Fascinating and Fun Factlets

This list looks at facts that are both fun and fascinating and hopefully largely unknown to most of our readers. They are generally tidbits of information that are not going to help you in your daily life but they might give you something to talk about at a party.

1. Dracula is the most filmed story of all time. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde comes second and Oliver Twist comes third.

2. Donald Duck has a sister called Dumbella.

3. Coca Cola has a pH of 2.8.

4. Al Capone’s older brother was a policeman in Nebraska.

5. Henry Ford never had a driver’s license.

6. The original name of Pacman was going to be Puck Man until the developers saw the obvious potential for parody.

7. Frank Baum got the name Oz in ‘The Wizard of Oz’ from his alphabetized filing cabinet (O-Z).

8. The Buzz generated by an electric razor in Britain is in the key of G. In America it is in the key of B flat.

9. More than half the world’s population have never made or received a telephone call.

10. Eskimos never gamble.

11. The Snickers bar was named after a horse the Mars family owned.

12. Tomato Ketchup was once sold as medicine

13. George W. Bush was the 17th US state governor to become president.

14. Buenos Aires has more psychoanalysts, per head, than any other place in the world

15. Oscars given out during World War 2 were made of wood, because metal was in short supply.

16. 75 percent of Japanese women own vibrators. The global average is 47 percent.

17. The Christmas holidays are the busiest times in plastic surgeons offices.

18. There has never been a sex-change operation performed in Ireland.

19. In China, the bride wears red.

20. Mexico City has more taxis than any other city in the world.

21. Peanuts are one of the ingredients of dynamite.

22. President Andrew Jackson once killed a man in a duel because he insulted his wife.

23. The first ice pop dates back to 1923, when lemonade salesman Frank Epperson left a glass of lemonade outside one cold night. The next morning, the ice pop was born – and originally called the epsicle ice pop.

24. Nobody knows were Mozart is buried.

25. Leonardo da Vinci could write with one hand and draw with the other at the same time.

Artistic Amazing Artworks

Art satisfies the soul. Feast your eyes and soul on these amazing artworks made from otherwise ordinary objects, proof of how art can make us see the world differently.

Food

Carl Warner gets the top spot on this list for his brilliantly realistic photographs of landscapes, which are created entirely from food. Warner, a London-based photographer, uses various food items like vegetables, fruits and bread, to create amazingly detailed dioramas, and photographs them for posterity. The dioramas, nicknamed ‘foodscapes’ , were made atop an eight feet by four-feet table, with the assistance of model-makers, and the scenes depicted ranged from a broccoli forest to a smoked-salmon sea in sunset. Warner photographs each scene multiple times, then he edits the images on a computer to produce the striking images.

Electricity

Australian Peter Terren likes playing with electricity. He does what he calls the ‘Holy Art of Electrickery,’ which is basically creating spectacular art made of pure electricity. Using an electric transformer called a Tesla coil (that he built himself ) that shoots out bolts of electricity (called plasma), Terren photographs these electric discharges, using long exposures to capture impressive images of electric ‘sculptures’ that danced through the air. Terren sometimes even incorporates himself into his photographs, like in his rendition of the famous sculpture ‘The Thinker’. Despite the unreal nature of the images, Terren insists that there is no Photoshopping involved in the production of his pictures, and only slight alterations were made to them post-production.

X-Rays

Nick Veasey of Kent, England, turns the mundane into the magnificent by X-raying ordinary objects, and turning the photographic results into art. While working as a photographer/designer for a television company, he was tasked to X-ray a truck full of soda cans to find a can containing a prize-winning ring pull. After three days without a winner, he X-rayed his sneaker out of boredom.

Fascinated by the result, he was duly inspired, and after three months of exploring and experimenting with the medium, Veasey has perfected his unusual art. Using an abandoned radar station as his studio, Veasey creates ghastly yet stunning X-ray images of various animals, a DJ holding a microphone, a man riding a bike, a tractor, and even a bus loaded with people. But Veasey’s most ambitious X-ray project as of yet is a 20,000 square-feet X-ray of a hangar containing an entire Boeing 777 jet, making it the largest object ever X-rayed.

