Every year around the end of the Buddhist Lent, crowds gather along the Mekong River to watch the Naga fireballs — glowing balls that, according to Wikipedia, "are alleged to… Read the rest of the article: Mysterious glowing balls rise from the Mekong every year
The Man in the Iron Mask was "an unidentified prisoner of state during the reign of Louis XIV of France." According to Wikipedia, he was arrested in 1669 under the… Read the rest of the article: The masked prisoner of Louis XIV whose name was never spoken
The Anti-PowerPoint Party is a real Swiss political party "dedicated to decreasing professional use of Microsoft PowerPoint and other forms of presentation software." According to Wikipedia, the party claims presentation… Read the rest of the article: There is a real Swiss political party devoted to abolishing PowerPoint
Wesley Willis was "an American musician and visual artist" from Chicago who, after being "diagnosed with schizophrenia in 1989," became a cult figure in the outsider-music tradition. According to Wikipedia,… Read the rest of the article: The schizophrenic Chicago artist who became an outsider rock legend
For three decades, a Hollywood director who wanted to disown a film could take his name off it and replace it with one man: Alan Smithee. According to Wikipedia, the… Read the rest of the article: For 32 years, every director who disowned a film became Alan Smithee
Jerry Gretzinger is 84, and for most of the past six decades he has spent nearly every day adding to a single map — now more than 4,000 hand-painted panels… Read the rest of the article: For 60 years, an 84-year-old has let a deck of cards build his map
The Kőbánya cellar system under the 10th district of Budapest is, according to Wikipedia, "the largest cellar complex in the country" — a network of tunnels estimated at 32 to… Read the rest of the article: A 20-mile maze under Budapest hid a secret WWII aircraft engine plant
In 1913 a party set out to map Crocker Land, "a huge island supposedly sighted by the explorer Robert Peary from the top of Cape Colgate in 1906." Peary had… Read the rest of the article: An expedition spent years looking for an Arctic island that didn't exist
The "Great Moon Hoax" began on August 25, 1835, when The Sun, a New York newspaper, ran the first of six articles "about the supposed discovery of life and civilization… Read the rest of the article: In 1835 a New York paper put bat-men and unicorns on the moon
When astronomers first observed iPTF14hls in September 2014, they identified it as a supernova and expected it to dim within 100 days. Instead, it kept erupting. Over approximately 1,000 days,… Read the rest of the article: A star discovered in 2014 has exploded six times and none of the theories explain it
The Honjō Masamune, forged in the 13th or 14th century and passed from shōgun to shōgun as a symbol of the Tokugawa dynasty, is considered one of the finest Japanese… Read the rest of the article: Japan's greatest sword was surrendered to a US sergeant in 1946. Nobody knows where it is.
In February 1985, a 29-year-old woman from Tokyo's Suginami neighborhood sent a letter to the Japanese magazine Book Magazine. "I'm not sure why," she wrote, "but since about two or… Read the rest of the article: In 1985, a Japanese woman wrote a letter about bookstores making her need to use the bathroom. It became a phenomenon.
From 1970 to 1974, the Varosha district of Famagusta, Cyprus, was "one of the most popular tourist destinations in the world," a favorite of Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, Raquel Welch,… Read the rest of the article: In 1974, Turkish forces fenced off a Cyprus beach resort. It's still empty.
John Lahr, writing in the London Review of Books, offers the sharpest piece I've read on Sid Caesar — ostensibly a review of David Margolick's new biography When Caesar Was… Read the rest of the article: Sid Caesar built the writers' room that taught Mel Brooks, Neil Simon, Carl Reiner, and Woody Allen how to be funny
A study published in Neuroscience by researchers at Spain's University of Zaragoza scanned the brains of 100 young adults and found structural differences in those who hold authoritarian beliefs —… Read the rest of the article: Brain scans of authoritarians show reduced grey matter in regions for empathy and social reasoning
On the night of 21 August 1986, Lake Nyos in northwestern Cameroon released between 100,000 and 300,000 tons of carbon dioxide in a single outgassing event. The cloud rose at… Read the rest of the article: In 1986, a Cameroonian lake released a CO2 cloud that killed 1,746 people overnight
According to the Bencao Gangmu, a 16th-century Chinese medical compendium, elderly men in Arabia would voluntarily mummify themselves in honey. The donor would stop eating all food except honey, bathing… Read the rest of the article: The ancient practice of mummifying a man in honey to sell as medicine
The Vatican Observatory has operated continuously since 1774, when the Papacy established the Observatory of the Roman College in Rome. The Church's interest in astronomy predates that: the Gregorian Calendar,… Read the rest of the article: The Vatican has run an astronomical observatory since 1774
While chairman of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan developed what economist Alan Blinder called "a turgid dialect of English" — deliberate obscurantism designed to prevent financial markets from overreacting to… Read the rest of the article: Fed Chair Alan Greenspan intentionally babbled meaningless slop and got away with it
Between 1993 and 2009, investigators across Austria, France, and Germany found DNA from the same unknown woman at 40 crime scenes — murders, burglaries, a police officer shot in Heilbronn.… Read the rest of the article: The 'Phantom of Heilbronn' serial killer turned out to be a cotton swab factory worker
