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 sombre tone lasts until the procession reaches its final destination, at which point they ‘cut the body loose’ - send the hearse off into the cemetery.

It is at this point that the mourners, themselves, cut loose: the band suddenly breaks into a rendition of ‘When the Saints Go Marching In,’ or ‘Didn’t He Ramble,’ or maybe ‘Lil Liza Jane.’ Relatives and mourners - the ’second line’ - dance with wild abandon. They would often be bedecked with umbrellas, which they would twirl with joy and smiles. Random bystanders are invited to join the celebration: it is considered good form to dance a stranger into the afterlife.

This funeral harkens back to old African traditions - a belief that life wasn’t over at ‘death.’ The Dahomean and Yoruba of West Africa thought that death, in this world, meant that a spirit could now run free into a new one. Those still living would mourn, yes - but then they could revel in the knowledge that their old friend would be dancing his heart out, on the other side.

In central Scotland, boats take the elevator.

The Falkirk Boat Wheel is the world’s only rotating boat lift. Boats that travel along the Union Canal have to transfer to the Fort and Clyde Canal - an eight-story drop. Thirty-five meters wide, the Falkirk Boat Wheel scoops boats up like playthings, and deposits them below.

It uses barely as much electricity as a washer and dryer: not even half a kilowatt per minute. This creation is powered by perfectly balanced caissons - a watertight retaining structure - which can carry over three hundreds tons of water, each. This massive balancing act moves the arms along, completing a full, gentle rotation every eleven minutes.

It has been designed, on purpose, like a Celtic double-headed ax. It is one of Scotland’s most prominent engineering achievements, at a cost of about $150 million. They offer one-hour, round-trip tours that they call ‘The Falkirk Wheel Experience.’

It’s been called ‘the worst building in the history of mankind.’

And Kim Jong-il would have been so proud. The Ryugyong (”Capitol of Willows”) Hotel stands 105-stories tall in the dead-center of Pyongyang, the capitol of North Korea. At its inception, it was hoped to have 3.9 million square feet of floor space (and seven revolving restaurants), at a total cost of $750 million - 2% of the entire country’s GDP. It was created as North Korea’s answer to a renaissance of Asian skyscrapers.

It was never finished, and never will be. Money ran out - as did, supposedly, electricity. All that is left now is a shell, empty and uninhabitable: the quality of concrete is so poor that building probably couldn’t be restarted even if they tried. But North Korea is still looking for a few hundred million dollars of foreign investment to do just that - instead of, say, fighting the country-wide famine and drought for which North Korea is far more famous.

The hotel is not featured on official maps, and even tour guides will deny knowing where it is. This is a rather impressive oversight: it is visible from throughout the entire city.

Once upon a time, off the coast of Turkey, a gigantic rock sat in the middle of the ocean. Unable to budge it, the local villagers summoned a man who was known to possess the ‘evil eye.’ ‘My,’ he said. ‘What a big rock that is.’ And with a deafening crack, the rock split in two.

This Turkish legend has given rise to nazar boncuk - the ‘evil eye stone.’ Forged out of an amalgamation of water, salt, iron, copper and molten glass, this deep-blue stone is used to keep ‘the evil eye’ at bay. When some people fall sick - even today, in the 21st century - people say, ‘Nazar touched them.’

In Turkey, these stones are everywhere. In major cities, you will see them over the tellers at Citibank. Mothers attach them to the lapels of newborns. It is actually the color itself that it supposed to deflect evil: even in the absence of the stones, doorways will often be painted blue.

These stones have been made for three thousand years. One small shop south of Izmir, for example, sells thousands of them, and nothing but. This shop is also home to a small zoo, including an albino peacock that will peck inquisitively at your Achilles’ heel.

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 to the ground.

It was built for the widow of the gun magnate, William Wirt Winchester. The recent Civil War had left millions of young men to rot on battlefields, underneath calvary horses and riddled with musket balls. Many of these musket balls were fired from Winchester rifles. And so Mrs. Winchester thought that the spirits of those killed would come back to haunt her.

