The Ottoman Empire feels like an entity of a time long past, while the name Nintendo conjures up images of modernity — electronics, video games, arcades, and mustachioed plumbers. However, Nintendo was actually founded before the Ottoman Empire ended, and this period of overlap isn’t measured in a matter of months or even a few years. When the Ottoman sultanate was eliminated in 1922 after the widespread geographic shuffle that followed World War I, Nintendo had already been in business for 33 years. 

Ottomans and Turks are the same thing.

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The Ottoman Empire was a tapestry of ethnicities that were not exclusively Turkish — in fact, the entire empire wasn’t even exclusively Muslim. As the BBC explains, calling the Ottoman Empire “Turkish” is similar to calling everything that made up the British Empire “English.”

Of course, this wasn’t the Nintendo that many of us know today — Nintendo didn’t make its first electronic video game until 1975. Founded on September 23, 1889, Nintendo began with a humble mission: selling playing cards, specifically Japanese-style cards called Hanafuda. The company did pretty well, but decided to expand further in later decades. Nintendo struck a deal with Disney in 1959 to create playing cards with Disney characters on them, and in the 1960s, Nintendo sold a series of successful children’s toys, including Ultra Hand and Home Bowling, before becoming the official Japanese distributor of the Magnavox Odyssey — the first commercial home video console. Seeing the promise of such a machine, Nintendo threw its weight behind this emerging entertainment category. The rest, as they say, is history.

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James A. Garfield didn’t have the strangest presidential pet — that distinction probably belongs to either John Quincy Adams’ alligator (which he kept in a bathtub) or Martin Van Buren’s two tiger cubs — but his dog Veto might have had the cleverest name. Named after the presidential power to prevent a bill passed by Congress from becoming law, the black Newfoundland was described by the Lewiston Evening Journal as “a true protector” who once alerted his humans to a barn fire by barking, and who also once “held the reins of a valuable horse on a rampage in the barn” until help arrived to resolve the equine emergency.

Garfield vetoed more bills in his first month than any other president.

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In a cruel bit of irony given his dog’s name, Garfield vetoed exactly zero bills during his brief White House tenure. Other presidents with no vetoes to their name include Millard Fillmore, Zachary Taylor, and Thomas Jefferson.

This wasn’t just a bit of humor on Garfield’s part. According to the book First Dogs: American Presidents and Their Best Friends, the 20th president “wanted to remind the rambunctious Congress of 1881 that he might not sign all of the bills it passed,” as he considered some of them “a revolution against the Constitution.” Neither Garfield nor Veto spent much time in the White House, alas. Garfield was shot by Charles J. Guiteau on July 2, 1881, and died on September 19 after just 200 days in office, with many historians believing that insufficient medical treatment contributed to his untimely death.

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Michel Lotito was a French entertainer renowned for his unusual diet, earning him the nickname “Monsieur Mangetout” (“Mr. Eat-it-All”). He was known to consume bicycles, TV sets, and other items made of metal and glass. In a 1978 interview with Canadian newspaper The Leader-Post, the man with the seemingly iron stomach claimed to have eaten his first piece of glass in a swimming pool at the age of 16 before going on to eat “plates, nails, and bottles — all to win bets.” He later carved out a career eating indigestible objects for others’ amusement.

One man has eaten more than 34,000 McDonald’s Big Macs.

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Donald Gorske is a McDonald’s superfan who has consumed more than 34,000 Big Macs. The Wisconsinite ate his first Big Mac on May 17, 1972, and loved it so much that he ate eight more that day alone. In 1999, he set the Guinness World Record for most Big Macs eaten in a lifetime (15,490).

On one occasion in 1978, Lotito ate 15 pounds of a bicycle over the course of 12 days for $5,000 (around $24,000 today), washing it down with 10 bottles of mineral oil and 100 razor blades on the side. To digest these materials, Lotito chopped the metal items into tiny pellets, stretched his meals out over multiple days, and drank plenty of water. Newspapers also reported on Lotito’s ability to consume TV sets, and he once ate a whole waterbed to help promote a Texas-based furniture company.

However, Lotito’s most awe-inspiring feat, if true, was his claim to have consumed an entire Cessna 150 aircraft between 1978 and 1980 — an achievement confirmed by Guinness World Records but deemed unverifiable (though possible) by Snopes. Lotito maintained the truth of this claim until he died of natural causes in 2006, and in a 1999 interview with journalist Ben Sherwood, he purported the plane’s rubber tires to be the least appetizing part of the aircraft.

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