Halo: Combat Evolved

Kanuni i Lek Dukagjinit

A slab of pykrete

Plate 34: Por una navaja ( For a clasp knife ). A garroted priest grasps a crucifix in his hands. Pinned to his chest is a description of the crime for which he was killed—possession of a knife.

Halo: Combat Evolved

The Halo Array — a ring 10,000 kilometers in diameter, built by an ancient civilization to starve a galactic parasite — introduced a battlefield so cosmically scaled that its grass and wind physics alone required a dedicated hardware chip on launch.

Calamity Jane

Calamity Jane scouted in men's clothes, claimed to have served under Custer, and demanded burial beside Wild Bill Hickok — a man she may have met only briefly. Deadwood gave her what she wanted in 1903.

Kanun (Albania)

The Kanun of Lekë Dukagjini sets a precise cash tariff for murder, specifies which rooms of a house grant sanctuary, and has been cited in Albanian court defenses as recently as the 1990s.

Drexel Burnham Lambert

Drexel Burnham Lambert collapsed in February 1990, wiping out in days the firm that had financed the entire decade of hostile takeovers. It left a $650 million crater and 5,000 unemployed bankers before a single competitor blinked.

Vlad the Impaler

He lined the road to his own capital with 20,000 impaled Ottoman corpses as a greeting for Sultan Mehmed II. Mehmed turned his army around and went home.

Pykrete

Pykrete — 14% sawdust locked in ice — stopped bullets in tests and barely melted. Project Habbakuk planned a 2-million-ton aircraft carrier made of it; a scale model was demonstrated to Churchill in a Quebec hotel bathtub.

Battle of the Little Bighorn

Custer split his 700-man 7th Cavalry into three columns at Little Bighorn, then led 210 men in a direct charge against a Lakota-Cheyenne encampment later estimated at 1,500–2,000 warriors. Not one of his column survived.

The Disasters of War

Goya etched 82 plates of castrated soldiers, impaled civilians, and mass graves — then hid them. They weren't published until 1863, 35 years after his death. The plates still exist; one shows a man arranged like a broken doll.

Phineas Gage

In 1848, a 3.5-cm iron tamping rod blasted through Phineas Gage's left cheekbone and out the top of his skull. He survived, walked to a cart — and became an entirely different man.