Suffragette medals
When British suffragettes were released from prison, they got medals.
Fewest chromosomes and fatherless ants
The jack jumper ant of south-eastern Australia has a nasty sting, can jump five times its own body length, and has the fewest chromosomes of any living thing.
Mona Lisa, shaved
In 1919, Marcel Duchamp drew a moustache and goatee on a postcard of the Mona Lisa, renamed it with a bawdy French pun L. H. O. O. Q., and called it art. Half a century later, he framed an unmodified Mona Lisa postcard and named it L. H. O. O. Q. Shaved.
Gut parka
Up near the Arctic Circle, the best waterproof parkas are made out of guts.
A fake place becomes real
Cartographers will sometimes insert fake locations in order to catch plagiarism of their maps. But sometimes those fake locations then become real.
Sparrow smashing
In 1958 Mao Zedong declared war on sparrows. Although he won that battle, China lost the war.
The order of the Quran
The Quran contains 114 chapters, but they are arranged neither chronologically nor thematically. Instead, they go from longest to shortest.
Hepcat-orooni
Slim Gaillard had one of the more remarkable lives of the 20th century: when he wasn’t inventing words or writing songs about cement mixers he was jamming with Charlie Parker, running bootlegged whiskey in a hearse, or wowing Jack Kerouac in On the Road.
Pilot out the window
In 1990 a British Airways plane heading to Spain had a windscreen malfunction mid-flight. The captain was sucked out of the gap, but a flight attendant caught his belt and the plane landed safely with the captain stuck halfway outside.
Dancing corpse
George Forster was executed for murder in 1803. Later that same day his corpse was dancing, thanks to Luigi Galvani’s nephew.
Coffee crisis
Vietnam is the second-largest producer of coffee in the world because of a crisis in 1970s East Germany.
Natural nuclear power
Enrico Fermi switched on the first human-made nuclear reactor in 1942, but the first natural nuclear reactor on Earth occurred 1.7 billion years earlier.
Igbo-Ukwu bronzes
In the 9th century CE, a town in what is now Nigeria produced the most masterful bronze artefacts in the world.
Hu’s on first
When Taiwanese baseball player Chin-Lung Hu hit a single in a game against the Arizona Diamondbacks he fulfilled a promise made in a comedy sketch seventy-one years before.
The universal antidote
For more than 1700 years, mithridate and theriac were Europe’s ultimate medicines. A concoction of up to sixty-four ingredients – including cinnamon, turpentine, and poppy – they were supposed to neutralise any poison or plague.
