The Phony King of England
Disney’s Robin Hood features a song about the “Phony King of England.” That song is based on an old (and very bawdy) English folk ballad about “The Bastard King of England.”
Recent Posts
Buried film history
In 1978 a cache of five hundred film reels was discovered under an ice rink in Dawson City, Yukon. These buried reels included the only copy of films that had been lost for decades.
Featured category: Ancient history
The Roman measurement of a human lifetime; the extinct species of gibbon we know only from a Chinese noblewoman’s tomb; how Pompey the Great was defeated by maddening honey; and the treasure map in the Dead Sea Scrolls.
From the archives: Renaissance art
One of the few female artists of the Italian Renaissance; the Mona Lisa with and without a moustache; why the Sistine Chapel ceiling has green shadows; and the Inquisition vs. a Last Supper painting with drunken Germans, dogs, parrots, and dwarfs.
Pierced buildings
A highway goes directly through the Gate Tower Building in Osaka, Japan; a monorail line goes directly through an apartment block in Chongqing, China.
Medieval cat poetry
Pangur Bán was an Irish monk’s cat in 9th century Germany; we know this cat’s name because the monk wrote a poem about him. Even though this poem was written more than a thousand years ago, Pangur Bán was not the first named cat in history.
Ski ballet
The 1988 Winter Olympics included three freestyle skiing events as a demonstration sport: moguls, aerials, and ski ballet. Two of these have become official Olympic sports. One has not.
Constipation Blues
The blues music genre at its core is about hardship, oppression, and suffering. But it took Screamin’ Jay Hawkins to sing about that real pain down inside.
Marriage by proxy
What do Marie Antoinette, Lorenzo the Magnificent, Charles I, and Napoleon have in common? All of them were not in the same location as their partner when they married.
Featured category: Literature
The anonymous unauthorised contemporary sequel to Don Quixote; the inflammatory lost memoirs of Lord Byron; the library buried for a thousand years; and the strange fate of the Tin Woodman’s human body parts.
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.
Closed seas
In the 16th century Portugal claimed the Indian Ocean and Spain the Pacific Ocean as their unique domain, as “closed seas.” In 1609, a Dutch jurist presented a new alternative that has since entered international law: the freedom of the seas.
The end of the world will be televised
When it launched in 1980, CNN was the first 24-hour news channel in television history. It has been running non-stop since that launch. But what happens if the world ends? Well, CNN plans to go out in style.
Update 9
We just passed Post Number 1000! Time for some updates, links to friends, and news about the future of this website.
The generalist
For more than fifty years, Norbert Pearlroth sat in the reading room of the New York Public Library main branch every weekday from noon until 10pm. Unknown to almost everyone, he was researching one of the 20th century’s great sources of facts and trivia.
Cryptographic magic
Steganographia is a late 15th / early 16th century German book of magic… but it’s not actually about magic.
The Generalist Academy 