Fashionable limp
Queen Alexandra had a scar and a limp – and British fashion followed suit.
Category: Places
Cryptography gardening
If you want to decipher an encrypted message, it’s helpful to plant some plaintext seeds.
Dancing plagues
Sudden bouts of contagious dancing plagued pre-modern Europe – afflicting up to a thousand people at a time.
Iron currency
In the late 19th century CE Sierra Leone and surrounds, high quality iron needles tied into bundles served as currency.
The town of no appendices
Before you move into Villa Las Estrellas you must have your appendix removed.
Wine immolation
King Charles II of Navarre died when, wrapped in alcohol-soaked linen, he caught on fire.
This chariot always points south
Around 255 CE, a Chinese inventor named Ma Jun created a chariot that could always point south – without using magnets.
Tied to the tracks
The first film to feature a woman tied to train tracks starred one of the earliest female directors and producers, Mabel Normand. She may also have been the recipient of the first pie-in-the-face film gag.
Three games of men
The festival Naadam is like the Mongolian equivalent of the Olympics, with just three sports: wrestling, archery, and horse racing.
Cities at the bottom of the sea
423,000 people live in Flevoland, a province of the Netherlands. Before 1957, the entire area did not exist.
Brelian crescendo
Jacques Brel, the famed Belgian singer, began some songs slowly and then sped up. A lot.
Kilometre zero
All roads lead to Rome… but where in Rome do they lead?
Chicago River, reversed
120 years ago engineers permanently reversed the flow of Chicago River.
The Amazon, reversed
The rise of the Andes reversed the direction of the Amazon River’s flow from the Pacific to the Atlantic.
Feed sack dresses
When US farmers bought seeds or flour during the Great Depression, the most important question was this: what patterns were printed on the sack?
Ghost station and ghost trains
Since 2006 no-one could enter the Newhaven Marine railway station in England. From then until 2019 one train passed through the station each day, and it was not allowed to carry any passengers.
The Generalist Academy 