The devil’s coins
Coins bearing a picture of the devil with the inscription “Civitas Diaboli” have been found in churches and museums in Denmark, Norway, and England – products of a hoax that began in 1973.
Recent Posts
Amateur orchestra
The Portsmouth Sinfonia was founded on one simple principle: why leave orchestras to the professionals?
First Jesus
The first pictorial representation of Jesus Christ is insulting Roman graffiti that gives him a donkey’s head.
Water puppets
Vietnamese puppetry uses an ingenious method to hide the puppeteers’ controls: they put them underwater.
Cursed stone city
Al-Khazneh, the temple carved out of a cliff in Petra, is the most famous remnant of the Nabataean Kingdom. But to its south lies Hegra, the cursed stoneland city.
Two-faced car
A passenger in the the 1957 Zündapp Janus sits with their back to the driver. The Janus has two doors: the front of the car and the rear of the car.
Reversing river
Every six months the Tonlé Sap River reverses direction.
Chinese rhyme
We know how Chinese was pronounced 1400 years ago thanks to the world’s oldest surviving rhyming dictionary.
The Kabuki pose
At the emotional climax of a Kabuki play, performers will strike a stylised pose to drive home the drama of the moment.
Miniature elephants of Sicily
Sicily and Malta used to be home to a species of dwarf elephant whose remains could have inspired the Greek myth of the cyclops.
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.
Inaccessible island
Inaccessible Island, in the south Atlantic, is surrounded by steep sea cliffs that make landing and entering the interior nearly impossible.
The savages of the Pacific
In 1806 the French artist Jean-Gabriel Charvet premiered one of the first multi-panel artistic wallpapers: it depicted a romanticised and colonial panorama of explorations in the South Pacific.
Buddhist martyr
Buddhism was made the state religion of Silla (a kingdom in early Korea) because a court official planned his own martyrdom.
Science wars: The island universe
April 26, 1920, two astronomers publicly debated the structure of the cosmos. Is the Milky Way everything there is, or is it just one of many “island” universes?
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 Generalist Academy 