← Back to the front page

America Wanted to Nuke the Moon and Other Weird History

Khalid Elhassan October 15, 2020 32 min

United States - List of nuclear weapons tests of China — Nuking the Moon. Stillness in the Storm

21. Scary Weird Pranking

Imagine waking up with a hangover, and finding one of these in your bedroom. Phys Org

Embarrassing people by seating them on whoopee cushions, whatever the downside, is a relatively harmless practical joke. It is coarse humor, but mostly innocent fun. Not so Heliogabalus’ weird – and sadistic – habit of pranking people by putting them in mortal fear of life and limb. One of his favorite pranks began with the teenaged emperor getting his dinner guests so drunk, that they had to crash and sleep it off in the palace.

Once Heliogabalus’ marks were zonked out, the emperor had his servants sneak tamed lions, leopards, bears, or a mix thereof, into the bedroom. Come the morning, the emperor would bust a gut laughing at his hungover guests’ reaction to waking up in the midst of a menagerie of man-eating predators. Between that and other weird behavior that his subjects viewed as deviant, the Romans heaved a sigh of relief when Heliogabalus was violently overthrown at age eighteen. He was beheaded, his corpse was tossed into the Tiber River, and his memory was damned by a senatorial edict.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.