The WrestlingSmarks History Club

[Hosferatu]

 

[Chris]

My only knowledge of this is the film In the Name of the Father

 

[Chris]

More 1800s wrestling gems

"02-10-1871: During the month of January 1871 numerous newspapers across the United States ran a story about a butcher scheduled to wrestle s bear in San Francisco with little terms of the details. The walnut valley times newspaper out of El Dorado, KS on February 10, 1971 ran a story saying the butcher had defeated the bear but the match was a work (fixed) and the butcher made a lot of money cleaning up on bets."

 

[Barry Poppins]

Not necessarily history related but I stumbled on this and I just can't help but laugh at the fact it's a real article on Wikipedia.

Wikipedia:Unusual articles/History - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Pre-modern​

Bal des Ardents	A masquerade ball in which the king and some noble dancers dress in wild man costumes and accidentally get set on fire by the king's drunk brother.
Burned house horizon	The horizon which consumed cultures in the Balkans and around the Black Sea.
Cadaver Synod	A deceased Pope was exhumed and put on trial!
Cagots	A group that were a persecuted minority in France and Spain into the 20th century, and nobody really knows why.
Complaint tablet to Ea-nāṣir	The progenitor of the one-star Yelp review is a gripe about poor-quality copper.
Criterion of embarrassment	You know it's true because it's too embarrassing for anyone to have made it up.
Daughter of Emperor Xiaoming of Northern Wei	A disputed first female monarch of Chinese history before Wu Zetian, whom the Empress Dowager Hu declared was a boy and was emperor for a day before being replaced by another infant.
Elagabalus	The number one Syrian teenage sun cultist polygamist possibly-transgender Roman emperor!
Erfurt latrine disaster	It's incredible how quickly someone's life can go to shit. Literally.
Hegelochus	History will remember him for mispronouncing one word in an Ancient Greek play.
Henry Symeonis	The University of Oxford held a grudge against him so long they forgot why.
House of Colleoni	A former Italian noble family whose arms included three pairs of testicles.
John the Posthumous	King of France from the minute he was born to the minute he died (total: 5 days).
Kottabos	The world's first drinking game. Care to play? All you need is a bronze "lamp stand" with a tiny statuette on top and some wine.
Máel Brigte of Moray	A Pictish nobleman who somehow managed to bite a man to death despite being long-dead himself.
Nika riots	Kind of like football hooliganism, except for chariot racing, and also if it resulted in tens of thousands dead, half of Constantinople being burnt to the ground and the Emperor nearly being lynched.
Onfim	A 7 year-old medieval Russian boy whose homework tablets, complete with doodles of himself as a "wild beast", were preserved for 700 years before being excavated and becoming a primary source for life in the Novgorod Republic.
Phantom time conspiracy theory	A theory by Heribert Illig that the Early Middle Ages (614–911) never occurred. Therefore, it is now 1728 rather than 2025.
Pope Benedict IX	He became pope at twenty, and later sold the papacy. He was pope three times.
Pope Celestine V	The pope who never wanted to be the pope and did everything in his power to stop it.
Pope Donus II	Turns out that maintaining a two millennium old list of popes leads to some confusion and the creation of a new, official, pope.
Pre-Columbian transoceanic contact theories	Native Americans are among the Ten Lost Tribes? The Zuni are related to Japanese peasants? This and more wild theories are found here.
Publius Afranius Potitus	If you're going to say you'd trade your life for your sick emperor's, make sure he doesn't get better.
Roland The Farter	If only we were all a jump, whistle & fart away from prosperity!
Sacred Band of Thebes	An elite fighting force consisting of a hand-picked groups of 150 pairs of male lovers.
Sanitation of the Indus Valley Civilisation	The home of the first flush toilet, as it turns out, is Punjab.
Sino-Roman relations	These empires inched progressively closer to each other in the course of the Roman expansion into the ancient Near East and of the simultaneous Han Chinese military incursions into Central Asia. Mutual awareness remained low, and firm knowledge about each other was limited.
Wise Men of Gotham	So-named after they acted like idiots so the king would go away.

 

[Barry Poppins]

Fun fact: Richard Nixon during the 1968 Presidential Elections conspired with his vice presidential pick Spiro Agnew, future Attornet General John Mitchell, and an ambassador by the name of Henry Kissinger conspired with the South Vietnamese junta to force South Vietnam to back out of the 1968 Paris Peace Talks in order to damage and destroy the image of the Democrats for thay election.

Kissinger for his part, became National Security Advisor, and went on to expand the Vietnam War for a further four years, creating chaos in Cambodia which led to the Khmer Rouge, bombed indiscriminately Laotian land, and then gave the Vietcong all of Vietnam after shamefully pulling out.

The only reason we know this? Lyndon Johnson bugged and wiretapped Nixon's communique (also illegally), and never released this evidence knowing it would also cause a constitutional crisis on his part.

 

[Barry Poppins]

 

[Chris]

That's an amazing story

 

[Chris]

Somerton Man - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

This is a crazy story I listened to a podcast about today.

Basically this guy who was seen alive but acting sketchy on a beach the day before, was found in that same spot dead. No ID at all. Seems to have been poisoned but they never find out with what. They eventually find a suitcase that they believe with relative certainly was his, it has "T. Keane" written on things. No one missing by that name, cold.

Then they find a tiny scrap of a foreign language poem in the dead guys pocket. So bc it's an obscure book, they basically put out an APB on this book and some dude comes in and says the book was thrown into his open window randomly and when he saw the thing he checked and he was missing that scrap from the dead guy.

In the book they find weird code that that can't crack written and also phone numbers. One is a woman who lives very close by. She claims she gave the book to an army man years ago and gives his name, he's still alive. Not the dead guy. Cold again.

During this time all of these theories pop up, and some hearsay makes it super juicy. The most prominent are Russian spies, apparently the woman's daughter later said her mom (the one in the book) was a communist and spoke Russian but everything else says she's Australian so that might just be fake.

But we're still not done, it gets real juicy when some historian decades later becomes obsessed. He finds out the son of the woman had some striking similarities to the dead man so he thinks maybe it was some kind of affair situation. He wants to examine DNA but both are dead obviously and the Australian government isn't really for it. So he seems out the granddaughter, daughter of this alleged son of the dead man.....and then almost instantly marries her???? She's even joked he did this for her DNA.

But drum roll now, after years, they got results back in 2022 and there is no match between the dead guy and her or her dad. However they actually get a name. It's just some Australian guy who had a rough go of it. T. Keane was his brother in law so he stole or borrowed his clothes. He was also an avid horse race gambler, the code in the book is theorized to now just be horse names. Suicide seems most likely

However, there's still so many unanswered questions mostly to do with the book in general. The only boring likely explanation I can think of is that he simply got that book used from that guy the girl originally gave it to. Also the Australian government has currently not accepted the DNA findings yet, but I believe they're still reviewing or something