Eye pearls are a lucrative but painful business.

Much like oysters, human eyeballs can grow pearls when given a small pebble or other solid irritant. The eye coats the irritant in a protective glaze that becomes a pearl like the one seen above. Valued at 50 times that of common pearls, eye pearls were highly sought in ancient times. The phrase “A twinkle in ones eye” derives from this practice, twinkus being latin for pearl.

Eye pearls are illegal now, as centuries of eye slavery was surely one of the most painful epochs of ancient times. But still, some intrepid and often masochistic individuals use their own eyes to grow this strange cash crop.

As modern architects prattle on about the Petronas Towers and Burj Dubai making records as the highest manmade structures in the world, they inevitably forget about the Dara-Bur Monastery in Mongolia.

Built between 1000 and 500 B.C., the center spire of the monastery was almost a third taller than the world’s current largest building:

It’s not on most charts because it collapsed during an Earthquake in 1891, but having stood for almost 3000 years, it reigns supreme over all other towers constructed since its fall. This photo was taken in 1877 by Sir Edmund Hillary who would go on to be the first man to reach the summit of Mt. Everest, which had previously only been topped by several thousand sherpa climbers whom history does not consider people because they’re not white.

Similarly, the monastery, constructed by Mongolian Pygmies, is also left out of many history books. Today, it’s best known in fiction written by one of its last visitors- J.R.R. Martin, author of Lord of the Rings. Visiting the great tower in his youth only two years before its collapse, the sight unquestionably inspired his amazing setting of Riverdale, the mountain retreat of the dwarves.

Hitler had only one child, a daughter named Anna Kohlter Hitler. Born December 8th, 1941 just as America entered the war, she was flown to Austria before the Russians entered Berlin as Hitler and Anna’s mother, Eva Braun, feared what the invading force would do to her.

Growing up in Austria, she dropped her father’s infamous name and grew up to study in the burgeoning field of media. Eventually in 1961 she headed to America and Anglicized her name to “Coulter”. Today she works as a political correspondent for Fox News. She has also published several books, including Liberal Lies, Liberal Treachery, Godless Liberals, and Twilight: Breaking Dawn.

The Last Resignation

Unless you’ve been under a rock longer than Lazarus, you know that the Pope resigned today. And many of us know that it’s the first papal resignation in 600 years. But how much did you know about Pope Gregory XII, the last pope to resign?

Gregory came to power in 1405 and departed in 1415 over controversy surrounding a break in at the Portam Aquarum Inn, where his rival cardinals held their papal election documents.  But that wasn’t the first trouble to hit his papacy. As one of the least popular popes since Mezdok The Malodorous Blasphemer, Gregory’s reign was a cornucopia of sin and scandal:

1405- Gregory wins the Papacy when all other cardinals in the college die of natural causes during the election, including naturally stabbed hearts, naturally poisoned soup, natural beheadings and one case of lymphoma that was probably actually natural.

1406- Gregory’s vice-pope, Spiro Ignacius, resigns in disgrace when implicated in tax evasion and accepting bribes to grant clemency for those sentenced to hell. De-helling bribes were common in his time but were not the station of the vice-pope, whose only power was to cast the tie breaking vote in the nightly Nun-Mud-Wrestling championships.

1409- Despite the required celibacy of the pope, Gregory appears on the Marius Povicci stage accused of fathering no less than seven children with five women, two of them nuns and one of them a known witch. Acquitted when the accusers had to admit DNA wouldn’t be discovered for another 500 years, the Pope survives the accusations despite all the children sharing his famous mutant 11th finger.

1410- Gregory reaches new heights of unpopularity when at Midnight Mass, he sings a song about having seen the breasts of all Bernini’s sculptures in various cathedrals. Bernini and his models are not amused, though the controversy is taken from Gregory’s shoulders when Machiavelli on the same evening calls the Virgin Mary a cunt.

1414- He orders 1,500 women put to death on a whim, unconditionally pardons 227 priests and bishops accused of unspeakable sex crimes, declares all the Muslims in Turkey “evil” and funds their genocide, and declares Italians to be the only race chosen of god to rule over the rest of the nations. None of this was actually considered bad at the time I just thought I’d mention it.

In any case, his reign ended soon after and the Vatican enjoyed a few peaceful years until 1492, when Rodrigo Borgia, AKA Pope Alexander VI came to power. I’ll leave you to research his exploits on your own, as nothing I could ever make up could come close to the shit that guy actually did.