From the archives: Comics
The most obscure pun in Asterix; the first comic strip character; the Scrabble-like game using comics instead of letters; and the comic that can be read upside-down.
Category: Website
Update 9
We just passed Post Number 1000! Time for some updates, links to friends, and news about the future of this website.
Featured category: North & Central America
The 1859 military standoff between the United States and Canadian territories over a single pig; the Panamanian rain forest that splits the transcontinental highway; foods that are illegal in the US; and how to swim all the way across North America.
From the archives: The senses
Blind imagination; the best colour vision in the world; the sixth, seventh, eight, and ninth senses; and how to train yourself to see light polarisation.
Featured category: Games & sport
The Mongolian Olympics; H. G. Wells’ miniature war game; the very first Mexican wrestler to be unmasked in the ring; and the 1970 computer-mediated fight between Rocky Marciano and Muhammad Ali.
From the archives: Hackers
The second computer worm in history was created to seek and destroy the first computer worm; cracking encrypted messages with “gardening”; the man who hacked a lottery’s random number generator; and the single line of code that can shut down a computer.
Featured category: Astronomy
The planet which is the closest to every other planet in the solar system; stars escaping their galaxy; the Martian moon that’s one third empty space; and the unidentified anomaly pulling a hundred thousand galaxies (including our own) around.
From the archives: The two Koreas
The two Koreas’ black ops assassination teams; the North Korean who defected with a MiG jet; the involuntary park inside the demilitarised zone; and the single tree that set off an international stand-off.
Featured category: 20th century history
The mistaken message that changed the course of the largest naval battle in history; the oldest artificial satellite still in orbit; the Cold War tunnels underneath Beijing; and the country that lost 80% of its land to strip-mining.
From the archives: The history of games
The oldest game in the world with the original rules; a game of pool with three “lives”; Medieval dice chess; and the forgotten chess pieces: couriers, henchmen, spies, and fools.
Featured category: North & Central Asia
The language with more consonants and fewer vowels than almost any other; the angry letters between the pope and the khan; the flying submarine designed to infiltrate the Black Sea; and Sergei Rachmaninoff’s songwriter credit for “All By Myself.”
From the archives: Plane crashes and close calls
The plane that landed with the pilot halfway out the front windscreen; the very first fatal plane crash; the sole survivor of a plane crash in the Amazon; and the Boeing 767 that ran out of fuel 12,000 metres off the ground.
Featured category: Film & television
The first jump scare in horror film history; that time Porky Pig swore; the first (and last) time Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton appeared on screen together; and the obscure British comedy routine that became the most repeated TV broadcast in the world.
From the archives: Borderlands
The women who carry goods worth billions across a north African border; the island that is in both France and Spain; the houses that are in both Canada and the United States; and the points where three time zones meet.
Featured category: Religion & belief
Seven and a half years of the Talmud; Saint Nick and the Christmas cannibals; the reason Buddha would not play Jenga; and the church ladder in Jerusalem that has stayed in the same place since 1728.
From the archives: Christmas songs
The price of twelve days of Christmas; the Christmas cannibalism song; the birth of the slow TV Yule log; and the mistranslation that led to some of the world’s most famous Christmas carols.
The Generalist Academy 