Earworm cure
An earworm is a piece of repetitive memorable music that gets stuck in your head. How do you cure it? Chew gum.
Category: Arts & recreation
Dictator vs. rock music
Manuel Noriega was the CIA-funded dictator of Panama from 1983 to 1989. When the United States invaded Panama, they drove him out with The Clash’s cover of I Fought the Law.
Porky Pig swearing
In a 1939 short film, Porky Pig swears in the funniest way possible. It was not seen by the public until the 1970s.
Nadaism
In 1958, surrealism, the Beat Generation, and a decade of civil war in Colombia distilled itself into the Nadaist movement – a rejection of Colombian government, literature, religion, and orthodoxy.
On the impossibility of final proof
It’s my 200th post! Time to talk about the nature of proof, using 18th century literary hero Baron Munchausen and his horse too.
The Fall of Icarus
In the myth, Icarus flew too close to the sun on wings of wax and fell to his death. 16th century Dutch / Flemish artist Pieter Bruegel the Elder asked the question: what if no-one noticed?
Puzzle cups
Europe has a long tradition of puzzle and prank cups and jugs: to drink out of these vessels you must first solve a mechanical challenge.
The queen’s duck
Have you ever had a boss who just had to contribute to your project in order to prove their worth? There’s an easy way to counteract that: just add a duck.
Prisons of the imagination
M. C. Escher drew impossible objects – things that could not actually exist in three-dimensional space. But an Italian engraver named Giovanni Battista Piranesi was drawing them more than a hundred years earlier.
Gender colour coding
Pink for girls, blue for boys. Or is it pink for boys, blue for girls? A persistent myth holds that colour stereotypes flipped some time in the 20th century.
The other dwarfs
Meet Disney’s seven other dwarfs: Baldy, Burpy, Puffy, Snoopy, Nifty, Thrifty, and Awful.
Lonely words
Flother is another word for a snowflake. It appears only once, in a 1275 CE book. The poison that killed Hamlet’s father in Shakespeare’s play, hebenon, is mentioned nowhere else. These are the hapax legomena, the lonely words.
Jazz on bones
In the 1950s and 60s, foreign music was censored in the Soviet Union. So bootleggers made illegal records out of old X-ray film: the jazz on bones.
Inquisition vs. Last Supper
In 1573 the Renaissance artist Paolo Veronese painted a Last Supper that included drunken Germans, dogs, parrots, and dwarfs. He liked it, but the Inquisition had other ideas.
Night thoughts
Existential and spiritual crises seem to appear in the middle of the night – at least, according to various Catholic saints, poets, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sparklehorse and Danger Mouse they do.
Victorian 360-degree film
The first 360-degree film was recorded for the 1900 Paris Exposition. It recreated the experience of rising in a hot air balloon, but the film probably never played for a real audience because of technical difficulties.
The Generalist Academy 