Due to a typo
Ode to the lunch lady
Are you crabs yet?
How a mafia boss helped the US invade Sicily in World War II
A luxury ocean liner burned and capsized in New York Harbor on Feb. 9, 1942. The SS Normandie, being converted into a troopship, caught fire during welding work and took 6,000 tons of water from firefighting efforts before rolling onto its side in the Hudson River. The Navy immediately suspected sabotage. German U-boats had sunk 120 American merchant ships in the first three months after Pearl Harbor, and fears of Axis agents operating along the waterfront ran high. Naval Intelligence started looking into local dock workers. Italian and German workers controlled by organized crime networks remained silent when federal investigators asked them questions. Commander Charles Haffenden of the Office of Naval Intelligence needed help investigating the incident and protecting the waterfront. He turned to the one man who could make dock workers talk, Charles Lucky Luciano, who was serving 30 to 50 years in prison. (via Military.com)
This Finnish inventor has more patents than Edison or Nikola Tesla
The legacy of the Finnish inventor and engineer Eric Magnus Campbell Tigerstedt (1887–1925) is not very widely known, even among the Finnish public. Nevertheless, Tigerstedt’s short yet prolific life touched and crossed several cultural and national boundaries: he was born to a Swedish-speaking aristocratic family in Russia’s Grand Duchy of Finland, but he studied in Germany, worked in Denmark and died in the United States at the age of 37. During his ill-fated career, Tigerstedt managed to create around 70 novel electrical devices and methods, which received over 100 patents from all over the world. Many of his inventions were aimed at creating a functioning and commercially viable sound film technology, including various amplifiers, loudspeakers and microphones. Even inventions such as the Cryptographone and an electronic hearing aid can be seen as side products of his ultimate dream of recording and reproducing synchronised sound with film image. (via Helsinki.fi)
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Continue reading “How a mafia boss helped the US invade Sicily in World War II”What’s wrong, babe?
Tired of the same old angel and devil?
Coffee cake is a scam
Good riddance but now what?
by Ogden Nash
Two strangers, a terrorist bomb and an amazing tale of courage
In the early hours of Friday, January 20, 2023, a dirty blue car parked outside St. James’s hospital in Leeds. The car was filled up to its windows with junk. Mohammad Farooq sat behind the steering wheel in the cold and dark, surrounded by his mess. His phone was in his hand. He was 27, overweight and round-faced, with black hair shaved neatly at the sides and swept over on top. His heart was pounding, and breathing took effort. It was, he decided, time to show them. At 12:53 a.m. he sent a carefully composed message to a senior nurse on ward J28, St. James’ acute assessment unit. “I’ve placed a pressure cooker on J28. It will detonate in one hour. Let’s see how many lives you will save.” He had read ISIS terror manuals that suggested causing an evacuation, then setting off a bomb, or stabbing or shooting those that emerged. He watched out of the window and waited for the sirens. (via Bungalow)
Rumoured to be a witch, she died in 1813 but wasn’t buried until 1998
For 185 years her skeleton was an object of derision, ridicule, and fascination. Joan Wytte is believed to be a local North Cornish woman known as the ‘Fighting Fairy Woman of Bodmin’ — abused and persecuted as a witch. Since her death, aged 38 in 1813 she has been in motion: stored in Bodmin Jail, used in a séance, examined, and hung in a museum. After her death the anatomist, William Clift, requested Joan’s body for scientific research, yet never bothered to collect her. William Hicks, the governor of the Bodmin Asylum in the 1840s and 50s, used her bones as a prop in a séance. Subsequently, Joan was derided as an item of ridicule and her bones were locked in storage until the prison closed in 1927. During the 1930s and 1940s she was in the custody of a Cornish doctor. It seems Joan was neglected until a ‘showman’ acquired her at auction in the 1950s for his new business venture — a Museum of Witchcraft and Magic. (via RebelBuzz)
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Continue reading “Two strangers, a terrorist bomb and an amazing tale of courage”Police catch 12-year-old hitman after he shoots the wrong person
Dubbed the “Child Assassin” by Swedish media, the unnamed minor was reportedly paid 250,000 Swedish crowns ($27,000) to travel to the city of Malmö and kill a certain person, but ended up shooting a 21-year-old man who was hanging out with some friends. It is unclear who ordered the killing and why, but authorities have reasons to believe that this wasn’t the 12-year-old’s first hit job. Swedish newspaper Expressen reported that the young suspect was apprehended on Tuesday, December 16, following eyewitness reports of the shooting. The minor had run away from his grandmother’s house in another city, where he had lived since he was 7 years old, and is believed to have become involved with violent gangs. (via Oddity Central)
A doctor invented sugar cubes after his wife hurt her hand breaking sugar
