremberg.

The condiment can be an obsession and is certainly the source of some very unusual facts.

10Early Versions Did Not Use Tomatoes

Though ketchup today uses tomato as a base, early versions did not. They were made from anchovies, shallots, oysters, lemons, or walnuts.

Perhaps you find walnut ketchup a tough nut to swallow or find shallots and oysters too fishy. Other people from long ago shared similar thoughts, so back then, mushrooms were the most popular type. A typical mushroom-based recipe is found in Beeton’s Book of Household Management, first published in 1861. Beeton’s mushroom ketchup calls for a peck of mushrooms, salt, pepper, mace, allspice, and a few drops of brandy.

Don’t want to coat your meals with a condiment made from fungi? Try the Philippines version; it uses bananas, so this ketchup tastes sweeter. If you find the thought of brown or yellow ketchup too strange to stomach, don’t worry. Out of deference to tradition, most products on the market are dyed red.

If ketchup made from bananas doesn’t give you a warm and fuzzy feeling either, there are other fruit or vegetable versions. Try plum, pear, sweet mustard, cranberry, carrot, mango, apple, or horseradish ketchup, for starters.

9Five Different Tastes

Most people are familiar with four basic food flavors: sweet, sour, bitter, and salty. A fifth—umami or savory—is also a recognized flavor. It’s a meaty taste and can be added to foods through flavorings such as monosodium glutamate and soy sauce. It was discovered by Japanese chemist Kikunae Ikeda and is found naturally in products such as ripe tomatoes, fish, and cured meat.

The earliest versions of ketchup used only two basic flavors, combining the salty and the bitter. Today’s recipes use five of them, courtesy of H.J. Heinz, founder of the eponymous Heinz company. While some recipes already called for vinegar and sometimes sugar, Heinz increased the amounts used, adding a sour taste and extra sweetness. He also insisted on only using ripe tomatoes, thereby ensuring umami.

Most of the world’s ketchup is currently produced by Heinz, Hunt, and Del Monte, with Heinz the top brand worldwide. It is the third-best-selling condiment in the US, topped only by mayonnaise and salsa, perhaps because it helps satisfy our sweet tooth and carnivorous cravings simultaneously.

8Originally A Cooking Ingredient

Ketchup is now primarily a condiment, but this was not always the case. It once was mainly an ingredient in foods like pies and in more complex sauces, and it was used to flavor fish, meat, and poultry while they were still being cooked. Housewives needing to make gravy with the necks, gizzards, feet, and livers of fowls could add a teaspoonful of mushroom ketchup for flavoring. Likewise, they had the option of using two spoonfuls of mushroom ketchup to help make hare hash and ox-cheek soup. The sauce became primarily a condiment in the 1900s, with the advent of hot dogs, french fries, and hamburgers.

Modern spices and flavorings have gone well beyond the vision of pioneering giant H.J. Heinz. Epicures with adventurous palates can pour beer-flavored ketchup onto their poached eggs and onion-flavored ketchup over their Angus burgers. Other gourmet flavors include cheese, apple cider vinegar, and jalapeño. These variants emphasize one or more parts of the five basic tastes, such as sourness or umani.

7The Ketchup Cure

Need to remove noxious content from your body by emptying bile from your liver into your intestines? If you buy into this 19th-century concept, consider curing yourself with ketchup.

Ketchup was considered to be a medicine around 1835 and was sold as tomato pills. The idea came from Dr. John Cook Bennett, the president of the medical department at Willoughby University in Ohio. He thought that tomatoes could cure illnesses such as diarrhea, jaundice, and indigestion. Bennett took these ideas directly from Dr. William Smith, a physician who lived in Michigan.

Bennett approached Archibald Miles, who at the time was selling his “American Hygiene Pill” patent medicine, convincing him to market “Dr. Mill’s Compound Extract of Tomato.” Researchers debate whether the first version simply used the original hygiene pills, but later versions did contain tomatoes. Miles’s success sparked numerous imitators, leading to even wilder claims of cures for rheumatism, the flu, headaches, and more.

Many of the ketchup pills were fraudulent. Not only did they use no tomatoes—they were actually laxatives. This caused the tomato pill market to collapse in 1840. Most people who wanted to treat their sinuses for a cold did not like treating their colons to thorough cleansings instead.

6Ketchup Helps Prevent Cancer

Despite using questionable science, Bennett and Smith were right: Ketchup does indeed possess health benefits. It’s good for the heart and helps reduce the risk of certain types of cancer. These benefits occur because ketchup is an excellent source of the chemical lycopene, which gives tomatoes its red color. Lycopene is an antioxidant, inhibiting inflammation and cell damage caused by free radicals. Uncooked tomato products such as juice are not as useful as ketchup because the body absorbs cooked tomato products better. Cooked products also have higher lycopene levels.

For prostate cancer, research shows that lycopene reduces the growth of cancerous cells and also affects the way these cells communicate. It chokes the way blood flows to these cells by inhibiting the growth of blood vessels that feed tumors. Some studies indicate that lycopene also helps with liver, skin, breast, and lung cancer, but the results are inconclusive. Interestingly enough, the chemical appears naturally in the human lungs, skin, liver, blood, prostate, adrenal glands, and colon. It is the most dominant color component in those organs and is also thought to have a natural role in guarding against cancerous cells.

Lycopene supplements, also called “essence of tomatoes” and “tomato pills,” are sold worldwide. Daily dosages of these “wonder pills” are claimed to save lives, increase life spans, cut cholesterol, reduce the risk of heart attacks and strokes, beat arthritis, help with diabetes, and keep the skin wrinkle-free. Bennett’s concept of tomato pills has come full circle.