Smoke

Using a special camera with a fast shutter speed, Graham Jeffrey captures amazingly beautiful pictures of smoke. Using incense sticks as the smoke source, Jeffrey preserves images of the ephemeral subject, adding color and manipulating the smoke to make enchanting shapes and forms.

Balloons

New York artist Jason Hackenwerth uses thousands of colorful balloons to create amazing installations that resembles alien creatures. As many as 3,000 individual balloons go into each piece, and each piece can take up to 25 hours to finish.

A4 Paper

Peter Callesen creates incredible cut-out sculptures of skeletons and buildings out of single sheets of A4 paper. Callesen remarked on his unusual medium: “I find the A4 sheet of paper interesting to work with, because it is probably the most common and consumed media and format for carrying information today, and in that sense it is something very loaded. This means that we rarely notice the actual materiality of the A4 paper.

By removing all the information and starting from scratch using the blank white 80gsm A4 paper as a base for my creations, I feel that I have found a material which we all are able to relate to, and at the same time is non-loaded and neutral and therefore easier to fill with different meanings. The thin white paper also gives the paper sculptures a fragility which underlines the tragic and romantic theme of the works.”

Typewriters

Jeremy Mayer sculpts anthropomorphic figures out of vintage typewriter parts. The metal creations were made without the aid of welding or adhesives. Some of his life-sized works contains parts from roughly 40 typewriters and could take a thousand hours to create.

Rice Crops

Every year since 1994, the small village of Inakadate, located in the Minamitsugaru District in Aomori, Japan, creates astonishing images in their rice fields to draw tourism to the place. The pictures are made using two types of rice plants: the purple or yellow-leafed “kodaimai” rice and the green-leafed tsugaru-roman rice. The giant pictures are visible until September, when the crops are harvested.

Chicken Wire

Ivan Lovett of Queensland, Australia, creates remarkably lifelike busts of famous icons such as Salvador Dali, Bob Dylan and John Lennon, from ordinary chicken wire. Each one of the highly-detailed pieces takes around three weeks to finish.

Coffee

Sunshine Plata of Manila, Philippines, creates whimsical paintings with a difference: instead of oil or acrylic paint, she uses coffee as her medium. Inspired by an exhibit of 19th-century artworks done in coffee, Plata creates entrancing sepia images of fairies and religious figures from the aromatic beverage. Her paintings proved to be so unique and beautiful, that on her first solo exhibit of caffeine art (entitled ‘L.S.D. (look, smell, discover) Trip by Caffeine’), only seven of the thirty-two works exhibited were left unsold.

Most Popular Fictional Detectives

These are all detectives who gave us a lot of reading pleasure.

Sherlock Holmes

Sherlock Holmes, a creation by Arthur Conan Doyle, remains the archetypal detective who solves mysteries by logical reasoning. He appears in only four novels, of which “A Study in Scarlet” (1887) was the first, and “The Hound of the Baskervilles” (1902) the most famous. At least as important are the fifty-six short stories. Two of my personal favorites are “The Red-Headed League” and “The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle”.

Holmes believes in the science of deduction: the principle that any problem can be solved if the necessary information is given. He is surrounded by people who are less bright than him. Dr Watson is a good observer, and can relate the cases in detail as first person narrator, but he never comes to the correct conclusion by himself. Inspector Lestrade is the not too clever police investigator with a lot of tenacity once he’s on the right track. His archenemy Professor Moriarty only appears in two stories.

As a private person Holmes is quite eccentric. He uses cocaine, and never gets romantically involved, although he does have feelings for Irene Adler from “A Scandal in Bohemia”. Of the many actors who have played Sherlock Holmes I’ll just mention Basil Rathbone and Jeremy Brett (photo).

