People are sharing awesome facts that happen to look like shitposts, after a prompt from Independent journalist Eric Michael Garcia.

In case you've missed everything from dial-up Internet right up until now (in which case we recommend you stop reading and go check out Hide The Pain Harold, you're going to love him), let us explain "shitposting".

Normal posting on the Internet involves posting things you think people will enjoy. Shitposting is posting things that are deliberately terrible and of "aggressively, ironically, and of trollishly poor quality" to social media, often intentionally to annoy people or just to amuse them with several layers of wrongness.

Sometimes, however, real-life facts just happen to look like shitposts. Here are a few of our favorites, we'll jump in if anything needs adding.

This, amazingly, is true. Martin Couney created a sideshow out of a neonatal unit in order to keep the unit up and running. Visitors to New York’s Coney Island in the 1930s could pay 25 cents to view the premature babies.

At the time, there were very few options for babies born prematurely, making being treated in a sideshow an unlikely preferable option. Couney – who historians believe was likely not actually a doctor – filled the attraction with incubators, and the incubators with babies, and likely saved thousands of lives. This was despite heavy criticism of people who thought it damaging psychologically to the children, and doctors still unconvinced of the benefits of incubation.

Yep, that is correct, history's favorite painters made their masterpieces using ground-up bits of human and feline mummies, which they called Mummy Brown because of the mummies.

 

This is true. However, his success was likely not down to his chemical mix, but likely due to his careful selection of jobs he took on, and the massive publicity he received for his successes vs the obscurity of his failures.

He would study the weather records to try and predict whether rain would come soon, and take a job if it was likely, taking sensible gambles that the rain would come.

Another strange fact about the Rescussie Annie doll: You have been giving the kiss of life to a woman who drowned in the Sienne over 100 years ago.

Amazingly, this too was real.