In 1976, Canadian stuntman Kenny Carter decided he was going to jump the St Lawrence Seaway in a Lincoln Continental.  The jump would cover a distance of more than a mile, so he wasn’t going to use just any old Lincoln Continental.  He was gonna soup that bitch up with some sweet fins and some mofo rockets.

The jump proved more complicated than anticipated, as jumping a mile across a river apparently isn’t something you can do just on the spur of the moment.  Several backers of the jump came and went, until finally in 1979 Kenny was ready.  Or at least, he thought he was.  Mechanical failures caused him to abort an attempt at the jump just five seconds before takeoff.

The film crew who was then funding the jump decided Kenny was just a big chicken, and called him to a “meeting” in Ottawa just to get him out of the way while they brought in another stuntman, American Kenny Powers.  Because as everybody knows, if a Canadian isn’t dumb enough to risk his life on something stupid, the only answer is to call in an American!

Well, if you watched the video above, you know what happened.  Or, hey, if you just thought about it for a few seconds, you probably figured out what happened.  The car rocketed off the huge ramp, and… freaking disintegrated in mid-air.  The chutes deployed early, and American Kenny plunged into the river, far short of the other bank.  Kenny Powers lived, thankfully, although he broke 8 vertebrae.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why you don’t attempt a stunt even Evel Knievel thinks is a bad idea.

Fought on October 25, 1415, near the three quarter mark of the 116 year long Hundred Years War, The Battle of Agincourt featured an army of French nobles getting their asses kicked by a much smaller English army that consisted mainly of peasants.

It is debatable just how badly the English were outnumbered in the battle.  Some estimates range as high as 30 to 1, or as low as 4-3.  The accepted consensus puts the numbers  around 6,000 men for the English and between 20,000 and 30,000 for the French, putting the French advantage between 3 and 5 to 1.

The battle was fought on a narrow strip of land between two heavily wooded areas.  The English King Henry V was attempting to move his army to Calais after a long but successful siege of the French port of Harfleur.  The French had hounded the English all the way, and finally forced the English into a stand-up fight.  The English army was starving and sick, the French fresh and convinced of their impending victory.

As was the way of things back in the day, the two armies lined up at opposite ends of a field and had at it.  The English assumed a defensive posture with their formidable longbowmen on the flanks behind defensive stakes, and men-at-arms in the middle.  The field was muddy from recent rains.

The French had the English trapped, and refused to open the battle as they were waiting for more troops.  The English knew they could not wait, and so they actually dug up their stakes and moved forward to within bowshot of the French.  Amazingly, the French still did not attack–had the French cavalry hit the English while they were in the process of digging back in, it is likely the battle would have turned out rather differently.

After digging back in, the English opened the battle with a volley of arrows.  Finally, the French decided they couldn’t wait any longer, and the cavalry charged.  However, some of the French cavalry had apparently gotten bored and wandered away while waiting for the fighting to start, because the charge was not as large as it should have been.  The French Knights were not able to outflank the longbowmen, nor get through their defensive stakes.  The cavalry retreated in disarray, with riderless horses running amok through the advancing French lines.

The cavalry charge did little more than to churn up the ground over which the French men-at-arms would now have to walk to reach the English, all while taking volley after volley from the English archers.  They were exhausted when they reached the English lines, and because the confines of the narrow field made it impossible for them to bring their superior numbers fully to bear, the English were able to force a retreat after three hours of hard fighting.

The French had the advantage of superior numbers, of overall health and condition of the men, and they had numerous cavalry that the English lacked.  However, at the end of the day, they were decisively beaten.

Is anybody surprised?

(That’s what we in the business call a “money intro”.)

René Blondlot was a professor of physics at the University of Nancy in France.  And yeah, they really do have a University of Nancy in France.  Apparently it’s named after the town of Nancy, not that awful comic strip.  While working with the recently discovered X Rays in 1903, Blondlot discovered a new form of radiation, which he called N Rays.  It turned out that this form of radiation was pretty ubiquitous, as Blondlot claimed to be able to detect it being emitted by almost everything, with the odd exceptions of green wood and certain metals.

Blondlot’s discovery was replicated at labs all across France.  Unfortunately, it seemed like this mysterious radiation was somehow confined to France, as very few scientists in England, Germany, or the United States could replicate the N Ray experiments.

Finally, the prestigious journal Nature asked American physicist Robert Wood to visit Blondlot and find out what was up.  While viewing a demonstration of the N Ray experiment in a darkened room, Wood removed a critical piece of Blondlot’s apparatus.  Oddly, Blondlot’s team still reported seeing the N Rays.  While trying to surreptitiously replace the piece he had removed, Wood was observed by one of Blondlot’s assistants.  However, he misread the situation and assumed Wood was in fact in the act of removing the piece he had already removed and replaced.  In further trials, with what should have been a fully functional apparatus, Blondlot’s team insisted they could no longer detect the N Rays!

