The thing that makes it appear that elephants can run is that they can walk at 25mph/40kph. I have seen people running a 4-minute mile on an elevated indoor track that was made so you could clearly see how fast those men were going. That’s 15mph. Elephants are fast.

Oh, they absolutely changed it. It’s indistinguishable from any generic root beer now. I assume part of the difference is that original Barq’s used cane sugar (that’s an assumption, too, but given where it was made I imagine that cane sugar was the cheap sweetener,) whereas the first change Coca Cooa would have made on Day 1 was to substitute high fructose corn syrup in what had just become a nation-wide product.

I can’t even drink Coke anymore, it’s just harsh and nasty, or I couldn’t until I discovered that you can buy Mexican Coca-Cola in glass bottles by the case at Home Depot. They still make it with cane sugar in Mexico, and it is a different kind of soda entirely.

The high-pitched voice was cultivated by public speakers before artificial amplification was available. The higher-pitched speaking voice is understandable farther away than a lower-pitched voice at the same volume.

Elmo would have been a very persuasive frontier politician. “Who’s against slavery!? WE are! YAAAAYYY!!!”

The original Barq’s is still my favorite root beer. It was a dark day when Coca Cola bought it and immediately changed the recipe.

One of the things I liked about it, other than the taste and mouthfeel, was the slogan in all their advertising: “Drink Barq’s, It’s Good.” Coca-Cola changed that, too, perhaps fearful of running afoul of truth-in-advertising laws.

The Raven dooky is a nice touch.

The star sphere is the name for the ancients’ earth-centric concept of the “realm of the stars,” a sphere with the earth at its midpoint, the night sky, the cosmos.

Personally, I think it would be a pretty cool name for a spaceship.

So you think Musk should have made up a word for it, like creativity-challenged automakers do?

It’s a marketing name. He is, much more than anything else, a salesman. He could have called it the Star Sphere, I suppose. Of course, that is also already a thing. Wombat? No, also already a thing.

You must find military aircraft names very frustrating.

Are you complaining because people aren’t capitalizing the name of the product? Granted, it isn’t a starship, but it is a Starship. Is that better?

A culvert on his back AND a rifle in his hand.

ETA: The know it isn’t a rifle in the OP, but it’s certainly rifle-adjacent, visually.

Upvoting you and downvoting the OP. The answer is an interesting story, but it’s widely known, and for those who don’t know the answer to the question, it’s easy to discover.

Looks like Shawn White. Oop, no, ‘88, not him. NM.

I’m going with Random Dude.

That very quickly took an unexpected turn.

There she is, the Purple Cow of song and story.

Is the Egyptian pictured wearing a very stylish mustache?

“… washed out of a river in the form of gold dust.” Does anyone else immediately think of the Golden Fleece of Colchis?

Everyone? Oh.

Early 60’s, ‘63 +/- 1 year, I’d guess.

That’s eerie and disturbing, and I say that as a lifelong cat person who has seen cats do some things.

“I’m taking the veggies down with me, you dick!”

This prompt generated a lot of responses in five hours! Some are long enough that I would be hard-pressed to copy some in the time between the prompt going up and the submission.

Too good. You could publish this. Someone right now is assembling a collection of short stories with which this could keep company. You should search for that person.

ETA: short-short stories. Long ago I had a copy of a collection of short-shorts, I don’t recall the title or the editor, because… long ago.

Do. Not. Stop.

EXTERMINATOR

OF SORTS

This, alone, is reward enough for reading, but you offer so much more. However, I want more still.

I don’t know where you are going, I don’t know if you know where you are going, but you really should try to go there.

It probably wasn’t that difficult to enforce. New tires were good for only 12,000 miles, and that was if you took care of them, and each registered car was allowed four for the duration of the war. There were no newly manufactured automobiles for the duration except those ordered by the military, and those were all of the same models that had been introduced in 1941. Of course, gas was severely rationed as well, despite the fact that the US was the world’s largest producer of petroleum, but restricting gasoline made tires last longer, and rubber was the chokepoint.

He wasn’t just looking like a badass. In my observation, paratroopers are badasses.

Some individuals did, anyone who survived and got back home (getting back also involved survival) and retained or was able to replace his gear and horses probably brought back a profit in loot, at a guess. However, that is a whole series of conditions.

Of course, they actually conquered the Holy Land at one point, and managed to hold Jerusalem for nearly(?) a century, so there was an acquisition of wealth there, although the smart money would have been transferred out of the Levant and back to England and France, because the wealth that was built up and stayed there turned out to be pretty transitory from the Crusaders’ POV.

Lightning ETA: I strongly suspect the Crusades were a net economic loss for the Crusaders. There’s so little profit in dying.