TIL: Today I Learned

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To be fair I don't think they did it to anyone else but I haven't really checked. They did try and blame the attack on Native Americans - going so far as to dress up like a war band to stage the initial attack which forced the wagon train to exhaust their supplies. Then they approached as themselves and claimed they could help the settlers escape the Indians. The settlers were out of options and agreed to surrender their guns and follow the Mormons out of the danger zone and were promptly lined up and shot to a person - only the children were spared. They tried to raise these children as their own but the oldest knew what had happened and wouldn't go along with it. The government intervened and very nearly went to war with the Mormon church.

The end result was that the Mormon church accepted the authority of the US Government and gave up polygamy. Brigham Young managed to escape the noose by throwing his direct underlings under the bus, however. He orchestrated the attack but got off and is hailed as the founder who saved and grew the church after Joseph Smith was murdered.
 
Timsup2nothin said:
I am concerned at the implication of rarity, because I have tangentially known three of these people.
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The 'better chance of x than winning the lottery' stats are so vague, unless they specifically say 'powerball/mega millions' instead of 'lottery' who knows what odds they are using.

Powerball is something like 1 in almost 300 million.
Death by vending machine is 1 in 112 million.*
Smaller jackpot lotteries (but still seven figures) I'm wildly guessing 1 in 10-50 million.
A $100,000 scratch off, is I don't know, 1 in a million?

*=Based on average of 2 deaths/year in the US. Odds were probably higher decades ago, presumably when the incident you are referring to happened, before safety features have been implemented.

Death by vending machine odds are based on chance of someone dying from it in a given year. Lottery chances are based on every drawing, so powerball/mega millions is 104 times a year. Far more likely to meet a lottery winner than have known someone who died by vending machine, lightning strike or whatever other really rare way to die.

I'm sure the death rate of people who rock vending machines are considerably higher than people who don't.
Ants kill more people than sharks do. Doesn't matter what the shark odds are, it's not going to happen to me if I don't go near the ocean....well barring a 'Sharknado'....
 
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More threatening. "LAND SHARKS"
 
Gamesharks.

Loan sharks.

I still say Street Sharks are the most dangerous though. They teamed with Dino Vengers for crying out loud.
 
I was thinking SNL
 
Ghost Shark!
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Japanese submarine slammed two torpedoes into our side, Chief. We was comin' back from the island of Tinian to Leyte, just delivered the bomb. The Hiroshima bomb. Eleven hundred men went into the water. Vessel went down in twelve minutes. Didn't see the first shark for about a half an hour. Tiger. Thirteen-footer. You know how you know that when you're in the water, Chief? You tell by lookin' from the dorsal to the tail. What we didn't know... was our bomb mission had been so secret, no distress signal had been sent. Heh.

They didn't even list us overdue for a week. Very first light, Chief, sharks come cruisin'. So we formed ourselves into tight groups. Y'know, it's... kinda like ol' squares in a battle like, uh, you see in a calendar, like the Battle of Waterloo, and the idea was, shark comes to the nearest man and that man, he'd start poundin' and hollerin' and screamin', and sometimes the shark'd go away... sometimes he wouldn't go away. Sometimes that shark, he looks right into ya. Right into your eyes. Y'know the thing about a shark, he's got... lifeless eyes, black eyes, like a doll's eyes. When he comes at ya, doesn't seem to be livin'... until he bites ya. And those black eyes roll over white, and then... oh, then you hear that terrible high-pitch screamin', the ocean turns red, and spite of all the poundin' and the hollerin', they all come in and they... rip you to pieces.

Y'know, by the end of that first dawn... lost a hundred men. I dunno how many sharks. Maybe a thousand. I dunno how many men, they averaged six an hour. On Thursday mornin', Chief, I bumped into a friend of mine, Herbie Robinson from Cleveland- baseball player, boatswain's mate. I thought he was asleep, reached over to wake him up... bobbed up and down in the water just like a kinda top. Upended. Well... he'd been bitten in half below the waist. Noon the fifth day, Mr. Hooper, a Lockheed Ventura saw us, he swung in low and he saw us. Young pilot, a lot younger than Mr. Hooper. Anyway, he saw us and come in low and three hours later, a big fat PBY comes down and start to pick us up. Y'know, that was the time I was most frightened, waitin' for my turn. I'll never put on a life jacket again. So, eleven hundred men went into the water, three hundred sixteen men come out, and the sharks took the rest, June the 29th, 1945.

Anyway... we delivered the bomb.
 
HoloDoc said:
*whoosh*
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Apparently. Perhaps you would like to explain the point then instead making of a snarky comment.

hobbsyoyo said:
It's a monologue from Jaws.
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It's been a while since I've seen it but I believe part of the backstory of the captain was he was a part of the crew of the USS Indianapolis. That monologue seems to refer to the shipwreck and the shark attacks afterwards all of which happened after that date, so my original question still stands.
 
BenitoChavez said:
Apparently. Perhaps you would like to explain the point then instead making of a snarky comment.



It's been a while since I've seen it but I believe part of the backstory of the captain was he was a part of the crew of the USS Indianapolis. That monologue seems to refer to the shipwreck and the shark attacks afterwards all of which happened after that date, so my original question still stands.
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Tbh, I thought you were poking fun at the line. We were discussing sharks, I posted a famous monologue from a film about sharks, and you nit picked a known mistake. I thought you simply knew about the error.

Regardless, it's a well-known mistake in the film. I don't know if it was a mistake in the script, if Robert Shaw misspoke the line and they decided to leave it - considering his performance, I would agree with that decision if I was Spielberg - or if it was incorrect in the book and they just copied the monologue. The book is allegedly terrible, so I've never read it.
 
HoloDoc said:
Tbh, I thought you were poking fun at the line. We were discussing sharks, I posted a famous monologue from a film about sharks, and you nit picked a known mistake. I thought you simply knew about the error.

Regardless, it's a well-known mistake in the film. I don't know if it was a mistake in the script, if Robert Shaw misspoke the line and they decided to leave it - considering his performance, I would agree with that decision if I was Spielberg - or if it was incorrect in the book and they just copied the monologue. The book is allegedly terrible, so I've never read it.
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Ah ok. Yeah I didn't know. TIL :)
 
BenitoChavez said:
Ah ok. Yeah I didn't know. TIL :)
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Yeah, it annoyed some people, but most of the surviving veterans of the Indianapolis were just happy that their story was mentioned in such reverent tones by Quint.

Now I want to watch Jaws again. I think my ex stole it. :mad:
 
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