Hercule Poirot

Hercule Poirot appears for the first time in Agatha Christie’s “The Mysterious Affair at Styles”, published in 1920. He is a retired Belgian police officer who came to England during World War I as a refugee. Poirot solves mysteries with his “little grey cells”, occasionally without even leaving his room. With his strong preference for symmetry, order and method, he has something of a comic book character.

Captain Arthur Hastings is his best friend, who relies too much on his intuition to solve a mystery by himself, but often helps Poirot with his observations and accidental remarks. Poirot’s secretary, Miss Lemon, is very efficient, but in contrast to Hastings she doesn’t have any imagination. Chief Inspector Japp from Scotland Yard isn’t too bright, but Poirot often sends him in the right direction. Detective writer Ariadne Oliver, who is partly based on Agatha Christie herself, believes in female intuition.

Poirot is surely one of the greatest fictional detectives, because he was involved in so many unforgettable crime novels, including “The Murder of Roger Ackroyd”, “Murder on the Orient Express” and “Death on the Nile”. Poirot was brought to life in movies by actors Albert Finney and Peter Ustinov, and by David Suchet (photo) in the ITV series.

Miss Marple

Agatha Christie’s Miss Jane Marple appeared first in a series of short stories in a magazine, later collected as “The Thirteen Problems”. This elderly spinster with a remarkable talent for amateur sleuthing can be followed in twelve crime novels, including “The Murder at the Vicarage” (1930) and “The Body in the Library” (1943).

She lives in the small village of St Mary Mead, where she finds the opportunity to study human nature. She sees analogies with people and events she knows from village life, which helps her to solve many mysteries. Intuition and psychology are quite important to her. She can annoy the police investigators, who initially see her as an old busybody, until they have to admit she was right. She was played in movies by Margaret Rutherford and Angela Lansbury, and on TV by Helen Hayes, Joan Hickson (photo) and Geraldine McEwan.

Lord Peter Wimsey

Lord Peter Wimsey was created by British author Dorothy L. Sayers. He’s the archetypal gentleman detective. Solving crimes is a hobby for him. In the second novel “Clouds of Witness” (1926), he has to take action because his brother is suspected of murder. He’s a round character with a past. After getting injured during World War I he was rescued by his later manservant Bunter, who also helps him with his investigations.

Wimsey falls in love with Harriet Vine, and marries her. He likes to cooperate with Chief Inspector Charles Parker from Scotland Yard. These novels are still worth reading, because they are simply good literature with a broad perspective on British society in that era. Wimsey himself may be a gentleman, but he meets people from the lower classes, like the farmer in “Clouds of Witness” who suspects Wimsey of having an affair with his wife. Several actors have played Lord Peter Wimsey, including Ian Carmichael (photo) in a BBC series.

Jules Maigret

Commissaire Jules Maigret is the only one in this top ten whose stories were not written in English, but in French. Although his author, Georges Simenon, was Belgian, Maigret himself is French and works in Paris. He holds a quantity record by appearing in seventy-five novels and twenty-nine short stories. Maigret usually smokes a pipe, drinks a lot and wears a heavy overcoat.

He’s a more realistic character than most of his colleagues in the Golden Age of Detective Fiction. His method of investigation comes close to the way a real policeman would work. His successes are based on team work, routine research and tenacity, rather than individual brilliancy. Maigret has been played by several TV actors, of which Jean Gabin was the first, and Bruno Cremer (photo) the most famous.

Inspector Roderick Alleyn

Detective Chief-Inspector Roderick Alleyn (pronounced “Allen”) is a British detective who appears in thirty-two novels by New Zealand writer Ngaio Marsh. It started with “A Man Lay Dead” in 1934, when a murder game ends with a real murder. Other examples are “Vintage Murder”, “Artists in Crime”, and “Overture to Death” – where the murder method is especially interesting.

