Niccolo Machiavelli and Leonardo Da Vinci, most likely at the behest of the Borgias, once conspired to steal a river.
That’s right folks. They planned to change the course of the Arno River so that they could steal it from Pisa and make Florence accessible by sea.
Please take a moment to imagine that.
Please.
‘So we just divert the -’
‘Don’t worry they won’t notice a thing’
100% better than National Treasure.
This should be a wacky bromance heist film. We need more wacky historical heist films.
It gets better. I just had to go check on the veracity of this and discovered MORE.
Their plan failed, at which point Machiavelli decided to quietly fade out of politics…and went on to write The Prince, one of the most (in)famous pieces of Western literature.
Da Vinci, meanwhile, never forgot the river that got away. In fact, he made it the background of one of his most famous paintings–hell, one of the most famous paintings, period.
Fun fact: Tenochtitlan fell in 1521. From 1603 onwards, large numbers of honest-to-god fricking Japanese Samurai came to Mexico from Japan to work as guardsmen and mercenaries.
Ergo, it would be 100% historically accurate to write a story starring a quartet consisting of the child or grandchild of Aztec Noblemen, an escaped African slave, a Spanish Jew fleeing the Inquisition (which was relaxed in Mexico in 1606, for a time) and a Katana-wielding Samurai in Colonial Mexico.
Also a whole bunch of Chinese Characters BECAUSE MEXICO CITY HAD A CHINATOWN WITHIN TEN YEARS OF THE FALL OF THE AZTEC EMPIRE.
Okay friends today we are gonna learn
about the GHOST ARMY, which, disappointingly, was not actually an
army made of ghosts
pictured: the unit patch for the
Ghost Army, which is DOPE AS FUCK
see one of the things that made WWII so
fucking nuts was the totally bizarre level of technology. Like wow we
invented the first real computer and radar but also if you wanted to
see how many troops were hanging out somewhere you had to send a dude
to fly over and take pictures manually??? this left A LOT of room for
shenanigans
so the normal method of dealing with
aerial surveillance was to cover shit with camouflage netting. Say
you’ve got an nice air base that you really don’t want any bombs
dropped on- you literally just cover that with a ludicrous amount of
netting and some fake trees and BAM now it looks like just an empty
field from the air
there’s a building under that weird
lump
that’s cool! That’s
really cool! But not cool enough
At some point
somebody sat down and went “hey wait. What if…what if instead of
disguising buildings and units as fields, we disguise fields as
units”
holy fucking
shit!!!
the British had
used a bunch of fake tanks and like, boxes of provisions stacked up
in tank shape and then covered with a tarp in 1942 during Operation
Bertram and it worked really well, but they didn’t have a special
unit devoted to just clowning on the Germans like that.
so the US military
decides they do want a designated clowning unit and goes out and
recruits a bunch of fucking nerds from all the art schools and makes
them into the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops aka THE
GHOST ARMY, WHY THE FUCK WOULD YOU USE ANY OTHER NAME LIKE SERIOUSLY
the ghost army’s
job was basically to go in, sidle up to a real unit, and then
basically set up a fake version of that unit while the actual unit
sneaked away to go dunk on Nazis where the Nazis weren’t expecting
them
okay time to get
into the really cool part of this story, which is HOW the ghost army
faked being a real unit:
step 1: INFLATABLE
TANKS AND AIRCRAFT OH MY GOD
that’s a big ol balloon!!!
the ghost army had
a stockpile of inflatable tanks, aircraft, artillery, cars, whatever,
that they would set up and then poorly cover with camouflage
netting so from the air it looked like someone had just done a
real shit job of hiding actual materiel. They even had dummy soldiers
that they would set up to make the scene look populated, since the
ghost army itself was about 1,000 dudes regularly imitating units of 30,000 men
what’s really cool
is that visual deception was more than just the inflatable stuff
itself. If the ghost army plopped down a balloon tank, they then also
had to go out with shovels and rakes and shit to make a fake track
that a real tank would have left, because it turns out tanks are
really hard on your landscaping
step 2: “spoof
radio”
the last couple of
days before the real unit moved out, the radio operators of the ghost
army would move in. see, radio transmissions were done in Morse code,
and it turns out every radio operator has a slightly different “fist”
when typing Morse. A “fist” is basically typing style- some
people would take longer to type out certain letters or would have
pauses between groups or anything like. Anybody listening to the
radio transmissions who was skilled enough could tell different radio
operators apart from just their fist
anyway the ghost
army operators would move in and basically listen to all the real
unit’s radio transmissions until they had learned the real operators’
fists. Then they would take over radio traffic, imitating that fist
so it seemed like the real operator had never left. I forgot to make
this section funny because I was too caught up in how rad it is SORRY
step 3: making a
lot of noise
the ghost army had
special trucks fitted with huge fuck off speakers and a whole library
of stock sound effects. Once the real unit left and the fake unit
inflated, the sound trucks would come in, select a combination of
sound effects that matched the unit they were impersonating, and then
played everyone in the 15 mile radius of the speakers their fire mix
tape
step 4: fuckin
partying!!!
