Learn widely
1866: the Irish invade Canada. The Irish independence cause spilled over to the rest of the world in interesting ways. In the Battle of Ridgeway, Irish republicans attempted to seize Canada to pressure the UK to leave Ireland.
Poggio Bracciolini was a key instigator of the Italian Renaissance: he recovered or rediscovered many of the Latin texts that would inspire that storied revival. Also, he loved a good fart joke.
Remember that Simpsons episode where Bart went to France and witnessed antifreeze being added to wine? It had its basis in fact, although it got the country wrong.
The Aboriginal languages of southeast Australia have an ingenious counting system – there’s a physical mnemonic built directly into the language.
Venice, 15th century. It’s a gorgeous city, but has a tendency to get a bit waterlogged, so you wear clogs to keep your clothes out of the mud. Next thing you know, you’re half a metre off the ground.
Lots of spiders, snakes, and fish are venomous. This is not news to most people. Many people know that the platypus has venomous spurs… but it turns out that the platypus is not the only mammal with venom.
The first criminal fingerprint bureau was set up in Argentina in 1892 by police chief Juan Vucetich. That year, an officer used Vucetich’s techniques to catch the first criminal to be found guilty because of fingerprint evidence.
On August 5th, 1944, more than a thousand Japanese prisoners of war broke out of the Cowra POW camp in eastern Australia. It was the biggest prison break of World War II.
In 1971, Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau apparently swore under his breath during a parliamentary session. He later referred to it as “fuddle duddle” – and so a minor scandal and a major pop culture phrase were born.
Around 1311 CE, the mansa (sultan) of the Mali Empire sent hundreds of ships to find the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. They were lost at sea, so on the next expedition he sailed into the Atlantic himself. He was never seen again.
In Chinese ancestor worship, it is traditional to burn offerings that look like bank notes and other goods in order to give the deceased spending money and wealth in the afterlife.
In one of my all-time favourite hoaxes, in 1957 the BBC managed to convince the British public that spaghetti grows on trees.
John Gayer, a 17th century Lord Mayor of London, had a close encounter with a lion while working in Syria. He prayed, the lion left, and he gratefully endowed a sermon to be given every year thereafter.
A magic square is a grid of numbers in which any row, column, or diagonal adds up to the same total. They look complex, but it’s actually easy to design your own using the Siamese method.
Everyone loves to give someone’s shins a good kick (no? just me then?) but leave it to the English to make it into a sport.
We think of rocket launchers as a modern invention, but the Koreans were using them four hundred years ago. The hwacha could fire two hundred rockets at once, blowing up enemies more than a hundred metres away.
The Generalist Academy 