Jump Those Babies!Since 1620 Castrillo de Murcia has celebrated Corpus Christi with a bizarre event that sees grown men dressed as the Devil leaping over helpless babies, an act that is known as El Colacho.The Catholic festival of Corpus Christi is celebrated all over Spain with processions, mystery plays and a wide variety of popular celebrations, but this one has to be the strangest. It is believed that as the incarnate devils jump they take all their evil with them and the children are cleansed.  (more…)

Florence Nightingale kept an owl in her pocket. It was named Athena.

Nightingale saved this owlet as a baby, after it fell from it’s nest at the Parthenon in Athens. For the next five years, she would care and tend to this owl, carrying it everywhere in the most convenient traveling case available - a pocket. The owl would become a trademark, of sorts, although a slightly dangerous one: it had a tendancy to peck at strangers.

It only lived five years, even with Ms. Nightingale as her keeper. After being posted to the Crimea for her nursing duties, Nightingale left Athena behind in the attic, thinking that she’d be able to fend for herself on local mice. Athena was found later, starved. A heartbroken Nightingale had her stuffed.

Nowadays, you can no longer keep owls as pets. To do so is illegal.

He was the ‘bard’ of the Soviet Union.

The government didn’t like to admit it, of course. Vladimir Vsotsky, for all of his massive popularity, was an official non-entity. He sang about the parts of Soviet Russia that weren’t supposed to exist - in the beginning, his famous ‘outlaw songs’ told tales about the drunks and prostitutes of Moscow. Over time, he would come to write dozens of serious satires, particularly about war. In the end, he would pen over six hundred songs that ranged over every imaginable subject - almost all of them written in the first person, and traded on bootlegged tapes by most of the Soviet population.

He battled with alcoholism his entire life. He spent his last ten years battling it with the help of Marina Vlady, a French actress who eventually joined the Communist Party in order to go to the Soviet Union more freely. In attempting to build their first home, Vsotsky had to provide free concerts to permit offices, factories and lumbermills. It was the only way to get the materials and proper paperwork.

On his grave stands a stirring monument, complete with angel wings. It is the last thing he or his wife wanted: such a monument is an expression of Soviet Realism. He continues to be almost completely unknown, outside of Russia.

It’s a window to the world.

More specifically, it’s a window between London and New York City, and it’s called the Telectroscope. It claims to be a tunnel, buried through the earth, connecting the two cities. If you stand on one side in Brooklyn, you can see out the other end, in London City Hall.

It isn’t quite the first of its kind. In 2003, people began to talk about a system called ‘Tholos,’ which aimed to network the cities of the world. Huge cylindrical screens would connect London to Vienna, Warsaw to Copenhagen, New York to Shanghai. But Tholos never got off the ground - whereas the Telectroscope goes straight through it.

Brits and New Yorkers alike have been waving hello for over a week now. The Telectroscope is an ‘art project,’ running for a mere month. As the story goes, the ‘tunnel’ was begun a hundred years ago, by the artist’s great-grandfather, Alexander Stanhope St. George. The reality is actually just some high-speed broadband - but the tunnel story is more fun.

In 1971, a former military barracks in Copenhagen had a surprising rebirth.

In the face of rising rent, a group of journalists, anarchists, and hippies took the place over. They christened the place ‘Christiania,’ and released a mission statement announcing that the barracks would form a ’self-governing society.’ Residents would make their own rules through consensus. These rules would include, for example, no violence, cars, or bulletproof vests.

“Pusher Street” is one of its major thoroughfares: for years, it was the center of the local drug trade. Within a decade of the community’s beginning, however, hard drugs nearly tore the community apart - heroin overdoses killed several residents. Residents instituted a Junk Blockade in 1979, patrolling the community in groups and and issuing ultimatums to junkies.

Hash remained. Permanent hash stands lined the street, and the business was (at best) tolerated by the Danish government. In 2002, the government asked the citizens to make the hash trade less visible - so residents dressed their stands in camouflage. But two years later, police moved in. Residents tore down their own stands.

Christiania still exists, albeit precariously. Riots in its defense have occurred as late as 2007. It is seen by many as a testament to how ideals can fade.

It used to be a power plant.

Nowadays, the Tate Modern is one of the most popular museums in London - it specializes in modern art. One huge room, in particular, is the site of some of its more unique works: the Turbine Hall, which once housed the power generators themselves.

