The same procedure as every year
Tonight millions of people in Germany, Sweden, Denmark, and Norway will watch an obscure British comedy routine from 1963. Dinner for One has inexplicably become perhaps the most repeated TV broadcast in history.
Month: December 2020
Pacific aurora
In 1962 the United States detonated a nuclear bomb in outer space over Hawai’i. It caused an artificial aurora in the sky over Honolulu – and another one over Samoa, more than four thousand kilometres away.
Weirdest shark
The cookiecutter shark is easily the weirdest shark around: it uses bioluminescence to lure large predators, feeds by suction, sheds whole rows of teeth at once and swallows them, and by weight can be more than one third liver.
Nontransitive dice
Consider three special dice: A, B, and C. On a fair roll, A is more likely to beat B. B is more likely to beat C. But C is more likely to beat A. These are nontransitive dice.
Sonic the protein
Genes and proteins have been named after Sonic the Hedgehog, the Smurfs, Spock, Pikachu, and the Tinman from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.
Fireplace television
In 1966 a New York TV station played a 17-second loop of a blazing fireplace accompanied by Christmas music. It was, and is, a huge success.
Christmas cannibals (Part 2)
One of the miracles attributed to Saint Nick is the resurrection of three children before they could be turned into Christmas hams.
Christmas cannibals (Part 1)
The Dutch win the prize for most disturbing Christmas song, 1978’s Flappie by Youp van ‘t Hek.
The devil’s coins
Coins bearing a picture of the devil with the inscription “Civitas Diaboli” have been found in churches and museums in Denmark, Norway, and England – products of a hoax that began in 1973.
Amateur orchestra
The Portsmouth Sinfonia was founded on one simple principle: why leave orchestras to the professionals?
First Jesus
The first pictorial representation of Jesus Christ is insulting Roman graffiti that gives him a donkey’s head.
Water puppets
Vietnamese puppetry uses an ingenious method to hide the puppeteers’ controls: they put them underwater.
Cursed stone city
Al-Khazneh, the temple carved out of a cliff in Petra, is the most famous remnant of the Nabataean Kingdom. But to its south lies Hegra, the cursed stoneland city.
Two-faced car
A passenger in the the 1957 Zündapp Janus sits with their back to the driver. The Janus has two doors: the front of the car and the rear of the car.
Reversing river
Every six months the Tonlé Sap River reverses direction.
Chinese rhyme
We know how Chinese was pronounced 1400 years ago thanks to the world’s oldest surviving rhyming dictionary.
The Generalist Academy 