Author: Karl Smallwood

They often say that money makes the world go around, but if that were true then surely by now we’d have spun off our axis by now and been flung, screaming towards the sun and a certain, not entirely unwelcome doom. Something we say because each and every year there are stories about the wealthiest…

For anyone unfamiliar with the term, or at least its specific definition, a Ponzi scheme is where you create a fake business and then promise the absolute world to anyone and everyone you can bend the ear of, and convince them to invest. Then, and here’s the part that makes this scam so successful, use…

Bruce Lee is a household name and, although he died relatively young, the legacy he left simply by being really good at punching people is astounding. Now there are many oft-repeated facts about the supposed almost superhuman abilities of Mr. Lee, and a simple Google search for his name leads to dozens of people questioning the veracity of…

Logos are a ubiquitous part of the urban ecosystem. With so many companies bombarding us with so many logos in every facet of modern life, it’s easy to tune them out or ignore them altogether. But if you look a little deeper, some of the logos you see every day have some interesting stories behind…

Bruce Lee is a household name and, although he died relatively young, the legacy he left simply by being really good at punching people is astounding. Now there are many oft-repeated facts about the supposed almost superhuman abilities of Mr. Lee, and a simple Google search for his name leads to dozens of people questioning…

In the Marvel universe there’s something called the “strength scale”, against which all heroes are measured and ranked in terms of their “raw physical strength.” At the upper end of this scale there are over a hundred heroes who supposedly possess an “incalculable” level of power. This of course makes ranking the top 10 strongest characters…

The rich, famous and powerful got that way by being committed, dedicated, and serious as all Hell. It’s hard to become a billionaire when you spend all your time putting potatoes in people’s exhaust pipes. But every now and again they’ll do something stupid, hilarious and, most importantly, awesome enough to make it onto a…

If the omniscient tome known colloquially as the Big Ol’ Book of Words for Nerds, and officially as The Dictionary, is to be believed, every word located within the well-worn pages of this bastion of the English language means something. But actually, there are a bunch of words many of us use every single day that don’t…

If necessity is the mother of all invention, then the concept of annoyance is probably like its weird second cousin or something. We say this because a surprisingly eclectic range of inventions and media exist today almost purely because the person who came up with the idea first really wanted to annoy someone they didn’t…

Shame is a powerful emotion, a fact a number of enterprising businesses and government entities have taken full advantage of over the years in an attempt to curtail obnoxious and inconsiderate behavior. Join us as we chronicle some of the more amusing examples we could find of people weaponizing shame to make the world a…

As we’ve mentioned before (several times now), the world is full of people who commit a sizeable percentage of their waking life to achieving goals that would seem unusual or impossible to ordinary folk. Something we absolutely think should be applauded because in this, the darkest timeline, it’s nice to know there are people out…

A while ago we published a list of badass sounding military mottos giving both some background information on the unit they belonged to and our reasoning for why their motto was cooler than the underside of Sub Zero’s pillow. Today we have another 10 mottos belonging to a wide variety of military units that we…

Nobody really likes dealing with creepy crawlies and pests, but just like family members you don’t like and the looming specter of death that hangs over us all, sometimes you just have to confront them. If, like most people, you harbor no love for things with too many legs or that carry immense amounts of…

As an active, rather than a passive medium, the way most video games look in motion is uniquely linked to the relative skill of the person playing them. As a result, in the hands of a skilled (or in some cases an inhumanly skilled) player such as a computer, some video games look totally different…

A while ago we personified the nebulous concept of physics and wrote an article about 10 objects we feel were seemingly invented just to annoy it. Join us today as we discuss another 10 inventions that thumb their nose at physics and slaps its friend science right in the chops. 10. Vantablack – AKA super-black…

Board games allows us to live out our greatest fantasies, such as bankrupting our parents by charging them an exorbitant amount of rent, or conquering Australia. Join us as we discuss 10 of the more amusing ways it’s possible to dominate popular games by taking advantage of little known rules, or using math. For example,…

The world is full of valuable objects, objects their owners want to squirrel away and hide from the world lest they be stolen by ninjas, handsome men in suits, of handsome ninjas in suits. In addition to gold, jewels, and old SNES games, there are some surprising things hidden away deep underground in cartoonishly massive…

As famed American philosopher H.J. Simpson once so eloquently put it, “facts can be used to prove anything that’s even remotely true.” Well, join us today as we discuss 10 studies showing that a not insignificant percentage of the American population believe in everything from lizard people running to world, to HTML being an STD……

David Bowie was a man who lived a life filled to the brim with adventure, mystery, and hair-spray. During his time here on Earth, the Starman accomplished more in a decade of his career than most could in five lifetimes. For this reason, even fans of Bowie aren’t aware of the full scope of the…

There’s a lot of pressure on schools these days, both to perform academically and mold their students into productive members of society. Given that most kids are, well, terrible, schools can be given a lot of leeway when it comes to making mistakes. Then you have these 10 schools, which couldn’t have made worse decisions…

Like many rulers from the time before we had running water and microwaves, the pharaohs of Egypt were considered to be only rivaled in power by the gods their people worshipped. Considering the ancient Egyptians worshipped a god with crocodile for a head, they must have thought their pharaohs were pretty boss. So boss in…

RoboCop (by which we mean the original 1987 masterpiece and not the crappy 2014 reboot) is arguably the best movie ever made about a robotic police officer who backhands criminals through unconvincing looking brick walls. Join us as we explore 10 lesser known facts about this awesome movie. Facts like… (Note: some of the videos…

“So bad it’s good” is a concept that applies to all forms of media. Basically, it’s when something sucks so hard it’s Metacritic rating bottoms out and somehow finds itself below zero, at which point it becomes amazing. Here’s a list of 10 companies who seem to specialize in making exactly this kind of content,…

As we’ve discussed before, the ancient Spartans loved them some trash talk and greatly respected the art of the withering verbal slap down. As a result of this, everyone from the mightiest Spartan kings to lowly unnamed soldiers that fought in their armies are credited with some of the most badass one-liners in history. Here’s…