Historical Moments That Seem Surreal in Retrospect....

Martin Van Buren: Co-Founder of the Democratic Party with, Vice-President of, and President after, Andrew Jackson. Elected President in 1836, lost in 1840. First President to run for a non-consecutive 2nd term, and first on a third party ticket (Free Soil) in 1848. Endorsed (begrudgingly) Republican President Abe Lincoln in 1860. Most Free Soilers went with the Democratic opposition, the Whigs, to create the Republican Party.

That's 4 parties he was part of: (Democratic-Republican, Democratic, Free Soil, and he endorsed the Republican ticket.)
 
How about obscure people from everyday lives becoming world leaders? A simple housewife whose husband was killed while returning to Manila is catapulted into the presidency. Two, a mere college dropout and actor by chance becomes president of the same country as the housewife.
 
That awkward feel, when you just sneezed on a general.

2006814A50B43D7C30DA82


Surreal, though not so much 'surreal in retrospect'.
 
This won't seem strange in 30 years. When Cobain killed himself, he took rock with him, and it isn't coming back.

There will continue to be rock bands, and they'll keep making music, but rock will never again be the "default" genre of music. Once upon a time, Jazz, Doo-wop, vocal quartets, all were huge and mainstream, and all fell to the next big thing. Rap took its place as the mainstream in the 90's, grunge was just rock's going away party (nu-metal was the hangover the next morning).

Considering the fact that literally dozens of rock bands have had number one hits since the 1990's I find this hard to agree with...
 
Gangsta rap in the 90s. Try to imagine if today, Adele and Lady Gaga got into a feud and started shooting each other.

Another cultural one is pretty much all the music of the late 2000s. There were pretty much no major rock bands in the mainstream and songs got popular through club airplay. Songs meant exclusively for one setting, pretty much one exclusively attended by twenty somethings, pretty much controlled the radio for years. Now imagine trying to explain this to a child in like, 30 years. It's weird.

Doesn't the latter paragraph describe pretty much exactly what happened with disco too? And LOL at the Adele-Lady Gaga gunfight, sounds like something out of Police Squad!
 

Cook

Banned
It might go a bit far to say consumption actually increased.
It’s not. Consumption of alcohol, particularly hard spirits, increased significantly during prohibition.

Another surreal moment from the Prohibition era: Al Capone taking over the milk industry and discovering that the profit margin on milk was greater than that on alcohol!
He is also responsible for the introduction of ‘Use By’ dates on milk.
 
Top