The Encyclopedia of Bizarre Trivia (2nd Edition)

“Dive into a strange and messy journey through the most unbelievable facts our universe has to offer. This collection of mind-bending truths will completely shatter your perception of time, space, nature, and the human body. Get ready to question everything you thought you knew about reality itself.

I always get stuck thinking about how time feels so squished together in our heads when we try to remember history classes from high school. We look back at the past and just lump everything old into one big dusty pile of events that supposedly happened a long time ago. I realized how completely messed up my mental timeline was when I stumbled across the actual founding date of Oxford University. Teaching started at Oxford around the year 1096. The Aztec Empire did not even get off the ground until the city of Tenochtitlan was founded in 1325. My brain just refuses to accept that as reality. People were sitting in lecture halls in England listening to professors hundreds of years before the Aztecs built their famous empire in the Americas. It feels like a glitch in the simulation or a mistake in a history textbook. Once you start pulling at that little thread of history you find out the whole sweater of time is totally unraveling.

Take Cleopatra for instance. Most people associate her directly with ancient Egypt and the building of the Great Pyramid of Giza. She actually lived closer in time to the release of the[…]”