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Well, well, well, look what episode it is—HAI #100. I have finally disproven those strangely
specific haters who said I would never make more than 99 medium quality, slightly funny,
slightly interesting videos on a nondescript grouping of subjects. Well, look at me now.
Anyway, over the past 99 videos there have been literally hundreds of potential topics
that we decided not to do because, even as good we are at stretching out topics, they
couldn’t possibly fill up a full five minutes. As there’s no better way to celebrate 99
of the same format of videos than something different, we’re going to cover as many
as possible of those today. Welcome to Quarter as Interesting.
Speaking of quarters, let’s start with the land that doesn’t have any—Australia.
Back in the 1930’s in Australia’s empty bit, there were lots of farmers and emus.
Now, farmers and emu’s go together like fish sticks and frosting—poorly. The emu’s
would break fences, eat crops, they were just all around destructive and so the Australians,
in keeping with their role as upside down Americans, decided to declare war… against
the emus. Basically, the army was sent out with machine guns, ammunition, and orders
to kill as many emus’ as possible. Beyond that, it’s pretty much a normal war story
except for the opponent being emu’s and in the end, the army actually lost because
have you even seen an emu? Now imagine tens of thousands of those. This is overall one
of these, “great title, ok topic,” kinda videos which is why, despite receiving literally
hundreds of requests for this, that’s all you get. Also, there’s a Sam O’Nella Video
on it so just go watch that. But let’s transition to Australia’s old,
senile father: the United Kingdom of Great Britain and probably Northern Ireland depending
on when you’re watching this. Two of the UK’s greatest loves are tea and football—the
non-moon-landing country kind. Now, when a child in born in the UK they are immediately
issued an electric kettle—it’s a requirement for living there. These mythical devices are
able to bring water to a boil in a matter of seconds which is crucial for improving
the country’s tcct statistics—that’s tea craving to consumption time. The problem,
though, is that these kettles use a lot of electricity and therefore, if a lot of people
want tea at the same time, the power grid has to predict and adjust to this in order
to avoid a blackout. Of course, when everyone wants tea is when a football match finishes.
The biggest instance of this was in 1990 when England played West Germany in the World Cup
semi-final. After the shootout was finished, in which England lost, everyone watching the
match in England went and turned on their kettles to make an anger tea and there was
a huge electricity surge of 2800 MegaWatts—equivalent to 1.1 million kettles being turned on simultaneously.
In the past this was a real concern for power grids during big TV events and so they had
to develop techniques to quickly generate power in response but nowadays, it’s supposedly
less of an issue as more and more of the country switches to watching Half as Interesting videos
at any time they want—among other online video things.
This also wasn’t an issue back in the 1890’s—partially because not many people were watching TV,
partially because time, as a concept, was iffy. The iPhones of the time didn’t set
the time automatically so people had to somehow get the accurate time from public clocks.
In Greenwich, England there were a few solutions to this. One was a ball at the top of the
Greenwich Observatory that would drop at 1:00 pm exactly but not everyone could see this.
One was a series of telegraph signals that would go off at certain times per day but
not everyone had a telegraph station. The third solution was to buy the time from a
lady named Ruth Belville. Every morning, she would set her super-accurate pocket-watch
to the accurate time of the Greenwich Observatory and then go around the town by horse and buggy
to give the accurate time to those who subscribed to her service. I’d say, with having already
figured out how to subscript-ionize time, that she was ahead of her time, but as we
know, she was right on ti…ahh shut up me. But let’s transition to England’s favorite
hexagon—France. If you want to get from the beautiful city of Nantes to the beautiful
island of Noirmoutier you have two choices—you can take the bridge like a boring oatmeal
eating dude or you can drive through the friggin ocean like you’re the prophet Moses back
from the dead to enable slightly more convenient underwater road routes. The under ocean road
in question is the Passage du Gois which is, and I can’t stress this enough, literally
underwater—at least for part of the day. You see, the coast of France has some of the
largest tides in the world with this particular area usually seeing about a 20 foot or 6 meter
difference between high and low tide. That’s enough to completely reveal this road at low
tide. Cars are only allowed to drive on it for the 90 minutes before and after each low
tide making its usage limited, but it can save about a whole ten or so minutes in comparison
to taking the bridge when coming from the north.
But let’s now head west and then south to talk about one of the battles of the American
Civil War. More south… more south… like, beyond the sofa on the porch kinda south…
yeah, there. Now, I’m no rocket scientist, but based off what I know about South America,
it is not the America in which the movie took place. So why was there an American civil
war battle there? Well, this is a quick one: basically, off the coast of Brazil there chilled
a Union boat, that was the OG US, and in came a Pacific-bound Confederate boat, those were
the breakaway bad guys. Both stopped in this Brazilian port. Upon seeing the bad guy boat,
the union boat sent a letter over basically saying, “u wot m8,” to which the confederate
boat responded, “I’m just trying to get repaired and leave,” to which the union
boat responded, “boom,” as it fired its cannons at it in the middle of the night.
Those cannonballs missed but then they exchanged musket fire, the Union boat rammed the confederate
one, boarded it, and won. The Brazilians understandably were not pleased about the US having a battle
on their turf, but the US, surprisingly, didn’t care even though the unprovoked attack was,
like, full-on, without-a-doubt illegal but anyway, that’s why there was a US Civil
War Battle in South America. Now, if you ever become a mid-to-late 1800’s
naval captain, you’ll know that one thing that you’ll desperately need is respect.
Well, I guarantee you the best way to get your sailors to respect you is to have a professional-looking
email address at a custom domain. Nothing screams, “in control,” like captain@lookatmyhat.cool.
That email, or really any email using their over 400 domain extensions, can be yours in
about 120 seconds by going to hover.com/HAI. You can also, of course, just buy a domain
from Hover as they’re the best place to buy your corner of the internet before someone
else steals your domain name. Whether its an email or a domain, you can get 10% off
your first purchase by going to hover.com/HAI and you’ll be supporting the show while
you’re at it.