see the thing about
impersonating your own units is that other allied units would know
about it and might talk about it where enemy collaborators could
hear. So the ghost army had to fool the Germans but they also had to
fool their own army. Every time they impersonated a new unit,
the ghost soldiers would paint that unit’s insignia on all the fake
materiel, make fake signs with the unit’s name and colors, and sew
the unit’s patches on their own uniforms
once they were
dressed up as soldiers from the impersonated unit, the ghost army
dudes would go into town and mingle with other soldiers from actual
fighting units nearby and hang out in bars while loudly saying things
like “YES HELLO I AM DEFINITELY A REAL SOLDIER FROM THE WHATEVER
DIVISION, ABSOLUTELY FOR REAL STATIONED ON THAT HILL OVER THERE”
so anyway this
bunch of weedy American art nerds staged 20+ battlefield deceptions
between 1944 and the end of the war, sometimes fooling that Germans
so successfully that they actually got shelled
I’mma leave you
with this quote from the book “The Ghost Army of World War II” by
Rick Beyer and Elizabeth Sayles, because it’s a quote from an actual
member of the Ghost Army and that alone makes it funnier than
anything I could ever write:
On another
occasion, two Frenchmen on bicycles somehow got through the security
perimeter. Shilstone managed to halt them, but not before they had
seen more than they should. “What they thought they saw was four
GIs picking up a forty-ton Sherman tank and turning it around. They
looked at me, and they were looking for answers, and I finally said
‘The Americans are very strong.‘”
Colophon: a statement at the end of a book containing the scribe or owner’s name, date of completion, or bitching about how hard it is to write a book in the dark ages
Oh, my hand
The parchment is very hairy
Thank God it will soon be dark
St. Patrick of Armagh, deliver me from writing
Now I’ve written the whole thing; for Christ’s sake give me a drink
Oh d fuckin abbot
Massive hangover
Whoever translated these Gospels did a very poor job
Cursed be the pesty cat that urinated over this book during the night
If someone else would like such a handsome book, come and look me up in Paris, across from the Notre Dame cathedral
I shall remember, O Christ, that I am writing of Thee, because I am wrecked today
Do not reproach me concerning the letters, the ink is bad and the parchment scanty and the day is dark
11 golden letters, 8 shilling each; 700 letters with double shafts, 7 shilling for each hundred; and 35 quires of text, each 16 leaves, at 3 shilling each. For such an amount I won’t write again
Here ends the second part of the title work of Brother Thomas Aquinas of the Dominican Order; very long, very verbose; and very tedious for the scribe; thank God, thank God, and again thank God
If anyone take away this book, let him die the death, let him be fried in a pan; let the falling sickness and fever seize him; let him be broken on the wheel, and hanged. Amen
My bros I have been doing a lot of
reading about Wacky WWII Hijinks lately and I want to tell you a
story because I love it okay
once upon a time there was a dude in
Spain named Juan Pujol Garcia. Pujol was a chicken farmer. Pujol
hated him some goddamn fascists.
