The Gay and Lesbian Kingdom
In 2004, in response to an Australian law defining marriage as between a man and a woman only, a group of activists declared independence and raised a rainbow flag over the Coral Sea Islands.
Category: Society
Multilingual tautologies
What do the River Avon, the Gobi Desert, and the La Brea Tar Pits have in common? Redundancy.
Match king of Sweden
In 1930 the Swedish match magnate Ivar Kreuger negotiated a legal monopoly with Germany; it lasted for fifty three years.
Unseen regalia
The Imperial Regalia of Japan consists of a legendary sword, mirror, and jewel. They are brought out at every imperial enthronement, but only a few priests and the emperor himself are ever allowed to see them.
Hedgehog flavour
In 1981 Phillip Lewis released potato chips flavoured like roasted hedgehog. In 1982 the UK government prosecuted him for false advertising because the chips did not contain real hedgehog.
Jet vs. airport terminal
The new terminal building of Ottawa’s international airport was supposed to open in 1959. After one pass by a US air force jet the day before the opening ceremony, it could not open until 1960.
Personal carbon footprint
The “personal carbon footprint” concept was popularised by an oil company advertising campaign to divert attention away from their own climate-unfriendly practices.
Fart battle
The He-Gassen scroll of Edo period Japan depicts an epic battle… of farts.
The horseback kissing game
The Turkic sport kyz kuu involves a man, a woman, two horses, a kiss, and a whip.
Walls within walls within walls
Julius Caesar won the Siege of Alesia with a military tactic known as investment: build walls around the besieged settlement’s own walls, and and then build another layer of walls around those ones.
Death Valley swindler
Walter E. Scott performed in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, scammed thousands of dollars with a fake gold mine, set a cross-country train speed record, and claimed to be building a castle in the midst of Death Valley.
Goddess of the sewers
The Cloaca Maxima in Rome is one of the world’s first sewer systems. It still works today, and with good reason: it has its own goddess.
Schools vs. Satan
Some of the first public schools in North America were founded explicitly to counteract “that old deluder, Satan.”
Chimeric parents
During a child support dispute in 2002, a DNA test seemed to show that a mother was not the parent of her own biological children. The truth was stranger than anyone expected.
The worst move in chess
Earlier this year, the current World Chess Champion Magnus Carlsen deliberately played the worst opening move possible against the American grandmaster Hikaru Nakamura… who then deliberately played the worst possible response.
Boycotting New Zealand
In 1976 most African countries boycotted the Olympics because the games would not ban New Zealand.
The Generalist Academy 