10 US Capitol Building In 2013, the US Capitol building occupied the entrance to the Pentagon’s Army Executive Dining Facility. Made of licorice garland and candy adornments and decorated with icicles of sugar and melting drifts of “snow,” the replica building was 1.4 meters (4.5 ft) long and 0.9 meters (3 ft) wide and weighed over 23 kilograms (50 lb). Finishing touches included a lawn of green-dyed, crushed cornflakes mixed with melted marshmallows and inverted ice cream cone trees, tiny candles in the windows, and miniature wreaths made of green icing and festooned with red icing bows....

But as we will see here, it appears that many animals are fond of giving presents, whether it’s a ball of spit or a lethal poison. Here are just 10 examples of gift giving in the animal kingdom. 10 Spiders Gift giving isn’t just about what you give but how you give it. No animal understands the importance of presentation better than Paratrechalea ornata. Males of this South American spider species are known to use gifts to woo females, presenting them with a bundle of prey wrapped in silk....

10 Mary Shelley Because of her classic novel Frankenstein (1818), Mary Shelley is just as prominent a figure today as her spouse, poet Percy Shelley. However, when the couple was first married, he was already an accomplished author/poet with a strong following. Mary later credited her husband for the substantial guidance he provided during the writing of what turned out to be her masterpiece. Frankenstein started out as a short story that Mary penned while she and Percy were on holiday together in Geneva with other luminaries such as Lord Byron....

10 Sir Jeffrey Hudson The son of a prominent butcher, Jeffery Hudson entered the court of Charles I as a page for Queen Henrietta Maria at the age of eight or nine. It is said that he was presented during a party thrown by the duke of Birmingham for the king and queen, in which Hudson was introduced encased within a pie crust. The queen took an interest in him. He also became popular at court and was given a number of important duties, such as fetching the queen’s midwife from France....

10 Australians Loved Them While the Wild West shows originated in the United States, Australians flocked to the shows when they came to their country. In 1891, Wirth’s Wild West Show was flooded with people in Sydney. The show boasted about having a Sioux chief, American Bear, who was set to race a New Zealand race horse around the track. Skuthorp’s Wild West Show visited Adelaide in 1911 and drew in country visitors from all around to see the show....

The grandson of American industrialist J. Paul Getty, JPG III grew up in Rome, where his father was in charge of part of Getty Oil’s European operations. JPG III grew up in the 1960s as a rebellious young man, managing to get himself kicked out of the exclusive private school he’d attended. On 10 July 1973, JPG III was kidnapped. His captors sent a note to his parents demanding a $17 million ransom....

10Michael Jackson’s Laser Robot In the mid-2000s, Michael Jackson was planning on a huge comeback by securing a residency in Las Vegas. Jackson and his crew developed a variety of ideas for arenas, costumes, and shows but needed a huge advertising statement. Many ideas hit the drawing board before Jackson settled on his favorite: a 15-meter (50 ft) walking robot that would circle Las Vegas shooting laser beams. Robot Michael Jackson was going to be fully mobile....

However, few film industry professionals are more underappreciated than the editor, whose job is to build the end product we all enjoy. Were it not for the lowly editor, some great and treasured films might never have made it onto our screens, or, if they did, they might never have returned from the unforgiving limbo of Blockbuster’s bargain bin. With hundreds of millions of dollars being plowed into big studio movie projects these days, producers and directors tend to be a little more firm on what goes into their films from start to finish....

Whether we enjoy a big, cooked breakfast or grab a quick, convenient one on the go, there are a number items which you will find on many breakfast tables around the world. We may take these things for granted today, but many have bizarre origins, and others were actually invented by mistake. How many of these items are on your breakfast table? 10 Coffee We all enjoy our morning cup of coffee to get us started for the day....

10Elizabeth Jennings Graham In 1854, 101 years before Rosa Parks made her historic stand in Montgomery, Elizabeth Jennings Graham made one of her own in New York City. Graham and a friend were on their way to church. They were running late, so Graham didn’t wait for a horse-drawn car designated for colored people. She hailed the first one she saw and got in. The white driver balked and refused to drive her....

