Watch this video on YouTube This time there is only spoken audio and a small amount of foley where appropriate. There is no musical background track. I am quite interested in the opinions of those who felt the narration may not have been sufficiently animated in the last recording, as the subject matter of this list required me to be slightly less sombre. I’m open to feedback and suggestions of course!...

10Accidental Euthanasia Millions of discarded pets flood animal shelters every year, and mistakes come with dealing with such vast numbers. The most tragic is accidental euthanasia, which happens often, occurring all across America. One particularly heartbreaking case from November 2010 involved a dog named Target. Target had saved the lives of US soldiers serving in Afghanistan by alerting them to the presence of a suicide bomber. When his tour of duty was over, Army Sgt....

From deeply disturbing acts by its founder, Joseph Smith, to atrocities committed in the name of God in Utah, Mormonism has some very dark secrets that even most members of the Church don’t know about. Fortunately, they are well documented—many even by official Mormon publications. 10Mormons Threatened To Exterminate All Missourians Sidney Rigdon was, for a time, the second most powerful person in Mormonism. Then, his relationship with Joseph Smith (depicted above in a statue at the Temple Square’s North Visitor’s Center) suffered due to a number of factors that strained the friendship including when Smith tried to marry Rigdon’s daughter (while Smith was already married) and his refusal to support polygamy....

But nothing is perfect, and many are unaware that a form of science that was supposed to make the world a better place has been a nightmare for some. Over the years, many people’s lives have been claimed by unfortunate accidents involving nuclear power. 10 Texas City Disaster On April 16, 1947, the worst harbor explosion in US history occurred. A French cargo vessel named the Grandcamp was carrying a load of ammonium nitrate, which is commonly used in fertilizer and in explosives for atomic weapons....

10 Albert Jackson In the 1960s, dry cleaning business owner Albert Jackson, who lived in Johannesburg, South Africa, was known for being a good family man to his wife, Lorna, and his two children. Unfortunately, Albert was deeply in debt, and there was only one solution to the problem—his life insurance policy. But in order to claim it, Albert needed to die, and it definitely couldn’t be a suicide. The next steps in the plan are a bit hazy, and it is unclear if Albert, Lorna, or both did the asking, but they approached an employee named Bennie Esterhuizen and asked him if he would kill Albert for money....

However, it would be impossible to deny that these are still dangerous times in which to be gay or trans, as recent events have shown us that anti-LGBT hate is still very alive. Since people tend to hate what they fear and fear what they do not understand, we thought it might be helpful to put forth some interesting and perhaps underrecognized facts about the LGBT community. 10 They Are Fewer Than You Probably Think Recent Gallup Poll data shows that—with a couple of exceptions—the gay community is spread quite evenly across the United States, with only about 3....

They live on every continent except Antarctica, survive in a wide variety of extreme environments, and eat unthinkable diets. Plus they’ve been doing it for longer than we’ve been around as a species. 10 They Dig Rain Basins Many species of tortoise thrive in some of the hottest deserts in the world. They escape from extreme temperatures, over 60 degrees Celsius (140 °F), by burrowing deep underground. With heat keeping them from exploring their already water-scarce environment, they have to be skilled at conservation to avoid shriveling up and dying....

Of course, World History and History of Western Civilization courses and textbooks always cover the history of the Romans. After all, so much of modern society and politics mirrors their achievements. However, some facts never seem to come up in class, many of which are quite strange. Some even border on the fantastical. 10 The Romans Closely Guarded Books That Foretold Events To Come Locked away from prying eyes were books written in spidery Greek that spoke of the future of Rome and her citizens, including its inevitable end....

Here is a list providing an overview of the facts and events that occurred during the Western sanitation movement of the 19th and 20th centuries. You can thank this movement for the fact that you don’t have to trudge through feces for your morning cup of coffee or risk contracting cholera every time you get a drink of water. 10 The Industrial Revolution And Increasing Population The 19th-century sanitation movement came at a key point in early American and European history....

Ingrid Betancourt Pulecio is a Colombian-French politician, former senator, anti-corruption activist and Nobel Peace Prize nominee. Betancourt was kidnapped by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) on 23 February 2002 and was rescued by Colombian security forces six and a half years later on 2 July 2008. The rescue operation, dubbed Operation Jaque, rescued Betancourt along with 14 other hostages (three Americans and 11 Colombian policemen and soldiers). In all, she was held captive for 2,321 days after being taken while campaigning for the Colombian presidency as a Green....

