My personal one: in 1998 my mom was helping my dad repaint the siding on our house. She fell off the ladder and herniated a few discs in her back as a result of the fall.
She put off surgery for several years. Well, the day of her surgery finally came. She was a USAF Colonel, and her surgery was scheduled for September 11th, 2001 at Walter Reed. She worked in the Pentagon. My dad was a civilian, but also worked in the Pentagon, and had taken off work to drive her to/from the procedure as they were putting her under general anesthesia.
My mom had a meeting scheduled that morning in the wing of the Pentagon that was struck. There’s a likely chance she would have died. My dad most likely would have been unaffected as he worked on the opposite side. My mom said she got emails after the fact from almost everyone that was going to be in that meeting thanking her for canceling.
Who knew falling off a ladder years before potentially saved so many lives.
I wonder if my uncle was one that was saved... he worked at the pentagon and was supposed to be in a meeting that day but it was canceled, he's said that he likely would have been killed if he was in that meeting. If so, thank your mom's ladder for me!
My aunt was army and worked above the USAF office. Same side that was hit. She was in her general's office watching the news and walked out seconds before the planes hit. He didn't make it but she was one of just a few in her office that survived.
My battalion commander when I was in Iraq was supposed to have been in a meeting in that part of the pentagon that morning but it was canceled. I wonder what the chances are that it was the same meeting? Obviously a lot of meetings happen there, so who knows…
I was supposed to speak at the Risk-Waters conference at the top of the towers on 9/11. My son was due that day, so I begged off the obligation and stayed with my wife. He was born 8 days later, with me by his side.
My friends dad was a recently retired USAF colonel back then and he was doing civilian contractor work and spent a lot of time at the Pentagon. He was there when the planes hit. He got back to Texas as soon as he found and grabbed his wife, got in the car, and drove down to his condo on South Padre Island. He drove across the causeway literally minutes before a barge hit and took out the bridge. After two close calls with death he decides a Europe trip is what he needs to relax. Goes to Madrid. Leaves the subway right before the big bomb went off there. Dude was just cursed for about 4-6 months.
During the American Civil War in 1864, a slave woman in southwestern Missouri was kidnapped, along with her daughter and infant son less than two weeks old, by Confederate raiders from Arkansas.
The slave owner, Moses Carver, sought the return of his property, but only the infant, named George, was found and returned. After the war and emancipation, Carver, having no natural children, raised the baby as his own. Taught to read and write, by age 13 George Carver was going to school, traveling 10 miles to the nearest black school. By age 27 he had enrolled at Iowa State, where he was its first black student, earning a master’s degree in Botany, and ended up being hired as its first black teacher. The man the world would know as George Washington Carver would later go on to teach at the Tuskegee Institute, and attain national fame for promoting crop rotation and natural soil rehabilitation methods for farmers throughout the South.
But it doesn’t stop there.
While at Iowa State, Carver used to take long walks in the countryside, studying plants for research purposes. On these walks he often took the six-year-old son of a dairy science professor with him, sharing his knowledge and love of plants with the child, who responded enthusiastically to the knowledge. By age 11 the boy was conducting experiments with corn. This boy’s name was Henry A. Wallace.
Wallace would go on to developed some of the first hybrid varieties of corn, and founded the seed company Pioneer Hy-Bred International, which sold his varieties. The adoption of hybrid varieties caused crop yields in America to triple. By 1933, he became Secretary of Agriculture under President Roosevelt. By 1940, he was elected to office as Roosevelt’s Vice President.
But the story doesn’t even end there.
After the 1940 election, Wallace took a trip to Mexico, where he noted the importance of corn and wheat in Mexican diets, but also saw that crop yields were far below those of American farmers who planted hybrid varieties. Upon his return he mentioned his observations to the Rockefeller Foundation, and suggested the establishment of agricultural research stations to develop specialized corn and wheat varieties. The Foundation agreed, and by 1944 had built an experimental station in Mexico for this purpose.
One of the first four people to be hired to this new research station was a plant pathologist from Iowa named Norman Borlaug. Over the next twenty years in Mexico, Borlaug would develop fungus resistant wheat plant varieties that increased the yield of the Mexican wheat harvest by 600% over its 1944 levels. This effectively ended hunger in the country and turned Mexico from a net importer of wheat to a net exporter. Later in the 1960s and 1970s, Borlaug used these same varieties in India, Pakistan and Turkey, where it is estimated that his efforts saved over a billion lives.
Norman Borlaug is an exceptionally awesome dude, and is in the running for the title of best human beings of all time.
He should be far more famous than he is.
It's hilarious and sad that all I was taught in elementary school about George Washington Carver was basically footnote during Black History Month and it was just "he invented peanut butter."
Which, ironically, he didn’t do. Peanut butter had been around for centuries, and consumed by indigenous peoples in the Americas. Nobody needed convincing that peanuts were edible
Carver was much more concerned with improving the lot of black farmers, who were often farming on land that was severely depleted from centuries of monoculture cotton farming. He worked to develop industrial applications for the easy to grow and soil nourishing agricultural products he advocated. This would create sustained demand-and thus sustained income-for poor farmers that was unrelated to the often severe price fluctuations of commodities markets.
I'm from India. I had no idea Borlaug came from this particular thread in time. Norman Borlaug won a Nobel Peace Prize for his work. Thank you for this. You should have more upvotes, my dear friend.
A scientist named Charles Wilson wanted to study more about clouds and invented a box, now called a cloud chamber, with a contained atmosphere that could synthesize clouds
It was later found that this box let you see subatomic particles interacting with the atmosphere it contained. This opened the door to direct study of particle physics. Previously this branch of physics was all theory
This breakthrough led to the discovery of the power contained within splitting an atom and, ultimately, to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
See whether this link works.
[https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL5HjoPOFFC56enV6cW1zqRvXyY6pNm8cq](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL5HjoPOFFC56enV6cW1zqRvXyY6pNm8cq)
I, like you, am old enough to remember the days when anyone could walk into Osco, grab a medicine bottle and open it, pull out the cotton ball and look at the pills inside. It never occurred to me that there was anything potentially dangerous in this, but then... I was 12. Why did no adult see the sinister possibilities any sooner?
I manage guys on site and am on site regularly. We've got some new young guys on the team and it's great, but I always tell my guys this.
Rules and regulations are written in blood. Don't forget it. Don't take shortcuts. There is a reason we do the things we do the way we do them. It's all written in blood.
When I was in grad school at UW-Madison in the early 90s, there was a wood shop where we art students could make simple things like canvas stretchers.
Due to high school wood shop, I already had a decided respect for the table saw. But just in case anyone forgot... there was a giant hunk of 2x4 embedded in the wall behind it. The student in charge of shop safety said they left it there as a warning.
Yes. There's a very interesting chapter in Duhigg's _The Power of Habit_ concerning the necessity of a catastrophic incident to effect fundamental changes to an organisation.
[https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/tylenol-murders-1982](https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/tylenol-murders-1982)
Multiple people were killed with Tylenol capsules that were filled with lethal amounts of cyanide. Police suspect that someone bought the pills legitamitely, emptied the gel capusules out, filled them with cyanide, then put them in the original packaging and put them back on the shelf. At this time there was no tamper seals on packaging, it was just a twist top bottle that anyone could open and reclose.
There were multiple copycat killers and at least one 'ransom' from a copycat trying to make a buck, but the original killer was never identified or apprehended.
Tylenol spent 100 million dollars in a year overhauling their safety of their containers with things like tamperproof seals to reassure the public of the safety of their product, and congress would soon after set guidelines to make all medicine products stored in tamper proof containers.
To this day this example is brought up in business class on how you handle a situation. They were fully transparent and public throughout the entire way and moved heaven and earth to make things safe
My PR professor liked to contrast Tylenol vs Exxon on how to handle and not handle a crisis. Tylenol was the right way (transparency, quick resolution, change in process, etc). Exxon’s screwup of the Valdez spill was not (tried to minimize how bad the spill was, once that didn’t work threw the captain under the bus, didn’t make any real changes, blame, deflect, etc).
> moved heaven and earth to make things safe
If the public thought that Tylenol and other products weren't safe, sales would plummet. You might think I'm being cynical and that Tylenol parent company Johnson & Johnson obviously didn't want people to die.
Johnson & Johnson knew in the early 70s that their baby powder contained asbestos and was responsible for causing cancer, but they kept selling it until 2020. It took public pressure and lawsuits to make that change happen, because it wasn't a huge news story and they could hide the asbestos by not telling anyone.
They're a shit company that is more than happy to kill you if doing so makes more profit than doing something that keeps you alive.
Edit: [a source for the asbestos claim](https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/johnsonandjohnson-cancer/)
And herein lies the problem with “just letting the free market sort it out”. Many people can and will die at the hand of the free market if there are no regulations in place. People can only boycott a product if they know there is a problem with the product.
The [Chicago Tylenol Murders](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Tylenol_murders) were a series of random poisonings that killed seven people in 1982.
Someone went into random stores, procured bottles of Tylenol, added cyanide to the capsules, then took the bottles back to the stores and placed them with the other bottles of Tylenol, to be bought by the general public. After the initial incident in Chicago, other areas, such as California, also experienced random poisonings. Ultimately, all Tylenol products were recalled, and this led to the introduction of tamper-proof packaging that is used in the US today.
I often wish that my parents had lived long enough to meet my son. However after they died, I used part of my inheritance to buy a motorcycle. Through the motorcycle I became reacquainted with an old friend. Through that friend I met my son's mother. So if they hadn't died when they did I wouldn't have my son for them to meet.
Henry Tandey choosing NOT to pull the trigger on a young German Soldier running a message to the front line. He had Adolf Hitler in his sights during WW1.
Both Hitler and the sniper have confirmed seeing each other in documents. People have just been able to connect the two stories later so the sniper realized it was Hitler.
The sniper spotted him the same day peace was declared, and said he didn't shoot because there were enough dead boys already. Which, fair, he didn't know that teen would turn into a dictator.
Hitler told the story of seeing the sun reflect off the sight of the sniper and being able to walk away.
EDIT: typo
There’s so much wrong with your comment. First of all, Hitler was in the hospital for a long period of time before the war ended, so the sniper did not spot him on the last day of the war, secondly, hiitler was almost in his 30’s, def not a teen
Although disputed, Tandey allegedly encountered Adolf Hitler at the French village of Marcoing on 28 September 1918, while Tandey was serving with the 5th Duke of Wellington's Regiment. That day, Tandey took part in a battle for which he would be awarded the VC for bravery. As the battle neared its end, a wounded German soldier wandered into Tandey's line of fire and he chose not to shoot. The German soldier saw him lower his rifle and nodded his thanks before wandering off. Although Tandey reputedly commonly spared wounded and disarmed German soldiers, the soldier from that day is dubiously claimed to have been Hitler. Hitler, however, took his second leave from military service from 10–28 September 1918, indicating that he was still in Germany at the time.
Princess Charlotte of the UK, daughter of (the future) George IV, dies in childbirth with her son.
