✉️ Frank's Five — Issue No. 2
Friday, June 12, 2026 • This week's theme: Timeline Scramblers
Morning, friend. This week the almanac takes a crowbar to your sense of historical order. Everything below is true; none of it will feel true. That's the good stuff.
🥇 The Headliner
Here's the arithmetic, since nobody believes it on the first pass. The Great Pyramid was completed around 2560 BC. Cleopatra VII, the last active ruler of Egypt's Ptolemaic dynasty, died in 30 BC. That puts roughly 2,500 years between her and the pyramid — but only about 2,000 years between her and Neil Armstrong stepping onto the Moon in 1969.
In other words: when Cleopatra took a tourist's look at the pyramids (and she could have — they were already a famous attraction in her day), she was gazing at monuments more ancient to her than she is to us. Ancient Egypt wasn't a period of history so much as an entire hallway of it — the pharaohs ruled, in one form or another, for some three thousand years. Rome barely managed a third of that and never stops bragging.
File this one for the next time someone at the table says "ancient history" like it's all one Tuesday.
🔢 Four More Beauties
- No. 2 Woolly mammoths were still alive while the Great Pyramid was being built. A holdout population survived on Wrangel Island, in the Arctic Ocean, until roughly 4,000 years ago — centuries after the pyramid went up. — History Facts
- No. 3 Nintendo was founded in 1889 — as a maker of hanafuda playing cards in Kyoto. The company is older than the zipper's patent and the Eiffel Tower's first birthday party. — History Facts
- No. 4 The shortest war on record is the Anglo-Zanzibar War of 1896, which lasted roughly 40 minutes, start to surrender. — History Facts
- No. 5 Anne Frank and Martin Luther King Jr. were born in the same year — 1929. And Anne Frank's birthday is June 12: this very day, 97 years ago. — History Facts
🚫 The Weekly Debunk
"Napoleon was tiny." FALSE — Frank checked
Napoleon Bonaparte stood about 5 feet 6 to 5 feet 7 inches (around 1.68–1.70 meters) — perfectly average, and possibly a touch above average, for a Frenchman of his era. The myth grew from two directions at once: French inches were longer than British inches, so his listed height of "5 feet 2" in French units got misread across the Channel; and British cartoonists, James Gillray chief among them, spent years drawing him as a stamping toddler because it was funny and there was a war on.
The propaganda outlived the empire. Frank's ruling: the man lost at Waterloo fair and square, but he's been losing three inches a century ever since, and that part isn't fair at all.
❓ Frank's Stumper
First, the answer to last week's Stumper (Which letter appears in the name of no U.S. state?): the letter Q. Every other letter of the alphabet shows up somewhere in the fifty state names — even J (New Jersey) and Z (Arizona) — but Q never got a seat.
This week's Stumper: Only one U.S. state has a name of just one syllable. Which state is it?
Answer revealed in next Friday's email. Say the fifty states out loud if you must — Frank does it in the truck.
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