Brain Breakers

All the fun of having an aneurysm, but in written form.

I’ve had a busy week, hence the quick movie piece on Wednesday and now this (reasonably) quick tour of some facts I came across in a Twitter thread, all based on the concept of time and intended to make your head hurt.

Enjoy! I guess…

• Dracula was written in 1897. This means the Count could have worn Levi jeans, drunk Coca Cola and owned products made by the Nintendo company.

• In 1843, the first Fax Machine was invented, billed as an “Electric Printing Telegraph.” Abraham Lincoln was assassinated in 1865. The Samurai class was disbanded in Japan in the 1870s, meaning that for twenty two years it was conceivable that a Samurai could have faxed Abraham Lincoln.

• Dinosaurs had already been dead for ten million years before grass evolved.

• Which is related in my head to the fact that sharks evolved before plants developed seeds and before Saturn had rings.

• If Marty McFly went back the same distance in time right now, he’d see his parents in school in 1991.

• Martin Luther King and Anne Frank were born the same year. Betty White from the Golden Girls was born seven years before that, and most recently voiced a character in Toy Story 4.

• France carried out its last guillotining the same year that Star Wars came out.

• Which seems weird until you realise that Star Wars is as distant to the modern day as King Kong was to Star Wars.

• Oh, sharks are also older than trees.

• Rosa Parks died after YouTube was started.

• Jimmy Carter was the first American President born in a hospital.

• Obama was the first (and so far only) American president born under the same flag that flew while he was president.

• Returning to Carter, if America kept the same people as President but functioned as a hereditary system where one passed it on to the next, Carter would be the fourth President. (Washington died in 1799, James Buchanan was born in 1791 and lived to 1868, William Taft was born 1857 and lived to 1930, Carter was born in 1924 and is still alive.)

• To put Carter’s age in perspective, here he is playing a guitar made out of a tree that he planted:

  

• The Appalachian mountain range is older than multicellular life. Within it, there are still caves you can visit that have been there longer than animals with bones have existed.

• If Elon Musk gave away a million dollars a day, it would take him more than eight hundred years to go broke.

• He won’t because he’s a prick.

• If you’d made a thousand dollars a week since the birth of Christ, you still wouldn’t be as rich as that prick Elon Musk.

• If you’d made five grand a day since Columbus set sail, you still wouldn’t even be a billionaire. In fact, you wouldn’t even have the amount of money that Jeff Bezos earns in a week.

• If all this money is pissing you off, bear in mind that it’s all about how you spend it. The Large Hadron Collider at CERN is the largest machine ever built, it’s seventeen miles long and has been used to conduct revolutionary experiments in physics. The UK’s COVID track & trace app cost 4.6 times as much and does fuck all.