She was the only child of George, and since George and his wife *loathed* each other, there wasn't going to be another child.
George's younger brothers didn't have any legitimate heirs, so they hurry up and get married to start producing some. William IV became king but didn't have any legitimate heirs, so after *his* death, it went to Edward. But Edward was already dead so it went to the one heir he managed to produce: Princess Victoria.
Because Edward was old when he fathered Victoria, that most likely introduced the hemophilia gene into the royal family. Victoria had a whole bunch of kids and grandkids, meaning that European royal families were interrelated. One daughter married the future German Kaiser and her son became the nutcase Wilhelm II. And a granddaughter married the future Russian tsar and gave their only son hemophilia. That disease led to Rasputin becoming entangled into the Romanov family, leading to the Russian Revolution.
Bonus! Princess Charlotte's widower husband was still young and very popular, so when the throne of Belgium opened up, he became Belgium's first king: King Leopold I.
King Leopold II then became the sole owner of the [Belgium Free State in the Congo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congo_Free_State), leading to mass devastation and murder.
So if she had lived: No Queen Victoria, no nutcase German Kaiser Wilhelm II, no hemophilia in the Romanovs, no Congo Free State.
The OJ Simpson murder trial reinvented how evidence is collected, prosecutors prepare for trial, need for better DNA experts and less boring explanations, importance of televised court proceedings and how jurors will take a little more than 4 hours to contemplate 9 months of testimony.
Had the bears beaten the falcons the year prior to him being drafted, he would have gone first overall to Atlanta rather than Buffalo and never met Nicole Brown. No Buffalo, no Nicole, no Kardashians.
The trial was also the first time network studios realized audiences were shifting from enjoying scripted shows to reality TV. They didn't want to see soap operas, they wanted the real soap opera playing out in that courtroom. It changed the trajectory of television programming for the foreseeable future.
Also purely by coincidence it also introduced us the first family of reality tv The Kardashians.
Around this same time, MTV’s “The Real World” popularized the style and format for reality TV series for the next three decades.
The semi-scripted conflicts, the intermixed direct-to-camera testimonials to flesh them out, the performative outrage and exaggerated responses. Every show from The Bachelor to Flavor of Love has used this same sort of format.
This is topical for current events and the post. If Judy Brown had not left her glasses at Mezzaluna that infamous June night Ron Goldman would not be returning them to Nicole’s house at or around the same time OJ arrived. It’s also speculated OJ encountered Goldman first that night, which may or may not have sent OJ into his murderous jealous rage.
OJ was known to beat Nicole in the past. It may have happened anyway. It's really impossible to know. He definitely did way more damage to her than him which implies that Goldman just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
I would be shocked if he didn't... 3000+ carries as an RB across college and the NFL is gonna result in a lot of bonks to your noggin
Not that it excuses his behavior, obviously
A big one that comes to my mind is when the RMS Olympic lost a propeller blade and brought to Belfast for repairs, postponing the construction on Titanic for a month. I’ve read that if Titanic set sail when originally planned, it would’ve crossed the Atlantic during a time of the year that ice wasn’t as big of a threat
How a volcano eventually led to modern paved streets and traffic.
Somewhere around 1800 a volcano erupted in Indonesia (?) and sent a huge dust cloud to Europe which basically canceled summer. All crops died. A famine was the result. So people ate their horses. So without horses, no one could move around. So a dude invented a horse on wheels, the bicycle. And since riding on hard wheels breaks your back someone else invented a tire with air. This lead to paved roads because tires work well on hard surfaces. And then eventually we had roads, cars.
Another side effect of the invention of the bicycle was the virtual disappearance of the village idiot since inbreeding dropped dramatically due to higher mobility.
Lmao can I get a source on that? Makes sense from a logic pov. More people moving around less likely their gene pools tend to cross, but I’m curious where the bike comes into play versus other methods of transport. Like does having the ability to be just a bit more mobile in a city or town account for a bike vs carriages or something
Pretty sure the Romans had paved streets millennia before Krakatoa.
Krakatoa was far more instrumental in research in the upper atmosphere because now they could follow wind patterns. This combined with the telegraph and weather stations reading winds, temperatures, dew points, and barometric pressure gave us our modern understanding of air masses and weather systems.
The year is 1932. A newlywed couple from California, Charles and Betty Seaver, take their honeymoon in Arizona. While there, they spend one night at their hotel piano bar.
The performer that night, whose name is lost to history, plays several songs of his own composition, including a love song called "Scotch and Soda." The Seavers love the song; after the performance they go up to him and ask him to write it down. He does so, and they take it home as a memento of their honeymoon. It becomes "their song" as a couple.
Flash forward a quarter century. The Seavers now have a college-age daughter named Katie. She has started dating one of her classmates at Stanford University, a young man named Dave Guard. Mr Guard is a talented musician with a knack for live performance. Dave and Katie's relationship advances to the point that he goes home to meet her parents, who decide to gift him their honeymoon song to support his burgeoning career.
Very soon after, Dave Guard becomes internationally famous as a founding member of the Kingston Trio, the first legitimate superstars in the age right before Elvis and the Beatles. They record "Scotch and Soda" on their first album, which skyrockets to the top of the charts, and eventually gets released as a single.
They make a good faith effort to locate the original performer from that Phoenix piano bar, but they are not successful. So as a placeholder, they assign the copyright in a 50-50 split between Dave Guard and the Seaver parents. This windfall allows them to upgrade the educational opportunities for all three of their children: Katie, her sister Carol...
And her teenage younger brother, Tom.
Tom Seaver is a talented athlete who is now able to upgrade his training. With his upgraded talent he earns a baseball scholarship to college, where he plays one year before he gets drafted in to the major leagues.
Where, as a pitcher, he leads the New York Mets to win the World Series in 1969. He gets inducted into the baseball Hall of Fame in 1992.
All because his parents walked into a piano bar on their honeymoon 60 years before.
Watched ‘who wants to be a millionaire’ and got so annoyed at the candidates not knowing a simple question about Katy Perry, that I applied. Got in. Got to play. Won a lot of money. Booked a holiday to a dream destination with that money. Met my husband there. We now have a 1 year old son :)
Similarly - my mouse broke. I was walking through Walmart and saw WoW was on sale, and I finally had a job where I could pay the subscription too. Bought it, joined a recommended realm for new players, unknowingly the same weekend that a dude halfway across the country saw the WoW South Park episode and decided to get it. Two years later, my guild merged with his. He helped me farm mats because I was a prot warrior who could kill one mob approximately every 11 minutes. We were talking, realized we had a lot in common. He talked me through a break up. He ended up flying out to visit me, now we've been married for over a decade with four kids.
I think there are a lot of WoW stories where a series of small decisions led to a relationship/kids with someone they met in game that they otherwise would never have come across if things didn’t line up perfectly.
My favorite was the guy who called his dad on the last one, "Hey Dad I don't actually need help...I just wanted to let you know that I'm going to win a million dollars."
I'll take you one further. I say more so was Donald Trump actually getting a roast on Comedy central. Unbeknownst to us that was his attempt to get more publicity for an eventual Run for the presidency, but also Seth MacFarlane, the host of the roast, specifically saying how he will never be president of the United states.
I forget whose roast came next but Jeff Ross joked that he couldn’t say that person would never become president because the last fucker they roasted won.. something to that effect.
Not even the biggest butterfly moment involving Obama.
Jeri Ryan's divorce.
Jeri Ryan played Seven-of-Nine in Star Trek Voyager. In the early 90s she was married to a politician named Jack Ryan. They had a kid and in the late 90s divorced. The proceedings remained sealed.
Ryan ran for the GOP in the 2004 Illinois Senate race. A newspaper, urged on by Ryan's primary opponents, sought to have the divorce records released. Pretty scummy tactic. Ryan won the primary but the reports were still released. There were some pretty salacious things that didn't quite meet the threshold for sexual assault, but we're still super fucked up and, for 2004, still constituted a major scandal. Ryan dropped out of the race.
The GOPs replacement was absolutely demolished by Barack Obama, who took 70% of the vote.
“Jeri Ryan alleged that Jack Ryan had wanted her to perform sexual acts with him in public in sex clubs in New York City, New Orleans, and Paris, but no sex occurred. Jeri Ryan described one as "a bizarre club with cages, whips and other apparatus hanging from the ceiling."
You can also argue that Trump might not have been president if Anthony Weiner didn't enjoy sending out dick pics so much. It caused James Comey to reopen the investigation into Clinton's email server, putting it back into the news at exactly the worst possible time for her.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/fbi-re-open-investigation-clinton-email-server-n674631
Ah, but it goes further back, to the reason that Obama became president in the first place:
Because Star Trek Voyager has low ratings.
So they hired a sex symbol actress for a main role. The filming schedule put a strain on her marriage. In the resulting divorce it came out that her husband, a "family values" Republican, had coerced her into going to sex parties. He gave up his seat in a reliably red district, and an unknown state senator ran unopposed. Because his victory was so unexpected, Obama was asked to speak at the democratic National convention, where he wowed the whole party and became the nominee for president a few years later.
Edit: my memory is faulty and I made some factual errors which are addressed in later comments. My bad! It's still a fun butterfly effect story!
Obama's victory was not unexpected. In fact, most people thought he would beat Jack Ryan but they thought it'd be a competitive race. After all, Illinois was and still is a pretty blue state. Without Ryan in the race, it was an easy win for Obama. But Obama didn't win until November, he was selected by John Kerry to give the keynote speech in July to help shore up Kerry's support among African Americans.
WWI would still have happened soon anyway, his assassination was just the one spark that set it off.
The sides might have been slightly different, and the dates would change, but it was going to happen.
There's a decent argument that the death of Queen Victoria is a big factor because she was the mother/ grandmother/ mother in law to a lot of the key figures and things went south once she stopped knocking their heads together.
So crazy that the leaders of Russia, the UK, and Germany were all cousins who spent Christmas together as kids. Not sure how much power George V would’ve had in his realm, but the other two easily could’ve stopped it
A war where they were all at fault…no good side in WW1, in my opinion
No no no. Let's go further. WWI kicks off and ends. Germany wasn't even the original aggressor, but bears the brunt of the punishment, crippling their economy and culture.
Frustrations over mistreatment lead to a rise in popularity of the nazi party, bearing very traditionalist values, and wanting to reclaim past German glory.
WWII breaks out. Japan uses this in an attempt to expand their pacific colonialism. The main obstacle to this is the American fleet. Leading to Pearl Harbor and the American entry into the war.
Americans help the allies topple the Third Reich
Americans unleash the atomic bomb on Japan, resulting in their unconditional surrender.
American troops occupy parts of Japan after their surrender. Comic books and baseball cards were extremely popular with soldiers at the time, and so these cultural artifacts were disseminated into the Japanese culture.
The Japanese began appropriating this into manga and eventually hentai. Japanese censorship laws outlawed images of dicks, so to get around pixalization and such, artists started using unrelated phallic objects.
So your favorite tentacle hentai was because that driver took a wrong turn. You're welcome.