Jacob Christoph Rad invented sugar cubes in 1841. Until then, sugar could only be bought in the form of cones or cobs. These sugar cones were up to 1.50 metres high and hard as a rock. If you wanted to sweeten your coffee with them, you needed tools: a hammer, tongs and a sugar crusher. When Juliane Rad injured her hand (presumably for the umpteenth time) while breaking sugar, she demanded – so the story goes – that her husband finally do something to get sugar into a user-friendly form. Jacob Christoph Rad was just the man to do it, because he ran a sugar factory in the Moravian town of Datschitz. In his sugar factory, Rad experimented with a model resembling today’s ice cube moulds into which he filled moistened sugar mass, pressed it and let it dry. (via the DPM)
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Continue reading “Police catch 12-year-old hitman after he shoots the wrong person”The Ingram Christmas Letter for 2025
Yes, it’s everyone’s favorite time of the year — time for the annual Ingram Christmas Letter! I know that you’re as excited as I am 🙂 I’ve been doing this now for about a quarter of a century, I think. And yes, I know sometimes it feels like longer than that (imagine how I feel). I’ve been pulling together all the previous versions and publishing them as blog posts at mathewingram.com/work, but since we’ve moved several times, and I’ve switched internet providers and computers multiple times, piecing those old letters together was harder than I thought it would be! When the first one came out I think Caitlin was ten, Meaghan was six and Zoe was one. Caitlin is now 36 and has two children, Meaghan turned 32 this year, and Zoe is 27. What’s really surprising is that Becky and I haven’t aged at all!
As usual, the photos that I link to here are in a Google photo album, and you can also find them all on the Ingram Photo Server (if that link doesn’t work let me know and I will ask Meaghan to turn the server back on — it’s sitting on the coffee table at their house in Kingston). You can also find an old-fashioned web version of this letter, complete with old-timey Santa images, on my website. If you have any questions, you can reach me by email at [email protected] — unless you have a criticism, in which case please email [email protected].
It’s not every day you get a new member of the family, but this year we got two, although the way we got them was very different :-). The first was the inestimable Casey Graham Hemrica, who came into the world on March 31, to be greeted by big sister Quinn and family. He is a wise old man of nine months or so now, and he has already learned how to pull himself up on things, and has mastered the front crawl (the land version) after spending a little time trying out the combat crawl (which features the arms only). He has a number of thoughtful opinions on the issues of the day, including food — which he thinks is fantastic — and the fire in the fireplace, which he is also a big fan of.
Continue reading “The Ingram Christmas Letter for 2025”He’s been running a DnD campaign for over 40 years
On 25 April 1982, two teenage boys in the small town of Borden, Saskatchewan, Canada began playing the relatively new fantasy role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons. Today, 43 years later and more than 2,000 km away, Robert Wardhaugh’s D&D campaign is still going strong. The Dungeon Master, who is today also a history professor at the University of Western Ontario, is the proud holder of the GWR title for the longest running D&D campaign (homebrew). He estimates that around 500 player characters have passed through the ranks of the Party of the Pendant over the last four decades, which corresponds to over four centuries of in-game time. Characters have come and gone, empires have risen and fallen, magical items – taken from cursed tombs or dragon’s hoards – have been handed down through generations of player characters. (via Guinness)
The Top Gun anthem might not have existed if not for Billy Idol
Electronic drums. A naval deck and the first hint of early morning sun. Synths, and the murmur of an F14. Then lift-off – cue Danger Zone. Harold Faltermeyer’s Top Gun Anthem is so synonymous with the film from which it takes its name that it’s hard to imagine it being used anywhere else, but it turns out that it almost ended up in a very different kind of movie. The anthem’s iconic melody was originally intended for a dream sequence in 1985 neo-noir comedy Fletch, in which Chevy Chase imagines that he’s starring for the LA Lakers basketball team. While Faltermeyer was working on the theme, it was overheard by Billy Idol, who was recording in the studio next door. “That’s great – you should use it for Top Gun,” the singer said. And the more Faltermeyer thought about it, the more he agreed with Idol. (via Music Radar)
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Continue reading “He’s been running a DnD campaign for over 40 years”What does a butcher with a whip have to do with Christmas?
Hi everyone — Mathew Ingram here. This is a special Christmas edition of When The Going Gets Weird, and it is the last newsletter of the year. Hope you and your loved ones have a great holiday (if you celebrate a winter festival of some kind) and we’ll see you again in 2026!
