Pie spy
The inventor of the pie chart and the bar chart was also a secret agent who helped collapse the French revolutionary government’s economy through an elaborate counterfeiting operation.
Category: Places
The Red Hand
The Red Hand is the symbol of the province of Ulster, but its origins are lost in time. Possible sources include three different clans, pagans, fairies, and a soldier who chopped off his own hand.
Central Australian yacht club
Lake Eyre, in the middle of the Australian Outback, is only a lake when it floods. And when that happens, people like to sail yachts on it.
Blood rain
Oh great, it’s raining blood again! I hope it’s just rain dust from the desert and not intercontinental cloud algae.
High treason on the radio
The last person to be executed for treason against the United Kingdom was not actually British.
Mammal extinction
No-one has seen a live Bramble Cay mosaic-tailed rat since 2009. It’s the first mammal to disappear completely because of human-made climate change.
The Bat unmasked
In Mexican wrestling the mask is sacred, and its loss in the ring is the ultimate insult. The first Mexican wrestler to lose his mask was El Murciélago Enmascarado, The Masked Bat, and it all happened eighty years ago.
Turtle demons and soul balls
In Japanese folklore, turtle monkey demons can steal your soul… by pulling it out of your anus. Fortunately, they have easily detachable arms and like cucumbers.
A letter to the dystopian future
In 1947 the English author Dennis Wheatley wrote a letter to the dystopian future he thought was coming and buried it. Twenty-two years later the letter was uncovered. It had not aged well.
Black teeth
In southern and south-eastern Asia and the Pacific, teeth were blackened or lacquered to keep them intact and healthy.
Russian hobbits
Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings books have a long history in the Soviet Union and Russia, from illegal translations in the 1960s to a film in the 1980s to an unauthorised retelling sympathetic to the orcs in the 1990s.
Involuntary park
When a location is abandoned by humans, nature returns. Sci-fi author Bruce Sterling calls these feral landscapes involuntary parks.
Ancient heart
The heart symbol may have originated with an ancient Roman form of birth control, a plant that is probably now extinct.
Gliding home
In 1983 a Boeing 767 with 61 passengers ran out of fuel while twelve thousand metres off the ground. The metric system was to blame.
Lying stones
In 1725 Professor Beringer of the University of Würzburg dug up some extraordinary fossils: they contained the name of God written in Hebrew. A book, a court case, and the ruining of several careers ensued.
Rise of the bureaucrats
Shengguan Tu is a board game from a millennium ago that charts players’ rise through the many layers of Chinese bureaucracy.
The Generalist Academy 