Anonymous Oscars
Pierre Boulle won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for Bridge on the River Kwai. He did not write the screenplay, did not accept the award in person, and in fact did not even speak English.
Category: Society
Shake and barn
In nuclear physics terminology, first you need to hit the barn, and next you need to wait for 50 to 100 shakes. And then the bomb blows up.
Education circus
Tents appear outside a town in early 20th century rural United States. It’s not the circus, it’s the circuit chautauqua: teachers, preachers, musicians, and orators, ready to bring education and religion to the masses.
Tiny sumo
Mainoumi Shūhei is a legend in the world of sumo for defeating opponents more than twice his weight.
Burning runway
What do you do when a plane cannot land because of heavy fog? In WWII Britain, you set the runway on fire.
Counting prayers
Worshippers of many different religious use beads on a string to count prayers: Catholic Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, Sikhs, Hindus, and Baháʼís.
Suffragette arson
The campaign for women’s voting rights was not smooth: by 1913 suffragettes in Britain were setting fire to houses, cricket pavilions, and Westminster Abbey.
Body swap
The corpses of Eva Perón, the first lady of Argentina, and Pedro Eugenio Aramburu, one of the generals who overthrew her husband’s government, became the centrepieces of a bitter dispute more than twenty years after Evita’s death.
The Witch of Endor
In the Bible, the Witch of Endor summons the spirit of the prophet Samuel from the dead. Translators and commentators since have been torn: is necromancy real, or was it all a trick?
President in flagrante
In 1899 the President of France died, in his office, alone with his much younger mistress. If rumour is to be believed, he died happy.
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.
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.
High treason on the radio
The last person to be executed for treason against the United Kingdom was not actually British.
Happy birthday to you
The song Happy Birthday to You is in the public domain. But that didn’t stop a music publishing company collecting two million dollars a year for its use.
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.
The Generalist Academy 