Freddie Mercury of Queen held a party in New Orleans in 1978, which featured nude waiters and waitresses, a man biting heads off live chickens, naked models wrestling in a liver pit, and dwarves walking around with trays of cocaine strapped to their heads. Fortified by “lines of marching powder as long and as thick as your grandmother’s arm”, the guests are free to choose from a menu of exotic diversions. The hotel ballrooms, made up to resemble labyrinthine jungle swamps, are swarming with magicians, Zulu tribesmen, contortionists, fire-eaters, drag queens and transsexual strippers. Drinks are served by naked waiters and waitresses who politely request that any tips are placed not on trays but in bodily crevices. Naked dancers cavort in bamboo cages suspended from ballroom ceilings. Nude models of both sexes wrestle in huge baths of shimmering, uncooked liver, while 300lb Samoan women lounge on banquet tables, smoking cigarettes from various orifices. As a bonus, visitors to the hotel’s grand marble bathrooms are orally serviced by prostitutes of both sexes. “Most hotels offer their guests room service,” quips a passing Mercury. “This one offers them lip service.”

Eduard Bloch, Hitler’s childhood doctor, and a Jew. When Hitler’s mother couldn’t afford cancer treatment, Bloch reduced his prices. Teenage Adolf declared undying gratitude, and when Austria was annexed, Hitler kept his word and granted the doctor special protection by the Gestapo.

Mark Zuckerberg spent $30 million to buy 4 houses surrounding his home, because he wanted to have privacy. The houses cost him more than $30 million, including one 2,600 square-foot home that cost $14 million. (His own home is twice as large at 5,000 square-feet and cost half as much.) Larry Page made a similar move a few years ago so he could build a 6,000-square-foot mansion. But Zuckerberg’s reason is different. He doesn’t want to live in excess, he just wants a little privacy. Zuckerberg reportedly took action after he learned that a developer wanted to purchase one of his neighbor’s homes and use the fact that Zuckerberg lived close by as a marketing tactic. He started purchasing the homes last December. Zuckerberg will lease the four homes he just bought back to its current residents.

There is only one person registered as a “Rectal Teaching Assistant” in the UK, traveling the country offering his anus to be examined by trainee doctors. He has since lost his job to a robot anus.

In 1989, then Prime Minister of Japan Sōsuke Uno resigned after a geisha revealed she had an extramarital affair with him. The key of the scandal wasn’t morality, but that he had failed to properly provide and support his mistress with an appropriate amount, and was branded as a stingy man. In their society of past a man would visit a geisha to relax and drink and flirt whereas his wife at home was viewed as a caretaker and mother figure. Not that the wives didn’t have any power, they controlled the purse strings and their word at home was law with the husband often looking up to them like a mother. Hence you don’t go to wife for sensuality. So wives never got jealous of geisha because they understood it was two different roles. A man would never leave his wife for a geisha. His wife will have known about it and accepted the situation without complaint.

Steve Jobs often went to his biological father’s Mediterranean restaurant in San Jose and even shook his hand. At the time, his dad didn’t know that Jobs was the baby he gave away for adoption, and Jobs didn’t know that he was his father. Given up for adoption as a baby, Jobs never knew he had a sister, until the biological mother he tracked down revealed her to him: the novelist Mona Simpson. Jobs met and bonded with Simpson and the two set out to find their father. Simpson found him, a man named Abdulfattah “John” Jandali. He was managing a coffee shop. Isaacson says Simpson had not told Jandali who his son was before he said to her, “‘I wish you could have seen me when I was running a bigger restaurant.’” Jandali said he ran a popular Mediterranean restaurant in Silicon Valley. “‘Everybody used to come there,’” Isaacson says Jandali told Simpson. “‘Even Steve Jobs used to eat there. Yeah, he was a great tipper.’” Simpson did not reveal who the big tipper was. She instead reported back to her brother, says Isaacson. She told him who his father was and where he had encountered him. In the taped interview, Jobs says of his father: “When I was looking for my biological mother, obviously, you know, I was looking for my biological father at the same time, and I learned a little bit about him and I didn’t like what I learned. I asked her to not tell him that we ever met…not tell him anything about me.”

Walt Whitman’s friend, Silas Soule. At 17, he was escorting slaves on the Underground Railroad. By 22, he’d staged two prison heists & become a blacksmith. At 26, he defied orders to participate in a massacre of Native Americans, testified against its architect, and was murdered for it. The massacre he defied orders to participate in: “The massacre lasted six or eight hours, and a good many Indians escaped. I tell you Ned it was hard to see little children on their knees have their brains beat out by men professing to be civilized. One squaw was wounded and a fellow took a hatchet to finish her, she held her arms up to defend her, and he cut one arm off, and held the other with one hand and dashed the hatchet through her brain. One squaw with her two children, were on their knees begging for their lives of a dozen soldiers, within ten feet of them all, firing – when one succeeded in hitting the squaw in the thigh, when she took a knife and cut the throats of both children, and then killed herself. One old squaw hung herself in the lodge – there was not enough room for her to hang and she held up her knees and choked herself to death. Some tried to escape on the Prairie, but most of them were run down by horsemen. I saw two Indians hold one of another’s hands, chased until they were exhausted, when they kneeled down, and clasped each other around the neck and were both shot together. They were all scalped, and as high as half a dozen taken from one head. They were all horribly mutilated. One woman was cut open and a child taken out of her, and scalped.”

Syndrome K: a fake disease that Italian doctors made up to save Jews who had fled to their hospital seeking protection from the Nazis. Syndrome K “patients” were quarantined and the Nazis were told that it was a deadly, disfiguring, and highly contagious illness. They saved at least 20 lives.

"Drinking 8 glasses of water a day” is based on a 1945 recommendation that had no medical basis. The current recommendation is “drink when you are thirsty, unless you are outside on a hot day or are elderly- then drink a bit more.”

MSG is generally accepted as harmless by the scientific community, with the negative stigma arising from a handful of anecdotal complaints in the 1960’s

A member of Al Capone’s gang promised federal agent Eliot Ness that $2000 (around $33,250 in today’s money) would be on his desk every Monday if he turned a blind eye to their bootlegging. Ness refused the bribe and in later years struggled with money; he died almost broke at the age of 54.

Most of the actors that auditioned for the role of Al Bundy on the sitcom Married with Children played him as angry and yelling. Ed O’Neil was the only one that portrayed him as a resigned loser.