As the younger brother of a baronet Alleyn is another example of a gentleman detective. He works for Scotland Yard, where he eventually reaches the rank of Chief Superintendent. Society journalist Nigel Bathgate often helps him during his investigations. Initially a bachelor, Alleyn later marries painter Agatha Troy. Of the three actors who have played him in TV adaptions the best known is Patrick Malahide (photo).

Sam Spade

Private detective Sam Spade was invented by Dashiell Hammett. He only appears in one novel and three short stories, but remains important as the first example of a detective in the hard-boiled genre. Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, among others, was inspired by Sam Spade. Spade is the main character in “The Maltese Falcon” (1930).

He runs a detective agency in San Francisco with his partner Miles Archer, who gets killed early in the novel. He’s not afraid of a fist fight or firearms. He appears to be cynical, but still has a sense of duty. The story also involves a typical femme fatale. He was played by several actors, of which the most famous remains Humphrey Bogart (photo) in the movie adaption of 1941.

Philip Marlowe

Philip Marlowe is a private investigator created by American author Raymond Chandler. He appeared for the first time in “The Big Sleep”, in 1939. Other well-known titles are “The Lady in the Lake” and “The Long Goodbye”. Marlowe belongs to the hardboiled direction, influenced by Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade.

He smokes and drinks a lot. He lives in Hollywood, Los Angeles. The stories are set in the more dangerous neighbourhoods in and around this city. Violence, drugs and tough language occur frequently. Marlowe has been played by a lot of actors, including Humphrey Bogart in “The Big Sleep” and Powers Boothe (photo) in the ITV series “Philip Marlowe, Private Eye”.

Kinsey Millhone

Private detective Kinsey Millhone was created by American author Sue Grafton. She appears in the alphabet series: “A Is for Alibi”, “B Is for Burglar” etc. She lives in an apartment in Santa Teresa, California. This fictional town based on Santa Barbara was invented by another writer, Ross MacDonald. Kinsey is a bachelorette who runs a lot to stay in shape, and has an affair from time to time. I like these novels because they are entertaining and have a fast pace and strong plot. There’s always a certain amount of action involved too. There hasn’t been a film or TV adaption of these stories yet – maybe an idea for the future.

Detective Inspector Thomas Linley

Inspector Linley is a British detective created by the American author Elizabeth George. He’s the eighth Earl of Asherton. He solves crimes with his Scotland Yard colleague Detective Sergeant Barbara Havers, who has a working class background. In the third Linley novel, “Well-Schooled in Murder”, Linley and Havers solve a homicide case in an elite British public school, which is remarkably well depicted for a non-British author.

George always prepares her novels by studying real locations in England, which makes her stories more realistic than those of many other crime writers. Linley himself is a round character with weaknesses. His relationship with Lady Helen Clyde evolves through the novels. Linley and Havers are portrayed by Nathaniel Parker and Sharon Small (photo) in the BBC series “The Inspector Linley Mysteries”.

Famous Novels Inspired By Dreams

Everybody dreams, but most of the time our dreams are nothing more than the subconscious mind processing thoughts and feelings from our waking hours. Yet, every so often a creative individual has a vivid dream which inspires them to put pen to paper and create a great work of literature.

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Scotsman Robert Louis Stevenson was already a successful writer when he had a dream about a doctor with split personality disorder and woke up gripped by a creative frenzy. Stevenson quickly documented the scenes from his dream and then went on to write a first draft of his novel in less than three days. As was his custom, he allowed his wife to review the draft and, using her suggestions, edited and rewrote sections of the work (allegedly fueled by copious amounts of cocaine). He finished the entire manuscript in an astounding ten days, from the moment he woke up from his dream.

The story of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde has withstood the test of time, garnering dozens of stage and screen adaptations to this day.