See Spain had recently ended its civil
war, with the fascists taking power. So when WWII broke out in
Europe, Spain technically remained neutral but in practice was buddy
buddy with the Nazis. Juan Pujol Garcia thought this was pretty
bullshit
so soon after war breaks out Pujol
travels to his local British embassy and goes “hey I wanna spy on
the Nazis for you”
“who the fuck are you?” say the
British, and kick him out
but Pujol is not deterred! He still
wants to dunk on some fascists, so now he goes to his local German embassy instead. “hey” he
says, “I wanna spy on the British for you, I sure do hate them”
“yeah
okay” say the Germans “that seems pretty legit”
and
just like that Pujol now officially works for the Abwehr, the German
intelligence agency. They hand him some spy gear (invisible ink and
such) and instruct him to travel to Lisbon, and from there make his
way into the UK. So Pujol heads to Lisbon, and a little while later
writes to his German handlers telling them he’s made it to England
Pujol
had not made it to England. He had, in fact, made it to the Lisbon
public library, where he checked out a number of English guide books
and set about just wholesale making shit up
this
is slightly complicated by the fact that, for example, he completely
did not understand British currency and all his expense reports were
basically gibberish. He also reported things like bribing Scotsmen,
because the people of Glasgow would “do anything for a litre of
wine” (an actual quote) because, hey, people in Spain like wine so
that’s probably the same right?
Here
is where it starts to get really crazy, because the Abwehr loves
this. “wow this dude is a
great spy” they say, because apparently none of them had ever been
the England either. In fact, they are so pumped about this new
awesome spy that the British start to get worried
you
see, by this time the British had cracked German’s supposedly
unbreakable Enigma code and were totally dunking on the Nazis by
reading basically all of their ~super top secret~ radio
transmissions. And, crucially, they’d become so good at breaking and
reading traffic that there were literally no German spies in England.
The Germans would set up a spy drop (usually dropping dudes in by
parachute in the middle of the night), the British would intercept
the message and then just scoop the dudes up as soon as they landed
in a move that must have been SUPER embarrassing to the spies
so
there are no German spies in the UK because they’re all sitting in a
prison run by MI5 (although some are being run under supervision as
double agents, feeding Germany bullshit). But suddenly MI5 is picking
up all this traffic from the Germans talking about their super great
spy- a spy the British do not have in their jail
“oh
shit” says MI5, and starts rereading all the transmissions they
have to and from this mysterious super spy.
“hey
wait” says MI5, upon actually reading the shit the spy was sending.
“someone is playing silly buggers, pip pip cheerio”
At
this point, Pujol, still in Lisbon, had actually been approaching the
British embassy again, repeatedly, but apparently “I am literally
an Abwehr agent and would like to offer you my services” wasn’t
interesting enough, because he was repeatedly turned away, again. It wasn’t until MI5 started
asking around that one of the embassy staff was like “oh yeah we
know that guy”
so in
1942 the British finally make contact with Pujol and he officially
becomes a spy for MI5. They move him to London and assign him a case
officer so he can start making up even better bullshit
and he
does. Once actually in London, Pujol reports to the Abwehr that he’d
recruited a whole slew of informants- from a bunch of Welsh Aryans to
disaffected army officers. He ends up with a network of 20+
sub-spies, all feeding him information from around the UK
none of these people actually exist
Pujol
just straight up invented like 20 people, keeping careful track of
their fake personalities, names, and activities. With the help of
MI5, the information he sends becomes even better- a mix of true but
ultimately useless facts and actually important intel timed to arrive
in Germany just slightly too late to be of any use. He and his “spy
network” become the Abwehr’s most trusted agents
Pujol,
now codenamed Agent Garbo (for his acting skills), ends up playing a
huge role in the run-up to D-Day, where the Allies mounted a huge
intelligence campaign to convince Hitler that the planned site of
attack was going to be Calais and not Normandy (this was Operation
Fortitude and you should absolutely look it up for more Wacky WWII
Adventures). Obviously you know how this ended
crazily
enough, the Abwehr never figured out that Pujol was a double agent.
After the war he received both the Iron Cross Second Class (which
require personal authorization from Hitler), and a
Member of the Order of the British Empire (from King George VI)
unable
to resist being totally fucking ridiculous,
Pujol turned down MI5’s post-war offer to continue spying, but this
time against the USSR. “no,” he said “just help me fake my own
death and then I’m moving to Venezuela”
and
that’s exactly what he did. Juan Garcia Pujol died in 1988, at the
age of 76
and at no point has anyone thought “maybe we should not build a giant flammable goat this year”
They tried fireproofing. And armed guards. And fences, and cameras… Sadly the wikipedia page has been cut down by super srs folks to remove all the awesome Keystone cops tales of the goat’s history (emphasis added by me)
1966 Stig Gavlén came up with the idea of a giant goat made out of straw. But it turned out that Gavlén organisation did not have enough funding for the goat. Then Harry Ström, who at that time was the chairman of the Södra Kungsgatan Ideella Förening (a non-profit society), decided to pay the whole cost for the goat out of his own pocket. The goat stood until midnight of New Year’s Eve, when it went up in flames. The perpetrator, who was from Hofors,Gästrikland, was found and convicted of vandalism. The first goat was insured and Ström got all his money back.
