Luxury Tax was always galling not so much for the money, but because you had to count out $75. But I was still pissed off that they changed it.

Buy every property you can except the green ones, which are money pits. Seriously, those three are Chernobyl in my house. Nobody wants to be stuck with them.

My 8-year-old son came up with a variation on Monopoly last year that is the most brilliant and grueling game I've ever heard of: Double Monopoly. If you have two Monopoly sets in your house (and why wouldn't you, you're not communists), arrange both boards so that the Free Parkings overlap. The pieces move around the…

The orange streets are the best. Not too expensive to develop, but a big payoff ($1000 for landing on a hotel!). And well-trafficked because of people getting out of jail. Ah, crap, I just realized I'm a slumlord profiting on the backs of the urban poor and the prison-industrial complex. Don't tell anyone, or I'll be…

The Reagan years?

More to the point, it's a necessary trait to running a company. If Steve Jobs had been less of a dick, he'd be Steve Wozniak and someone else would have run Apple.

Okay, you win this one.

Yet another way Tesla was decades ahead of his time. Yo mama's so fat she makes a uranium atom's nucleus look like a beryllium atom's nucleus!

Reading this, I feel like he could have saved a lot of time and money and damage to his career if he had started with a 12-foot tower, gotten that to work, and then tried the 180-foot tower. I didn't include this in the article because I couldn't verify it (and I try to stick with what Wikipedia says), but there were…

I'm afraid both answers are wrong. The best piece is the hat, perched on top of the car.

C&C Music Factory was also the last factory in America to be powered by a Tesla coil. Little known fact.

Towards the bottom of the Wikipedia article, there's a quote from Tesla to that effect… which he put in a eulogy for Edison! "We've lost a great man today… one who was sloppy, inefficient, and got results because he had tremendous resources at his disposal. Also, he had bad breath and his mama was fat. He will truly…

Most of those misconceptions are exaggerations of things that are in fact true. He didn't die penniless, but he did die deeply in debt. I probably should have been clearer that he didn't invent alternating current, but he did make it viable for use on a large scale. And his fame seems to have waxed and waned. During…

I heard a story - possibly apocryphal - that Prohibition was only intended to affect hard liquor, and that was all the temperance movement was after. But by the time Congress was done dicking around with the Amendment, it included beer and wine. If they had stuck to liquor, who knows if it would have actually worked —…

It's usually safe to assume that either Britain or the US was fucking with basically any country. I saw a map online of all the countries that the UK has invaded in his history, and it's basically a map of all the places where there's land.

The Wikipedia article mentions longstanding rumors of British influence behind the war, but there's no real evidence of it. It's very plausible that López, who was basically an Uday Hussein figure, was just bad enough at his job to piss off Argentina while invading Brazil and wound up at war with three countries…

All of our wars with Spain were basically, "you can't fuck over those people! That's our job!"

Damn it! I knew there was one more great war name that I saw at first glance, and then when I went back to re-read the list and do links, I just skimmed right by it!

Well, 90% of the adult male population, and I assume in this case "adult" means "military age," so there were boys and old men still alive in large numbers. But that middle generation was just gone. Wikipedia says it took decades for the male/female ratio to get back in the neighborhood of 1:1. And then cholera…

As it is, I probably spent more time on the 1876 election than the piece warranted, but it's really a lose-lose. A Northerner from the Party of Lincoln wins, and black people get screwed. And because white Southerners stopped blacks from voting in significant numbers, the election was close enough that — while they…