Twilight

In June of 2003, suburban Arizona mother Stephenie Meyer woke up from an intense dream in which two young lovers were lying together in a meadow, discussing why their love could never work. On her website, Meyers says, “One of these people was just your average girl. The other person was fantastically beautiful, sparkly, and a vampire. They were discussing the difficulties inherent in the facts that A) they were falling in love with each other while B) the vampire was particularly attracted to the scent of her blood, and was having a difficult time restraining himself from killing her immediately.”

This dream turned out to be the very basis of what would become one of the most popular series in Young Adult fiction of all time. To date, Meyer’s novel has sold 17 million copies worldwide, spent over 91 weeks on the New York Times Best Seller list, and has spawned four subsequent novels and four big budget Hollywood movies.

Frankenstein

In 1816, Mary Shelley was just eighteen years old when she spent the summer with her lover (and future husband) Percy Shelley, at Lord Byron’s estate in Switzerland. One night, as they sat around the fire, the conversation turned to the subject of reanimating human bodies using electrical currents. Shelley went to bed that night with images of corpses coming back to life swirling through her head; as she slept, she clearly saw Frankenstein’s monster and imagined the circumstances under which he had been created.

Shelley woke up and began to write a short story about her dream. Later that year her husband, also a writer, encouraged her to expand her story into a full-length novel. She complied, and the great literary masterpiece Frankenstein was published when Shelley was just nineteen. Incidentally, Lord Byron was also inspired by their fireside chat; his resulting work, Vampyre, is considered to be the predecessor of all romantic vampire-human love stories.

Jonathan Livingston Seagull

In 1959, writer Richard Bach, an avid aviator, heard what he called a “disembodied voice” whisper the title of this novella into his ear. He immediately wrote the first few chapters of the work before running out of inspiration. He shelved the half-finished manuscript and it wasn’t until eight years later, after he had a dream about the now-famous titular seagull, that he was able to complete what is one of the most profound and philosophically-moving novellas ever written.

Bach’s fable was a surprise best-seller, eventually surpassing the hardcover sales record, set by Gone With The Wind. Though both his book and the manner in which it was conceived seem to have a strong connection to psychic phenomenon, Bach believes that good writing is more dependent on hard work than on anything metaphysical. He is quoted as saying, “You are never given a dream without also being given the power to make it true. You may have to work for it, however.”

So there you have it – dream big! You never know from whence you’ll get your next flash of inspiration.

Misery

Stephen King is one of the most prolific and popular writers of our time, so it may surprise you to learn that he came up with plot concepts and graphic images for a few of his novels while sound asleep. In the case of Misery, King describes falling asleep on an airplane and having a dream about a fan kidnapping her favorite author and holding him hostage. When he awoke, King was so anxious to capture the story of his dream that he sat at the airport and frantically wrote the first 40-50 pages of the novel. Misery became a best-seller that inspired a successful movie and earned Kathy Bates, who played deranged fan Annie Wilkes, a Best Actress Academy Award and Golden Globe.

King has been quoted as saying, “I’ve always used dreams the way you’d use mirrors to look at something you couldn’t see head-on, the way that you use a mirror to look at your hair in the back.” He credits his dreams with giving him the concepts for several of his novels and for helping him to solve troublesome moments in the writing of his novel IT as well. (Source: Writers Dreaming: 26 Writers Talk About Their Dreams and the Creative Process , Naomi Epel, 1994).

World Top Conspiracy Theory

Everyone enjoys hearing about a good conspiracy theory and many people enjoy coming up with new ones. You can spend an incredible amount of time reading about theories and wondering if there is any truth to them.

9/11 was Planned by the US Government [Wikpedia]

Many conspiracy theories have been presented concerning the September 11, 2001 attacks, many of them claiming that President George W. Bush and/or individuals in his administration knew about the attacks beforehand and purposefully allowed them to occur because the attacks would generate public support for militarization, expansion of the police state, and other intrusive foreign and domestic policies by which they would benefit.