It was here that a Danish artist exhibited his work: a gigantic, perpetual sunset. The Weather Project would run for five months, and some locals would return on a regular basis - just so that they could lie on the floor and stare at a single moment, for hours. The entire ceiling was replaced with mirrors, so they would stare straight up at their own shimmering reflection.

The Weather Project even gave some visitors a contact high. The meditative experience it inspired - by staring a hundred feet up at your own reflection - had some patrons comparing the experience to a drug trip. Some staff, sadly, didn’t fare quite as well: they said that the sugar water mist, used to set the scene, simply made them ill.

It’s where Ferraris meet dance tracks meet the Serbian flag.

It was called ‘turbo-folk’ - but others called it ‘porno-nationalism.’ Fast cars and scantily-clad women provided the visuals, and the lyrics ran the Serbian gamut of adultery, love, revenge - and ‘mythomaniac kitsch.’ Said one popular song: “Days of freedom are coming straight/For our dear leader is great/Our song is loud and true/Radovan, we’re all with you.”

Svetlana Ražnatovic certainly helped. Already a popular singer, her relationship with Željko Ražnatovic Arkan was national news, and their 1995 marriage televised. Arkan was a celebrity in his own right - for different reasons. He was one of Serbia’s foremost paramilitary leaders: the UK’s Guardian called him ‘the underworld boss of Milosevic’s murder squat.’ He would be indicted for war crimes in 1997 - and gunned down in 2000. Concerts were dedicated to him.

International politicians hated it. It was decried on the left wing as emblematic of the region’s moral decline, an anthem of criminality - and sometimes even on the right, as being “too Turkish.” But the people loved it. One of Ražnatovic’s most popular songs included the line, ‘If you were wounded, I’d give you my blood‘ - it was a hit on both sides of the trenches.

Ten years later, Serbian turbo-folk clubs are still up and running. In Croatia.

It’s a weapon of war that’s turned over a new leaf.

Tankballing is paintball, but with tanks. The paint pellets: 40mm. The site: a former WWII bombing range in Leicestershire, England. The weapon of choice: a retrofitted 17-ton war machine. Two hours will cost you as much as a few tanks of gas. Spectators are welcome.

The Brits invented the tank: it was called a landship, a ‘behemoth.’ Tanks helped defeat Germany in World War I, and German embarrassment about that defeat spawned the panzers, and the tank graveyard that became the Battle of Kursk. Tanks are iconic, mechanical beasts that long served as a symbol of liberation - just as often as they crushed dissent.

But sometimes, war can take a backseat to shooting brightly-colored balls of paint at your mates.

They may be the most stylish carpenters in the world.

They are Journeymen - Gesellen. Since the 13th century, these young German tradesmen have gone ‘auf der Walz,‘ or taken to the road with little more than a walking stick and their tools. Then, as now, they always were their trademark, tailored Kluft: bellbottom pants, double-breasted vests with gigantic buttons, and a black slouch hat. In modern times, fedoras are very popular.

They wander the earth, for at least three years, doing their job. Stonemasons ogle the technique of Angkor Wat in Cambodia, and carpenters survey the Imperial Palace in Tokyo. They take odd jobs, and are often put up and supported by strangers, cafe owners and farmers who are inevitably impressed with their skills. They’re almost always the most interesting people at parties.

There are rules. No Journeyman can come home: not within fifty kilometers of their hometown. No cell phones. Always wear the Kluft - of which they have a second, less expensive pair, for work. And it may or may not be a rule to look fantastically snazzy at all times.

In the whole world, there are only hundreds left: estimates range from 250 to 600. And yet, if you ask, many of them have tales of running into each other - from Morocco to New Zealand.

It’s the deepest man-made hole in the world: over seven miles.

Soviet Russia wanted to go deeper. By the time it closed up shop in 1994, the Kola Superdeep Borehole had worked its way through one-third of the continental crust. Even after pioneering new methods of drilling, that was as far as they could go: after a certain point, the earth’s molten crust acts almost like liquid plastic, closing up any hole they would make.

They took core samples all the way along, and geologists were agog. Miles below the surface, they found water - but not free water, like you can find in any earthly ocean. Instead, the ungodly pressure of the earth just squeezed together hydrogen and oxygen atoms - until water molecules had no choice, but to exist. They also kept on finding fossils - four miles down.

America once tried to do the same: they tried drilling straight into the sea floor, under two miles of water. They only got six hundred feet. The project was known simply as, ‘Project Mohole.’