The History Channel; Beef Jerky for the mind

I guess all us (ahem) more seasoned and experienced folks missed out on the present 'hip, poppin' and conjecture filled history of the human race.

I made the mistake of watching a couple hours of The History Channel and learned the following things that we all may have missed when we were busy trying to keep arbitrary dates straight and deciphering which ancient civilization was killed and eaten by the next up-and-coming ancient civilization.

Here's the cliff notes so everyone who actually could operate a book with pages can understand all the fun we missed out on.

-Extraterrestrials may well have helped the Third Reich produce a plethora of deadly doomsday weapons that didn't actually work. Indiana Jones may or may not have had a pivotal role in that.

-The Knights Templar nobly escaped their executions for murder, theft and rape so they could come to America and hide carved stones telling the secrets of the Holy Grail in Minnesota of all places.

-The Free Masons designed entire cities in geometric patterns to hide secrets that even they couldn't decipher so that Nicholas Cage could star in movies that make him look smart.

-Nostradamus proved that drunken people could write near incomprehensible and vague predictions that will waste the time of future scholars for centuries while making gullible people nervous wrecks. Keep an eye out for the anti-Christ, unless we already missed him.

-The same non-helpful extraterrestrials that decided to pal around with Hitler could have also helped other ancient civilizations make massive structures .Future adventure seekers could then experience lost luggage and diarrhea while capturing pictures that bore all their friends to tears.

-The Loch Ness monster, while openly admitted by the first guy to take a picture as being a hoax, is still sucking up enormous funds and technical expertise to be found. In a weird turn of events, he hasn't.

-Other murky lakes now have giant prehistoric creatures magically appearing up in them like reptilian pop-tarts. Now you can be just as afraid of lakes as were of the ocean after 'Jaws' came out.

-Bigfoot is still out there, somewhere, leaving enormous footprints and shaky images of giant Steven Stills (From Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young) in his wake.

-Calendars produced by the Mayans showed that they may have known when the end of the world will be but weren't smart enough to figure out their own demise.

-The end of the world is coming next year, unless it doesn't. Either way don't clean out that 401k plan to buy a speedboat just yet.

-The Russians have finally opened up their own secret files, proving to the world that their own UFO nutjobs were just as loopy as ours.

-The Bermuda Triangle had a terrifying history of swallowing planes and boats that in NO WAY could be attributed to pilot error, even though the only thing to disappear there in the last 20 years was the Folstien children's college fund in a cruise ships casino.

-Viking may have left their own cold and forbidding lands centuries before Columbus got lost so they could settle in the one place as lousy as their own country-then promptly disappear.

-and last, but not least, Hitler was a real dick.

It almost makes you wish you could type up a term paper again, doesn't it?