You Might Be a Zombie and Other Bad News - Writers of Cracked dot Com [19]
While directing Clooney in the 1999 Gulf War flick Three Kings, David O. Russell filmed actual bullets entering actual human innards to capture hyperrealistic visual effects. The details of how Russell obtained a body to rekill are sketchy, but one thing is clear: Some lucky bastard got the break millions would kill for, just by being dead.
Sure, catching a hot one in the spleen is a steep price to pay for a walk-on part. But, like a true celebrity, you won’t feel a damn thing.
THE FIVE MOST RIDICULOUS LIES YOU WERE TAUGHT IN HISTORY CLASS
REMEMBER back in elementary school when you were at the peak of your potential as a human being? Remember all those fun stories your hungry brain absorbed about the great men who built the world around you? Yeah, that was all bullshit.
5. COLUMBUS DISCOVERED THAT THE EARTH IS ROUND
The story
In 1492, a ponce named Christopher Columbus won his long-standing feud with the Spanish monarchy to get funding for a voyage to East Asia. It had been a tough battle because everybody besides Columbus thought that the earth was a flat disc and that anyone sailing east would fall off the world’s edge, presumably into the mouth of the giant turtle they thought supported it. Columbus did fail to reach his destination, but only because he crashed into the future greatest nation on earth, baby! Thus Columbus proved that the world was round, discovered America, and a national holiday was born.
The truth
In the 1400s, the flat-earth theory was taken about as seriously as it is today. Greek philosopher Pythagoras had figured out the earth was round about two thousand years before Spain even existed.
The Spanish government’s reluctance to pay for Columbus’s journey had nothing to do with its misconceptions about the shape of the world. Columbus himself severely underestimated the size of the earth, and everybody knew it. He eventually scraped together enough funds and supplies to get halfway to his destination, at which point he and his crew would have died horrible deaths had he not crash-landed on a continent he didn’t know existed.
The myth probably began with Washington Irving’s 1838 novel The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus. Elements of the fictional account started creeping into our history textbooks when editors realized that nobody wants to read history books starring some dumb asshole who lucked into inventing a country.
4. EINSTEIN FLUNKED MATH
The story
Motivational speakers love the story of a German kid who, despite his sincerest efforts, could never manage to do well in math.
That dumb ass grew up to be Albert freaking Einstein! And if he can do it, then so can you!
The truth
Actually, no you can’t. As it turns out, Einstein was a mathematical prodigy. Before he turned twelve, he was already better at arithmetic and calculus than you will ever be. Not only did he pass math with flying colors, he probably could have taught the class by the end of semester.
The idea that Einstein did badly at school is thought to have originated with a 1935 Ripley’s Believe It or Not! trivia column, which probably should have been called Believe It or Not! I Get Paid Either Way, Assholes. The famous trivia “expert” never cited his sources, and the various “facts” he presented throughout his career were mostly things he thought he heard, combined with stuff he pulled directly out of his ass.
According to Walter Isaacson’s Einstein: His Life and Universe , when Einstein was first shown Ripley’s supposed exposé of his early life, he allegedly laughed and politely responded that before he was fifteen he “had mastered differential and integral calculus.” When he finally kicked the bucket in 1955, failure was the one concept that Albert Einstein had never managed to master.
3. NEWTON AND THE APPLE
The story
Isaac Newton was pretty much the Jesus of physics. In the late seventeenth century, he discovered the laws of motion, the visible spectrum, the speed of sound, the law of cooling, and calculus. Yes,