A little refreshing randomness from around the globe
If you smoke jimsonweed, you will see leprechauns. Then you will die.
Your best chance for survival, as a matter of fact, is if a passing ambulance knows an obscure nursery rhyme: “Red as a beet, blind as a bat, dry as a bone, mad as a hatter, hotter than hell.” These are the symptoms for [...]
Tanuki - or ‘raccoon dogs,’ which are related to dogs but not raccoons - are beloved creatures of Japanese folklore. Statues of these animals sit outside Japanese temples, with large bellies (denoting luck) and holding a cup of sake, for which they’ll never pay.
Tanukis are notorious shapeshifters: they have fooled monks by transforming into tea-kettles. [...]
A border dispute has become a daily party.
India and Pakistan share a single border that cuts straight through the town of Wagah: the eastern half sits in India, and the other half in Pakistan. Border conflicts killed countless people in both countries back in 1947 - and decades later, skirmishes still kill thousands.
At the sound [...]
Geeks do a lot of things: compile code, watch cartoons, and occasionally become billionaires by inventing, say, YouTube. They also read webcomics with near fanatical dedication, to the point that some authors have been able to quit their day job through reader donations alone.
The comic XKCD is a flagship of geek humor. Formerly a robot [...]
If you sail the seven seas long enough, you may be invited to King Neptune’s Court.
The line-crossing ceremony occurs every time a ship crosses the equator. The ship’s passengers and crew are divided into pollywogs (the uninitiated who have never crossed the equator before, and are thus the lowest form of sea life), and the [...]
Buzkashi is Afghanistan’s national sport: it involves whips, horses, and a dead calf.
The calf itself has been beheaded, cut off the knees, soaked in cold water for twenty-four hours to make it tough, and occasionally filled with sand. It is placed into a shallow hole, and a circle of quicklime is drawn nearby: this circle [...]
The northern Finnish town of Oulu has been described as ‘Just like Geelong, but colder and with more fish.’ It is home to, among other things, the World Air Guitar Championship.
It is also the birthplace of the Shouting Men’s Choir: thirty men in black suits, yelling.
Finns, by and large, are quiet people. Silence doesn’t have [...]
Land mines have never been so educational.
The founder of the Cambodian Land Mine Museum, Aki Ra, was an orphan and a child soldier for the Khmer Rouge. Receiving his first rifle at the age of ten, he himself laid hundreds of mines. He joined the United Nations Transitional Authority of Cambodia in 1994, where he [...]
The motto of Austin, Texas is ‘Keep Austin Weird.’
Part of Austin’s inspiration is the ‘Cathedral of Junk.’ Sequestered along a quaint surburban street, a whimsical side project which began in 1988 has blossomed into a gargantuan mass of circuit boards, lawnmower parts, forks and knives, car bumpers - everything, most likely including at least one [...]
A man wanted to trade a paperclip for a house.
It took him a year, but he did it. On July 12, 2005, an unemployed Canadian by the name of Kyle MacDonald announced to the world, on Craigslist, that he had one red paperclip, and he was willing to trade.
He first traded this paperclip for a [...]
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