Napoleon’s Hemorrhoids and Other Small Events that Changed History

Posted by $ Olduglycarl 6 years, 8 months ago to Ask the Gulch
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This is just too cool not to share: 10 Small Events that Changed the Course of History.

I wonder what events occurred that brought AR here to the US and to fame and our pleasure; hence without that one occurrence may have never come to pass.

Have you, perhaps, experienced something which if it had not occurred, your life would have been quite different.

Here is an interesting point to this exercise. It's the back story, not necessarily a personal one on the part of the subject. Yes, we all could say: If I hadn't taken this road or hadn't gone with this person or hadn't done this or that...that's the personal side we all have in common.
The back story, what was happening at the time by others or events out of view that perhaps can't be realized within one's life time but by others looking at the bigger pictures behind the scenes of your life.

Some of you may have an inkling on your back story...mine?..haven't a clue...
SOURCE URL: http://www.intellectualtakeout.org/article/10-small-events-changed-course-history?roi=echo3-45227050037-43177526-a298400b729684f61e9e13ed22c959ff


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  • Posted by $ CBJ 6 years, 8 months ago
    Everything you do changes the course of your life (and eventually, most other people’s lives). We frequently initiate cascade effects when our decisions impact the decisions other people make later (such as pulling in to a particular parking spot or renting a particular apartment). It can be plausibly argued that if you are old enough, minor decisions you made several decades ago are partly responsible for millions of people younger than you being born – if your decisions had been different, their parents may not ever have met and a different group of young people would populate the earth today.

    As the article points out, seemingly minor events and decisions can make the difference as to whether major events happen or don’t happen. But we have no access to alternate histories that would let us know whether, for instance, a different set of past monsters and geniuses would have led to better or worse outcomes for humanity today.
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  • Posted by salta 6 years, 8 months ago
    Here is one connected with Ayn Rand.
    As a child returning home during the first war, crossing the Baltic Sea (I think it was). The ship in front of hers in the convoy, and the ship behind, were both destroyed by mines.
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    • Posted by $ 6 years, 8 months ago
      That is interesting...the ship she was on, somehow avoided the mines.
      Thanks

      How about you...anything happen or didn't happen that brings you here to the present?
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      • Posted by $ allosaur 6 years, 8 months ago
        Back during the 70s, had The Montgomery Advertiser given me with 5 (of eventually 7) years experience a job as police reporter as the managing editor told me I had in the bag once a hiring freeze ended, I'll never know if I would have been better off now as a retired Alabama corrections officer living on a state pension.
        The hiring freeze ended two months later when The Montgomery Advertiser hired someone fresh out of college for far less money than promised to me.
        That's when me dino saw the writing on the wall.
        There were this --------------------many graduated journalists needing a job and this --------many jobs.
        (I create spaces with my hands when demonstrating that vocally).
        For a few months I earned more money than my diploma skill by making $6 an hour painting walls for a construction company during 1980.
        Toward the end of my 21-year corrections career I was making $100 a day, more if I caught mandatory overtime which I hated for sleep deprivation.
        One time I worked 16 hours three days straight. Talk about feeling wretched!
        Recall rapping my baton on a sleeping cube officer's window who was supposed to be watching me in a day room with 96 inmates walking around.
        It was about that time I learned I was part of a trust fund, bought four years of my required 25 years and got the hell out early.
        I worked security guard jobs for lesser pay but with more sleep until the four years were up and I could start collecting on the 25-years served pension.
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      • Posted by $ Radio_Randy 6 years, 8 months ago
        I had applied at the sewage treatment plant, in Spokane, but started at another (less smelly) job, before they got around to asking me to interview.

        Some years later, a fellow H.S. classmate (who did get a job, there) was killed in a freak accident when the roof of a tank he was inspecting, collapsed (not my preferred way of dying).
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      • Posted by $ Suzanne43 6 years, 8 months ago
        I missed a phone call from a school system that wanted to offer me a teaching position. Because i missed it, I signed a contract with another school system. I could have broken the contract and gone with the first school system, but that's not how I do things. Was my life altered? Of course it was. But there is little use of dwelling on the road not taken. Sometimes it's not the decisions that you make so much as it is the things that just happen to you that change your life.
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        • Posted by $ 6 years, 8 months ago
          We all have that in common...but it's the hidden back stories that interest us most...usually after the fact.
          I expected someone to say something like, my mechanic closed up shop, so I went to work with the car running bad when it just quit, A pretty lady gave me a ride and not soon after she became my bride...therefore...you would not exist if it wasn't for the closing of the business.

          That close to a back story.

          salta above gives a good back story on AR.
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  • Posted by Herb7734 6 years, 8 months ago
    This was told to me many years ago by a History Prof.:George Washington in Valley forge is a story of privation and survival. Unknown to Washington's officers, their cook was a British spy. The cook decided that he would poison Washington and thus speed up the end of the conflict. In preparing a salad for the General, he used a a vegetable that he found when putting together the salad. He knew it was related to the mandrake root which was poisonous, so he sliced a generous amount and mixed it in the salad. Unfortunately for the cook, the item, though completely eaten by Washington, had no effect on him. This convinced the cook that George Washington was chosen by God, and who was he to be against him? Today we gobble this veggie cum fruit by the ton. It's called the tomato. But - what if it had been poison?
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  • Posted by jimjamesjames 6 years, 8 months ago
    I have a picture of me and four others, sitting at an outside table on the Island of Ibiza, in 1968. They were opening a bar on the island and asked me to be a bartender. I had a ticket for a ship that left Barcelona for NY in six days in my pocket and two friends to meet me at the ship. Did not take the job and have wondered many times what would have been my life if I had accepted.
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