String of Pearls

Joan of Arc burned at the stake sixty-one years before Columbus discovered the New World.

William Shakespeare was born six years before Guy Fawkes and they were both born in April.

Confucius was born roughly one-hundred-and-twenty years before Plato.

A carpenter effectively by birth, Jesus Christ, who was almost certainly a real person, was an itinerant Jewish prophet and declaimer in a long and storied tradition, with a bit of a fire and brimstone message and a tendency to shame his audience. 

A basic tenant of Roman law is that crucifixion, a hideous way to go but also very public, was to be reserved exclusively for political radicals, organized seditionists, and slaves. 

The prophet Muhammad loved cats.

After a domestic dispute involving his wife in 1963, Kenyan blues singer and guitar player George Mukabi was beaten to death by a mob and hacked to pieces with machetes.

Instead of actually selling them alcohol, the fur traders working out of the Hudon’s Bay Company provided alcohol to the indigenous populations of the upper Americas in order to incentivize trade.

The day Franz Ferdinand was assassinated, an event that would kick off the First World War, which is about as baffling and absurd as facts get, seven non-professional assassins from the group Young Bosnia—armed with bombs, pistols, and cyanide—were basically wandering the streets of Sarajevo hoping they’d have a chance to kill the man. The lucky assassin, Gavrilo Princip, who was standing in front of a deli at the time, only chanced upon his surprise opportunity because Franz Ferdinand’s driver Leopold Lojka had made a wrong turn with the car.

Sarah Bernhardt, probably the most popular and successful stage actress from the period immediately before cinema, claimed she purchased a custom-built rosewood and satin-lined coffin at age fifteen in order to better understand death and play classical tragedy on the stage. Additionally, Bernhardt traveled with a wild menagerie that included a cheetah, a wolf, a monkey named Darwin, a boa constrictor, and a baby alligator.

Caustic and even often outright lewd broadway legend and icon among gay men the world wide Tallulah Bankhead once said "I have enemies I've never met—that's fame.”

Silent film legend Louise Brooks said that Charlie Chaplin sometimes put iodine on his penis under the mistaken belief that it helped prevent sexually-transmitted diseases, and that when she was a teenager dancing with the Ziegfeld Follies prior to her brief movie career he once chased her around a hotel room laughing with a large purple erection to which he had just applied iodine.