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Pangur Bán was an Irish monk’s cat in 9th century Germany; we know this cat’s name because the monk wrote a poem about him. Even though this poem was written more than a thousand years ago, Pangur Bán was not the first named cat in history.
The blues music genre at its core is about hardship, oppression, and suffering. But it took Screamin’ Jay Hawkins to sing about that real pain down inside.
What do Marie Antoinette, Lorenzo the Magnificent, Charles I, and Napoleon have in common? All of them were not in the same location as their partner when they married.
In the 16th century Portugal claimed the Indian Ocean and Spain the Pacific Ocean as their unique domain, as “closed seas.” In 1609, a Dutch jurist presented a new alternative that has since entered international law: the freedom of the seas.
When it launched in 1980, CNN was the first 24-hour news channel in television history. It has been running non-stop since that launch. But what happens if the world ends? Well, CNN plans to go out in style.
For more than fifty years, Norbert Pearlroth sat in the reading room of the New York Public Library main branch every weekday from noon until 10pm. Unknown to almost everyone, he was researching one of the 20th century’s great sources of facts and trivia.
Steganographia is a late 15th / early 16th century German book of magic… but it’s not actually about magic.
Auckland, New Zealand, is built on top of more than fifty volcanoes.
Before we knew about plate tectonics, a zoologist proposed a lost continent connecting Madagascar and India across the Indian Ocean. That hypothesis, now debunked, was nevertheless picked up by Theosophists and Tamil revivalists.
The leaves of Codariocalyx motorius move fast enough that you can see their motion. This plant likes to dance.
From 1681 to 1838, performances of Shakespeare’s famous tragedy King Lear had a happy ending.
Przewalksi’s horse is genetically distinct from modern horses (it has an extra chromosome pair). It went extinct in the wild in 1969, but a small population was introduced to the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone in 1998; they have thrived.
The border between Belgium and the Netherlands at Baarle-Hertog is one of the messiest in the world. It includes bits of Belgium in the Netherlands, and bits of the Netherlands in the bits of Belgium that are in the Netherlands.
Cliffhangers have been a staple of serialised fiction for centuries, but the first literal cliffhanger appears in an 1873 novel by Thomas Hardy.
By tradition, the president of Argentina is godparent to all seventh sons and seventh daughters born in the country; in Belgium, the seventh children are named after the reigning monarch, and that monarch also becomes their godparent.
The 105th surah of the Quran relates a battle outside Mecca between Yemeni war elephants and a flock of birds.
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