The conquerors on this list boasted that they had “all the lands at [my] feet” or promised to make “Egypt taste the taste of my fingers!” But in the end, they, too, have been largely forgotten. Look upon their works and despair. 10Lugalzagesi Civilization was born in ancient Sumeria, in the rich lands between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. But by 2330 BC, the region was in an uproar and ancient cities lay in ruins....

10A Young Arnold Schwarzenegger (Allegedly) Instigates A Dangerous Tank Race Members of the armed forces know full well not to use tanks as playthings. But every so often, a rascally soldier takes one of those mechanized death-mobiles out for a high-octane joyride. One of those military imps was Arnold Schwarzenegger. During an appearance on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, the Terminator-turned-Governator-turned-Terminator-again regaled the audience with a story about the time he supposedly embarked on a late-night tank race as a soldier in the Austrian Army....

10Rose Burkert And Roger AtkisonAmana Holiday Inn In September 1980, Rose Burkert and Roger Atkison were hoping to have a romantic weekend away when they checked into the Amanda Holiday Inn near Williamsburg, Iowa. What they got, however, was far from that. The day after they checked in, housekeeping went to clean the room but received no response from inside. Upon entering, the housekeeper saw feet peeking out from under the bedsheets and assumed that the couple was asleep....

Robert Berdella, aka the Kansas City Butcher, would later be unmasked as one of Missouri’s worst serial killers. Making Berdella’s bloodlust worse was his deviant love of photographing his crimes. This list will take a trip into the heart of darkness and down into the basement at 4315 Charlotte Street. 10 Lonely Little Boy Robert Andrew Berdella came into the world on January 31, 1949, in the mostly proletarian city of Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio....

Dating back to the US Civil War, American history has been stained by the blood of thousands of minorities who were lynched, especially in the South. Between the years of 1882 and 1968, there were about 4,700 documented lynchings, 3,400 of which were African-American men and women in Southern states like Mississippi, Georgia, Texas, and Louisiana. These states recorded the highest incidences of lynching. Eventually, lynchings grew into elaborate spectacles where body parts were passed around for souvenirs and smiling photos were taken with the victims’ lifeless bodies hanging in the background....

Before all our Multilingual folks start complaining, allow me to clarify that I’m referring to the transitive verb (not the noun): “pimp”, which roughly means “to decorate” or “to gussy up”. This verb was made popular by T.V shows like: Pimp My Ride. Although this term was to pay homage to hip-hop culture and its connection to street culture, it has now entered common, and even mainstream, commercial use. The Spanish slang “Pompear”, used in a few Latin-American countries, evolved as a direct derivation with a close meaning....

10Rembrandt’s Mirrors Rembrandt is famous for his use of light, and while many other artists of the time used light in a similar manner, none of them could capture the beauty that Rembrandt put on the canvas. Over the years, Rembrandt’s techniques have been uncovered based on details in his paintings. To create almost photographic accuracy, Rembrandt manipulated his surroundings using mirrors and lighting, much like many photographers use today. For his self-portraits, Rembrandt used a complex series of flat and concave mirrors along with projectors like the camera obscura to get the closest possible likeness....

10 Longitude Act In the 18th century, sea travel was a big deal. That’s why the British government passed the Longitude Act in 1714 to solve the longitude problem and ensure British superiority on the seas. Until that point, navigation was hit or miss. It was easy to determine a ship’s latitude by using the Sun. However, determining the longitude involved inaccurate methods that often led to naval disasters. That’s why the Longitude Rewards were established....

But how often do we stop and consider the roots of our holidays and the events from which they were born? Most people with an Internet connection know that many modern holidays are a hodgepodge of ancient pagan practices which have been augmented or adopted in various forms by the surviving religions. But beyond just ancient paganism, many holidays stem from historical events. Sometimes, those events are quite dark and not exactly the nice, cheery tales we’d expect such holidays to spring from....

10 What It Was The American Eugenics Society was an organization that began in the United States in the early 1900s. Its mission included not just segregation, but a racial cleansing and the establishment of a strong, pure race untainted by the blood of those that were deemed lesser, whether by race or by disability. That meant the practice of forced sterilization for those who were deemed unfit to have a family, such as those with learning disabilities or those in institutions....