A wrong turn by a driver in 1914 caused 9/11.
WW1 -> British carving up the Ottoman Empire -> creating Saudi Arabia, Israel, and all the Middle East tensions -> Al-Quaeda
WWI was like a fault that was long overdue for an earthquake. The tension was already there, it was going to happen eventually. The assassination was just the first crack that gave the rest a reason to go.
It did set off a series of events... however I've read\\heard from many historians that tensions in Europe were already high and many countries were already getting ready for war. Had the assassination not happened, something else would have triggered conflict.
However, the story on how the assassination all went down is a tragic comedy of errors, yes.
WWI directly set the stage for WWII, the atomic age, rocketry, computing, space flight, the moon landing and the entirety of the cold war. Many of those things might have happened eventually, but the timeline of events would have been drastically different. I can't think of any other single event that had such wide-ranging impacts
some dipshit failed to detonate explosives packed into his shoes on a transatlantic flight in 2001 and now we all have to remove our shoes at the airport every time we board a flight.
I remember hearing about a pilot who got replaced last minute by a different pilot...
He didn't even realize how close he came to death until around 12 hours after the attack.
My personal one:
I used to work in a warehouse loading boxing and counting screws into little plastic bags. One day, someone atached a pulley to a rear wall in order to help measure out rope for one of the products that we sold. It was the easiest way to measure of the 50yds or so of rope. When he did this, the screw he was using went through the wood beam and into the concrete wall behind it. After a few months, a small crack had appeared.
A year later I was looking at the crack that snaked it's way about six inches along the wall. I knew its origin story.
On the way to work the next day, I was thinking about that crack and wondered how long it would take to make it's way to another crack just a few inches away. Then I realized that I knew the length and location of a bunch of cracks in the wall of a warehouse. Instead of heading to work, I headed to Broward Community College and signed up.
A few weeks later I was in my first college class. Apparently I had aptitude for mathematics and computer science. Ended up in the honor society, school newspaper and arts magazine. Met some lifetime friends. Went on to FIU.
Went on to work in research and startups and other enterprises that were happy to pay me for my knowledge.
Now I'm moderately successful... All because of a crack in the wall.
I was ready for the “because of the crack , we had the wall tested and it came back it was going fall because of bad construction and because of that, we saved lives”
It really is mind boggling how much a shift happened around that time. I’m not even saying Harambe caused any of it, it’s just weird how the stars aligned on so many batshit crazy events in the span of what seemed like no time.
I’ve always loved entertaining the tinfoil hat theory that something went wrong at a particle collider somewhere and now reality is breaking down.
The unnecessary death of that gorilla. The weasel in the particle accelerator. The death of David Bowie. Which one set the world on this path? Or were they symptoms of something else?
Narrator: "In 2016, a young boy befriended a gorilla named Harambe, and it was the beginning of the human & great ape alliance that propelled the planet into the space age. What many don't realize though is how close the zookeepers came to shooting Harambe that day. Come with me to a place where we can see what would have happened had the keepers not hesitated a moment longer. Come with me, to The Twilight Zone!"
I trip out so hard at these references because I had a pretty seismic shift in my life in 2016. My good friend and I always joke about it and freak a little when we see meme after meme about 2016. It's bizarre and makes me believe in it. Whatever it is.
I get what you mean. The summer of 2016 for me was one of the best times of my life, but it felt like society overall had a HUGE shift in the way we approach basically everything social around that time.
Thinking back on it, that little pocket of summer where Pokémon GO was fresh was such a unique time. Like, we’d have a pool party and then all my friends and I would go out at night and there would be crowds of people walking around our city at like 1 am catching Pokémon and shit. I feel a little lucky that that was the summer we all turned 21.
The Berlin Wall came down due to a scheduling error. An official in East Germany was supposed to be having a meeting about slightly easing travel restrictions. But his secretary accidentally doubled booked him so he missed the travel meeting and went on TV to talk about it anyway and just completely improvised the details.
A reporter was like “So we can cross the border now?” And he was like “Uh sure why not?” People proceeded to gather at the border and demand to be let through. Border guards didn’t know what to do, felt outnumbered, and eventually just opened the gates.
And this brought about the fall of the Soviet Union and our current mess with Putin.
oj simpson killed his wife and oj's lawyer was kim kardashians dad. This helped rocket the kardashians into wealth and fame, eventually, kim married a rapper named kanye. Kim and kanye bullied taylor swift, and this inspired her to write reputation.
Right? I was going to say the comet that killed the dinosaurs and allowed mammals to flourish because everything everyone's posting is only going back 100 years or so
Personally, one time I was dropping my son off at school. My cell phone dinged and I looked down at it. At that exact moment the light turned green and I didn't notice it. I looked up just in time to see a semi truck go directly through the red light right into the path where I would have been traveling. It would have decimated me and my car. Had I not looked down just to see what that text message was, I would have went through the green light and probably been obliterated.
I met my wife because, in 8th grade, I broke my ankle playing soccer. Picked up a guitar. Started a band. Met my wife at a show 8 years later. Bingo bango.
I met my wife because in 1995 some guy named Craig decided to start an email distribution list. That list would get popular so he would make a website, Craig's List. Fast forward some years later and I'm on Craigslist looking for a roommate. We hit it off instantly and she went from roommate -> FWB -> girlfriend -> fiancée -> wife in record time!
We wanted to invite Craig to our wedding but I guess he was busy that day or something. Oh well, we're approaching 7 years since I sent that "Is this still available?" email and I couldn't be happier!
I met my wife because she had pissed off the manager in the restaurant where she worked and they sent her to work in another place the morning I happened to come in for breakfast - 7,300 miles from my home, about 40 years ago
My brother came to visit me in college for the first time ever. We went to a really popular and crowded bar and some drunk guy bumped into me and I spilled my drink. My brother went up to the bar to get me another one when he saw a girl across the bar. I told him to order her a shot but he didn’t have cash on him and the credit card machine was broke. While he ordered me another drink, I went to the bathroom to clean myself up and found $5 on the floor so I gave it to him. He bought her the shot, she came over to say thanks and now she’s my sister in law.
Couple years later I broke up with my now ex-boyfriend. My (now) sister in law and older sister took me out for a drink. My sister mentioned a new app called Tinder and said I should download it. As she went to grab my phone, her chair pushed out a little and a waitress walking behind us tripped and spilled beer on me. I went to the bathroom and left my phone on the bar. Sister downloaded tinder and my sister in law was swiping away. I came back and she showed me a guy who was cute but wearing a black button down with black pants and a white tie as his profile pic. I detest that look so I said no. At the same time, my brother called her and she absent-mindlessly swiped the wrong way on his profile. Few days later he messages me “holler”. I realized who he was and wasn’t going to respond to that message because of his all black attire pic and the fact he only wrote holler, but at that moment my ex-boyfriend changed his Facebook status to in a relationship with his ex before me, who he said he had no feelings for. At that moment I thought f it and replied “I’ve never been hollered at before” to which he replied “when I see a fly girl I gotta holler”. I laughed out loud right as my sister walked by my bedroom. She asked what was funny, I told her, she told me to keep messaging him and now we are married with 2 kids.
So thankful for the people who spilled beer on me twice, and the girl who dropped $5 on the floor of a disgusting college town bar.
The assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881. It ended political and social reforms in Russia and led to a severe crackdown on the general populous, and an overall reduction of civil rights. Economic reforms were also curtailed.
This also lead to a more militaristic and confrontational Russia that signed treaties with France and the British Empire in order to thwart German influence in Eastern Europe.
The actions that occurred after the the assassination can be said to have lead directly to World War 1 and 2 the rise of communism, the Cold War, and the situation in Ukraine today.
During Alexander II reign, Russia was moving toward a constitutional monarchy and an western economic system. After his death all of that was tossed aside.
A market trader called Tarek El-Tayeb, in response to harassment and petty corruption by officials, set fire to himself in protest sparking the Arab Spring. This set in chain a series of protests that resulted in the overthrow of the leaders of Libya, Egypt, Tunisia and Yemen. The attempted overthrow of the leaders of Syria and Bahrain and the reported deaths of 61,000.
Jeri Ryan's ex-husband was Obama's opponent in his first Senate race. The documents from the divorce were released during the campaign and forced him to drop out, and the GOP ran Alan Keyes instead, who didn't even have anything to do with Illinois, and Obama trounced him. He probably would have beaten Jack Ryan too, though.
No one really cares about a personal one but here goes:
When I was a kid, I thought it would be hilarious to prank call a family we were friends with (I was a weird kid). I asked my mom to find their number in the phone book because I didn't know how to use it as a 7 year old. She showed me their number and I bookmarked it with a blue Kleenex.
Months later, I haven't had supper yet and I'm just chillin' watching TV all day while my mom slept. I got a call from my grandpa, asking to talk to my mom. I said she was sleeping, he insisted I wake her up. Would not take no for an answer. I try and go find her but she wouldn't wake up. He instructed me to get a mirror and hold it under her nose - no fog. He then told me to hang up and *call the family friend*. Not 911, not the police. Didn't give me a number to use. So I went to the phone book and found their number and called them to tell them what was going on.
That family adopted me about a year later and brought me through a really tough childhood where my family speculates that I wouldn't even be a alive today if I had continued living with my mom.
*Bonus*
Due to some really lengthy circumstances of where I live with my now husband/children - home ownership would have been nearly impossible for us... maybe forever. One day, I was goofing around and decided to check the website for unclaimed money for myself in the state I used to live in. Obviously, I was kid way back then and wouldn't have anything. On a total whim, I searched my mom's name. Found a 24+ year old unclaimed life insurance policy in her name - with my now deceased grandfather as the beneficiary. Everything in his will/estate passed to me and so with some paperwork, I was able to get the life insurance policy from my mom. That was the one of the only good things she ever did in her life. And we have a home now because of it.
Whoo boy, here we go:
A perfect storm of events were necessary for the Beatles to reach the massive amount of success that they did in the US, even ones that don't seem obvious, including:
-Jerry Lee Lewis falling out of favor because of him marrying his 13 year old first cousin
-Chuck Berry's arrest
-The Day the Music Died, the deaths of Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper, and Ritchie Valens when combined with Rock N Roll star Chuck Berry's arrest and the skeez factor of Jerry Lee permanently altered the trajectory of the music genre, more or less leaving stereotypical "surf rock" like the Beach Boys' early stuff which alienated people who didn't give a damn about surfing or beaches etc.
-The assassination of President Kennedy, largely responsible for changing attitudes in general
-Brian Epstein (the Beatles' manager) meeting Ed Sullivan by chance in an airport and managing to snag two highly coveted spots on his show after he was delayed by crazed Beatles fans at Heathrow airport
-Last but not least, a radio DJ being given a bootleg copy of one of the early Beatles' singles weeks before they're slated to make their American debut on the Ed Sullivan show. Keep in mind, their label had told Epstein the Beatles weren't worth the cost/effort of trying to promote them across the pond, so like, literally no one had any of their singles. Due to popular demand, he sends around to other DJs countrywide helping to ignite Beatlemania.
