A little refreshing randomness from around the globe
It’s like the world’s largest jungle gym.
The City Museum in St. Louis has been pieced together with scraps of the past, all culled from within city limits. Fire engines, school buses, and aircraft fuselages are fused to the outside of an old shoe factory. Wrought iron slinkies, four feet wide, stretch from castle turret […]
In New Orleans, they send you off in style.
The ‘jazz funeral’ starts off sombre. On its way to the cemetery, the brass band plays soulful, sad funeral hymns called ‘dirges’: ‘Nearer My God to Thee’ is a popular choice, but it can be anything that reminds mourners of the ups and downs of life. This […]
A mansion in San Jose was built to confuse ghosts.
It has one-hundred and sixty rooms, four-hundred and sixty-seven doors, and forty-seven fireplaces. But many of the cabinets open to blank walls. Stairways wind around in circles, or run straight into the ceiling. There is at least one door that opens up into a ten-foot drop […]
Even pickpockets know the value of a good education.
The School of the Seven Bells is a legendary, possibly apocryphal, and deliciously plausible school, said to be based in Colombia. Pickpocketing is largely a skilled combination of timing, and distraction, but South American pickpockets are particularly notorious.
There is, of course, an exam. Thieves-to-be are faced with […]
Trinidad is known as the “Victorian Jewel of Southeastern Colorado.” It’s better known for something else.
Back in 1969, a local citizen approached Dr. Stanley Biber, and asked if he could perform a gender reassignment. Dr. Biber actually had no idea what transgenderism was, so he studied diagrams from John Hopkins. He became a pioneer: until his retirement in […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
If you ever want to watch TV with a baboon, go to college.
Moorpark College is the Harvard of exotic animal trainers. For two years, its students endure endless work days, far more science courses than most of them expected, and epic amounts of poo. But these diehard animal people endure those years with grace and […]
