Friday, August 6, 2010

Stuff I have learned from studying history

1. The first postgrad students at Sydney Uni did not have APAs. Instead they spent three months each year in Egypt building the pyramids.

2. Charles Dickens got the idea for Oliver Twist while working as an intern on the space shuttle program in 1968.

3. When travelling by sea Abraham Lincoln caught krill for breakfast by putting his head in the water and straining them through his beard.

4. The Country Women’s Association was founded in 1919 as a militia to resist invasions from space.

5. Richard Wagner wrote only 45 minutes of original music for Der Ring des Nibelungen. The other 13 hours and 45 minutes were computer-generated on a mainframe designed by Johannes Brahms.

6. The manuscript of Tolstoy’s last completed novel, The Romance of a Lobster, lies unpublished in a Moscow bank vault. No one knows which bank.

7. Attila the Hun was neither Attila nor a Hun. He was a northern minke whale named Gerald.

8. The working title for Michelangelo Antonioni’s film Blowup was Photos an’ shit.

Thought you'd like to know.

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