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Charles Schulz, creator of the iconic comic strip Peanuts, saw the stripe's protagonist, Charlie Brown, as a laughable loser. According to the Peanuts Wiki website, Schulz once said that "Charlie Brown must be the one who suffers, because he's a caricature of the average person. Most of us are much more acquainted with losing than winning. Winning is great, but it isn't funny."

For the almost the entire first half of the 20th century, African Americans were barred from playing for Major League Baseball teams. But on April 15, 1947, Jackie Robinson took the field for the Brooklyn Dodgers, breaking the color barrier.

"You can't win if you don't pay"—that's a slogan used by a number of different state-run lotteries in the United States. It's a truism of sorts—the statement is obviously correct (both in the context of lotteries and more generally) and says nothing really interesting, but it makes for good ad copy.

In 1999, a 22-year-old Missouri man named Cornealious Michael Anderson held up a Burger King at gunpoint, making away with more than $2,000 in cash. He was captured two months later, and in July 2000, Mike Anderson was convicted of armed robbery and sentenced to 13 years in prison.

In 1953 North and South Korea entered into an armistice, ending the Korean War and providing a shaky basis for something close to peace between the two nations.

The Kiss Cam is a time-honored tradition of American sporting events. During time outs and other stoppages of play, the stadium events team – having already scoured the crowd for a target – focuses the cameras on a couple and puts their picture on the scoreboard.

Silly String is liquefied plastic compressed in an aerosol can. Point it at your friend, hit the button and the liquid plastic comes shooting out.

At the close of World War II, the victorious Allies split Germany into four parts—one controlled by France, another by the United Kingdom, another by the United States and another by the Soviet Union. And Berlin, although it was embedded within the Soviet-controlled sector, was itself divided into four similarly managed parts.

"Don't scream if you meet a cow. If she sees you first, she will run/Don't undertake a long ride if you are not confident of performing it easily/Don't contest the right of way with cable cars/Don't emulate your brother's attitude if he rides parallel with the ground"—those four "don'ts" are from the now-defunct New York World newspaper.

In the 1971 book The Lorax, the incomparable Dr. Seuss tells the story of an environmentally conscious monster (the Lorax) and his efforts to protect Truffula trees (a fictional species) from an industrialist named the Once-ler who is chopping them down.

That's a quote from a Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority train rider named Alicia Porter from December 2013. As she and many others told the Atlanta Constitution-Journal, it was best to avoid the Atlanta subway's elevators unless one wanted to take a large whiff of – and this is gross – someone else's urine.

EMI was a British music company that once had many different labels under it. But the company's history is more robust than simply putting music onto records, cassettes, CDs and iTunes.

George Miller Beard was born in 1839. He attended Yale University, graduating in 1862, and in 1866 he earned a medical degree at the school now affiliated with Columbia University.

For some people, high school is life's best years. For others, those four years are, well, happily forever in the past. But at any rate, once high school is over, you can't go back—at least, not as a student.

Despite its name, Iceland is actually a very welcoming country if you're a tourist looking to get away. The small island nation is one of the few places where visitors can see the Northern Lights, go whale watching, climb volcanic mountains, and also avail themselves of the heated spas and pools that the nation's geothermal energy allows.

For better or for worse, funerals send out a certain social signal about the life of the person who has recently passed. If a lot of people show up to mourn the dearly departed, it typically means that she was well-loved and respected.

The internet has made newspapers' "Help Wanted" ads a thing of the past. But in 2001, before this form of advertising was sent into obsolescence, an entrepreneurial (and seemingly desperate) job seeker named Brian O'Dea used the medium to reverse things.

Imagine what Earth was like a thousand years ago—the year 1015. Almost everything would be foreign to modern eyes and ears—even the language would be incomprehensible.

Alligators' tails allow them to swim. By moving its tail from side to side, the animal can propel itself through water at fish-like speeds, which is important because when it comes to eating, alligators have a pretty easily defined diet: if it is in or near the water, it is food.

Yves Rossy is a pilot. Like most other pilots, he flies things. But unlike any other pilot, the thing he flies is himself.