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Ten compact stories for the part of the day where your phone is the only management meeting you're willing to attend. All factual. All strange enough to repeat later.
READ ONE. READ TEN. ACT LIKE YOU ALREADY KNEW THEM.Built to be read fast. Sources are right there because making shit up is for the group chat.
NIPSCO says roughly 370,000 customers lost power during the August 11 storm sequence. Eleven days later, more than 30,000 were still out. That is system-level damage, not routine storm cleanup.
SOURCE: ABC 7 Chicago ↗Only four commodity vessels crossed Thursday, with no large crude or LNG carriers. A shipping bottleneck overseas lands here as fuel, freight and grocery pressure.
SOURCE: Reuters ↗In 1904, the General Slocum was carrying families from St. Mark’s Evangelical Lutheran Church on an excursion when fire swept through the steamship in New York’s East River. More than 1,000 people died. It remained the New York area’s deadliest individual disaster until September 11.
SOURCE: Library of Congress ↗In 1518, people in Strasbourg began dancing uncontrollably in the streets. Within weeks, accounts described a crowd in the hundreds. Authorities responded by hiring musicians and building a stage for them. The cause of the outbreak remains disputed.
SOURCE: The Public Domain Review ↗In the 1960s, the CIA explored wiring a cat with a microphone and transmitter so it could drift near conversations without attracting attention. The hardware was one thing. Getting a cat to follow orders was another. The project became known as Acoustic Kitty.
SOURCE: CIA ↗In 1986, Lake Nyos suddenly released an enormous cloud of carbon dioxide that poured downhill into nearby villages. People and livestock suffocated. The killer was not lava or water. It was a dense, invisible gas cloud rolling through the valleys.
SOURCE: U.S. Geological Survey ↗USS Akron was a 785-foot rigid airship designed to carry small fighter planes inside its hull. In 1933, it crashed into the Atlantic off New Jersey during a thunderstorm. Seventy-three people died. Only three survived.
SOURCE: Naval History and Heritage Command ↗Mount Tambora erupted in 1815 and helped drive global temperatures downward. Frost and snow hit parts of North America during the normal growing season. Crops failed, the weather went sideways, and 1816 became known as the Year Without a Summer.
SOURCE: National Park Service ↗Camp Century contained tunnels, laboratories, living quarters and a portable nuclear reactor. Behind its research mission sat Project Iceworm: a plan to see whether nuclear missiles could be hidden beneath the ice. The missile network was never built.
SOURCE: Cold Regions Research & Engineering Laboratory ↗In 1835, the New York Sun convinced readers that astronomers had discovered life on the Moon. The stories described unicorns, bizarre animals and bat-like humanoids seen through a telescope. It became the Great Moon Hoax. The creatures existed only in print.
SOURCE: OPEN THE FULL FEATURE ↗In 1917, a French munitions ship caught fire and detonated in Halifax Harbour. The blast flattened huge sections of the city and killed nearly 2,000 people. Before the atomic bomb, it was the largest human-made explosion on record.
SOURCE: Canadian War Museum ↗In 897, Pope Formosus had been dead for months when his corpse was dressed in papal robes and seated before a church court. He was found guilty, stripped of his vestments, and his papacy was declared invalid. History calls it the Cadaver Synod.
SOURCE: Columbia University ↗