Venezuelan serial killer and cannibal Dorangel Vargas – who confessed to killing and eating at least ten individuals – didn’t consume fat people because he thought they had too much cholesterol. Sure I eat people,” the candid cannibal told reporters. “Anyone can eat human flesh, but you have to wash and garnish it well to avoid diseases… I only eat the parts with muscles, particularly thighs and calves which are my favorite … I make a very tasty stew with the tongue and I use the eyes to make a nutritious and healthy soup.” Vargas said he prefers the taste of men to women and will not eat hands, feet or testicles, “although I’ve been on the point of trying them on various occasions.” He said he rejected overweight men because they had too much cholesterol, and the elderly were spared because their flesh “is contaminated and very tough.”

President Garfield’s assassin chose an ivory-handled gun over a similar wooden-handled model because he knew it would look better in a museum exhibit. To the end, Guiteau was actively making plans to start a lecture tour after his perceived imminent release and to run for President himself in 1884, while at the same time continuing to delight in the media circus surrounding his trial. He was dismayed when the jury was unconvinced of his divine inspiration, convicting him of the murder. He was found guilty on January 25, 1882. He appealed, but his appeal was rejected, and he was hanged on June 30, 1882 in the District of Columbia. At his execution, Guiteau famously danced his way up to the gallows and while on the scaffold he waved at the audience, shook hands with his executioner and, as a last request, recited a poem he had written called “I am Going to the Lordy”. He had requested an orchestra to play as he sang his poem, but this request was denied.

China has mobile “execution vans” that drive around carrying out the death penalty. The government claims this is both more cost-effective and more humane than traditional methods. China executed at least 1,634 people in 2015. The buses, of which over 40 are currently in use, are replacing firing squads as China’s preferred method of execution. The buses provide a setup for lethal injections, and the acts are carried out on streaming video so local authorities can observe and ensure that everything is done legally.

Donnie Wahlberg lost 43 pounds to play Vincent Grey in The Sixth Sense, a role which had less than 3 minutes of screen time, to prove to people that he was serious about acting.

“Affluenza” teen Ethan Couch Couch used to drive himself to school at the age of thirteen. When the head of the school questioned that practice, his father threatened to buy the school

Seattle kids have a lower polio vaccination than the African country of Rwanda. Vaccine denialism is a perverse affliction of people who should be smarter than they act—the well-educated, high-income folks who know just enough to know too much, and to assume that simply because they haven’t seen a disease in a long time it’s gone away. And hey, if it does turn up, they’ve surely got the resources to deal with it. That’s the reason that in the U.S., anti-vaxxers tend to cluster in wealthy, blue-state communities like Silicon Valley, New York City, Columbus, Seattle and it’s down-coast little sister Portland. It’s the reason too that the nonsense that animates the anti-vaxxers—the idea that vaccines are toxic or overprescribed or nothing more than a cash grab by big pharma and big government—is a lot likelier to gain traction in other wealthy countries around the world than in ones that have only recently done away with scourges like polio or are still struggling with them, and either way have images of sick or dying children still fresh in their minds.

To help airline passengers deal with travel anxiety, San Francisco International Airport has hired the nation’s first airport therapy pig. LiLou wears costumes and performs tricks to help travelers calm down before boarding their flights

During WWII, L Ron Hubbard once led a 68 hour battle against two Japanese submarines which he claimed “definitely sunk, beyond doubt”. An analysis later concluded that there were never any submarines in the area. Years later, Hubbard told Scientologists: I dropped the I-76 or the Imperial Japanese Navy Trans-Pacific Submarine down into the mouth of the Columbia River, dead duck. And it went down with a resounding furor. And that was that. I never thought about it again particularly except to get mad at all the admirals I had to make reports to because of this thing, see? This was one out of seventy-nine separate actions that I had to do with. And it had no significance, see?

George Washington feared the growing influence of political parties in the US. He thought that it would lead to “the alternate domination” of each party, taking revenge on each other in the form of reactionary political policies, and that it would eventually cause the North and South to split.

Divorce rate of couples whose wedding cost more than $20,000 is 1.6 times higher than those whose wedding cost between $5,000 and $10,000, and couples who spent $1,000 or less had a lower-than-average rate of divorce

Katrin Himmler, grandniece of SS Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler, has NOT refused to have children to end her great-uncle’s bloodline. She believes the idea of good or evil being passed through bloodlines is itself a reflection of Nazi ideology. She married a Jewish man. Here are a couple of a questions she was asked in an interview: Q.You married the Israeli son of a Holocaust survivor. Is that right? My ex-husband’s father was in the Warsaw ghetto as a child, but his family left with false papers and survived in the surroundings of Warsaw until the end of the war. Q.So your father — Himmler’s nephew — and your father-in-law, who once lived in a place where thousands of Jews were shipped to camps every day, were in the same wedding party? Look, I know the discussion in the U.S. about the Holocaust is much more emotional than in Israel and Germany, but I am a bit frustrated with the suggestion that we are extraordinary freaks. Our fathers are both open-minded and tolerant men. Our parents are still good friends. Both of our families are convinced that it’s not helpful to separate the world into good and bad after generations but that it is necessary to speak with the other side.

25% of all Russian men die before they reach their mid-50s, mainly due to vodka. Two Russians are lost at sea in a tiny lifeboat. They’ve been drifting for weeks with no hope of rescue. One day, one of them sees a lamp floating in the waves. He picks it up and rubs it, and a genie appears. “You may have one wish,” says the genie. Instantly, the Russian with the lamp says, “I wish the ocean was made of vodka!” “Your wish is my command,” booms the genie. He turns the entire ocean into vodka, and then disappears in a puff of smoke. “You idiot!” yells the other Russian. “Now we have to piss in the boat!”