Football war
In 1969, Honduras and El Salvador went to war while their football teams faced off in a World Cup qualifier.
Month: June 2021
Cat poetry (Part 2)
The famed Romantic poet Thomas Gray wrote a verse about his friend’s cat drowning in a goldfish bowl. [2 of 2]
Cat poetry (Part 1)
Cat poetry has a long history: Christopher Smart wrote a Romantic religious poem featuring his cat Jeoffry while confined in a mental asylum in the 1760s. [1 of 2]
Featured category: Language
An international alphabet, the tongue-twisters of click languages, language chains across continents, and the five million dollar comma.
From the archives: The West in the East
Mongolia’s answer to the Beatles, the Soviet Union’s answer to cowboy films, the Russian adaptation of The Hobbit, and Western music etched onto old x-ray film to get through the Iron Curtain.
Largest caves
Gruta Casa de Pedra in Brazil has the largest cave mouth in the world – it is higher than the Great Pyramid of Giza. But the largest cave chamber in the world is larger still.
Best beer
Some of the best beers in the world (according to aficionados) are also among the rarest beers in the world.
Cycling around the world
Between 1894 and 1895 Annie Londonderry cycled around the world – the first woman to do so.
Math homework
In 1939 a student at UC Berkeley copied down two homework problems from the class blackboard. He solved them in a few days… and then discovered that they were two of the thorniest unsolved theorems in statistics.
Cross-eyed white tigers
Almost all white tigers have crossed eyes.
Featured category: South Asia
The juggernaut’s kitchen, patenting yoga, the thousand names of Vishnu, and the strange chain reaction that led from anti-inflammatory drug use on cattle to a leopard invasion.
From the archives: Shipwrecks
The 17th century warship sunk the same day it was launched, the deepest shipwreck in the world, the dreadnought sunk by a human torpedo, and the cyclone that ended gunboat diplomacy in Samoa.
Orinoco flow
By discharge volume, the Amazon and the Orinoco are the largest and fourth largest rivers in the world. The Casiquiare River in Venezuela connects them.
Triple clarinet
The Sardinian launeddas, also known as a triplepipe, sounds like someone playing three clarinets at the same time.
Political plagiarism
Two German politicians resigned from office – in 2011 and 2013 – when their doctorates were revoked because of plagiarism.
First light
After the Big Bang the universe was dark for hundreds of million years, until the formation of the earliest stars and galaxies. And one of those galaxies was GN-z11, the oldest we have ever observed.
The Generalist Academy 