Ripley Entertainment Inc.'s Blog, page 353
March 30, 2018
March 29, 2018
Marie Antoinette Never Said “Let Them Eat Cake”
Featured in Ripley's Believe It or Not!
Or Not
In today’s world many misconceptions have been perpetuated—becoming modern day “facts”—when, in reality, myths and hearsay have taken over. Sorry to burst your bubble, but in this weekly column, Ripley’s puts those delusions to the test, turning your world upside down, because you can’t always…Believe It!
Today: Marie Antoinette never said “Let them eat cake.”
Let Them Eat Cake
The phrase “Let them eat cake” lives in infamy as the privileged retort from Marie Antoinette when she was informed the peasant populace was starving with no bread to eat. But did the Queen really make so insensitive a statement, or was it just 18th-century fake news?
The young Austrian princess in hunting attire.
The Phrase
A summation and a rhetorical piece of false logic, the phrase is used to highlight the obliviousness of the rich and powerful to the lives and plight of the common people.
Marie Antoinette was indeed rich and spent lavishly on dresses and jewels, but she probably wasn’t the air-head she’s made out to be. For one, when she was asked to buy a set of jewels meant for the previous Queen, she refused and suggested her husband instead spend the money on France’s navy. For two, she wrote coded messages to other countries asking for help restoring the monarchy to France after she and her husband were imprisoned during the French Revolution.
The latter feat would eventually earn her an appointment with the guillotine, but she had at least some understanding of her political situation.
Less Popular Acts
Despite her supposed disconnect from her subjects, she did exhibit a less-than-popular curiosity with peasant life. Facing growing stress in the palace, Antoinette had an entire Austrian village built on palace grounds where she and her ladies in waiting would dress as peasants and cavort around to feel “normal.”
The queen’s private village.
She also got in trouble with that diamond necklace we mentioned before. Believe it or not, an imposter on the French court impersonated letters from the Queen and coerced money from a Catholic priest to buy the jewels. The Queen’s name was dragged into the mess, and she received most of the blame in a scandal that angered the Pope and even involved the nefarious occultist Count Alessandro di Cagliostro.
These continuing missteps, combined with an increasingly upset French populace, made Antoinette the target of French Revolution rhetoric. As they suffered a crumbling economy, and labor and debt relations became violent, the Queen was made out to be a foreigner and spendthrift with no concern for her subjects.
But Did She Say It?
As the Queen of France, she wouldn’t have used English in a casual conversation. The line she’s quoted using is actually:
“Qu’ils mangent de la brioche.”
One word you might recognize in the original French is brioche. While brioche isn’t sweet like cake, it is still a butter and egg-rich confection that would have had a similar, albeit less fanciful, implication. Despite the slight difference in semantics, there is no historical record of Antoinette ever uttering the phrase.
French writer Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote the line in one of his books, attributing it to a “great princess.” Rousseau’s writings became incredibly popular during the Revolution, and it’s believed this is what led people to think he was talking about Marie Antoinette. Rousseau’s work was actually written while Antoinette was just 12 years old.
Folklore experts have also found a similar phrase used in German stories from the 1600s, only this time cake and brioche are replaced with krosem—German sweet bread. Nonetheless, the monarchy was executed and Marie-Antoinette’s name remains stained to this day.
The execution of Marie Antoinette.
March 28, 2018
Phone Booth Stuffing: A 1950s Pop Culture Challenge
Featured in Ripley's Believe It or Not!
The Internet may enable and perpetuate any number of ridiculous challenges, but the art of doing stupid or reckless stuff just for the hell of it has been around forever. Much like the goldfish-swallowing craze that swept through colleges in the 1930s, phone booth stuffing became the fad of the hour in the 1950s.
Legend has it that phone booth stuffing was popularized by a group of 25 South African students who managed to cram themselves into a single booth in 1959. As word of their exploit spread, other colleges couldn’t help challenging it.
Rules for the challenge varied from college to college. Some required everyone be totally inside the booth, some allowed legs and arms to stick out, while others just required more than half a person’s body be in to count. In England, where the practice was called “telephone booth squash,” they required someone be able to make a successful phone call once the booth was fully occupied.
22 students stuffed into a booth at St. Mary’s College.
Incorporating the feat into their academics, many students tried to devise ways of fitting in more people through the application of geometry and calculus. Students fasted to fit in and even recruited as many small-bodied freshmen as they could find for the cause.
As the stakes rose, they began cutting class. Groups claiming to break the record even upended a phone booth, knocked it on its side, and piled in like it was a canoe. Rumors of a school in Canada claimed that they had managed to cram 40 people into a phone booth, but an investigation found they had used a fraternity phone room and were disqualified in most people’s eyes.
Despite receiving press from news outlets all over the country and being featured in TIME magazine, the fad lost momentum by the end of 1959—the same year it started. A new challenge of stuffing kids in Volkswagen Beetles would emerge years later, but phone booth stuffing would only rear its head during reunions and class anniversaries in the coming half-century.
March 27, 2018
Space Cowboy’s “Million Volt Man” Is Shocking
Featured in Ripley's Believe It or Not!