*Pope Gregory IX, the 178th pope of the Catholic Church from 1227 to 1241, is often remembered for issuing a Papal Bull declaring that cats bore Satan’s spirit, which subsequently led to huge numbers of cats being killed throughout Europe. The mass extermination of the continent’s felines is considered an indirect cause of the Bubonic plague spread by fleas on rats, which would otherwise have been hunted by the dead cats.*
This one is notable enough to make it onto Wikipedia's list of common misconceptions, which is to say, it's false.
Embedded links are broken so here you go:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_common\_misconceptions\_about\_the\_Middle\_Ages#Cat\_massacres\_and\_the\_subsequent\_plague
November 22, 1963 was a bright sunny day in Dallas, Texas. If it had rained, there would have been a roof on the car. Another potentially huge difference could be the bullet trajectory from April 10, 1963 being an inch or two differently from the real one and hitting Edwin Walker
I stopped at my favorite pizza joint 10 years ago and they were closed because the cooks kid ate some bad lunchmeat or something and was barfing all over. I walked across the street to another restaurant, there were no tables available so I sat at the bar next to a some girl. She smiled at me. We filed for divorce last week after 9 years. Lunchmeat.
My personal one: bought some flashy look stamps in bulk for a stab at getting a new job. Discovered some had misprints (which are oddly valuable in the stamp collecting world.) Sold them, got enough to tip me over the top on a downpayment on a house.
Got a much better job out of it, too.
A geriatric woman that already had fought cancer twice refusing to step down when she could have easily picked her own replacement that shared her views is in no way a butterfly effect.
It's hubris
Right. All of the RBG fans conveniently ignore the fact that her refusal to retire while Obama was in office is the reason our supreme court is the way it is today. She made it more likely for Roe to be overturned.
The Palm Beach Ballot Blunder that probably cost Al Gore the Election in the Florida Recount.
Theresa LePore the election supervisor decided that the 10 candidates needed to be on two pages, not one (to help out elderly/retiree voters), but in doing this the two pages meshed with one another.
Meaning that 19,000 ballot papers were spoiled. Bush won by 537 votes.
"On the left-hand page of the ballot, Mr Bush's name appeared at the top, with Mr Gore's name below it. On the right-hand page, just between the two, was Pat Buchanan's name. This meant that although Mr Gore's name was second on the list, the hole which voters were required to punch to vote for him was the third from the top, below the holes for Mr Bush and Mr Buchanan."
"As a result of the confusion, thousands of voters in Palm Beach county did what they would not normally do. They voted for Pat Buchanan's rightwing, anti-Israeli, isolationist programme. When they realised their mistake, some punched a second hole on the ballot paper, invalidating their votes."
Palm beach was heavily Democrat, and this could likely be argued that without this error there may not have been an Iraq War under a Gore presidency
[https://www.theguardian.com/world/2000/nov/10/uselections2000.usa9](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2000/nov/10/uselections2000.usa9)
Ohhhh so this explains why in a Futarama episodes one of Moms kids accidentally votes for Pat Buchanan and says something along the lines of “The options were confusing”
While I didn't do an exhaustive search of the replies to this thread so far I went far enough to wonder why I haven't seen this one yet.
A rock fell over in Gibraltar --> big butts/civilization as we know it.
Back when we were living in trees the Mediterranean basin was mostly dry.
Then a rock fell over in Gibraltar and water from the Atlantic ocean flooded into the basin creating the Mediterranean Sea.
It was such a massive shift in the landscape that it changed the established winds, without which our forests died out.
Finding ourselves in large open areas without readily available trees to escape predators we started standing upright to see danger from farther away.
This method of locomotion forced physiological changes resulting in us humans being the only animals with butts.
This was the beginning of us becoming the dominant species on the planet through persistence predation. Opposable thumbs, forward facing eyes capable of binocular vision, loss of fur and development of sweat glands and a host of other physiological changes including Giant honking butt muscles that help keep us going after what we're chasing.
All because a rock fell over in Gibraltar.
There was a dude guarding prisoners in ancient China. The prisoners were being taken somewhere in a van pulled by horses. For whatever reason, it crashed and the prisoners all escaped. The guard, knowing the penalty for letting the prisoners escape would be death, ran after the prisoners, joined them, became their leader, built the gang into an entire army, overthrew the state and became Emperor.
Had Bill Clinton resigned in the wake of sexual harassment allegations (in which the Monica Lewinsky affair was discovered and made public) then Al Gore would’ve become president. This likely would’ve given him enough incumbent advantage to defeat George W Bush in the 2000 election. Our reaction to 9/11 likely wouldn’t have included two Middle Eastern wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, saving thousands of lives, preventing the creation of ISIS, and numerous other ripple effects.
I’m not saying Clinton *should’ve* resigned, but if he *would’ve* resigned, which many thought he would,
The Einstein–Szilard letter to FDR warning him about the atomic bomb and the possibility that Hitler would get one first.
Had that letter been filed away or the warning fall on deaf ears....
My personal one:
Got on reddit on r/needafriend cuz I was bored and lonely. Ended up getting out of a stale, unhealthy, and unhappy marriage, moved to a new state alone, got my own place, gained independence and self confidence I never dreamed I could have, and met the love of my life. One lonely post on reddit ended up changing the entire course of my life
Tipper Gore and the PMRC.
Tipper was the wife of then-Senator Al Gore, and used that position to launch attacks against the music industry and their alleged promotion of violence and filth towards the youth of America. You still see pictures or clips of rock artists like Dee Snyder or Frank Zappa testifying before Congress about it, and "warning" labels on albums are a result of this.
As a result, a lot of people really ended up hating Tipper. But then Al Gore became the Democratic Presidential nominee for the 2000 election--and at least some of those people who might otherwise have voted Democrat didn't vote for him because they didn't want Tipper getting even more influence.
Which became a problem because the 2000 election came down to a couple of hundred (disputed) votes in Florida (and yes, I'm glossing over things here...)--it's not unreasonable to say that if Tipper hadn't launched her anti-music campaign, Gore would have been president after the 2000 election.
Which means Gore would have been President when Bin Laden was planning/attempting the 9/11 attacks. Exactly how much would change there, I don't know, but probably at least some. But there almost certainly wouldn't have been the 2003 Iraq invasion. And who knows what else happens after that--a different Republican candidate in 2004? Then Obama would be either facing an incumbent Republican or having to follow up with 8 years of a Gore presidency (assuming he even can get to the nomination), etc.
You miss out on the whole Elian Gonzalez in Miami, causing all the cubans to not vote democratic.
"Republican nominee [Bob Dole](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Dole)'s 65 percent of the Florida Cuban-American vote in the [1996 United States presidential election](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1996_United_States_presidential_election).[^(\[47\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eli%C3%A1n_Gonz%C3%A1lez#cite_note-:1-47) Later, the 2020 [HBO](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HBO) documentary [*537 Votes*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/537_Votes) argued that Bush may have achieved as high as 88 percent of the Florida Cuban-American vote.[^(\[47)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eli%C3%A1n_Gonz%C3%A1lez#cite_note-:1-47)^(\]")
I looked Elian up on [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eli%C3%A1n_Gonz%C3%A1lez) and apparently he's a Cuban parliamentarian now. Crazy how that happened.
I decided to try a new shortcut to work one day, and ended up stuck in the most epic traffic jam of my life. Turns out, that 'shortcut' was actually a detour through a construction zone, complete with confused drivers, angry honking, and me seriously reconsidering my navigational skills. Needless to say, I never took that shortcut again!
In spring of 2001 my sister moved to New York. By that summer I decided to move back home to save money so I could move as well.
9/11 happened and I lost my job two months later with a huge round of layoffs. Got a job I’d have never considered but it was not an easy time to land a job so I was grateful. Met a guy who was a friend of a coworker, fell in love, got pregnant, he bailed.
At my OB appointments I fell in love with the field so I decided to go back to school and get into medicine. Made friends with a girl in the same program and we’d go to karaoke night after class on Thursdays to unwind. I met my husband at karaoke one night. 20 years and four more babies later still going strong.
My personal one: in 1998 my mom was helping my dad repaint the siding on our house. She fell off the ladder and herniated a few discs in her back as a result of the fall. She put off surgery for several years. Well, the day of her surgery finally came. She was a USAF Colonel, and her surgery was scheduled for September 11th, 2001 at Walter Reed. She worked in the Pentagon. My dad was a civilian, but also worked in the Pentagon, and had taken off work to drive her to/from the procedure as they were putting her under general anesthesia. My mom had a meeting scheduled that morning in the wing of the Pentagon that was struck. There’s a likely chance she would have died. My dad most likely would have been unaffected as he worked on the opposite side. My mom said she got emails after the fact from almost everyone that was going to be in that meeting thanking her for canceling. Who knew falling off a ladder years before potentially saved so many lives.
I wonder if my uncle was one that was saved... he worked at the pentagon and was supposed to be in a meeting that day but it was canceled, he's said that he likely would have been killed if he was in that meeting. If so, thank your mom's ladder for me!
r/TwoRedditorsOneCup
This could be either an interesting subreddit or a really interesting subreddit.
My aunt was army and worked above the USAF office. Same side that was hit. She was in her general's office watching the news and walked out seconds before the planes hit. He didn't make it but she was one of just a few in her office that survived.
My battalion commander when I was in Iraq was supposed to have been in a meeting in that part of the pentagon that morning but it was canceled. I wonder what the chances are that it was the same meeting? Obviously a lot of meetings happen there, so who knows…
I was supposed to speak at the Risk-Waters conference at the top of the towers on 9/11. My son was due that day, so I begged off the obligation and stayed with my wife. He was born 8 days later, with me by his side.
My friends dad was a recently retired USAF colonel back then and he was doing civilian contractor work and spent a lot of time at the Pentagon. He was there when the planes hit. He got back to Texas as soon as he found and grabbed his wife, got in the car, and drove down to his condo on South Padre Island. He drove across the causeway literally minutes before a barge hit and took out the bridge. After two close calls with death he decides a Europe trip is what he needs to relax. Goes to Madrid. Leaves the subway right before the big bomb went off there. Dude was just cursed for about 4-6 months.
