Emmett Till loved to laugh."He would pay people to tell him jokes," according to his cousin, Wheeler Parker. He also "loved to tell jokes," said childhood friend Richard Heard, who remembered Emmett being "a funny guy all the time."
Read MoreThe Pentagon, headquarters of the United States Department of Defense, is a remarkable feat of architectural design and structural engineering. And it's got a ton of bathrooms.
Read MoreBaba Yaga is Russian, she's scary, and she wants to eat you, but there's so much more. How do you know when you've found a Baba Yaga and not just a generic forest witch? Is she definitely going to eat you? Can you go to her for a solid deal on a good horse? This is the legend of Baba Yaga explained.
Read MoreAmerica's tragic history of racism is rooted at least in part in the nation's sordid history of slavery. Enter the Clotilda -- a poignant reminder of injustice.
Read MoreEvery time a metalhead throws up the devil horns and casts a protective ward against the evil eye, we're saying a small thank you to Ronnie James Dio. Here's how he passed.
Read MoreAn 1884 song observed that "A Boy's Best Friend is His Mother." It perfectly describes the relationship of King Henry VII of England -- father of the future Henry VIII, grandfather of Queen Elizabeth I -- and his mother, Margaret Beaufort.
Read MoreYes, 300 is based-ish on real events, but it portrays those events through a deeply goofy lens. As it turns out, the Spartans, the real Spartans, weren't what you'd call "TV ready."
Read MoreNevertheless, there are those who manage to cut a truly unique swath through the world of popular culture, even art, and sustain that unique place for the course of a career. By anyone's estimation, at the head of the pack would be the songwriter/director/actor/performer known as Prince.
Read MoreGenuine, committed, dyed-in-the-wool dog owners are like golfers: They're really easy to shop for. But there's one thing dog owners are split down the middle about -- dog beds? To buy or not to buy?
Read MoreIn the scant few months since its official unveiling, America's sixth military branch, the United States Space Force, has faced many battles. But its biggest foe of all may turn out to be ... Netflix.
Read More"Bruce Lee was my friend and teacher," Kareem Abdul Jabbar states simply, yet powerfully. The basketball superstar had started studying martial arts growing up in New York, and when he was a student at UCLA sought to continue that growth.
Read MoreQuick: what do George Floyd and Kente cloth have in common? Congressional Democrats were accused of using both of them in a photo op masquerading as a meaningful gesture.
Read MoreLegendary rock and roll/folk artist Neil Young is 74 years old, but that doesn't stop him from continuing to tour around the world and making and releasing music for his fans.
Read MoreThey say that some of the best things come by accident, something hard rock pioneers Led Zeppelin knew too well during the group's formation in the late 1960s.
Read MoreFunny how a little piece of cloth can become the focus of a political debate, and a political divide. But this is not our nation's first pandemic rodeo, and it's not the first time people got snippy about wearing masks in public to help control a public health menace.
Read MoreBram Stoker can thank his mom for some of the dark inspiration of Dracula.
Read MoreAt the 1972 Munich Games, a group of U.S. basketball players set out to make their hoop dreams come true, but this was no Olympic Dream Team. There was no Michael Jordan to make gravity look like an inconvenience, no "Mailman" like Karl Malone to deliver in the post, no Larry Bird or Magic Johnson.
Read MoreSave for its strange design choices and clunky build, the Zune was a quality MP3 player, which were in high demand in the mid-2000s. So why was it such a colossal failure?
Read MoreDepending on who you believe, a half-century of recordings -- about 500,000 of them -- went up in smoke from a fire at a warehouse at Universal Studios Hollywood in 2008.
Read MoreLots of people probably resent Aerosmith's success, are jealous of Steve Tyler and Joe Perry's combined levels of irresponsible personal debauchery...
Read MoreIf you happen to find yourself in New Jersey's Pine Barrens, keep an eye out for a scary cryptozoological creature which, these days, usually goes by the friendly name of the Jersey Devil. And no, it has nothing to do with hockey. This is the legend of the Jersey Devil explained.
Read MoreThroughout his musical career, Tom Petty accomplished many impressive milestones. He saw multiple number 1 hits on Billboard's charts, played the halftime show at the Super Bowl, and he released 13 studio albums. His early career was comprised of bands ...
Read MoreAfter two years of letters and in-person visits with "Son of Sam" David Berkowitz, it became abundantly clear to author and criminologist Dr. Scott Bonn that Berkowitz "relished his evil celebrity status and that he enjoyed terrorizing the city of New York ...
Read MoreSARS came and went -- which seems like a real glass-is-half-full potential outcome for the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020. Unfortunately, there's a small pile of reasons why it's unlikely that we'll see the same miraculous contagion disappearing act this time around.
Read MoreGet ready to buckle your swash, me hearties, to hear a tale of long ago from the High Seas, and there's a celebrity, and there's pirates! This one happened back around 75 BCE and it involves one of the few people from Ancient Rome that almost everybody can name: Julius Caesar.
Read More"Another insipidly sleazy, lizard-brain shoot-'em-up that through its very dullness demonstrates how rote such ghastly fare has become in our culture." "Instantly forgettable tough-guy fantasia." Just a few selected lines from reviews of the critically panned The Last Days of American Crime.
Read MoreIt sounds like the stuff of fantasy. An underwater ghost village in the Mediterranean? That's got to be a lost suburb of Atlantis, right? Do mermaid ghosts live there, and do they swim or just eerily pass through the water like it doesn't exist?
Read More
