A little refreshing randomness from around the globe
Moko Jumbies first protected believers from evildoers. Originally a West African tradition, men and women on gigantic stilts would dress in long gowns and masquerade as gods. Gods can look down on humanity from above, and foresee danger better than mere mortals. The stilt-walkers would collect donations, from revelers and onlookers on second-story balconies.
They now [...]
Chinese zombies devour life force. George Romero’s zombies only eat brains. That’s the difference.
‘Zombie’ isn’t actually the word. The literal translation of Jiang Shi comes out as ’stiff corpse.’ But in English, the best translation reads, ‘Hopping Vampire.’ They hop, because Chinese undead suffer from rigor mortis. They are also blind, and depend on their [...]
Funerals are an opportunity to go out with some style. When Josephine Baker died in France, Paris came to a standstill. Jim Henson banned people from wearing black, and had a chorus of Muppets sing the send-off. Hunter S. Thompson had his ashes shot into space, because let’s be honest: he really, really loved guns.
In [...]
In order to commune with God, some people dance with poisonous snakes.
And these signs shall follow them that believe; In my name shall they cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues; They shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on [...]
“The Amish have the best parties.”
This boy was very drunk, and totally serious. He was just one of hundreds of Pennsylvania teenagers who were captured on camera during the filming of Devil’s Playground, a film about the Amish period of rumspringa. Starting around the age of sixteen, Amish children are allowed, if they so desire, [...]
Chittagong is where supertankers go to die.
One supertanker can carry about two million barrels of oil, which is about as much crude as Hong Kong consumes in a week. At the end of their life, half of these behemoths - provided they don’t go out with more of a bang, like the Exxon Valdez - [...]
Guinness turned a rural Argentine village into a gigantic game of dominoes.
The final sequence used 6,000 dominoes, 10,000 books, 400 tires, 75 mirrors, 50 fridges, 45 wardrobes and 6 cars. The chain wound from inside a darkened room, out a window, down and across any number of streets, and at one point involved bales of [...]
A former Russian gangster has built a log cabin half the size of Big Ben.
He says it was an accident. Nikolai Sutyagin began to build his dacha – the traditional Russian summer house – in 1992. He hoped to make it two stories, so his neighbors would know that he was the richest man in [...]
In 2005, an amateur photo from Lagos, Nigeria took the world by storm.
It showed men with baboons and hyenas on leashes. In various media reports, these men were identified as drug dealers, debt collectors, street toughs or bodyguards. They are known by locals as Gadawan Kuru, which means ‘hyena handers, guides.’
They are actually a family [...]
Parkour cannot be stopped. That, in fact, is the entire point: parkour is the French martial art of escape, of surmounting every obstacle in your path in the case of an emergency. It is also known as l’art du déplacement, ‘the art of displacement.’
Get from Point A to Point B as quickly and as effortlessly [...]
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