Wood reported to Nature that the N Ray phenomenon was pure delusion.  Blondlot had been tricked by purely subjective phenomenon (a subjective “brightening” of photographs taken in the supposed presence of N Rays) and the other French scientists who had confirmed his results had seen the same thing because they were subconsciously biased in favor of a fellow Frenchman.  The non-French scientists hadn’t seen the effect because it wasn’t goddamn there.  And also, screw the French anyhow.

The story is told today as a cautionary tale about the dangers of experimenter bias in science.  But I tell it here because it’s funny.  And also, screw the French anyhow.

Now, I know what you’re thinking.  You’re thinking “You’re just going to make fun of the French some more, aren’t you?”  And, well, you’re right.  I know, it’s cheap and easy to make fun of French military blunders.  But the best part about the Battle of Verdun is that the French were arguably being less dumb than the Germans who were attacking them.  Any time you have a situation where someone fucks up harder than the French while fighting a battle, you know you’ve got an all-time blunder on your hands.

Here’s the situation.  World War I started in late summer 1914, and by early fall the western front had stagnated.  The two sides (Britain and France on one side, Germany and Austria-Hungary  on the other) settled down into a network of trenches and didn’t move much for the next four years.  Throughout 1915 both sides attempted to achieve the elusive breakthrough that would end the stagnation and bring victory for their side.  Alas, all this achieved was minuscule movements of the trench lines and lots and lots and lots of casualties.

In 1916, the Germans decided to try a different tactic.  They reasoned that a breakthrough was no longer possible in the current situation, and instead they would pick a spot on the French lines that the French Army could not afford to abandon, and attack it endlessly, forcing the French to bring more and more men into the fray.  They sought to “bleed them white”, to inflict such great casualties on the French that they would either lose the will to fight or would be unable to defend other parts of the line effectively.

They picked the fortifications in and around the city of Verdun.  Verdun had played a major role in several previous French wars; it had withstood an assault by Attila the Hun in the fifth century, and had been built up after the Franco-Prussian war specifically to bolster French defenses against future German aggression.  The German plan was to attack, and bait the French into an all-out defense of the city and forts.

Well, it worked… sort of.  The Germans attacked, and the French took the bait and committed to hold the city at any cost.  It became not just a matter of military importance, but of French national pride.  Before the battle was finally over,  70% of the French army had been through “the wringer of Verdun”.  However, this might have been to France’s ultimate advantage–the French army had a policy of rotating troops out of the battle every 2-3 weeks, which is why such a high percentage of the army eventually saw action at Verdun.  By comparison, only 25% of the German army saw action at Verdun, so the French troops were comparatively fresh at any given time.

The Germans spilled a lot of French blood at Verdun, but at a price that was far too high.  The French casualties from the battle (approximately 371,000 killed, missing, or wounded) were only slightly higher than the German casualties (337,000).  By the time all was said and done, the entire thing was a wash–the Germans made small advances, but were eventually turned back by French counter attacks.  The Germans had managed to do nothing other than reduce the number of available fighting men on both sides by approximately the same amount, and also to blast the shit out of small portion of the French countryside.

The French, in turn, took their successful (if highly costly) defense of Verdun as a sign that fixed fortifications were a good idea, now and forever, and this led to the creation of the Maginot Line after the war.  And we all know how well that worked for them.  Also, the demoralizing effect of the war, and the Battle of Verdun in particular, is often credited with contributing to the French collapse at the start of World War II–they just didn’t have the heart to go through it all again.

So there you have it.  The Germans failed to either take Verdun or kill enough Frenchmen to change the course of the war, and they lost nearly as many men as they killed.  The French in turn held a line that probably didn’t need to be held, at such a huge cost that the effects were still being felt decades later.

Dumbest battle ever?  It’s in the running, for sure.

Stats wise, there’s no doubt Ty deserves to be in the Hall.  The all-time hit king before Rose played for seven thousand years and beat his record (and his career .366 average is still the best ever), Cobb was also a demon on the basepaths, stealing somewhere north of 800 bases in his career, which is good for fourth on the all time list–and 2-3-4 on the list are bunched up fairly close together.  Lou Brock in second has 938, Billy Hamilton in third has 912, and Ty in fourth has 892.  Of course, Rickey Henderson swiped 1406 because he was a mother fucking base stealing MACHINE sent from the future to steal our bases.

But we’re here to talk about Ty Cobb.  And part of the reason he was so good at stealing bases wasn’t just because he was fast (although he was).  It was because he’d spike the shit out of you if you got in his way.

