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The Yalta Conference Was A Boozy Mess With No Toilets
The Yalta Conference was one of the most important diplomatic events in history, as the "big three" of Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin got together to plan the fate of post-war Europe. It was also a dung-coated mess, held at a Crimean resort that Winston Churchill described as "the Riviera of Hades" and the "worst place in the world."
Yalta itself is renowned for its beauty -- at least when a war hasn't turned it into a burning husk. What the Western delegations didn't realize was that speeding through fifty miles of bombed-out countryside was going to be the most pleasant part of the trip. The opulent-looking Russian palaces were, in fact, medieval nightmares. The interior was freezing, the mattresses were "paper-thin" and bedroom light switches were conveniently located several rooms away. Also, every room was crawling with bedbugs and lice while mosquitos swarmed underneath the banquet tables. The Americans and Brits had to literally drench their bedrooms with toxic DDT to not get devoured.
National ArchivesThe architects of the modern world, ready for their daily lice check.
But the real horror was the toilet situation, or rather, a lack thereof. The ancient palaces had almost no indoor plumbing and the long lines almost certainly had the generals making vaguely sexist comments about how they'd never had to wait in a line for a men's room before. As a solution, the Soviets dug a big trench in a nearby park for the esteemed military leaders to relieve themselves in. And when you imagine a bunch of shivering, lice-ridden soldiers catching dysentery in a muddy trench, you don't expect to see quite so many decorations on their uniforms.
To distract them from the Airbnb experience from hell, the Soviets improved their hospitality in the most Russian way possible. Every morning, a full bottle of expensive vodka was put in front of every room. For the week the conference went on, the attending delegations tended to be drunk from morning to midnight, with most of the diplomacy-ing being conducted during boozy dinner parties. No wonder post-war Europe was such a mess -- they probably decided the fate of Poland during an epic game of Vodka-pong.
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Apollo 12 Astronauts Had Playboy Nudes Taped To Their Wrists
Before 1969, the idea of putting someone on the moon sounded like just an expensive way to turn astronauts into space-corpses. But once we went to -- and pooped on -- the moon, it suddenly became a lot less daunting. So when the second moon landing was planned, everyone at NASA was a lot more relaxed -- enough even to pull some sexy pranks.
On November 4th, 1969, astronauts Pete Conrad, Alan Bean and Richard Gordon set off to the moon. Unbeknownst to them, their vehicle had a few extra passengers. As a joke, and perhaps to ease the loneliness of Command Module Pilot Gordon, the nude poster of Playboy's Miss November '69 DeDe Lind was hidden inside one of the lockers. And while his moonwalking colleagues were boldly going where few men had gone before, the shuttle bound Gordon stumbled upon his sexy stowaway.
RR AuctionGiving him the chance to boldly come where no man had come before.
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