Proponents point to the Project for the New American Century, a conservative think tank that argues for increased American global leadership, whose former members include ex-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Vice President Dick Cheney and several other key Bush administration figures. An 1990 report from the group stated that “some catastrophic and catalyzing event — like a new Pearl Harbor” would be needed to budge public opinion in their favor.

UFO Recovered at Roswell [Wikpedia]

The Roswell UFO Incident involved the recovery of materials near Roswell, New Mexico, USA, in July 1947, which have since become the subject of intense speculation, rumor, questioning and research. There are widely divergent views on what actually happened, and passionate debate about what evidence can be believed. The United States military maintains that what was recovered was a top-secret research balloon that had crashed.

By the early 1990s, UFO researchers such as Friedman, William Moore, Karl Pflock, and the team of Kevin Randle and Don Schmitt had interviewed several hundred people who had, or claimed to have had, a connection with the events at Roswell in 1947. Additionally, hundreds of documents were obtained via Freedom of Information Act requests, as were some apparently leaked by insiders, such as the disputed “Majestic 12″ documents. Their conclusions were that at least one alien craft had crashed in the Roswell vicinity, that aliens, some possibly still alive, were recovered, and that a massive cover-up of any knowledge of the incident was put in place.

John F. Kennedy’s Assasination [Wikpedia]

The assassination of John F. Kennedy, the thirty-fifth President of the United States, took place on Friday, November 22, 1963, in Dallas, Texas, USA at 12:30 p.m. CST (18:30 UTC). Kennedy was fatally wounded by gunshots while riding with his wife Jacqueline in a presidential motorcade through Dealey Plaza. The official investigation by the Warren Commission was conducted over a ten-month period, and its report was published in September 1964. The Commission concluded that the assassination was carried out solely by Lee Harvey Oswald, an employee of the Texas School Book Depository in Dealey Plaza.

Princess Diana was Murdered by the Royal Family [Wikpedia]

In 1997, Princess Diana (Princess of Wales) and Dodi Fayed (son of Mohamed Fayed, owner of the Ritz Hotel and Harrods) were killed in a car accident while trying to get away from press photographers in Paris. The scandal surrounding their relationship (Dodi was Muslim whilst Diana was the mother of the future head of the Church of England) has led many people to speculate that they were actually killed in order to prevent further scandal to the throne of England.

Jewish World Domination [Wikpedia]

This theory, in recent history, extends mainly from the booklet The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which are widely considered to be the beginning of contemporary conspiracy theory literature. The Protocols are considered by some to be an anti-Jewish literary forgery that purports to describe a Jewish plot to achieve world domination. Numerous independent investigations have repeatedly proven it to be a plagiarism and a hoax, yet numerous independent investigations have shown it to be a factual document.

The text was popularized by those opposed to Russian revolutionary movement, and was disseminated further after the revolution of 1905, becoming known worldwide after the 1917 October Revolution. It was widely circulated in the West in 1920 and thereafter. The Great Depression and the rise of Nazism were important developments in the history of the Protocols.

Apollo Moon Landing Hoax [Wikpedia]

Apollo Moon Landing hoax accusations are claims that some or all elements of the Apollo Moon landings were faked by NASA and possibly members of other involved organizations. Some groups and individuals have advanced alternate historical narratives which tend, to varying degrees, to state that the Apollo Astronauts did not land on the moon, and that NASA created and continues to perpetuate this hoax.

Pearl Harbor Was Allowed to Happen [Wikpedia]

This theory states that President Roosevelt (FDR) provoked the attack, knew about it in advance and covered up his failure to warn the Hawaiian commanders. FDR needed the attack to sucker Hitler to declare war, since the public and Congress were overwhelmingly against entering the war in Europe. It was his backdoor to war.

Theorists believe that the US was warned by, at least, the governments of Britain, Netherlands, Australia, Peru, Korea and the Soviet Union that a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor was coming. All important Japanese codes were broken. FDR and Marshall and others knew the attack was coming, allowed it and covered up their knowledge.