Chayne “Space Cowboy” Hultgren, a street performer from Australia, is one of the most extreme performers Ripley’s has ever encountered. Besides being an expert sword swallower, he juggles chainsaws on a unicycle, catches arrows blindfolded, and even performs stunts involving a high voltage Tesla coil.
Sword Swallowing
Hultgren has swallowed a sword with a 49-pound weight suspended from it and was the first man to swallow a sword underwater—in a tank full of live sharks. Chayne was born with an internal deformation of his digestive system, so his stomach sits unusually low. This means that the Space Cowboy can swallow the entire length of a 28½-inch sword blade—a blade longer than any other swallower can manage—so that it reaches an inch below his belly button. To conquer the extra-long sword, Chayne is able to rearrange his internal organs, elongate his body, and change the shape of his stomach. We featured the Space Cowboy in our 2010 annual, Enter if You Dare!
Shocking
Eight years since we last caught up with him, we were shocked to see his newest performance, “Million Volt Man.” Electrified by the Tesla Coil, the Space Cowboy shoots 5-foot arcs of electricity from his hands and explodes blocks of wood held in his hands.
Performing his stunt without a Faraday cage or other protection took him many years to master, making small tweaks and adjustments as he went along. Now he can swallow swords while electrified, causing the top of the sword to arc out and light up bulbs suspended overhead.
Danger
Hultgren admits his stunts are dangerous but notes that he has been injured an amazingly few number of times considering all the danger he puts himself in. His worst injury was receiving an arrow through his hand. The Space Cowboy mastered arrow catching by relying on muscle memory, sound, and intuition. Though he trained with a tennis ball shooting machine and rubber-tipped arrows, he now uses metal-tipped arrows.
His hardest stunt was performing multiple backward summersaults underwater while sword-swallowing, but he finds the high voltage stunts potentially dangerous as well since they require so much refining.
He credits his success to preparation, training, and a healthy vegetarian lifestyle.
“I am obsessed with what I do. I love pushing myself every day to try new things and train my body. Part of my daily routine is brainstorming ideas and devising or perfecting new stunts.”
Rudolph Valentino’s Cursed Ring Remains Locked In A Hollywood Vault
Featured in Ripley's Believe It or Not!
The shopkeeper never wanted to sell the ring. “It’s cursed,” he said. It’s called The Destiny Ring.
But for Hollywood actor Rudolph Valentino, who saw the ring in a San Francisco shop, it didn’t matter. The simple silver ring with the semi-precious stone was perfect; he had to have it, so he bought it. Then again, perhaps he should’ve listened and stayed away from it.
It was the 1920s, and Valentino was a movie star. Born in Italy in 1895 he left for America and became a sensation in the silent film era, but after purchasing the ring something went wrong. It all started with the miserable flop of “The Young Rajah,” and by the time he made “The Son of the Sheik” in 1926, he died wearing the ring. At 31, he’d developed an infection after having surgery for bleeding ulcers. An estimated 100,000 people mourned outside his funeral home after his death.
A Nice Ring To It…
The ring was then passed on to his lover, actress Pola Negri, a well-known Hollywood vamp, who immediately fell ill. While she recovered, her Hollywood career came to an abrupt end. She decided to pass the ring to young singer Russ Colombo, who reminded her of Valentino. Not long after, he died in a shooting accident.
Valentino’s bereaved lover, Pola Negri.
The ring then made its way to Colombo’s friend, Joe Casino. Casino put the ring under glass, but eventually decided to wear it, resulting in a fatal hit by a truck a week later. By this time the ring’s reputation had grown. When Casino’s brother Del inherited it, he locked it away in a safe in his house.
It was stolen by James Willis, who set off the alarm in the house and when police arrived on the scene they shot Willis and killed him. Inside his pocket was the ring, which was recovered and placed back in the safe.
Director Edward Small retrieved the ring when he became interested in making a movie about Valentino. Small hired an unknown actor named Jack Dunn to portray Valentino and had him wear the ring. Two weeks later Dunn died of a blood disease.
Who’s Next?
Now, the ring sits in a vault in a Los Angeles bank. Some say it has survived numerous robbery attempts, a strike, and a fire. Others say it has again been stolen.
“I do not know (exactly) where it came from, nor do I know where it is now,” author and journalist Alyse Wax told Ripley’s. “I believe that the actual events took place; however, I do not believe the ring is cursed. I don’t really believe in curses. I think it was a string of unfortunate incidents that people attach to a physical object. Despite the fact that I don’t believe in curses, it is quite a remarkable sequence of events, and I don’t blame anyone for believing in a curse. The timing is just eerie.”
Some say Valentino’s ghost still searches for the ring, wanting to destroy it. Fans still flock to his Hollywood Forever Cemetery crypt every Valentine’s Day, leaving him gifts and cards. Many have reported seeing his ghostly figure as he paces the grounds. He’s also said to have been spotted at restaurants, the Paramount studios and two places in town that feature statues of him.
To top it all off, the ghost of Valentino’s dog, Kabar, is said to haunt the L.A. Pet Cemetery in Calabasas. In September 2017, a portrait of Valentino, Negri and the ring was sold at auction. No word on how the patining’s owner is doing…
By Ryan Clark, contributor for Ripleys.com.
Source: Rudolph Valentino’s Cursed Ring Remains Locked In A Hollywood Vault
March 26, 2018
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