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I'm in: Genghis Khan, who build the world's largest land empire in under twenty years largely by revolutionizing cavalry tactics, died just falling off his horse while nothing important was going on. Two of the USSR's Premiers, Stalin and Krustchev, weren't Russian. Stalin was Georgian and Krustchev was Ukrainian. Both were lampooned for their accents in Russia. Presumably they were lampoon very, very quietly.  Percy Shelley died young when he vanished at sea. The only other person on the boat with him was a friend of his, whose wife he was loving.  Christopher Marlowe, notorious playwright and close friend of William Shakespeare, was killed in an otherwise benign bar fight by catching a wooden stool to the dome. It has since been discovered that he was a spy for the Catholic Church in Elizabeth I's court, and that an enemy agent had discovered this and took the bar brawl as a chance to assassinate him. (The other agent apparently adhered to the Daniel Craig school of spycraft in how he brutally murdered Marlowe with a blunt object that was lying around.)Edit: Also, in before someone mentions Wojtek. Wait... gently caress. 
Railing Kill has a new favorite as of 12:54 on Nov 4, 2015 |
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Nov 4, 2015 12:38
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Trin Tragula posted:Napoleon Bonaparte's Imperial Guard regularly went into battle while singing a jolly little song about onions. This is awesome and I never knew (or bother to look, to be fair) the origin of the term "grognard." Thank you!
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Nov 12, 2015 18:18
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TWIST FIST posted:"Even among revenge tragedies, Titus Andronicus is particularly brutal. It has 14 killings, 9 of them on stage, 6 severed members, 1 rape (or 2 or 3 depending on how you count), 1 live burial, 1 case of insanity, and 1 of cannibalism – an average of 5.2 atrocities per act, or one for every 97 lines." Another thing that helps contextualize the violence in Titus Andronicus is that the entertainment literally across the street from where Shakespeare (and others) would put on plays, a play's biggest competition, was bear baiting. That's where they tie a captured bear to a tether and sic dogs on it until it dies. People would place bets on how many dogs the bear would kill before it finally succumbed, but most people just showed up to watch a blood bath. A baiting was considered a failure if less than six dogs died. Some bears would kill dozens of dogs and the exhibition would last hours. There are some primary sources I remember reading (in college ten years ago, don't ask me to go find them) that said the people running the bear baiting ran out of dogs a couple of times and had to sneak around London to steal people's dogs in order to keep the bout going for an increasingly drunk and restless audience. Otherwise, they'd have an ol' fashioned Imagine the sound of that in the background of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Now Titus Andronicus makes a bit more sense.
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Dec 3, 2015 15:00
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Lord Lambeth posted:While we're talking about Russian rulers, Olga of Kiev was my favorite. Commissar Canuck posted:You can't talk about Olga of Kiev without posting this Hahaha. Holy poo poo. Now, at some point, that stopped being a woman protecting her family and became a woman using her husband's death as a flimsy excuse to become Vlad the Impaler. Phyzzle posted:Top Marriage Proposal FAILS Almost choked on my lunch reading this post. Now my office neighbors think I'm crazy. I mean, they're right, but now they know.
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Dec 8, 2015 20:42
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Lockback posted:Why on Earth would you keep doing the things she asked you to do?!? Da lady just likes pretty birdies.  (Yeah, I have no idea, either. The Drevlians were apparently led by Wile E. Coyote. Maybe her plan to kill all of their smart people first worked...) Comrade Koba posted:
Hey, bebe. drat, girl. How you doi-- OH GOD STOP KILLING ME AND EVERYONE I KNOW Olga of Kiev's bird scheme reminds me of the American "Bat Bomb" in WWII. The idea was to drop canisters full of live bats on Japanese cities. The canister would touch off a flame just as it opened, so if it worked properly, you would have hundreds of bats, on fire, flying up on instinct into eaves for miles around. This was intended for maximum destruction of mostly wooden Japanese cities, spreading fire in a wide area and in a way that was difficult to put out. It was a plan that combined a comically unnecessary amount of cruelty toward both animals and civilians! It was never implemented. (But the developers did gently caress up and burn down a testing facility in New Mexico. Hey, proof of concept!)
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Dec 9, 2015 01:02
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Yeah. The Schlieffen Plan also required a comical amount of logistics. You're talking about an army with little or any mechanized infantry (which, by the way, are not nearly as cool as they sound; they're just more mobile) going from Paris to Moscow in under two weeks. The Schlieffen Plan hinged on the entire German army's ability to traverse all of Europe in less time than it would take for the Russian army to simply pick itself up and mobilize. Sure, mobilization takes a bit of time, probably more than a week or two, but that's not the hilarious error in Schlieffen's plan. The error is on the other side of the equation. Even if they met no resistance whatsoever in France (which obviously wouldn't be the case), it would have almost certainly been impossible to cross Europe in the time allotted by the plan. Is was a failure even before it got bogged down in France.
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Dec 16, 2015 14:09
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