Chinese rhyme
We know how Chinese was pronounced 1400 years ago thanks to the world’s oldest surviving rhyming dictionary.
Category: Society
Muntzing TVs
Earl Muntz was an American businessperson who made a fortune chopping unnecessary bits out of TV sets. He may have also coined the term “TV” and certainly named his daughter “Tee Vee” too.
Buddhist martyr
Buddhism was made the state religion of Silla (a kingdom in early Korea) because a court official planned his own martyrdom.
Pig War
In 1859 a dispute over a single pig led to a military standoff between the United States and the United Kingdom. The conflict would eventually draw in George Pickett (of Pickett’s Charge), Henry Robert (of Robert’s Rules of Order) and Kaiser Wilhelm I.
The Tin Woodman of Theseus
The Ship of Theseus is a classic philosophical thought experiment. L. Frank Baum’s Tin Woodman took it some place rather gruesome.
Pope vs. music
In 1324, Pope John XXII issued a papal bull condemning the excesses of modern popular music.
Suffragette medals
When British suffragettes were released from prison, they got medals.
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.
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.
Coffee crisis
Vietnam is the second-largest producer of coffee in the world because of a crisis in 1970s East Germany.
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.
Testing the katana
When a samurai received a new katana, the sharpness of the sword could be tested by attacking a random civilian or (after that was banned) by slicing a criminal or corpse.
Dictator’s purgatory
António de Oliveira Salazar served as prime minister and dictator of Portugal for 36 years. Following a head injury he was removed from office, but no-one told him and he died two years later still believing himself in charge.
Parents vs. Frank Zappa
The Parents Music Resource Center was formed to fight obscenity in popular music. The parental warning labels were their doing. Musician and notorious non-conformist Frank Zappa fought back the only way he could: with music.
The election of the doge
The ruler of Medieval Venice was chosen by an exceptionally complex ten-step process of alternating random lots and elections.
The unpopular president
Five US presidential elections (so far) have elected presidents who received fewer votes than one of their opponents.
The Generalist Academy 