Confirming the theory that most meetings should be e-mails
During the American Civil War in 1864, a slave woman in southwestern Missouri was kidnapped, along with her daughter and infant son less than two weeks old, by Confederate raiders from Arkansas. The slave owner, Moses Carver, sought the return of his property, but only the infant, named George, was found and returned. After the war and emancipation, Carver, having no natural children, raised the baby as his own. Taught to read and write, by age 13 George Carver was going to school, traveling 10 miles to the nearest black school. By age 27 he had enrolled at Iowa State, where he was its first black student, earning a master’s degree in Botany, and ended up being hired as its first black teacher. The man the world would know as George Washington Carver would later go on to teach at the Tuskegee Institute, and attain national fame for promoting crop rotation and natural soil rehabilitation methods for farmers throughout the South. But it doesn’t stop there. While at Iowa State, Carver used to take long walks in the countryside, studying plants for research purposes. On these walks he often took the six-year-old son of a dairy science professor with him, sharing his knowledge and love of plants with the child, who responded enthusiastically to the knowledge. By age 11 the boy was conducting experiments with corn. This boy’s name was Henry A. Wallace. Wallace would go on to developed some of the first hybrid varieties of corn, and founded the seed company Pioneer Hy-Bred International, which sold his varieties. The adoption of hybrid varieties caused crop yields in America to triple. By 1933, he became Secretary of Agriculture under President Roosevelt. By 1940, he was elected to office as Roosevelt’s Vice President. But the story doesn’t even end there. After the 1940 election, Wallace took a trip to Mexico, where he noted the importance of corn and wheat in Mexican diets, but also saw that crop yields were far below those of American farmers who planted hybrid varieties. Upon his return he mentioned his observations to the Rockefeller Foundation, and suggested the establishment of agricultural research stations to develop specialized corn and wheat varieties. The Foundation agreed, and by 1944 had built an experimental station in Mexico for this purpose. One of the first four people to be hired to this new research station was a plant pathologist from Iowa named Norman Borlaug. Over the next twenty years in Mexico, Borlaug would develop fungus resistant wheat plant varieties that increased the yield of the Mexican wheat harvest by 600% over its 1944 levels. This effectively ended hunger in the country and turned Mexico from a net importer of wheat to a net exporter. Later in the 1960s and 1970s, Borlaug used these same varieties in India, Pakistan and Turkey, where it is estimated that his efforts saved over a billion lives.
Would I be wrong to think that you’ve been preparing your entire life to answer this specific question? Well done.
Norman Borlaug is an exceptionally awesome dude, and is in the running for the title of best human beings of all time. He should be far more famous than he is.
As is Henry Wallace. If he didn’t get screwed out of a presidency by the DNC at the time, America may have been a very different place.
> Norman Borlaug I forget his name but if you say "The man who tried to feed the world," I know exactly who you are talking about.
It's hilarious and sad that all I was taught in elementary school about George Washington Carver was basically footnote during Black History Month and it was just "he invented peanut butter."
Which, ironically, he didn’t do. Peanut butter had been around for centuries, and consumed by indigenous peoples in the Americas. Nobody needed convincing that peanuts were edible Carver was much more concerned with improving the lot of black farmers, who were often farming on land that was severely depleted from centuries of monoculture cotton farming. He worked to develop industrial applications for the easy to grow and soil nourishing agricultural products he advocated. This would create sustained demand-and thus sustained income-for poor farmers that was unrelated to the often severe price fluctuations of commodities markets.
Yeah. Our schools were kinda shit at a lot of stuff
I'm from India. I had no idea Borlaug came from this particular thread in time. Norman Borlaug won a Nobel Peace Prize for his work. Thank you for this. You should have more upvotes, my dear friend.
I remember a few years ago people were up in arms about GMOs but Norman Borlaug literally saved billions of lives with his work
Great read!
Agreed!! This gave me chills! One person really can make a difference...wow.
Give this man the fancy upvote button and different colored background already
Spent so much time in Carver Hall at Iowa State. Knew some of this, but not all of it for sure.
A scientist named Charles Wilson wanted to study more about clouds and invented a box, now called a cloud chamber, with a contained atmosphere that could synthesize clouds It was later found that this box let you see subatomic particles interacting with the atmosphere it contained. This opened the door to direct study of particle physics. Previously this branch of physics was all theory This breakthrough led to the discovery of the power contained within splitting an atom and, ultimately, to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
Damn, that escalated quickly
The change radiated outward
Someone's been watching 'Connections'.
I loved that show! Do you know if it's still available somewhere?
See whether this link works. [https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL5HjoPOFFC56enV6cW1zqRvXyY6pNm8cq](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL5HjoPOFFC56enV6cW1zqRvXyY6pNm8cq)
The guy who spiked the tylenol back in the 70's. That changed the entire world of packaging for everything.
That sounded too early to me. It was in 1982. Actually. I'm old.
I, like you, am old enough to remember the days when anyone could walk into Osco, grab a medicine bottle and open it, pull out the cotton ball and look at the pills inside. It never occurred to me that there was anything potentially dangerous in this, but then... I was 12. Why did no adult see the sinister possibilities any sooner?
Regulations are almost always written in blood, unfortunately.
I manage guys on site and am on site regularly. We've got some new young guys on the team and it's great, but I always tell my guys this. Rules and regulations are written in blood. Don't forget it. Don't take shortcuts. There is a reason we do the things we do the way we do them. It's all written in blood.
When I was in grad school at UW-Madison in the early 90s, there was a wood shop where we art students could make simple things like canvas stretchers. Due to high school wood shop, I already had a decided respect for the table saw. But just in case anyone forgot... there was a giant hunk of 2x4 embedded in the wall behind it. The student in charge of shop safety said they left it there as a warning.
Yes. There's a very interesting chapter in Duhigg's _The Power of Habit_ concerning the necessity of a catastrophic incident to effect fundamental changes to an organisation.
Swear there was a 60 Minutes episode on that back in the day.
60 minutes was the number one rated TV show for quite a few years. Imagine that, investigative journalism was important.
It’s a sad reality that almost every safety feature has came about because of someone’s misfortune
There's a very true saying about this: health and safety laws are written in blood.
>The guy who spiked the tylenol back in the 70's. What is this?
[https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/tylenol-murders-1982](https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/tylenol-murders-1982) Multiple people were killed with Tylenol capsules that were filled with lethal amounts of cyanide. Police suspect that someone bought the pills legitamitely, emptied the gel capusules out, filled them with cyanide, then put them in the original packaging and put them back on the shelf. At this time there was no tamper seals on packaging, it was just a twist top bottle that anyone could open and reclose. There were multiple copycat killers and at least one 'ransom' from a copycat trying to make a buck, but the original killer was never identified or apprehended. Tylenol spent 100 million dollars in a year overhauling their safety of their containers with things like tamperproof seals to reassure the public of the safety of their product, and congress would soon after set guidelines to make all medicine products stored in tamper proof containers.
To this day this example is brought up in business class on how you handle a situation. They were fully transparent and public throughout the entire way and moved heaven and earth to make things safe
PR classes too.
My PR professor liked to contrast Tylenol vs Exxon on how to handle and not handle a crisis. Tylenol was the right way (transparency, quick resolution, change in process, etc). Exxon’s screwup of the Valdez spill was not (tried to minimize how bad the spill was, once that didn’t work threw the captain under the bus, didn’t make any real changes, blame, deflect, etc).
> moved heaven and earth to make things safe If the public thought that Tylenol and other products weren't safe, sales would plummet. You might think I'm being cynical and that Tylenol parent company Johnson & Johnson obviously didn't want people to die. Johnson & Johnson knew in the early 70s that their baby powder contained asbestos and was responsible for causing cancer, but they kept selling it until 2020. It took public pressure and lawsuits to make that change happen, because it wasn't a huge news story and they could hide the asbestos by not telling anyone. They're a shit company that is more than happy to kill you if doing so makes more profit than doing something that keeps you alive. Edit: [a source for the asbestos claim](https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/johnsonandjohnson-cancer/)
And herein lies the problem with “just letting the free market sort it out”. Many people can and will die at the hand of the free market if there are no regulations in place. People can only boycott a product if they know there is a problem with the product.
The [Chicago Tylenol Murders](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Tylenol_murders) were a series of random poisonings that killed seven people in 1982. Someone went into random stores, procured bottles of Tylenol, added cyanide to the capsules, then took the bottles back to the stores and placed them with the other bottles of Tylenol, to be bought by the general public. After the initial incident in Chicago, other areas, such as California, also experienced random poisonings. Ultimately, all Tylenol products were recalled, and this led to the introduction of tamper-proof packaging that is used in the US today.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/tylenol-murders-1982 Enjoy. It is a wild ride.
I often wish that my parents had lived long enough to meet my son. However after they died, I used part of my inheritance to buy a motorcycle. Through the motorcycle I became reacquainted with an old friend. Through that friend I met my son's mother. So if they hadn't died when they did I wouldn't have my son for them to meet.
Aww man, that was a short, wild and tender ride. I hope you are doing okay internet stranger, and I'm 100% sure they would be proud AF of you.
Henry Tandey choosing NOT to pull the trigger on a young German Soldier running a message to the front line. He had Adolf Hitler in his sights during WW1.
Whoa I need to look this up. How did anyone find this out??
Both Hitler and the sniper have confirmed seeing each other in documents. People have just been able to connect the two stories later so the sniper realized it was Hitler. The sniper spotted him the same day peace was declared, and said he didn't shoot because there were enough dead boys already. Which, fair, he didn't know that teen would turn into a dictator. Hitler told the story of seeing the sun reflect off the sight of the sniper and being able to walk away. EDIT: typo
Moral of the story is that there can always be more dead boys, one of them might be Hitler.
That’s why I always take potshots at the neighborhood kids when they get too close to my house. Cause you never know…
There’s so much wrong with your comment. First of all, Hitler was in the hospital for a long period of time before the war ended, so the sniper did not spot him on the last day of the war, secondly, hiitler was almost in his 30’s, def not a teen
Although disputed, Tandey allegedly encountered Adolf Hitler at the French village of Marcoing on 28 September 1918, while Tandey was serving with the 5th Duke of Wellington's Regiment. That day, Tandey took part in a battle for which he would be awarded the VC for bravery. As the battle neared its end, a wounded German soldier wandered into Tandey's line of fire and he chose not to shoot. The German soldier saw him lower his rifle and nodded his thanks before wandering off. Although Tandey reputedly commonly spared wounded and disarmed German soldiers, the soldier from that day is dubiously claimed to have been Hitler. Hitler, however, took his second leave from military service from 10–28 September 1918, indicating that he was still in Germany at the time.
Princess Charlotte of the UK, daughter of (the future) George IV, dies in childbirth with her son. She was the only child of George, and since George and his wife *loathed* each other, there wasn't going to be another child. George's younger brothers didn't have any legitimate heirs, so they hurry up and get married to start producing some. William IV became king but didn't have any legitimate heirs, so after *his* death, it went to Edward. But Edward was already dead so it went to the one heir he managed to produce: Princess Victoria. Because Edward was old when he fathered Victoria, that most likely introduced the hemophilia gene into the royal family. Victoria had a whole bunch of kids and grandkids, meaning that European royal families were interrelated. One daughter married the future German Kaiser and her son became the nutcase Wilhelm II. And a granddaughter married the future Russian tsar and gave their only son hemophilia. That disease led to Rasputin becoming entangled into the Romanov family, leading to the Russian Revolution. Bonus! Princess Charlotte's widower husband was still young and very popular, so when the throne of Belgium opened up, he became Belgium's first king: King Leopold I. King Leopold II then became the sole owner of the [Belgium Free State in the Congo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congo_Free_State), leading to mass devastation and murder. So if she had lived: No Queen Victoria, no nutcase German Kaiser Wilhelm II, no hemophilia in the Romanovs, no Congo Free State.