Most Evil Men and Women

This is are the lists of evil men and women and combines ranks the worst of the worst. Please tell us if you think someone else should be on the list.

Delphine LaLaurie

LaLaurie was a sadistic socialite who lived in New Orleans. Her home was a chamber of horrors. On April 10, 1834, a fire broke out in the mansion’s kitchen, and firefighters found two slaves chained to the stove. They appeared to have started the fire themselves, in order to attract attention. The firefighters were lead by other slaves to the attic, where the real surprise was.

Over a dozen disfigured and maimed slaves were manacled to the walls or floors. Several had been the subjects of gruesome medical experiments. One man appeared to be part of some bizarre sex change, a woman was trapped in a small cage with her limbs broken and reset to look like a crab, and another woman with arms and legs removed, and patches of her flesh sliced off in a circular motion to resemble a caterpillar.

Some had had their mouths sewn shut, and had subsequently starved to death, whilst others had their hands sewn to different parts of their bodies. Most were found dead, but some were alive and begging to be killed, to release them from the pain. LaLaurie fled before she could be bought to justice – she was never caught.

Ilse Koch

Known as The “Bitch of Buchenwald” because of her sadistic cruelty towards prisoners, Ilse Koch was married to another evil Nazi, who served in the SS, Karl Otto Koch, but outshone him in the depraved, inhumane disregard for life which was her trademark. She used her sexual prowess by wandering around the camps naked, with a whip, and if any man so much as glanced at her she would have them shot on the spot.

The most infamous accusation against Ilse Koch was that she had selected inmates with interesting tattoos to be killed, so that their skins could be made into lampshades for her home (though, unfortunately, no evidence of these lampshades has been found). After the war she was arrested and spent time in prison on different charges, eventually hanging herself in her cell in 1967, apparently consumed by guilt.

Shirō Ishii

Ishii was a microbiologist and the lieutenant general of Unit 731, a biological warfare unit of the Imperial Japanese Army during the Second Sino-Japanese War. He was born in the former Shibayama Village of Sanbu District in Chiba Prefecture, and studied medicine at Kyoto Imperial University. In 1932, he began his preliminary experiments in biological warfare as a secret project for the Japanese military. In 1936, Unit 731 was formed. Ishii built a huge compound — more than 150 buildings over six square kilometers — outside the city of Harbin, China.

Having been granted immunity by the American Occupation Authorities at the end of the war, Ishii never spent any time in jail for his crimes and died at the age of 67, of throat cancer.

Ivan IV of Russia

Ivan IV of Russia, also know as Ivan the Terrible, was the Grand Duke of Muscovy, from 1533 to 1547, and was the first ruler of Russia to assume the title of Tsar. In 1570, Ivan was under the belief that the elite of the city of Novgorod planned to defect to Poland, and led an army to stop them, on January 2. Ivan’s soldiers built walls around the perimeter of the city in order to prevent the people of the city escaping.

Between 500 and 1000 people were gathered every day by the troops, then tortured and killed in front of Ivan and his son. In 1581, Ivan beat his pregnant daughter-in-law for wearing immodest clothing, causing a miscarriage. His son, also named Ivan, upon learning of this, engaged in a heated argument with his father, which resulted in Ivan striking his son in the head with his pointed staff, causing his son’s (accidental) death.

Oliver Cromwell

The Cromwellian conquest of Ireland (1649–53) refers to the re-conquest of Ireland by the forces of the English Parliament, led by Oliver Cromwell, during the Wars of the Three Kingdoms. The consequence of this conquest (in order to displace Catholic authority) was 200,000 civilian deaths from war-related famine and disease, and 50 thousand Irish being taken as slaves.

