Along with turning water into wine, Jesus was also said to have the power to cast out demons. That means exorcisms have been around for at least 2000 years. Surprisingly, the Catholic Church didn’t really establish any guidelines until 1614. But in the modern world, and no doubt thanks to the influence of pop culture,…
Author: Ian Fortey
To this day, 2011’s Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides still stands as the most expensive film ever made with a truly baffling $379 million budget. The average studio movie costs $65 million, not including marketing. Even the average bare bones, no frills, just out of film school indie movie will cost between $10,000…
Cancel culture is a buzz term we can’t escape these days. Ban, ignore, refuse or deny anything and it’s a victim of cancel culture rightly or wrongly. But the concept of banning things is hardly a new one. We’ve done it just short of forever. Even music is unable to escape the cold, callused hand…
The idea of a world beneath our feet has been fascinating to people for ages. It’s a staple of old science fiction in stories like Journey to the Center of the Earth and the Divine Comedy both describe incredibly rich and detailed worlds and even in modern times the idea that there’s something more down…
They say that only two things in life are guaranteed: death and taxes. If you’re not a human, then that means only one thing is guaranteed. And even though we all have to die sometime, we sure don’t all get to go out the same way. The animal kingdom can be brutal and death can…
The word phantom is generally used in two ways. It’s something of a less popular synonym for ghost, but outside of old Scooby Doo episodes, not a lot of people bother with it anymore. It’s also used in a semi-synonymous way to deal with more serious issues, including medical ones. The idea of something felt…
They say the English language is one of the hardest to master if it’s not your native tongue, and for good reason. The words we use are a confusing mishmash of what must look like nonsense to non-native speakers. Why doesn’t laughter rhyme with slaughter? Why does the word “set” have 430 ways it can…
When it comes to learning how to do anything in life, we tend to have two options. You either study what other people have come up with, which is what most of us do, or you come up with a method on your own. At some point, everything we could learn or do was new.…
War has changed a lot over the years. The earliest battles were probably fought with sticks and rocks. Later, we evolved to use swords and bows. And now we can kill people on the other side of the planet with the push of a button. Typically, any war or battle takes place in a geographic…
The world seems to be going to hell in a handbasket these days. There are murder hornets and natural disasters and pandemics and the threat of world-destroying war to keep us all on edge. What happened to the good old days when all we had to worry about were things like rampant street crime and…
A movie is all about telling a story on the screen. A lot of times that means creating people and things and whole worlds that never really existed and, sometimes, destroying them. Usually, that’s all done with special effects, but sometimes it’s easier and more efficient to destroy a thing for real. Other times it…
Using available box office numbers, superhero film franchises have generated well over $40 billion to date, which is a fairly decent indicator that people are really into superheroes. But if you’re feeling a little burned out on the whole thing, worry not. Nature itself offers up some unbelievable alternatives to the MCU. In a way,…
Camouflage is a process or mechanism used to conceal something by making it blend in with its surroundings. It can be natural, as is the case with animals that blend in with their environment or unnatural, as is the case when the military paints vehicles or puts uniforms on soldiers to help them blend in.…
The global video game market is worth over $85 billion today. We’ve come a long way from the Magnavox Odyssey, the first console ever sold back in 1972. In that time, countless games have been created. One site came up with an estimate of 1,181,019 games but then acknowledges this doesn’t include any old PC…
Popularity is a fickle thing, just ask any One Hit Wonder in the history of music. You ride high for a little while and then crash and burn. Often it’s easy to tell how popular something is – when a Marvel movie makes over $1 billion at the Box Office, you can bet a lot…
As we’ve seen in the past, divorce can be not just an emotional issue, it can be a downright weird one. While case by case, divorce can be the result of strange circumstances, the reasons different places have accepted as grounds for divorce over history have sometimes been remarkably unusual. 10. Thousands of Egyptian Divorces…
A food health inspector averages around $67,000 per year to help ensure we can enjoy our food safely and securely. From plants where food is processed down through warehousing and storage to the end of the line at stores and restaurants, an inspector has to make sure safety and sanitation guidelines are being met. And…
In a very rudimentary way, teamwork is the foundation of civilization. People coming together for their mutual benefit is what allowed us to grow beyond simple foragers in the wild and develop cities, economies, agriculture, religion and even language. It’s worked pretty well for us as a species. And sometimes it even works beyond our…
Self-defense is big business. You could learn boxing, jiu-jitsu, krav maga and dozens of other fighting styles. You can also invest in tools that range from telescoping batons to tasers to high-powered rifles. If you want to defend yourself, the sky’s the limit. Animals, on the other hand, have far less at their disposal. Most…
YouTube has become the entertainment hub of the modern world. There are 30,000 hours of new video posted to the website every single hour of the day. With all of that content, it’s not hard to imagine you’re getting a mixed bag. Some are really interesting and entertaining stuff. Some are nonsense that isn’t interesting…
Science fiction has a curious way of being prophetic. We can only hope that stories like The Matrix, Terminator, I, Robot and others missed the mark when they suggested robots and computers are going to rise up against us and either use them as batteries or fertilizer for plants they’ll crush under their robot treads. …
In this day and age, it seems like everyone is getting a side hustle. Making ends meet gets harder every year and a lot of us are looking for part time jobs and gigs that can provide some quick money without a lot of time and effort. They may not be careers, but they can…
According to quantum physics, everything that is is made up of particles. Matter, light, things seen and unseen. It’s all particles and they control the function of the entire universe. Some are common and well known to most of us, like electrons. Others are a little more unusual, like quarks. But the basic idea of…
People love a lot of things. And by that we don’t mean a large variety of things, but when there are just a large number of things. For some reason, a lot of any given thing is oddly fascinating, and this is made even more fascinating when you find that large number of things in…