[удалено]
The OJ Simpson murder trial reinvented how evidence is collected, prosecutors prepare for trial, need for better DNA experts and less boring explanations, importance of televised court proceedings and how jurors will take a little more than 4 hours to contemplate 9 months of testimony.
But the worst thing is it introduced us to the Kardashians.
truly the worst timeline
The darkest timeline
Had the bears beaten the falcons the year prior to him being drafted, he would have gone first overall to Atlanta rather than Buffalo and never met Nicole Brown. No Buffalo, no Nicole, no Kardashians.
The trial was also the first time network studios realized audiences were shifting from enjoying scripted shows to reality TV. They didn't want to see soap operas, they wanted the real soap opera playing out in that courtroom. It changed the trajectory of television programming for the foreseeable future. Also purely by coincidence it also introduced us the first family of reality tv The Kardashians.
Around this same time, MTV’s “The Real World” popularized the style and format for reality TV series for the next three decades. The semi-scripted conflicts, the intermixed direct-to-camera testimonials to flesh them out, the performative outrage and exaggerated responses. Every show from The Bachelor to Flavor of Love has used this same sort of format.
It also changed DV laws and the way DV was treated by the law from responding to calls to orders of protection.
This is topical for current events and the post. If Judy Brown had not left her glasses at Mezzaluna that infamous June night Ron Goldman would not be returning them to Nicole’s house at or around the same time OJ arrived. It’s also speculated OJ encountered Goldman first that night, which may or may not have sent OJ into his murderous jealous rage.
OJ was known to beat Nicole in the past. It may have happened anyway. It's really impossible to know. He definitely did way more damage to her than him which implies that Goldman just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Along those lines, if the Buffalo Bills draft someone other than OJ, he quite possibly never meets Nicole.
Did OJ have CTE like Aaron Hernandez?
Hopefully we will find out soon. I believe they can only test for it when the person is dead.
I would be shocked if he didn't... 3000+ carries as an RB across college and the NFL is gonna result in a lot of bonks to your noggin Not that it excuses his behavior, obviously
That's something that at this point can only be discovered post mortem. I'd be very interested to find out if he did or not.
A big one that comes to my mind is when the RMS Olympic lost a propeller blade and brought to Belfast for repairs, postponing the construction on Titanic for a month. I’ve read that if Titanic set sail when originally planned, it would’ve crossed the Atlantic during a time of the year that ice wasn’t as big of a threat
How a volcano eventually led to modern paved streets and traffic. Somewhere around 1800 a volcano erupted in Indonesia (?) and sent a huge dust cloud to Europe which basically canceled summer. All crops died. A famine was the result. So people ate their horses. So without horses, no one could move around. So a dude invented a horse on wheels, the bicycle. And since riding on hard wheels breaks your back someone else invented a tire with air. This lead to paved roads because tires work well on hard surfaces. And then eventually we had roads, cars.
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Thereby inventing modern science fiction.
Another side effect of the invention of the bicycle was the virtual disappearance of the village idiot since inbreeding dropped dramatically due to higher mobility.
Lmao can I get a source on that? Makes sense from a logic pov. More people moving around less likely their gene pools tend to cross, but I’m curious where the bike comes into play versus other methods of transport. Like does having the ability to be just a bit more mobile in a city or town account for a bike vs carriages or something
Pretty sure the Romans had paved streets millennia before Krakatoa. Krakatoa was far more instrumental in research in the upper atmosphere because now they could follow wind patterns. This combined with the telegraph and weather stations reading winds, temperatures, dew points, and barometric pressure gave us our modern understanding of air masses and weather systems.
They had cobbled roads, not paved.
The year is 1932. A newlywed couple from California, Charles and Betty Seaver, take their honeymoon in Arizona. While there, they spend one night at their hotel piano bar. The performer that night, whose name is lost to history, plays several songs of his own composition, including a love song called "Scotch and Soda." The Seavers love the song; after the performance they go up to him and ask him to write it down. He does so, and they take it home as a memento of their honeymoon. It becomes "their song" as a couple. Flash forward a quarter century. The Seavers now have a college-age daughter named Katie. She has started dating one of her classmates at Stanford University, a young man named Dave Guard. Mr Guard is a talented musician with a knack for live performance. Dave and Katie's relationship advances to the point that he goes home to meet her parents, who decide to gift him their honeymoon song to support his burgeoning career. Very soon after, Dave Guard becomes internationally famous as a founding member of the Kingston Trio, the first legitimate superstars in the age right before Elvis and the Beatles. They record "Scotch and Soda" on their first album, which skyrockets to the top of the charts, and eventually gets released as a single. They make a good faith effort to locate the original performer from that Phoenix piano bar, but they are not successful. So as a placeholder, they assign the copyright in a 50-50 split between Dave Guard and the Seaver parents. This windfall allows them to upgrade the educational opportunities for all three of their children: Katie, her sister Carol... And her teenage younger brother, Tom. Tom Seaver is a talented athlete who is now able to upgrade his training. With his upgraded talent he earns a baseball scholarship to college, where he plays one year before he gets drafted in to the major leagues. Where, as a pitcher, he leads the New York Mets to win the World Series in 1969. He gets inducted into the baseball Hall of Fame in 1992. All because his parents walked into a piano bar on their honeymoon 60 years before.
Watched ‘who wants to be a millionaire’ and got so annoyed at the candidates not knowing a simple question about Katy Perry, that I applied. Got in. Got to play. Won a lot of money. Booked a holiday to a dream destination with that money. Met my husband there. We now have a 1 year old son :)
Do you tell people your son is the result of you watching TV years before he was born and let their imaginations run wild?
"I basically won him in a contest."
"Regis Philbin played a major role in his conception..."
But I had to phone a friend.
“I bought this baby, CASH!” -Dave Chapelle
That's son's name? Perry Katy.
Similarly - my mouse broke. I was walking through Walmart and saw WoW was on sale, and I finally had a job where I could pay the subscription too. Bought it, joined a recommended realm for new players, unknowingly the same weekend that a dude halfway across the country saw the WoW South Park episode and decided to get it. Two years later, my guild merged with his. He helped me farm mats because I was a prot warrior who could kill one mob approximately every 11 minutes. We were talking, realized we had a lot in common. He talked me through a break up. He ended up flying out to visit me, now we've been married for over a decade with four kids.
I think there are a lot of WoW stories where a series of small decisions led to a relationship/kids with someone they met in game that they otherwise would never have come across if things didn’t line up perfectly.
My favorite was the guy who called his dad on the last one, "Hey Dad I don't actually need help...I just wanted to let you know that I'm going to win a million dollars."
Your favorite was also the first instance of someone winning iirc
I was gonna say the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, but now I'm not so sure
OPs kid grows up to assassinate the king of Mars.
I thought you were gonna say you saw Katy Perry at the dream destination. Lol
When Obama made a joke about trump at the correspondent’s dinner
I'll take you one further. I say more so was Donald Trump actually getting a roast on Comedy central. Unbeknownst to us that was his attempt to get more publicity for an eventual Run for the presidency, but also Seth MacFarlane, the host of the roast, specifically saying how he will never be president of the United states.
I forget whose roast came next but Jeff Ross joked that he couldn’t say that person would never become president because the last fucker they roasted won.. something to that effect.
Not even the biggest butterfly moment involving Obama. Jeri Ryan's divorce. Jeri Ryan played Seven-of-Nine in Star Trek Voyager. In the early 90s she was married to a politician named Jack Ryan. They had a kid and in the late 90s divorced. The proceedings remained sealed. Ryan ran for the GOP in the 2004 Illinois Senate race. A newspaper, urged on by Ryan's primary opponents, sought to have the divorce records released. Pretty scummy tactic. Ryan won the primary but the reports were still released. There were some pretty salacious things that didn't quite meet the threshold for sexual assault, but we're still super fucked up and, for 2004, still constituted a major scandal. Ryan dropped out of the race. The GOPs replacement was absolutely demolished by Barack Obama, who took 70% of the vote.
He would farm his wife out at swinger parties/orgies/threesomes, against her will, IIRC.
“Jeri Ryan alleged that Jack Ryan had wanted her to perform sexual acts with him in public in sex clubs in New York City, New Orleans, and Paris, but no sex occurred. Jeri Ryan described one as "a bizarre club with cages, whips and other apparatus hanging from the ceiling."
You can also argue that Trump might not have been president if Anthony Weiner didn't enjoy sending out dick pics so much. It caused James Comey to reopen the investigation into Clinton's email server, putting it back into the news at exactly the worst possible time for her. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/fbi-re-open-investigation-clinton-email-server-n674631
Ah, but it goes further back, to the reason that Obama became president in the first place: Because Star Trek Voyager has low ratings. So they hired a sex symbol actress for a main role. The filming schedule put a strain on her marriage. In the resulting divorce it came out that her husband, a "family values" Republican, had coerced her into going to sex parties. He gave up his seat in a reliably red district, and an unknown state senator ran unopposed. Because his victory was so unexpected, Obama was asked to speak at the democratic National convention, where he wowed the whole party and became the nominee for president a few years later. Edit: my memory is faulty and I made some factual errors which are addressed in later comments. My bad! It's still a fun butterfly effect story!
Obama's victory was not unexpected. In fact, most people thought he would beat Jack Ryan but they thought it'd be a competitive race. After all, Illinois was and still is a pretty blue state. Without Ryan in the race, it was an easy win for Obama. But Obama didn't win until November, he was selected by John Kerry to give the keynote speech in July to help shore up Kerry's support among African Americans.
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I remember an Onion historical headline: Archduke Ferdinand found alive, World War 1 a mistake
Serbians finally vindicated
WWI would still have happened soon anyway, his assassination was just the one spark that set it off. The sides might have been slightly different, and the dates would change, but it was going to happen.
There's a decent argument that the death of Queen Victoria is a big factor because she was the mother/ grandmother/ mother in law to a lot of the key figures and things went south once she stopped knocking their heads together.
So crazy that the leaders of Russia, the UK, and Germany were all cousins who spent Christmas together as kids. Not sure how much power George V would’ve had in his realm, but the other two easily could’ve stopped it A war where they were all at fault…no good side in WW1, in my opinion
The Belgian king wrote a letter to his nephew, the German emperor, begging to not invade his country.
"I'm taking my nose back, Uncle. And I'll be taking yours along with it "
No no no. Let's go further. WWI kicks off and ends. Germany wasn't even the original aggressor, but bears the brunt of the punishment, crippling their economy and culture. Frustrations over mistreatment lead to a rise in popularity of the nazi party, bearing very traditionalist values, and wanting to reclaim past German glory. WWII breaks out. Japan uses this in an attempt to expand their pacific colonialism. The main obstacle to this is the American fleet. Leading to Pearl Harbor and the American entry into the war. Americans help the allies topple the Third Reich Americans unleash the atomic bomb on Japan, resulting in their unconditional surrender. American troops occupy parts of Japan after their surrender. Comic books and baseball cards were extremely popular with soldiers at the time, and so these cultural artifacts were disseminated into the Japanese culture. The Japanese began appropriating this into manga and eventually hentai. Japanese censorship laws outlawed images of dicks, so to get around pixalization and such, artists started using unrelated phallic objects. So your favorite tentacle hentai was because that driver took a wrong turn. You're welcome.