Cromwell considered Catholics to be heretics so the Irish conquest was a modern day Crusade for him. The bitterness caused by the Cromwellian settlement was a powerful source of Irish nationalism from the 17th century onwards. He died in 1658, and was so hated that, in 1661, he was exhumed from the grave and given a posthumous execution – his corpse was hung in chains at Tyburn, and he was later dismembered and his remains thrown into a pit, with his head being displayed on a pole outside Westminster Hall for the next twenty-four years.

Jiang Qing

Jiang Qing was the wife of Mao Tse-tung, the Communist dictator of China. Through clever maneuvering, she managed to reach the highest position of power within the communist party (short of being President). It is believed that she was the main driving force behind China’s Cultural Revolution (of which she was the deputy director).

During the Cultural Revolution, much economic activity was halted, and countless ancient buildings, artifacts, antiques, books and paintings were destroyed by Red Guards. The 10 years of the Cultural Revolution also brought the education system to a virtual halt, and many intellectuals were sent to prison camps. Millions of people in China, reportedly, had their human rights annulled during the Cultural Revolution.

Millions more were also forcibly displaced. Estimates of the death toll – civilians and Red Guards – from various Western and Eastern sources are about 500,000 in the true years of chaos of 1966—1969, but some estimates are as high as 3 million deaths, with 36 million being persecuted.

Pol Pot

Pol Pot was the leader of the Khmer Rouge and the Prime Minister of Cambodia, from 1976 to 1979, having been de facto leader since mid-1975. During his time in power, Pol Pot imposed an extreme version of agrarian communism where all city dwellers were relocated to the countryside to work in collective farms and forced labour projects.

The combined effect of slave labour, malnutrition, poor medical care and executions is estimated to have killed around 2 million Cambodians (approximately one third of the population). His regime achieved special notoriety for singling out all intellectuals and other “bourgeois enemies” for murder. The Khmer Rouge committed mass executions in sites known as the Killing Fields. The executed were buried in mass graves. In order to save ammunition, executions were often carried out using hammers, axe handles, spades or sharpened bamboo sticks.

Heinrich Himmler

Heinrich Himmler, the architect of the holocaust and final solution, and considered to be the biggest mass murderer ever, by some (although it’s really Josef Stalin). The holocaust would not have happened if not for this man. He tried to breed a master race of Nordic appearance, the Aryan race.

His plans for racial purity were ended by Hitler’s vanity in making rash military decisions rather than letting his generals make them, thus ending the war prematurely. Himmler was captured after the war. He unsuccessfully tried to negotiate with the west, and was genuinely shocked to be treated as a criminal upon capture. He committed suicide by swallowing a cyanide capsule he had bit upon.

Adolf Hitler

Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany in 1933, becoming “Führer” in 1934 until his suicide in 1945. By the end of the second world war, Hitler’s policies of territorial conquest and racial subjugation had brought death and destruction to tens of millions of people, including the genocide of some six million Jews, in what is now known as the Holocaust.

On 30 April, 1945, after intense street-to-street combat, when Soviet troops were spotted within a block or two of the Reich Chancellory, Hitler committed suicide, shooting himself while simultaneously biting into a cyanide capsule. Hitler ranks over Himmler merely for the fact that it was in his power to prevent Himmler’s policies being implemented.

Josef Stalin

Stalin was General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union’s Central Committee, from 1922 until his death, in 1953. Under Stalin’s leadership, the Ukraine suffered from a famine (Holodomor) so great it is considered by many to be an act of genocide on the part of Stalin’s government.

Estimates of the number of deaths range from 2.5 million to 10 million. The famine was caused by direct political and administrative decisions. In addition to the famine, Stalin ordered purges within the Soviet Union of any person deemed to be an enemy of the state. In total, estimates of the number murdered under Stalins reign, range from 10 million to 60 million.

Amazing Noble Tree Wooden Sculptures

These beautiful noble tree wooden sculptures are fabulous as woods described in so many stories. Wizards, forest fairies, Mogli… living in the woods, and in this case are like Pinocchio and made of wood.