Liu Ziye

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A Coleman white gas lantern mantle glowing at full brightness

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Liu Ziye forced his own aunts into his imperial harem, declared them imperial concubines, then was stabbed to death by a palace servant at sixteen — his ministers had arranged the blade.

A sitting president joked, live on stage, that he should have 'gone first' before soldiers raped and killed Australian missionary Jacqueline Hamill in 1989. The crowd laughed. He won the election anyway.

The pronghorn runs at 55 mph with an endurance no living predator can match — because it evolved to outrun the American cheetah, extinct for 10,000 years. It is the fastest land animal on a continent that no longer threatens it.

Aldrich Ames ran the CIA's Soviet counterintelligence division while methodically selling its agent roster to Moscow. Within a year of his first data dump in 1985, at least ten CIA assets inside the Soviet Union were executed.

Valerie Solanas self-published the SCUM Manifesto in 1967 and sold it on the street — 10 cents for men, free for women. One year later she shot Andy Warhol. The manifesto was reprinted 40 times after.

Before electricity, a mesh sock soaked in radioactive thorium dioxide burned inside every middle-class parlour lamp. The mantles crumbled to radioactive dust when touched. Millions were sold; none came with warnings.

NBA referee Tim Donaghy bet on games he personally officiated from 2005 to 2007, adjusting foul calls to swing point spreads. He pled guilty to two federal felony counts and served 15 months.

Soviet serial killer Nikolai Dzhumagaliev served human meat kebabs to guests at dinner parties in 1980s Kazakhstan, his metal front teeth gleaming. At least seven women were killed and partially eaten before a guest found a head in his fridge.

The Tesem, a sleek prick-eared hound depicted on pre-dynastic pottery circa 4000 BCE, was buried in pharaonic tombs with its own name-stele and food offerings. Amenhotep II had four interred with him at death.