Spacedust buster
The portable vacuum cleaner Dustbuster was built on the back of technology for the moon landings.
Category: Arts & recreation
Uganda Hollywood
There are a lot of pseudo-Hollywoods making films: Bollywood, Dhallywood, Mollywood, and Wellywood. My favourites are the hyper-violent action films of Uganda’s Wakaliwood.
Rotten before it is ripe
Chaucer, Shakespeare, Cervantes, and Rabelais all wrote about the medlar fruit, which must rot before it is ready to eat.
Hobo news
From 1913 to 1929, the hobos had their own newspaper.
First scream
The Wilhelm scream is a sound effect that has been used in hundreds of films, including Disney, Lord of the Rings, Indiana Jones, and Star Wars films. But who was Wilhelm? And why was he screaming?
Cow opera
Leave it to the Norwegians and Swedes to take a way to call cattle in high mountain pastures and turn it into a genre of music.
Red Westerns
Sergio Leone famously filmed Westerns in Italy and Spain, creating the genre known as the Spaghetti Western. But Soviet bloc countries had their own version too: the Red Westerns.
Art in the trenches
In World War I millions of troops sat in trenches for more than three and a half years. It was by turns terrifying and boring. To ignore one feeling and allay the other, they made art.
Castle licence
If you wanted to build a castle in medieval England, you needed permission from the king. They’re supposed to be for the defence of the realm, but sometimes you just want to fake out the neighbours.
Encyclopedia vs. volcano
The eruption of Mount Vesuvius, which destroyed the Roman cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum, also killed the famous author of one of the earliest encyclopedias.
The lost memoirs of Byron
Lord Byron, the Romantic poet and infamous libertine, wrote a book of memoirs that may have set 19th century England aflame with scandal – if they hadn’t been deliberately destroyed within a month of his death.
The Thing in the polar night
Every year in late February and early March, at the South Pole research station, the last flight leaves and the last sun sets. Neither will return for months. How do you mark such an occasion? With a horror film festival, of course.
Worst poet
William McGonagall is widely recognised as the worst poet in history.
The alchemist’s elementals
Elementals are a common feature of modern bestiaries, video games, and RPGs. We have the 16th century alchemist Paracelsus to thank for thinking them up.
Lovers’ eyes
If the eyes are the windows to the soul, why would you paint anything else? The eye miniature was one of the oddest trends in late 1700s art.
Audience and jury
Author Ayn Rand wrote a play about a murder trial. Audience members were invited to play the jury and determine the end of the play – thus creating one of the first choose-your-own-adventure plots in history.
The Generalist Academy 