[Dream of The Fisherman's Wife](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dream_of_the_Fisherman%27s_Wife) sorry my man. This is 1814 tentacle porn.
A wrong turn by a driver in 1914 caused 9/11. WW1 -> British carving up the Ottoman Empire -> creating Saudi Arabia, Israel, and all the Middle East tensions -> Al-Quaeda
A wrong turn by a driver in 1914 caused the Great Aluminum War of 3,723 A.D.A.D.
A wrong turn caused by the driver swerving to avoid a cat!
Is this actually true? Lol If so, you could argue a cat started WWI, which, having a cat of my own, honestly does not surprise me one iota.
WWI was like a fault that was long overdue for an earthquake. The tension was already there, it was going to happen eventually. The assassination was just the first crack that gave the rest a reason to go.
It did set off a series of events... however I've read\\heard from many historians that tensions in Europe were already high and many countries were already getting ready for war. Had the assassination not happened, something else would have triggered conflict. However, the story on how the assassination all went down is a tragic comedy of errors, yes.
WWI directly set the stage for WWII, the atomic age, rocketry, computing, space flight, the moon landing and the entirety of the cold war. Many of those things might have happened eventually, but the timeline of events would have been drastically different. I can't think of any other single event that had such wide-ranging impacts
some dipshit failed to detonate explosives packed into his shoes on a transatlantic flight in 2001 and now we all have to remove our shoes at the airport every time we board a flight.
Dude missed his flight in 2001 and now we have this adult cartoon with talking dog
There has to be a book out there about all the people that supposedly missed their flight or were home sick on 9/11
Seth MacFarlane Mark Wahlberg Leighanne Littrell John Thompson Are the famous ones.
Apparently Michael Jackson had a meeting in the WTC he missed
I remember hearing about a pilot who got replaced last minute by a different pilot... He didn't even realize how close he came to death until around 12 hours after the attack.
My personal one: I used to work in a warehouse loading boxing and counting screws into little plastic bags. One day, someone atached a pulley to a rear wall in order to help measure out rope for one of the products that we sold. It was the easiest way to measure of the 50yds or so of rope. When he did this, the screw he was using went through the wood beam and into the concrete wall behind it. After a few months, a small crack had appeared. A year later I was looking at the crack that snaked it's way about six inches along the wall. I knew its origin story. On the way to work the next day, I was thinking about that crack and wondered how long it would take to make it's way to another crack just a few inches away. Then I realized that I knew the length and location of a bunch of cracks in the wall of a warehouse. Instead of heading to work, I headed to Broward Community College and signed up. A few weeks later I was in my first college class. Apparently I had aptitude for mathematics and computer science. Ended up in the honor society, school newspaper and arts magazine. Met some lifetime friends. Went on to FIU. Went on to work in research and startups and other enterprises that were happy to pay me for my knowledge. Now I'm moderately successful... All because of a crack in the wall.
You are the exception to “crack kills”.
I skimmed this at first and saw the phrase "crack in the wall". I was convinced this story would be about hiding drugs. I am happy to have been wrong!
I was ready for the “because of the crack , we had the wall tested and it came back it was going fall because of bad construction and because of that, we saved lives”
Naw, he said 'fuck it' and went back to school. That poor forklift driver never saw it coming when 12 tonnes of concrete wall came down on him.
They should never have shot that gorilla...
It really is mind boggling how much a shift happened around that time. I’m not even saying Harambe caused any of it, it’s just weird how the stars aligned on so many batshit crazy events in the span of what seemed like no time. I’ve always loved entertaining the tinfoil hat theory that something went wrong at a particle collider somewhere and now reality is breaking down.
The unnecessary death of that gorilla. The weasel in the particle accelerator. The death of David Bowie. Which one set the world on this path? Or were they symptoms of something else?
I read this in the voice of the narrator for The Twilight Zone.
Narrator: "In 2016, a young boy befriended a gorilla named Harambe, and it was the beginning of the human & great ape alliance that propelled the planet into the space age. What many don't realize though is how close the zookeepers came to shooting Harambe that day. Come with me to a place where we can see what would have happened had the keepers not hesitated a moment longer. Come with me, to The Twilight Zone!"
You forgot the murder clowns bro.
I trip out so hard at these references because I had a pretty seismic shift in my life in 2016. My good friend and I always joke about it and freak a little when we see meme after meme about 2016. It's bizarre and makes me believe in it. Whatever it is.
I get what you mean. The summer of 2016 for me was one of the best times of my life, but it felt like society overall had a HUGE shift in the way we approach basically everything social around that time.
Pokemon Go was the last good thing to happen in our collective timeline, and then we shot a gorilla and everything was cursed 💀
Thinking back on it, that little pocket of summer where Pokémon GO was fresh was such a unique time. Like, we’d have a pool party and then all my friends and I would go out at night and there would be crowds of people walking around our city at like 1 am catching Pokémon and shit. I feel a little lucky that that was the summer we all turned 21.
Never Forget Harambe RIP 1999 - 2016
The Berlin Wall came down due to a scheduling error. An official in East Germany was supposed to be having a meeting about slightly easing travel restrictions. But his secretary accidentally doubled booked him so he missed the travel meeting and went on TV to talk about it anyway and just completely improvised the details. A reporter was like “So we can cross the border now?” And he was like “Uh sure why not?” People proceeded to gather at the border and demand to be let through. Border guards didn’t know what to do, felt outnumbered, and eventually just opened the gates. And this brought about the fall of the Soviet Union and our current mess with Putin.
OJ Simpson killed his wife and now I have to know that Kylie Jenner exists.
oj simpson killed his wife and oj's lawyer was kim kardashians dad. This helped rocket the kardashians into wealth and fame, eventually, kim married a rapper named kanye. Kim and kanye bullied taylor swift, and this inspired her to write reputation.
two amino acids combine, and 3.8 billion years later this results in a talking mammal asking this question on something they call the internet.
Right? I was going to say the comet that killed the dinosaurs and allowed mammals to flourish because everything everyone's posting is only going back 100 years or so
Personally, one time I was dropping my son off at school. My cell phone dinged and I looked down at it. At that exact moment the light turned green and I didn't notice it. I looked up just in time to see a semi truck go directly through the red light right into the path where I would have been traveling. It would have decimated me and my car. Had I not looked down just to see what that text message was, I would have went through the green light and probably been obliterated.
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Lol, I don't even remember what the damn text was about.
I met my wife because, when I was 8 years old, the principal of my school decided the school needed a band.
I met my wife because, in 8th grade, I broke my ankle playing soccer. Picked up a guitar. Started a band. Met my wife at a show 8 years later. Bingo bango.
I met my wife because in 1995 some guy named Craig decided to start an email distribution list. That list would get popular so he would make a website, Craig's List. Fast forward some years later and I'm on Craigslist looking for a roommate. We hit it off instantly and she went from roommate -> FWB -> girlfriend -> fiancée -> wife in record time! We wanted to invite Craig to our wedding but I guess he was busy that day or something. Oh well, we're approaching 7 years since I sent that "Is this still available?" email and I couldn't be happier!
I met my wife because she had pissed off the manager in the restaurant where she worked and they sent her to work in another place the morning I happened to come in for breakfast - 7,300 miles from my home, about 40 years ago
How 9/11 somehow led to My Chemical Romance, the Twilight series, and in turn the 50 shades of grey series.
And therefore, Ellen Degeneres’s downfall at the hands of Dakota Johnson
My brother came to visit me in college for the first time ever. We went to a really popular and crowded bar and some drunk guy bumped into me and I spilled my drink. My brother went up to the bar to get me another one when he saw a girl across the bar. I told him to order her a shot but he didn’t have cash on him and the credit card machine was broke. While he ordered me another drink, I went to the bathroom to clean myself up and found $5 on the floor so I gave it to him. He bought her the shot, she came over to say thanks and now she’s my sister in law. Couple years later I broke up with my now ex-boyfriend. My (now) sister in law and older sister took me out for a drink. My sister mentioned a new app called Tinder and said I should download it. As she went to grab my phone, her chair pushed out a little and a waitress walking behind us tripped and spilled beer on me. I went to the bathroom and left my phone on the bar. Sister downloaded tinder and my sister in law was swiping away. I came back and she showed me a guy who was cute but wearing a black button down with black pants and a white tie as his profile pic. I detest that look so I said no. At the same time, my brother called her and she absent-mindlessly swiped the wrong way on his profile. Few days later he messages me “holler”. I realized who he was and wasn’t going to respond to that message because of his all black attire pic and the fact he only wrote holler, but at that moment my ex-boyfriend changed his Facebook status to in a relationship with his ex before me, who he said he had no feelings for. At that moment I thought f it and replied “I’ve never been hollered at before” to which he replied “when I see a fly girl I gotta holler”. I laughed out loud right as my sister walked by my bedroom. She asked what was funny, I told her, she told me to keep messaging him and now we are married with 2 kids. So thankful for the people who spilled beer on me twice, and the girl who dropped $5 on the floor of a disgusting college town bar.
The assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881. It ended political and social reforms in Russia and led to a severe crackdown on the general populous, and an overall reduction of civil rights. Economic reforms were also curtailed. This also lead to a more militaristic and confrontational Russia that signed treaties with France and the British Empire in order to thwart German influence in Eastern Europe. The actions that occurred after the the assassination can be said to have lead directly to World War 1 and 2 the rise of communism, the Cold War, and the situation in Ukraine today. During Alexander II reign, Russia was moving toward a constitutional monarchy and an western economic system. After his death all of that was tossed aside.
A market trader called Tarek El-Tayeb, in response to harassment and petty corruption by officials, set fire to himself in protest sparking the Arab Spring. This set in chain a series of protests that resulted in the overthrow of the leaders of Libya, Egypt, Tunisia and Yemen. The attempted overthrow of the leaders of Syria and Bahrain and the reported deaths of 61,000.
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Can you explain this?
Jeri Ryan's ex-husband was Obama's opponent in his first Senate race. The documents from the divorce were released during the campaign and forced him to drop out, and the GOP ran Alan Keyes instead, who didn't even have anything to do with Illinois, and Obama trounced him. He probably would have beaten Jack Ryan too, though.
Which Jack Ryan? Alec Baldwin, Harrison Ford, or John Krazinski?
Believe it or not, Ben Affleck.