1967 Nothing happened.
1968 The goat survived. A fence was built around the goat. Previously it was popular for children to play hide-and-seek inside and around the goat. There was also a rumor that one night a couple had sex inside the goat. In subsequent years the inside of the goat was protected by a chicken-wire net.
1969 The goat was burnt down on New Year’s Eve.
1970 The goat was burnt down only six hours after it was assembled. Two very drunk teenagers were connected with the crime. With help from several financial contributors the goat was reassembled out of lake reed.
1971 The Southern Merchants got tired of their goats being burned and stopped building the goat. The Natural Science Club (Naturvetenskapliga Föreningen:NF) from the School of Vasa (Vasaskolan) took over.
1984Burnt down on 12 December, the night before Lucia.
1985 The 12.5 metre (41 ft) tall goat of the Natural Science Club was featured in the Guinness Book of Records for the first time. Even though the goat was enclosed by a 2 metres (6.6 ft) high metal fence, guarded by Securitas and even soldiers from the Gävle I 14 InfantryRegiment, it was burnt down in January.
1986 The merchants of Gävle decided they were willing to build the goat once again. From 1986 on two goats were built, the Southern Merchants’ and the School of Vasa’s. The big goat burnt down the night before Christmas Eve.
1987A heavily fireproofed goat was built. It got burnt down a week before Christmas.[21]
1988 Nothing happened to the goat, but gamblers were for the first time able to gamble on the fate of the goat with English bookmakers.
1989 Again, the goat burnt down before it was assembled. Financial contributions from the public were raised to rebuild a goat that was burnt down in January. In March 1990 another goat was built, this time for the shooting of a Swedish motion picture called Black Jack.
1990Nothing happened. The goat was guarded by many volunteers.
1991 The goat was joined by an advertising sled, that turned out to be illegally built. On the morning of Christmas Eve the goat was burnt down. It was later rebuilt to be taken to Stockholm as a part of a protest campaign against the closing of the I 14 Infantry Regiment.
1992The goat was burnt down eight days after it was built. The Natural Science Club’s goat burnt down the same night. The Southern Merchants’ goat was rebuilt, but burned down on 20 December. The perpetrator of the three attacks was caught and sent to jail. The Goat Committee was founded in 1992.
1993 Once more the goat was featured in the Guinness Book of Records, the School of Vasa’s goat measured 14.9 metres (49 ft). The goat was guarded by taxis and the Swedish Home Guard. Nothing happened.
1994 Nothing happened. The goat followed the Swedish national hockey team to Italy for the World Championship in hockey.
1995 A Norwegian was arrested for attempting to burn down the goat. Burnt down on the morning of Christmas Day. Rebuilt to be standing before the 550th anniversary of Gävle county.
1996 The first time the goat was guarded by webcams, nothing happened.
1997Damaged by fireworks. The Natural Science Club’s goat was attacked too, but survived with minor damage.
1998Burnt down on 11 December, even though there was a major blizzard. Was rebuilt.
1999Burnt down only a couple of hours after it was erected. Rebuilt again before Lucia. The Natural Science Club’s goat was burnt down as well.
2000Burnt down a couple of days before New Year’s Eve. The Natural Science Club’s goat got tossed in the Gävle river.
2001 Goat set on fire on 23 December by Lawrence Jones, a 51-year-old visitor from Cleveland, Ohio, who spent 18 days in jail and was subsequently convicted and ordered to pay 100,000 Swedish kronor in damages. The court confiscated Jones’s cigarette lighter with the argument that he clearly was not able to handle it. Jones stated in court that he was no “goat burner”, and believed that he was taking part in a completely legal goat-burning tradition. After Jones was released from jail he went straight back to the US without paying his fine. As of 2006 it was still unpaid. The Natural Science Club’s goat was also burnt down.
2002 A 22 year old from Stockholm tried to set the Southern Merchants’ goat on fire, but failed, the goat receiving only minor damage. On Lucia the goat was guarded by Swedish radio and TV personality Gert Fylking.
2003Burnt down on 12 December.
