May 2010
101 posts
Libertatia →
Libertatia (also known as Libertalia) is said to have been a free communalist colony forged by pirates under the leadership of Captain Olivier Misson in the late 1600s. Whether or not Libertatia actually existed is disputed.
List of websites blocked in the People's Republic... →
Tumblr
April 2010
95 posts
“Barbie and Ken decided to split up in 2004, but in February 2006 they were back...”
– http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbie (via yvonneyeah)
List of people who have been pied →
(via andrewfmorrison)
Errors in the Encyclopedia Britannica that have... →
Phantom time hypothesis →
The Phantom time hypothesis is a hypothesis developed by Heribert Illig (born 1947 in Vohenstrauß) in 1991. It proposes that there has been a systematic effort to make it appear that periods of history, specifically that of Europe during Early Middle Ages (AD 614–911) exist, when they do not. Illig believed that this was achieved through the alteration, misrepresentation and forgery of documentary...
Hákarl →
Hákarl (Icelandic for “fermented shark”) is a food from Iceland. It is a Greenland or basking shark which has been cured with a particular fermentation process and hung to dry for 4-5 months.
Chef Anthony Bourdain, who has travelled extensively throughout the world sampling local cuisine for his Travel Channel show No Reservations, has described it as “the single worst, most...
U.S. history of alcohol minimum purchase age by... →
The Game (mind game) →
There are three rules to The Game:
Everyone in the world is playing The Game. (Sometimes narrowed to: “Everybody in the world who knows about The Game is playing The Game”, or alternatively, “You are always playing The Game.”
Whenever one thinks about The Game, one loses.
Losses must be announced to at least one person (either by using a statement such as “I lost...
Wizards Project →
The Wizards Project (formerly called the Diogenes Project) was a research project that studied the ability of people to detect lies told by others.
A “Truth Wizard” is a person identified in the Wizards Project, who can identify deception with exceptional accuracy of at least 80% or higher, whereas the average person is only as good as a coin toss. No Truth Wizard, however, is 100%...
Timeline of the burrito →
The timeline of the burrito documents the use of the burrito, a food made with tortillas and filling found in Mexico and the United States.
Sokushinbutsu →
Sokushinbutsu were Buddhist monks or priests who caused their own deaths in a way that resulted in their mummification.
For 1,000 days (a little less than three years) the priests would eat a special diet consisting only of nuts and seeds, while taking part in a regimen of rigorous physical activity that stripped them of their body fat. They then ate only bark and roots for another thousand days...
Ringing rocks →
Ringing Rocks are rocks that have the curious property of resonating like a bell when struck.
Witching hour →
In European folklore, the witching hour is the time when supernatural creatures such as witches, demons and ghosts are thought to be at their most powerful, and black magic at its most effective. This hour is typically midnight, and the term may now be used to refer to midnight, or any late hour, even without having the associated superstitious beliefs. The term “witching hour” can...
Banana beer →
Banana beer is an alcoholic beverage made from fermentation of mashed bananas. The alcohol content is about 4.8% alcohol by volume.
Blanket fort →
A blanket fort is a construction commonly made using blankets, bed sheets, pillows, and sofa cushions. It is also known as a couch fort or pillow fort.
Dome (disambiguation)
In highly-specific regions of Eastern Massachusetts, “to dome” means to “aggressively consume a sandwich from Subway or another discount sandwich chain, in an entirely non-gay manner. Honest.”
Crush, Texas →
Crush, Texas, was a temporary “city” established as a one-day publicity stunt in 1896. William George Crush, general passenger agent of the Missouri-Kansas-Texas Railroad, conceived the idea to demonstrate a train wreck as a spectacle. About 40,000 people showed up on September 15, 1896, making the new town of Crush, Texas, temporarily the second-largest city in the state.
Some of the...
“Infornography is a portmanteau word formed by the combination of the words...”
– Infornography - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Yea, that’s about right.
(via dkeen)
List of paradoxes →
The Licked Hand →
The Licked Hand, known sometimes as The Doggy Lick, is an urban legend popular among teenagers.
A young girl is left home alone with only her dog to protect her. On the news that night, they announced there was a serial killer on the loose in the local area. Before she goes to bed, she locks all the doors and tries to lock all the windows, but the one in the basement won’t close. She...
British Rail flying saucer →
The British Rail flying saucer, officially known simply as space vehicle, was a proposed spacecraft designed by Charles Osmond Frederick. A patent application was filed by Jensen and Son on behalf of British Rail on 11 December 1970 and granted on 21 March 1973.
The flying saucer originally started as a proposal for a raiseable platform. However, the project was revised and edited, and by the...
Carl Tanzler →
Carl Tanzler or sometimes Count Carl von Cosel (February 8, 1877 – July 23, 1952) was a German-born radiologist at the United States Marine Hospital in Key West, Florida who developed a morbid obsession for a young Cuban-American tuberculosis patient, Elena Milagro “Helen” de Hoyos (July 31, 1909 - October 25, 1931), that carried on well after Hoyos succumbed to the disease.
In 1933,...
Gloria Ramirez →
Gloria Ramirez (January 11, 1963 - February 19, 1994) was a Riverside, California, woman dubbed “the toxic lady” by the media when several Riverside General Hospital workers became ill after exposure to her body and blood.
Capgras delusion →
The Capgras delusion (or Capgras syndrome) is a disorder in which a person holds a delusion that a friend, spouse, parent or other close family member, has been replaced by an identical-looking impostor.
Mellified Man →
Mellified Man refers to a legendary medicinal substance created by steeping a human cadaver in honey. According to legend, an elderly man (over 70 years old), likely to die in the near future, would donate his corpse to be used as a healing confection.
This process differed from a simple body donation because of the aspect of self-sacrifice; the mellification process would ideally start before...
Out-of-place artifact →
An out-of-place artifact (OOPArt) is a term coined by American zoologist and cryptozoologist Ivan T. Sanderson for an object of historical, archaeological or paleontological interest found in a very unusual or seemingly impossible context.
An example of an OOPArt is the Maine penny, found at the Goddard site in Blue Hill, Maine. It is an 11th century Norse coin which was found in an American...
Fasting Girls. →
exempli-gratia:
“A Victorian term for young females, usually preadolescent, who, it was claimed, were capable of surviving over indefinitely long periods of time without consuming any food or other nourishment. Fasting girls were not only girls who refused food but who also drew attention to their fast by claiming to have special religious and/or magical powers.”
Vanishing hitchhiker →
1975 saw a rash of reports of a prophetic nun vanishing from cars after hitching lifts near the Austrian-German border. On 13 April that year, after a 43-year-old businessman drove his car off the road in fright at the disappearance of his passenger, Austrian police threatened a fine equivalent to £200 (1975 value) to anyone reporting similar stories.
Dermoid cyst →
A dermoid cyst is a cystic teratoma that contains developmentally mature skin complete with hair follicles and sweat glands, sometimes luxuriant clumps of long hair, and often pockets of sebum, blood, fat, bone, nails, teeth, eyes, cartilage, and thyroid tissue.
Hofling hospital experiment →
In 1966, the psychiatrist Charles K. Hofling conducted a field experiment on obedience in the nurse-physician relationship. In the natural hospital setting, nurses were ordered by unknown doctors to administer what could have been a dangerous dose of a (fictional) drug to their patients.
In spite of official guidelines forbidding administration in such circumstances, Hofling found that 21 out of...