Short hand
The hand is a flexible and convenient mnemonic device. The knuckle mnemonic tells us the number of days in a month, but a musical mnemomic called the Guidonian hand has been around for eight hundred years.
Category: Arts & recreation
Pirate radio
New Zealand had no private radio stations in the early 1960s. The government monopoly was broken by a “pirate” radio station, Radio Hauraki, which broadcast from an old boat anchored in international waters in the Hauraki Gulf.
The most beautiful words
What is the most beautiful noun phrase in English? Cellar door is the favourite of many famous writers, including Dorothy Parker, J. R. R. Tolkien, and C. S. Lewis. But no-one is quite sure who said it first.
Waiting for Godots
Samuel Beckett’s famous play Waiting for Godot attracts famous actors who want to do something interesting on stage, and this has led to some powerful pairings. Mel Gibson and Geoffrey Rush. Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart. Nathan Lane and John Goodman. But perhaps the most star-studded cast happened in 1988.
Green shadows
You’re a Renaissance artist. You have a very limited range of paint colours. How do you make shadows that aren’t muddy or too dark? Easy: you paint the shadows in a different colour.
Stone circles of Africa
For most Westerners, stone circles begin and end with Stonehenge. But there are examples around the world, in Australia, Asia, and Africa too. In Senegal and The Gambia, there are around two thousand of these megalithic monuments.
Jazz harp
When most people think of jazz they don’t think of the harp. But in the 1960s and 70s Alice Coltrane recorded two dozen albums of jazz with the harp in a central role.
Batman angle
Whenever a villain appeared on the old Batman TV series, the scene was not level, but was shot on an angle, as if the viewer’s head is tilted to the side. The term for this is a “Dutch angle” – and it has nothing to do with the Dutch.
A book without the letter ‘e’
Georges Perec wrote a 300 page novel without using the letter ‘e’. It’s a mystery, of course: friends gather at a country manor, but one of their number (A. Vowl) is missing. The title of the book is itself a pun: A Void.
The actor’s ring
Since the 19th century, the “most significant and worthy” actor in the German-speaking theatre world carries the Iffland-Ring.
Illustrated book of demons
Jacques Collin de Plancy’s 1818 book Dictionnaire Infernal contained a list of demons, part of a long tradition of grimoires and demonology texts. What made it stand out were the illustrations.
Shakespeare: the programming language
Shakespeare is a programming language designed to look like one of the bard’s plays.
The second-greatest wall
The Great Wall of Gorgan in Iran is 195km long, making it the second-longest wall in history behind the Great Wall of China. Built by the Sasanian Empire in the 5th or 6th Century to keep out (probably) the White Huns, medieval tradition also connects it with Alexander the Great and his legendary Caspian Gates.
The Generalist Academy 