5Slower Than A Turtle

How fast does Heinz ketchup exit the bottle? According to the company, the ketchup flows 0.045 kilometers (0.028 mi) per hour or about 1.3 centimeters (0.5 in) per second. To put things in perspective, some turtles travel at 0.8 kilometers (0.5 mi) per hour on land.

Heinz promotes their product’s slowness as a good feature. In 1979, the company made a commercial showing two boys waiting eagerly for ketchup to flow onto their food. The commercial was set to Carly Simon’s 1972 hit “Anticipation,” which became known as “The Ketchup Song.” The ad not only embedded the tune in ketchup lore, it was voted the best ad of the 20th century. Carly later expressed regret with the association between her song and the condiment.

Meanwhile, there’s an actual ketchup song, “Asereje (The Ketchup Song)” by Las Ketchup, a Spanish girl group. The song borrows from the Sugarhill Gang’s “Rappers Delight.” In a fruitful example of how the apple does not fall far from the tree, Las Ketchup is a group of sisters whose famous father is the flamenco guitarist El Tomate.

If, like the kids in the commercial, you are on pins and needles waiting for the ketchup to pour, tap the “57” on the bottle. Better yet, to increase the flow for any ketchup bottle, take the cap off and insert a straw. Make sure that the straw almost touches the bottom. This trick increases air flow, allowing the ketchup to move more quickly.

4The World’s Largest Ketchup Bottle

What do you do with a ketchup bottling plant and a water tower company? Combine forces, of course. This is what happened in Collinsville, Illinois, home of the world’s largest ketchup bottle.

The W.E. Caldwell Company, a Louisville, Kentucky firm that constructed tanks and towers, built the bottle in 1949 for the Collinsville-based G.S. Suppiger catsup-bottling plant. At the time, G.S. Suppiger made Brooks Catsup, back then known as “America’s largest selling TANGY catsup.” The sauce is immortalized as a huge, steel 21.4-meter (70.1 ft) tank on legs 30 meters (100 ft) tall, making the total height of the tower 52 meters (170 ft).

The world’s largest ketchup bottle is a rock star. It has its own website, fan club, and annual festival. It also has a role in promoting a healthy lifestyle. A walking club hosts a Catsup Bottle Water Tower Walk, and the bottle is the focus of an event called the Big Bottle Bicycle Ride. Today, the W.E. Caldwell Company is Caldwell Tanks. G.S. Suppiger no longer exists; it merged with the P.J. Ritter Company in 1959.

3The World’s Largest Ketchup Packet

The good people of Collinsville, Illinois set yet another ketchup record—the world’s largest ketchup packet. It also holds the record for being the world’s largest condiment sachet and is featured on the inside cover of the 2009 Guinness World Record book.

The hefty packet was created in 2007 at a fundraiser for the Collinsville Christian Academy, which had been damaged in a fire. Heinz donated 4,000 glass ketchup bottles. Participants paid $1 apiece for bottles, pouring the ketchup into a trough. Once inside the trough, the ketchup was sucked up by a hose and then poured into a packet made by Clear Lam Packaging.

This monster is 2.4 meters (8 ft) tall, 1.2 meters (4 ft) wide and 24 centimeters (9.5 in) thick. It weighs approximately 500 kilograms (1,100 lb) and holds 480 liters (127 gal) of ketchup.

2It Cleans! It Polishes! It Dyes! It’s Ketchup!

Ketchup is a miracle condiment. It’s a wonder it hasn’t been featured on a late-night commercial with an enthusiastic male host assisted by a beautiful woman.

Ketchup is acidic because of its tomatoes and vinegar. To the delight of penny-pinchers, this acidity makes it an inexpensive cleanser and polisher, especially for metals. It cleans the tarnish from copper. For pots and pans, coat the object, let it sit for 10 minutes, and then rinse it off. Cover tarnished pennies with ketchup for an hour, and then wash them. Ketchup is also highly effective on brass. People rub it on brass items such as jewelry and lamps to remove tarnish, using the same method as copper.

The condiment can polish steel, so it is used to shine silverware and steel sinks. It can also ruin silverware if left on too long, so quickly rinse it off. For stubborn tarnish, the ketchup can remain on for 15 minutes before removal. Because of its effectiveness on metals, frugal car owners shine the outside of their vehicles with the condiment.

1Multinational Party

Ketchup is used for almost any food you can think of, including sweets and beverages. To throw a party featuring international dishes, use a bottle of the magical red condiment.

Start with fried chicken dosed with ketchup, a dish favored in countries such as China, Thailand, and Jamaica. Add ketchup to pizza to practice a popular custom from places like Trinidad, India, Japan, Poland, and Norway. Want to add a Swedish flavor to pasta dishes at your shindig? Pour ketchup over spaghetti and macaroni.

Don’t forget dessert and snacks. Imitate our good Canadian neighbors—buy ketchup chips made by companies such as Lay’s and Herr’s, and make Canadian ketchup cake for celebrations. Include chocolate ketchup, like Hershey Resorts in Pennsylvania makes, as a barbecue or dipping sauce. Baskin-Robbins once experimented with ketchup ice cream but did not allow the flavor to leave the lab. Do not be disappointed. Either make it from scratch with a recipe such as Heinz’s carnival cream, or purchase some from mom and pop stores in New York. Finally, have your guests wash everything down with pruno, a prison wine concocted with ketchup, sugar, fruit cocktail, and oranges.

Kim Lewis is a freelancer who has been writing for the web for several years.