Of all the diverting entertainments that firearms have to offer, perhaps the most notorious is Russian roulette.  There’s not much to the rules.  All you need is a pistol that holds six bullets.  You put a bullet in one of the chambers, and everyone takes turns holding the gun to their heads until it goes off.  It’s quite a game, and it forces one to ask the question: why on earth would anyone play it?  And who came up with this, anyway? The first record of this game (and I’m using the term loosely) dates to Mikhail Lermontov’s 1840 novella The Fatalist.  In it, the game involves a gun with five live rounds and one empty chamber, and it’s played alone.  (The character who “plays” puts the gun to his head, pulls the trigger, and survives.)  In this story, this isn’t called Russian roulette.  It’s not called anything at all, though it does appear in a Russian novella. The term Russian roulette was coined almost a century later, in 1937, by Swis...

“Assassination has never changed the history of the world.”—Benjamin Disraeli In every country and in every time and in every point in history, citizens complain about corruption in their government. There are always people saying it’s never been worse. Sometimes they’re correct about that, too, but really, in most cases, you can find at least one point in history where corruption had been worse than however terrible it might happen to be right now. In America, for all the corruption that might be going on in the national and state capitals today, it’s reasonable to say that in the 1870s, corruption was much worse. Scandals plagued the administration of President Ulysses S. Grant, and his successor, Rutherford B. Hayes, didn’t manage to do much to clean things up, despite high expectations from the voters and his own best intentions. One big issue on the minds of critics of the day was the buying of offices, where a politician was allowed to offer a job to someone in exch...

Since the early thirteenth century, engineers have worked to streamline the process of beheading.  The earliest known beheading machine was the Halifax Gibbet, found in the town of Halifax, Yorkshire, England.  The first record of its existence dates from the year 1210, though the first public record of the Gibbet executing anyone comes from 1280.  It was a simple device: two long upright poles fitted with grooves would allow a heavy wooden block to be raised on a rope and dropped by the operator.  Attached to the block was an axe which would chop off the head of the criminal below.  The Gibbet was used for the execution of petty criminals, which was defined as anyone who stole (or who confessed to having stolen) money or goods worth 13½ pence or more.  The Gibbet was used to kill over 150 thieves between 1280 and 1650, when Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell abolished capital punishment for theft.  Certainly others were executed throughout England for...

A recent (May 10, 2019) news item caught the attention of longtime fans of Mad Magazine.  President Donald Trump (R) went after Mayor Pete Buttigieg (D) of South Bend, Indiana, who is seeking the 2020 Democratic nomination for president.  The current president unloaded with another one of his infamous Twitter attacks, likening the mayor to Alfred E. Neuman.  Buttigieg, displaying a quick wit, did not let this taunt go unmet.  “I’ll be honest.  I had to Google that,” Buttigieg said.  “I guess it’s just a generational thing.  I didn’t get the reference.  It’s kind of funny, I guess.  But he’s also president of the United States, and I’m surprised he’s not spending more time trying to salvage this China deal,” he told Politico.  Mayor Buttigieg’s response was clever, at once letting the press know that he can take a joke, and taking two shots at Trump, both calling him old and suggesting that he should spend more time doing his job and less...