This video was made possible by Hover. Buy your custom domain and email for 10% off at
hover.com/HAI. Well, well, well, look what episode it is—HAI
#100. I have finally disproven those strangely specific haters who said I would never make
more than 99 medium quality, slightly funny, slightly interesting videos on a nondescript
grouping of subjects. Well, look at me now. Anyway, over the past 99 videos there have
been literally hundreds of potential topics that we decided not to do because, even as
good we are at stretching out topics, they couldn’t possibly fill up a full five minutes.
As there’s no better way to celebrate 99 of the same format of videos than something
different, we’re going to cover as many as possible of those today. Welcome to Quarter
as Interesting. Speaking of quarters, let’s start with the
land that doesn’t have any—Australia. Back in the 1930’s in Australia’s empty
bit, there were lots of farmers and emus. Now, farmers and emu’s go together like
fish sticks and frosting—poorly. The emu’s would break fences, eat crops, they were just
all around destructive and so the Australians, in keeping with their role as upside down
Americans, decided to declare war… against the emus. Basically, the army was sent out
with machine guns, ammunition, and orders to kill as many emus’ as possible. Beyond
that, it’s pretty much a normal war story except for the opponent being emu’s and
in the end, the army actually lost because have you even seen an emu? Now imagine tens
of thousands of those. This is overall one of these, “great title, ok topic,” kinda
videos which is why, despite receiving literally hundreds of requests for this, that’s all
you get. Also, there’s a Sam O’Nella Video on it so just go watch that.
But let’s transition to Australia’s old, senile father: the United Kingdom of Great
Britain and probably Northern Ireland depending on when you’re watching this. Two of the
UK’s greatest loves are tea and football—the non-moon-landing country kind. Now, when a
child in born in the UK they are immediately issued an electric kettle—it’s a requirement
for living there. These mythical devices are able to bring water to a boil in a matter
of seconds which is crucial for improving the country’s tcct statistics—that’s
tea craving to consumption time. The problem, though, is that these kettles use a lot of
electricity and therefore, if a lot of people want tea at the same time, the power grid
has to predict and adjust to this in order to avoid a blackout. Of course, when everyone
wants tea is when a football match finishes. The biggest instance of this was in 1990 when
England played West Germany in the World Cup semi-final. After the shootout was finished,
in which England lost, everyone watching the match in England went and turned on their
kettles to make an anger tea and there was a huge electricity surge of 2800 MegaWatts—equivalent
to 1.1 million kettles being turned on simultaneously. In the past this was a real concern for power
grids during big TV events and so they had to develop techniques to quickly generate
power in response but nowadays, it’s supposedly less of an issue as more and more of the country
switches to watching Half as Interesting videos at any time they want—among other online
video things. This also wasn’t an issue back in the 1890’s—partially
because not many people were watching TV, partially because time, as a concept, was
iffy. The iPhones of the time didn’t set the time automatically so people had to somehow
get the accurate time from public clocks. In Greenwich, England there were a few solutions
to this. One was a ball at the top of the Greenwich Observatory that would drop at 1:00
pm exactly but not everyone could see this. One was a series of telegraph signals that
would go off at certain times per day but not everyone had a telegraph station. The
third solution was to buy the time from a lady named Ruth Belville. Every morning, she
would set her super-accurate pocket-watch to the accurate time of the Greenwich Observatory
and then go around the town by horse and buggy to give the accurate time to those who subscribed
to her service. I’d say, with having already figured out how to subscript-ionize time,
that she was ahead of her time, but as we know, she was right on ti…ahh shut up me.
But let’s transition to England’s favorite hexagon—France. If you want to get from
the beautiful city of Nantes to the beautiful island of Noirmoutier you have two choices—you
can take the bridge like a boring oatmeal eating dude or you can drive through the friggin
ocean like you’re the prophet Moses back from the dead to enable slightly more convenient
underwater road routes. The under ocean road in question is the Passage du Gois which is,
and I can’t stress this enough, literally underwater—at least for part of the day.
You see, the coast of France has some of the largest tides in the world with this particular
area usually seeing about a 20 foot or 6 meter difference between high and low tide. That’s
enough to completely reveal this road at low tide. Cars are only allowed to drive on it
for the 90 minutes before and after each low tide making its usage limited, but it can
save about a whole ten or so minutes in comparison to taking the bridge when coming from the
north. But let’s now head west and then south to
talk about one of the battles of the American Civil War. More south… more south… like,
beyond the sofa on the porch kinda south… yeah, there. Now, I’m no rocket scientist,
but based off what I know about South America, it is not the America in which the movie took
place. So why was there an American civil war battle there? Well, this is a quick one:
basically, off the coast of Brazil there chilled a Union boat, that was the OG US, and in came
a Pacific-bound Confederate boat, those were the breakaway bad guys. Both stopped in this
Brazilian port. Upon seeing the bad guy boat, the union boat sent a letter over basically
saying, “u wot m8,” to which the confederate boat responded, “I’m just trying to get
repaired and leave,” to which the union boat responded, “boom,” as it fired its
cannons at it in the middle of the night. Those cannonballs missed but then they exchanged
musket fire, the Union boat rammed the confederate one, boarded it, and won. The Brazilians understandably
were not pleased about the US having a battle on their turf, but the US, surprisingly, didn’t
care even though the unprovoked attack was, like, full-on, without-a-doubt illegal but
anyway, that’s why there was a US Civil War Battle in South America.
Now, if you ever become a mid-to-late 1800’s naval captain, you’ll know that one thing
that you’ll desperately need is respect. Well, I guarantee you the best way to get
your sailors to respect you is to have a professional-looking email address at a custom domain. Nothing
screams, “in control,” like captain@lookatmyhat.cool. That email, or really any email using their
over 400 domain extensions, can be yours in about 120 seconds by going to hover.com/HAI.
You can also, of course, just buy a domain from Hover as they’re the best place to
buy your corner of the internet before someone else steals your domain name. Whether its
an email or a domain, you can get 10% off your first purchase by going to hover.com/HAI
and you’ll be supporting the show while you’re at it.