10 Charlie Chaplin This sounds like one of those oft-repeated “facts” that everyone has heard but seems to have come from nowhere, like the (stupid) myth that dogs can’t look up. But no, Charlie Chaplin really did once lose a Charlie Chaplin lookalike contest. While walking around San Francisco, Chaplin happened upon the contest and, feeling he had a distinct edge over the competition, signed up. Though his final placing in the contest isn’t known, Chaplin didn’t make it past the preliminary stages and didn’t appear in the finals....

10The Nation’s Name Is The Theme Of The Books The world of The Hunger Games is filled with many interesting names though some are a bit on the nose, from the white-clad President “Snow” to a baker whose name is a homonym for “pita.” However, one clever name goes so far as to describe the entire theme of the series, and that’s the name of Suzanne Collins’s fictional nation: Panem. The name “Panem” reflects the Latin phrase made famous by Juvenal: panem et circenses....

Wiley Post who was the first pilot to fly solo around the world and his good friend Will Rogers a famous comedian, humorist and social commentator were set out to fly around the world together. This photo (that’s Will Rogers in the hat and tie, standing on the wing) was taken on August 15, 1935 shortly before taking off from a lagoon near Point Barrow Alaska. During take off Post’s experimental Lockheed Explorer sea plane crashed when its engine failed killing both men....

When Fredrick Henry Royce purchased his first two-cylinder car (a French Decauville) he was very dissatisfied with its performance. He decided to build a car of his own by “taking an existing part and making it better and eventually started successfully building his own two-cylinder, 10-horsepower cars that were known for their silent and vibration-free ride. The automobiles soon caught the attention Charles Stewart Rolls who at the time operated a London dealership for French Panhard automobiles....

This was the first successful reattachment of a human limb. In 1962, 12 year old Everett Knowles was trying to hop a freight train in Somerville, Massachusetts and was thrown against a stone wall ripping his right arm off cleanly at the shoulder. Knowles walked away from the tracks using his left hand to hold his right arm inside a bloody sleeve and was then rushed to the emergency-room. Chief surgical, Dr....

10Mildred Gillars Though not nearly as famous as Iva Toguri and the other women who were known as Tokyo Rose during World War II, Mildred Gillars played her part as a propagandist for the Germans and was known to the Allied forces as Axis Sally. An American from Ohio, she moved to Germany, where she struggled to make a living in the years before World War II. Once war broke out, she became romantically involved with the station manager at the radio station where she worked, a man who prompted her to become an on-air talent spewing hateful propaganda to the Allied forces....

10 Cockroach Eating Contests The Six Flags Great America theme park in Chicago came up with a very gag-worthy promotion for Halloween back in 2008. They offered park passes to the winner of a contest to eat the most live cockroaches in the space of five minutes. A doctor advised people against taking part because of the microorganisms that live inside the insects. Nevertheless, the park resurrected the contest in 2011, citing “popular demand....

There are an astronomical number of words in modern English; the Oxford English Dictionary puts the tally at roughly 170,000. This gifts English speakers with a tantalizing array of choices to describe the world around them. Whatever they do, see, or feel, it would seem they have a word for almost everything. Below, however, we’ve put together a list of ten words from other languages without a direct English translation....

10 Annette Kellerman As a child, Annette Kellerman took up swimming as a means to cope with a degenerative muscle disorder. By the time the disease subsided, Kellerman had become so adept at the sport that she went on to become a famous swimmer and diver in her native Australia. As an actress, she earned renown for her films of aquatic adventure. Today Kellerman is remembered as the first movie star to appear nude on camera....

10First Aircraft Hijacking It is nearly always claimed that the first plane hijacking of an aircraft occurred in 1931, when armed revolutionaries in Peru surrounded a plane that had just landed in Arequipa. To call this a hijacking is a bit of a stretch, however. The pilot, Byron Richards, refused the hijackers’ orders to take off with them onboard. After a two-week standoff, he was told that the revolution had been successful and that he was free to leave....