2004Burnt 21 December, only three days before Christmas Eve. The fire brigade quickly arrived on the scene, but the goat could not be saved. No new goat was built.
2005Burnt by unknown vandals reportedly dressed as Santa and the gingerbread man, by shooting a flaming arrow at the goat at 21:00 on 3 December. Reconstructed on 5 December. The hunt for the arsonist responsible for the goat-burning in 2005 was featured on the weekly Swedish live broadcast TV3’s “Most Wanted“ (”Efterlyst”) on 8 December.
2006 On the night of 15 December at 03:00, someone tried to set fire to the goat by dousing the right front leg in petrol (gasoline). The red ribbon on that leg was slightly burned and fell off. The lower part of the right leg was scorched, but the rest of the goat failed to light. The leg was repaired that morning. The Natural Science Club’s goat was burned at about 00:40 on 20 December; the vandals were not seen and got away. On the night of 25 December, a drunken man managed to climb up on the goat. Before the police arrived on the scene the man climbed down and disappeared. He did not try to set fire to the goat. The Southern Merchants’ goat survived New Year’s Eve and was taken down on 2 January. It is now stored in a secret location.
2007 The Natural Science Club’s goat was toppled on 13 December and was burned on the night of 24 December. The Southern Merchants’ goat survived.
2008 10,000 people turned out for the inauguration of one of the goats. No back-up goat was built to replace the main goat should the worst happen, nor was the goat treated with flame repellent (Anna Östman, spokesperson of the Goat-committee said the repellent made it look ugly in the previous years, like a brown terrier). On 16 December the Natural Science Club’s Goat was vandalised and later removed. On 26 December there was an attempt to burn down the Southern Merchants’ Goat but patriotic passers-by managed to extinguish the fire. The following day the goat finally succumbed to the flames ignited by an unknown assailant at 03:50 CET.
2009 A person attempted to set the Southern Merchants’ goat on fire the night of 7 December. An unsuccessful attempt was made to throw the Natural Science Club’s goat into the river the weekend of 11 December. The culprit then tried, again without success, to set the goat on fire. Someone stole the Natural Science Club’s goat utilizing a truck the night of 14 December.[36] On the night of 23 December before 04:00 the South Merchant goat was set on fire and was burned to the frame, even though it had a thick layer of snow on its back.[37] The goat had two online webcams which were put out of service by aDoS attack, instigated by computer hackers just before the burning.[38]
2010 On the night of 2 December, arsonists made an unsuccessful attempt to burn the Natural Science Club’s goat.[39] On 17 December, a Swedish news site reported that one of the guards tasked with protecting the Southern Merchants’ goat had been offered payment to leave his post so that the goat could be stolen via helicopter and transported to Stockholm. Both goats survived and were dismantled and returned to storage in early January 2011.
2011 The inauguration of the goat took place on 27 November. The fire-fighters of Gävle sprayed the goat with water to create a coating of ice in the hope of protecting it from arson. The goat was burnt down in the early morning of 2 December.
2012 The inauguration of the goat took place on 2 December. It was burnt just ten days later in the hours before midnight of 12 December, one day before Lucia.
2013 As in 2006 and 2007, the straw used to build the goat has been soaked in anti-flammable liquid to prevent it from burning in the event of an arson attack. The inauguration ceremony took place on 1 December. But despite the anti-flammable liquids the goat was burnt down on the early morning of December 21.
Any history of plots involving a DDoS attack on the security cameras, a plot to steal it with a helicopter and flaming arrows shot by people dressed as Santa and the Gingerbread man is just plain hilarious in my book.
I’m laughing so much about this goat. obviously if you build something big enough people are going to have sex in it and burn it down. obviously
2016 update: it’s the 50th anniversary so, naturally, it needs a birthday party. Streamed, apparently w a fucking english commentator for all the world to enjoy. It’s gonna be cringeworthy for sure. Also, it’s wearing a bow tie.
which probably won’t dissuade aspiring goat murderers any more than its cutesy tweets have, but can’t fault them for trying.
Bertha Boronda (from the first San Quentin photo set I posted) was sentenced to five years in prison for “Mayhem” in 1908.
What’s “Mayhem” you ask? Apparently in Bertha’s case, it’s cutting off your cheating husband’s penis with a straight razor, disguising yourself as a man and fleeing by bicycle.
Steel Phoenix Studios 