Here he is kicking some poor catcher in the dick:

Seriously, look at that.  He gave that guy a flying kick right in the goddamn dick.  And why?  Probably because he had the unmitigated gall to try to tag Ty out at home.  Or maybe JUST BECAUSE.  For all I know, Ty just walked, and decided to jump-kick the catcher’s ball sack before heading to first, just on goddamn principle.

Cobb fought everybody.  He once challenged an umpire to fight him under the grandstand after the game.  The hell of it is, the umpire accepted, and Cobb knocked him down and choked the shit out of him until some spectators intervened.  He fought with fans–he once climbed into the stands and beat the shit out of a handicapped man who called his momma names.

He was a well known racist.  He once slapped a black elevator operator for being “uppity”.  When a black security guard intervened, Cobb stabbed him.  It being the early 1900s, this was apparently acceptable, and the issue was never taken to court.

He was hated by so many people, one time a manager basically threw a couple games just to prevent Cobb from winning a batting title.  St Louis Browns manager Jack O’Connor ordered his third baseman to play back on the outfield grass every time Nap Lajoie came up to bat in the final two games of the season.  Nap was behind Ty by just a few percentage points in the batting title race, and old Jack hated Ty so much, he tried to rig it so Nap would win.  Nap went 8 for 8 in the double header, with six bunt singles, but MLB cottoned on to what Jack was up to and ended up awarding the title to Ty anyway.

So, in conclusion, Ty Cobb was a huge cock.  He was a shithead, a racist asshole, and a loudmouth punk with an inferiority complex that caused him to lash out at everybody.  But holy shit could the man play baseball.

So the next time someone tries to tell you Barry Bonds shouldn’t be in the Hall of Fame because maybe he took roids, show them that picture of Ty kicking that poor dude in the dick.  If that’s “playing the game the right way”, I’m not sure what Barry (probably) did was so wrong.

This is a video of Dr. Josiah Thompson, noted JFK conspiracy author, explaining why Oswald could not have fired the number of shots he is said to have fired (3) in the amount of time it is said he had (most conspiracy buffs cite a number around 6 seconds, usually something overly exact like “5.6 seconds”).

Now, never mind that the FBI test he is apparently misrepresenting shows that it is possible to shoot three accurate shots with a Mannlicher-Carcano rifle like Oswald’s in as little as 4.5 seconds.  This guy proceeds to tell us that the “necessary minimal mechanical firing time” of this rifle (which he defines as taking one shot, cycling the bolt, and taking another shot) is 2.3 seconds.  He flat out says this is the minimum time it takes to fire a shot, prepare the rifle for another shot, then fire again.  So obviously, you can’t take 3 shots in 5.6 seconds or whatever sub six second number you would like to pull out of your ass today.

Thing is, as you can see in the video, he demonstrates what he means by “minimum mechanical firing time”.  Are you seeing where I’m going with this yet?  For those of you who don’t have a stopwatch handy, go here and time it for yourself.

What did you get?  I tried it a few times, and never got more than 1.9 seconds.  From the time he dry fires the rifle the first time to the time he dry fires the second time is somewhere between 1.7 and 1.9 seconds by my tests.

Good job, asshole. Way to parrot incorrect information then make a complete jackass of yourself on television.

It’s often said that in each new war, the generals start out trying to re-fight the last war, and that was never more true than during the lead-up to World War II.  France had spent nearly all of World War I on the defensive in their own territory, fighting off the invading Germans with neither side ever able to score a decisive breakthrough.

After the war, the French figured they’d build a huge defensive line of forts on their eastern border with Germany, which became known as the Maginot Line.  In fairness to the French (note: this may be the last time you ever hear me say those words), the Line was not supposed to be the be-all, end-all of defense against the Germans.  It was merely supposed to hold them off long enough to allow the French army to mobilize to meet the threat, which could take as long as two to three weeks.

Well, it sort of worked.  Hitler took one look at the long line of forts that stood between him and Paris, and did what any sensible person would have done:  he went around it.   He faked a frontal assault on the Line, and then attacked through Belgium.  France was, for some reason, counting on the Belgians and their own line of defensive forts to hold off the Germans just in case they turned out to be smart enough not to just barrel-ass headlong into the Maginot Line.  Needless to say, this was not the best plan ever.  Once the French and the British moved into Belgium to offer help in fighting off the Germans, the bulk of Hitler’s forces then moved through the “impenetrable” Ardennes region and flanked the allies.  Meanwhile, the Luftwaffe just, you know, flew over the Line, dropping paratroopers and just generally bombing the shit out of whatever they felt like.

The whole thing was over in less than six weeks, with the British heroically running away at Dunkirk and the French surrendering and being occupied by the Germans.  Oddly, this was exactly the outcome the Germans had expected to achieve in World War I, so in this instance, maybe the Germans are the first people in history to successfully fight the previous war during the successive campaign.