Here are ten outrageous meals and the dishes served at them. 10 Catastrophes Caused By Food 10 Vitellius’ Feast Roman orgies have become proverbial. While there were certainly often sexual antics presented to feasters it was the shear opulence of the food served up that most ancient historians found shocking. At the height of the Roman empire foods from thousands of miles away could be brought to the tables of the wealthy and swallowed down with rare vintages of wines....

I thought of this the other day when I was about to have a nice meal at a restaurant and all across the menu I noticed various ‘buzzwords’ used to try to entice me to buy the food. You have all seen them. A simple ‘hamburger’ description isn’t good enough – though I know very well what a hamburger is and what it will look and probably taste like. No, the simple word ‘hamburger’ is not sufficient....

10An Unsaintly Smear Campaign Two recognized saints of the Catholic Church were once hostile rivals for the papacy. Hippolytus was the West’s most important third-century theologian. He was also an unpleasant character, judgmental, stubborn, and unforgiving. When Pope Zephyrinus died in 217, his adviser Calistus was elected as his successor, and Hippolytus opposed him for being too lenient with repentant sinners. Callistus also favored more equality within the Church, and he blessed marriages between free people and slaves....

However, it appears that booby traps do not always catch the bad guys or the good ones in the case of law enforcement. Many people have ended up becoming victims of their own booby traps. Many have died while others managed to escape with devastating and sometimes life-threatening injuries in a few other instances. 10 Louis Dethy In 2002, Belgian police responded to a suspected suicide in a home in Charleroi, Belgium....

Others, however, deliberately committed crimes or made inquiries about committing crimes that could land them in prison. There are many reasons for this. Some were attracted by the free food, health care, and accommodation in prison. Others just wanted to escape some other circumstance, such as a nagging wife. 10 Eric Torpy In October 2005, an Oklahoma court handed Eric Torpy a 30-year sentence for robbery and attempted murder. Torpy asked the judge to add three extra years because he wanted to match basketball player Larry Bird’s jersey number....

While it’s not uncommon to hear someone say they have a fear of spiders, snakes, or even thunderstorms, the ten people on this list suffer from strange phobias—mostly everyday things—that have had a debilitating effect on their lives. 10 Cafephobia: Fear of Coffee No matter whether you prefer black coffee, espresso, or a custom-made beverage from your local coffee shop, for most people, our morning doesn’t truly start until after we’ve had our first cup of coffee—or that half-caf caramel macchiato with extra whip....

Then as now, the idea that the murderer was a lone gunman perched in an upper-floor window nearly 100 meters (330 ft) behind the president’s limousine was a tough sell to a scared, skeptical public. A rifleman was on the knoll. A team of assassins fired as many as six shots. A Secret Service agent shot JFK by accident. The limo driver shot him on purpose. Conspiracies big and small persist to this day....

We humans think we are so smart. We sculpt and tame and add to the Earth and even the seabed. But the malls, streets, and skyscrapers that we build are just future plant holders. Here are ten places and times that the plants have taken over what we have made. 10 Wangaratta Most of the time, plants take over because humans have abandoned a particular space and stopped actively pushing the plants back....

As the number of legendary locales grew over the centuries, so did the number of explorers bent on finding them. Many were tantalized by visions of gold, jewels, and various treasures, while others wanted to cement their names in the pantheon of history. Some sought powers beyond human comprehension or a pathway to a paradise that seemed all too good to be true. And yet others simply had an insatiable curiosity for solving a mystery that had vexed their contemporaries....

At least, that’s usually the case. But every now and then, you get a government that comes along and treats childbirth as just another situation they can project their insanity onto. 10Romania’s Enforced Baby Boom Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu can be accused of many things, but hating children is not one of them. Under his guidance, 1960s Romania was transformed from a country approaching zero population growth into a baby-making machine....

10 Ethidium Bromide To be a biologist today, you have to learn the tricks of working with DNA. The problem is that DNA is stubbornly invisible at the concentrations in which most people use it. If you want to isolate fragments of DNA, you have to dye it. Ethidium bromide is an ideal dye for DNA. It fluoresces beautifully and binds tightly to DNA. What more could you want? How about a compound that does not cause cancer?...

10LightsabersStar Wars We’ve all wanted a lightsaber at some point in our lives, right? Well, they may be a reality not too far off in the future. In September 2013, scientists from Harvard and MIT found a way to manipulate photons—particles that normally don’t interact with each other—into a photonic molecule. Until these scientists created the process of binding photons into molecules, it was only a theoretical possibility. They say that the closest example of what this new process creates is—you guessed it—a lightsaber!...

10 Raiko And The Tsuchigumo Spiders appear in ancient legends across the globe from the Navajo myth of Grandmother Spider to West African tales of Anansi, the trickster god. For the most part, the stories are pretty positive, but the Japanese weren’t so fond of our eight-legged friends. Take the Tsuchigumo for example, a nasty arachnid with a thing for human blood. It shows up on scrolls, in plays, and in works of art, and it was usually pitted against Raiko, a fabled samurai from the 10th and 11th centuries....

Perpetrating a massacre has become an option, a way out, a means of expression for those filled with rage and sadness. But fortunately, there are also massacres that never happened. Sometimes it was sheer luck, a keen eye, or even second thoughts by a would-be shooter coming to his senses at the very last second. 10 The Jammed Gun In October 1992, Arthur McElroy walked into his science class at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln with a rifle....

However, it happens far more often than you think, and companies have gone as far as to tie it into their marketing campaigns. From celebrity encounters to scientific data on in-flight orgasms, there is so much more to know about the mile-high club than most people realize. 10 The Founding Member In 1914, Lawrence Burst Sperry was a 21-year-old pilot who went down in history for inventing the self-driving autopilot....

Aside from religious reasons, many of us are obsessed with the concept of life after death in an attempt to make our passing from this world less frightening and final. This can make us targets for charlatans who will tell us exactly what we want to hear—usually for a hefty price. Fraudsters like to tackle other subjects in the paranormal and scientific realms, too. But they often have critics who push back....

10 The Black Codes In the years after the Civil War, the Freedman’s Bureau provided some much-needed support for slaves who had been emancipated but not given the resources that they needed. Not everyone agreed with the idea, of course, and individual states instituted the so-called “Black Codes” in order to continue to restrict the freedom of those that had just been granted it. The Black Codes were so restrictive that they were practically slavery....

10 ‘Respect’Aretha Franklin Aretha Franklin’s hit song “Respect” is a feminist classic. The image of a proud woman standing tall and saying that all she wants is “a little respect” is an icon for women’s rights. Used as the anthem for civil rights and feminist movements, the song has never lost its staying power. But that’s the exact opposite of what songwriter Otis Redding intended with his lyrics. Redding didn’t write the song for Aretha Franklin....

10 First Flyby Of The Moon Launched on January 2, 1959, Luna 1 was the first spacecraft to successfully reach the vicinity of the Moon. The 360-kilogram (800 lb) spacecraft carried various metallic emblems, including the Soviet coat of arms, and was meant to crash-land on the Moon to demonstrate the superiority of Soviet science. However, the spacecraft missed the Moon, passing within 6,000 kilometers (3,700 mi) of the lunar surface....

10 Edward Palmer And The Boston Stocks In colonial America, rapidly growing villages were required by law to have facilities to control the most unruly of their citizens. If not, the villagers could be subject to a fine. In the early days of Boston, town officials imported their implements of restraint from England, bringing over iron bilboes, device which were little more than iron bars with shackles affixed to them. A bilbo held the guilty party by the feet, resulting in the common sentence of public display and humiliation....