This house was continually built, twenty-four hours a day, for thirty-eight years - from 1884 to 1922. Legend has it that Mrs. Winchester’s spiritual medium had advised her to move west in the first place - and told her that if building ever stopped, she would die. Construction only stopped when she did, in fact, do just that.

The mansion is now a gigantic tourist attraction. In the gift shop, they sell shot glasses in the shape of shotgun shells.

It started in a parking garage.

Two men had been arguing all night about their roaches. Drunk and Australian, they decided that the only way to determine who truly possessed ‘the fastest roaches in Brisbane’ was to retreat to a local parking garage. To the cheers of inebriated fans, they held a race. No one really remembers who won.

This is how cockroach racing was born. Every year, in a glorious feat of Australian absurdity, roaches are now raced to the cheers of thousands. The roaches are actually introduced, as at a boxing match, until a bin of them is overturned in the middle of a circle. And at the signal, the box is raised, and these panicked pests make a break for it.

The way that Australians figure it, the cockroaches are just as much a part of their culture as kangaroos or koalas - maybe even moreso. At least with roaches, everybody has one. And besides, a cockroach race is a good excuse to drink. It is, therefore, a brilliant idea.

Performance-enhancers like coffee, sugar and wine are banned. And anyone who argues with the rules is deemed simply, ‘Not very Australian at all.’

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 a mannequin (or even a teacher) in a man’s suit, strewn with pockets, and rigged up with seven strategically-placed bells. They must pick the mark clean, without ringing a single bell.

The story changes with each telling: one version has it that the ‘diploma’ consists of a fake passport to the United States, and entry into one of the major American city crime gangs. The school may have closed, or even moved to Canada. Whatever the truth, the legend won’t die.

(Posted in honor of Mardi Gras: an amazing holiday, and a pickpocket gold mine.)

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 2003, Dr. Biber would go on to perform thousands of surgeries.

Trinidad, once a dying coal town, was suddenly alive again: the income from the surgeries paid for a new hospital, and revitalized the downtown. Many of the transgender people who came into town for their surgeries would decide to stay: of the nine thousand residents, hundreds are transgender. Cowboys tip their hats to transgender women, and call them, ‘Ma’am.’

Dr. Biber died in 2006. Dr. Marci Bowers, a transgender woman herself and one of Dr. Biber’s students, has since taken over the practice. She has been called the ‘Rock Star’ of transgender surgery.

Loi Krathong makes 4th of July look tame.

Fire lanterns are released en masse. They symbolize the grief and misfortune of the previous year, and they float off into the distance. Fireworks erupt. And people watch bits of flame float off, providing a wistful sort of closure for the year.

Revelers also make krathongs - little floats traditionally made out of banana leaf tree sections and flowers. They are imbued with all of the bad luck from the previous year, and sent down the river and out of your life. It’s become a bit of a hazard in recent years: people have been making them out of styrofroam.

Loi Krathong, like the rest of Thailand, is exquisitely mad. Once the fire lanterns are released, the country gets fabulously drunk. After they pass into unconscious, the fire lanterns lose altitude, and land square on top of Thailand’s typical wooden houses. Fires erupt, and hundreds die each year. ‘How sad,’ the Thai say, ‘this bad luck.’

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 anticholinergic toxidrome, which is a fancy way of saying that your nervous system hates you, and it quits. Because this is what happens when you smoke, as some people inevitably do, Datura stramonium, also known as jimsonweed.

British soldiers sent in to put down Bacon’s Rebellion in 1680s Virginia once used this plant to make a salad: for the next eleven days, these soldiers chased feathers and pretended to be monkeys. Smoking it is much, much worse. The singular, standout symptom is called micropsia - also known as Lilliputian hallucinations, as in Lilliputians from Gulliver’s Travels. Even more clearly: Alice in Wonderland Syndrome. You see tiny, tiny people all around you.

This is very, very terrifying. It also does not help that you pulse is probably topping 150, like if you were on coke. But if you are very, very lucky, a smart doctor will shoot you full of a bloody awful concoction called physostigmine, and hope for the best. Unfortunately, physostigmine during a cocaine overdose would just make things worse. So, chances are, it won’t happen.