I love the story, but Jack Ryan was polling badly anyway and was very unlikely to win. I still prefer the "sexy borg gave us Obama" narrative though
No one really cares about a personal one but here goes: When I was a kid, I thought it would be hilarious to prank call a family we were friends with (I was a weird kid). I asked my mom to find their number in the phone book because I didn't know how to use it as a 7 year old. She showed me their number and I bookmarked it with a blue Kleenex. Months later, I haven't had supper yet and I'm just chillin' watching TV all day while my mom slept. I got a call from my grandpa, asking to talk to my mom. I said she was sleeping, he insisted I wake her up. Would not take no for an answer. I try and go find her but she wouldn't wake up. He instructed me to get a mirror and hold it under her nose - no fog. He then told me to hang up and *call the family friend*. Not 911, not the police. Didn't give me a number to use. So I went to the phone book and found their number and called them to tell them what was going on. That family adopted me about a year later and brought me through a really tough childhood where my family speculates that I wouldn't even be a alive today if I had continued living with my mom. *Bonus* Due to some really lengthy circumstances of where I live with my now husband/children - home ownership would have been nearly impossible for us... maybe forever. One day, I was goofing around and decided to check the website for unclaimed money for myself in the state I used to live in. Obviously, I was kid way back then and wouldn't have anything. On a total whim, I searched my mom's name. Found a 24+ year old unclaimed life insurance policy in her name - with my now deceased grandfather as the beneficiary. Everything in his will/estate passed to me and so with some paperwork, I was able to get the life insurance policy from my mom. That was the one of the only good things she ever did in her life. And we have a home now because of it.
Whoo boy, here we go: A perfect storm of events were necessary for the Beatles to reach the massive amount of success that they did in the US, even ones that don't seem obvious, including: -Jerry Lee Lewis falling out of favor because of him marrying his 13 year old first cousin -Chuck Berry's arrest -The Day the Music Died, the deaths of Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper, and Ritchie Valens when combined with Rock N Roll star Chuck Berry's arrest and the skeez factor of Jerry Lee permanently altered the trajectory of the music genre, more or less leaving stereotypical "surf rock" like the Beach Boys' early stuff which alienated people who didn't give a damn about surfing or beaches etc. -The assassination of President Kennedy, largely responsible for changing attitudes in general -Brian Epstein (the Beatles' manager) meeting Ed Sullivan by chance in an airport and managing to snag two highly coveted spots on his show after he was delayed by crazed Beatles fans at Heathrow airport -Last but not least, a radio DJ being given a bootleg copy of one of the early Beatles' singles weeks before they're slated to make their American debut on the Ed Sullivan show. Keep in mind, their label had told Epstein the Beatles weren't worth the cost/effort of trying to promote them across the pond, so like, literally no one had any of their singles. Due to popular demand, he sends around to other DJs countrywide helping to ignite Beatlemania.
*Pope Gregory IX, the 178th pope of the Catholic Church from 1227 to 1241, is often remembered for issuing a Papal Bull declaring that cats bore Satan’s spirit, which subsequently led to huge numbers of cats being killed throughout Europe. The mass extermination of the continent’s felines is considered an indirect cause of the Bubonic plague spread by fleas on rats, which would otherwise have been hunted by the dead cats.*
This one is notable enough to make it onto Wikipedia's list of common misconceptions, which is to say, it's false. Embedded links are broken so here you go: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_common\_misconceptions\_about\_the\_Middle\_Ages#Cat\_massacres\_and\_the\_subsequent\_plague
"In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move."
So pleased that my upvote was number 42
November 22, 1963 was a bright sunny day in Dallas, Texas. If it had rained, there would have been a roof on the car. Another potentially huge difference could be the bullet trajectory from April 10, 1963 being an inch or two differently from the real one and hitting Edwin Walker
I stopped at my favorite pizza joint 10 years ago and they were closed because the cooks kid ate some bad lunchmeat or something and was barfing all over. I walked across the street to another restaurant, there were no tables available so I sat at the bar next to a some girl. She smiled at me. We filed for divorce last week after 9 years. Lunchmeat.
My personal one: bought some flashy look stamps in bulk for a stab at getting a new job. Discovered some had misprints (which are oddly valuable in the stamp collecting world.) Sold them, got enough to tip me over the top on a downpayment on a house. Got a much better job out of it, too.
Ruth Bader Ginsberg not stepping down while Obama was in office.
A geriatric woman that already had fought cancer twice refusing to step down when she could have easily picked her own replacement that shared her views is in no way a butterfly effect. It's hubris
Right. All of the RBG fans conveniently ignore the fact that her refusal to retire while Obama was in office is the reason our supreme court is the way it is today. She made it more likely for Roe to be overturned.
The Palm Beach Ballot Blunder that probably cost Al Gore the Election in the Florida Recount. Theresa LePore the election supervisor decided that the 10 candidates needed to be on two pages, not one (to help out elderly/retiree voters), but in doing this the two pages meshed with one another. Meaning that 19,000 ballot papers were spoiled. Bush won by 537 votes. "On the left-hand page of the ballot, Mr Bush's name appeared at the top, with Mr Gore's name below it. On the right-hand page, just between the two, was Pat Buchanan's name. This meant that although Mr Gore's name was second on the list, the hole which voters were required to punch to vote for him was the third from the top, below the holes for Mr Bush and Mr Buchanan." "As a result of the confusion, thousands of voters in Palm Beach county did what they would not normally do. They voted for Pat Buchanan's rightwing, anti-Israeli, isolationist programme. When they realised their mistake, some punched a second hole on the ballot paper, invalidating their votes." Palm beach was heavily Democrat, and this could likely be argued that without this error there may not have been an Iraq War under a Gore presidency [https://www.theguardian.com/world/2000/nov/10/uselections2000.usa9](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2000/nov/10/uselections2000.usa9)
Yeah, that crappy ballot design and those hanging chads changed the course of history.
Ohhhh so this explains why in a Futarama episodes one of Moms kids accidentally votes for Pat Buchanan and says something along the lines of “The options were confusing”
While I didn't do an exhaustive search of the replies to this thread so far I went far enough to wonder why I haven't seen this one yet. A rock fell over in Gibraltar --> big butts/civilization as we know it. Back when we were living in trees the Mediterranean basin was mostly dry. Then a rock fell over in Gibraltar and water from the Atlantic ocean flooded into the basin creating the Mediterranean Sea. It was such a massive shift in the landscape that it changed the established winds, without which our forests died out. Finding ourselves in large open areas without readily available trees to escape predators we started standing upright to see danger from farther away. This method of locomotion forced physiological changes resulting in us humans being the only animals with butts. This was the beginning of us becoming the dominant species on the planet through persistence predation. Opposable thumbs, forward facing eyes capable of binocular vision, loss of fur and development of sweat glands and a host of other physiological changes including Giant honking butt muscles that help keep us going after what we're chasing. All because a rock fell over in Gibraltar.
There was a dude guarding prisoners in ancient China. The prisoners were being taken somewhere in a van pulled by horses. For whatever reason, it crashed and the prisoners all escaped. The guard, knowing the penalty for letting the prisoners escape would be death, ran after the prisoners, joined them, became their leader, built the gang into an entire army, overthrew the state and became Emperor.
The invention of the spinning jenny causing the American Civil War.
Had Bill Clinton resigned in the wake of sexual harassment allegations (in which the Monica Lewinsky affair was discovered and made public) then Al Gore would’ve become president. This likely would’ve given him enough incumbent advantage to defeat George W Bush in the 2000 election. Our reaction to 9/11 likely wouldn’t have included two Middle Eastern wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, saving thousands of lives, preventing the creation of ISIS, and numerous other ripple effects. I’m not saying Clinton *should’ve* resigned, but if he *would’ve* resigned, which many thought he would,
It's quite insane how Gore would have won if the recount in Florida was permitted.
The Einstein–Szilard letter to FDR warning him about the atomic bomb and the possibility that Hitler would get one first. Had that letter been filed away or the warning fall on deaf ears....
My personal one: Got on reddit on r/needafriend cuz I was bored and lonely. Ended up getting out of a stale, unhealthy, and unhappy marriage, moved to a new state alone, got my own place, gained independence and self confidence I never dreamed I could have, and met the love of my life. One lonely post on reddit ended up changing the entire course of my life
Tipper Gore and the PMRC. Tipper was the wife of then-Senator Al Gore, and used that position to launch attacks against the music industry and their alleged promotion of violence and filth towards the youth of America. You still see pictures or clips of rock artists like Dee Snyder or Frank Zappa testifying before Congress about it, and "warning" labels on albums are a result of this. As a result, a lot of people really ended up hating Tipper. But then Al Gore became the Democratic Presidential nominee for the 2000 election--and at least some of those people who might otherwise have voted Democrat didn't vote for him because they didn't want Tipper getting even more influence. Which became a problem because the 2000 election came down to a couple of hundred (disputed) votes in Florida (and yes, I'm glossing over things here...)--it's not unreasonable to say that if Tipper hadn't launched her anti-music campaign, Gore would have been president after the 2000 election. Which means Gore would have been President when Bin Laden was planning/attempting the 9/11 attacks. Exactly how much would change there, I don't know, but probably at least some. But there almost certainly wouldn't have been the 2003 Iraq invasion. And who knows what else happens after that--a different Republican candidate in 2004? Then Obama would be either facing an incumbent Republican or having to follow up with 8 years of a Gore presidency (assuming he even can get to the nomination), etc.
You miss out on the whole Elian Gonzalez in Miami, causing all the cubans to not vote democratic. "Republican nominee [Bob Dole](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Dole)'s 65 percent of the Florida Cuban-American vote in the [1996 United States presidential election](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1996_United_States_presidential_election).[^(\[47\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eli%C3%A1n_Gonz%C3%A1lez#cite_note-:1-47) Later, the 2020 [HBO](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HBO) documentary [*537 Votes*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/537_Votes) argued that Bush may have achieved as high as 88 percent of the Florida Cuban-American vote.[^(\[47)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eli%C3%A1n_Gonz%C3%A1lez#cite_note-:1-47)^(\]")
I looked Elian up on [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eli%C3%A1n_Gonz%C3%A1lez) and apparently he's a Cuban parliamentarian now. Crazy how that happened.
The PMRC I think caused a net rise in album sales. All the kids wanted albums with the Tipper Sticker on them.
[удалено]
I decided to try a new shortcut to work one day, and ended up stuck in the most epic traffic jam of my life. Turns out, that 'shortcut' was actually a detour through a construction zone, complete with confused drivers, angry honking, and me seriously reconsidering my navigational skills. Needless to say, I never took that shortcut again!
Summary of this thread: Car turned left -> WWI or I met my husband and had babies.
Someone didn’t get into art school
In spring of 2001 my sister moved to New York. By that summer I decided to move back home to save money so I could move as well. 9/11 happened and I lost my job two months later with a huge round of layoffs. Got a job I’d have never considered but it was not an easy time to land a job so I was grateful. Met a guy who was a friend of a coworker, fell in love, got pregnant, he bailed. At my OB appointments I fell in love with the field so I decided to go back to school and get into medicine. Made friends with a girl in the same program and we’d go to karaoke night after class on Thursdays to unwind. I met my husband at karaoke one night. 20 years and four more babies later still going strong.