Helen Duncan was sort of the Long Island Medium of her day. She traveled the UK holding seances, offering her patrons closure, and probably only swiping the occasional pocket watch. During one such divination in April of 1944, she told a pair of worried parents that two British battleships -- including their son's, the HMS Barham -- had sunk. Military authorities, fearing a leak of state secrets in such close proximity to the Normandy landings and completely oblivious to the fact that Duncan could have garnered the information from a strikingly un-supernatural source known as "the newspaper," picked her up and charged her with conspiracy, fraud, and, to top it all off, violation of the Witchcraft Act of 1735. Only the black magic charge stuck, and Duncan was sentenced to nine months in prison. For black magic. In 1944.

Harry Price
Newsreel footage of her trial can been seen here.

Now, we'd be misleading you if we implied that people didn't find this utterly ridiculous even at the time. Winston Churchill himself visited Duncan in prison and, in a powerful act of British solidarity, declared the entire affair "tomfoolery." Still, Duncan served out her time, and her conviction stands to this day, despite the fact that Churchill repealed the sorely outdated act under which she was convicted in 1951.

But Actually ...

If you're not familiar with the logistics of seppuku, allow us to enlighten you on its full-on goddamn gnarliness: As a means of preserving their honor, men would disembowel themselves, and then jam the blade into either their neck or their heart like the punctuation mark at the end of the most hardcore sentence ever written.

Far from vanishing into history hundreds of years ago, this practice held sway well into the 20th Century. In 1912, following the death of Emperor Meiji, General Nogi Maresuke literally spilled his guts after years of sending polite requests to honor his death wish. You see, the general first requested permission to commit the act after losing a flag in battle 25 years earlier, and then again after losing scads of his men during the Russo-Japanese War.

National Diet Library
"They wouldn't fire me, so I quit."

And Maresuke was far from the most recent to rock out with his colon out. Many Japanese soldiers were known to chop themselves down rather than face capture during World War II, and we've already told you about Yukio Mishima, the popular Japanese author who committed seppuku in fucking 1970 after organizing a failed government coup powered entirely by his gleaming pectoral muscles.

For an even more public display of anachronistic Japanese swordplay, let's turn to the case of 17-year-old Otoya Yamaguchi, a member of the ultra-right nationalist group Uyoku dantai. Much as a modern teenager might fetishize dubiously aged anime girls, Yamaguchi idealized Japan's former isolationist glory. Yamaguchi's worldview came to a megalomaniacal head on October 12, 1960, when he rushed the stage during a speech by socialist politician Inejiro Asanuma and stabbed him with an actual motherfucking samurai sword on live television:

Warning: extremely graphic

In a turn of events that made the janitorial staff more thankful than ever for the prison's strict "no samurai swords" policy, Yamaguchi hanged himself in his cell a few weeks later.

As it turns out, steel ships are highly susceptible to the unique danger of magnetic mines, which attach to their hulls as they pass through hostile waters. Building your minesweepers out of wood gets around this. As an added bonus, should one of those mines happen to go off anyway, wood is better than steel at withstanding the blast.

US Navy
"YOU COULD HAVE TOLD US THIS WAS GOING TO HAPPEN."
"And risk introducing bias into the test???"

But that was still back in black-and-white days, right? Surely, no one is still building airships in the era of America's Got Talent. Lockheed Martin disagrees. Behold the Hybrid Airship, looking for all intents and purposes like the mobile headquarters of a flamboyant supervillain:

Lockheed-Martin
"Oh no, a stiff wind from the south! My evil plan has been thwarted!"

Twenty years of development have resulted in a floating behemoth capable of carrying 20-ton loads at a top speed of 70 miles per hour across thousands of miles. Its ability to land basically anywhere promises to revolutionize industries such as mining by eliminating the need to build a reliable infrastructure (read: roads) before the magnificent, untouched countryside can be adequately pillaged for its resources.

Lockheed-Martin
It's an adorable harbinger of destruction.

In more worrisome news, Russia is hard at work on a superblimp of their own, which they assure us will begin crowding their airways by 2018:

Augur RosAeroSystems
Paradoxically, a giant flying Airstream frankly seems like more of an American idea.

The hi-tech Atlant is supposed to carry 200 passengers and tons of cargo, which, to anyone who has ever seen Red Dawn, sounds a lot like "a heavily armed invasion force." Apparently, the next cold war will be fought with balloons.

Augur RosAeroSystems
If you think that sounds silly, you've never felt terror of hearing the words "Kirov reporting."