A butcher, a man with a whip, and a jolly bishop walk into a bar. This is not, in fact, the opening line of a twisted joke — it’s preparation for the biggest day of the year in Nancy, an elegant city in France’s Lorraine region. St. Nicholas Day is celebrated across many European countries on December 6 or the weekend following it. Each evening in Nancy from late November till early January, a lights display projects a story onto the opulent façade of the Hôtel de Ville. The expectant crowd watches as three children knock on the door of a local butcher, only to be chopped up into little pieces and left to cure in a salting pot. Falling snowflakes are replaced with chunks of veal. You might be wondering what this gruesome scene has to do with St. Nicholas, who is the predecessor of Santa Claus. Often throughout Europe, St. Nicholas is said to be accompanied by an evil nemesis designed to frighten children into good behavior. (via Atlas Obscura)
Bob Rutan has one of the best Christmas stories of all time thanks to playing Santa for Macy’s
Santa Claus was nursing a beer at an uptown dive bar. The neighborhood was gentrifying, and management seemed eager to accommodate — there was scented soap in the bathroom and twenty-two-dollar lobster rolls. But the place couldn’t outrun the regulars. They drank tumblers of Irish whiskey filled to the brim, illicit pours they secured with ten-dollar tips to a curvy Dominican bartender. Santa — Billy — was fiftyish, with a modest gut, gray hair, a lustrous beard, and a caddish gaze that followed the bartender up and down the rail. He was dressed in sweatpants and a T-shirt. For the price of three beers, he told me his story. As a young man, Billy had come to New York to be an actor, but over time he began to feel like an extra in his own life, watching it happen without any control over its direction, the way a person does sometimes. These were bad years, shameful even. He lost his job. He lost his wife. Lost touch with his young son too. He was overweight and undershaved. A friend had a weird idea: Billy could try playing Santa Claus at Macy’s. And that’s what Billy did. (via Esquire)
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Continue reading “What does a butcher with a whip have to do with Christmas?”She froze to death. Is her boyfriend to blame for leaving?
A distant webcam captured the moments the couple’s hiking trip started to unravel.The pair, a boyfriend and girlfriend, were nearing the summit of Grossglockner, the tallest mountain in the Austrian Alps, when their lights appeared on its dark peak.Around midnight, the man said, his girlfriend was struck by sudden exhaustion and could not continue. He said the two made a contentious, if not uncommon, decision: He would leave her behind and continue alone to find help.Hours later, he was out of harm’s way, and the woman was dead. Rescuers found her frozen body later that morning not far from the summit, officials say.Now, nearly a year later, the authorities have accused the man of making a series of mistakes that led to his girlfriend’s death, charging him this month with gross negligent manslaughter. (via the NYT)
Paganini wasn’t buried for 36 years because the Pope thought he made a deal with the devil
There is one musician who is regarded as the greatest violinist in History. One with an intense life, as befitted the Romantic period of his time; one who was sometimes compared to a serial killer and to a vampire; one who was said to be favored by having extraordinarily long fingers and by having made a pact with the devil to achieve his virtuosity: Niccolò Paganini. In May 1840, while at the home of the president of the Senate, he suffered an internal hemorrhage and died. He was fifty-seven years old. Death occurred so quickly that there was no time to call a priest, which, combined with his status as a Mason and the rumor of a diabolical pact, led the prelate to forbid his burial in the cemetery. His body was embalmed and kept in the basement of the same house in which he died. There it remained until 1853, when it could be buried in the Gaione cemetery (Parma). Finally, in 1876, the Pope authorized his burial. (via La Brujula Verde)
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Continue reading “She froze to death. Is her boyfriend to blame for leaving?”They won a £1-million lottery jackpot for the second time
One lucky couple has beaten extraordinary odds to win £1m on the National Lottery — for the second time. Richard Davies, 49, and Faye Stevenson-Davies, 43, first scooped a seven-figure jackpot playing the EuroMillions Millionaire Maker in June 2018. And now they have done it again by matching five main numbers and the bonus ball in the Lotto draw on 26 November. According to experts at Allwyn, operator of the National Lottery, the odds of winning both the EuroMillions Millionaire Maker and then five numbers and the bonus ball on Lotto are over 24-trillion-to-one. Former hairdresser Richard uses his skills at a shelter for the homeless in Cardiff, a project which received vital National Lottery funding, while also helping out friends by working as a delivery driver. Ex-nurse Faye is a volunteer cook at Cegin Hedyn community kitchen in Carmarthen, while also providing mental health counselling services. (via the BBC)
New research helps solve the mystery of why more women wake up during surgery
Often casually compared to falling into a deep sleep, going under is in fact wildly different from your everyday nocturnal slumber. Not only does a person lose the ability to feel pain, form memories, or move—they can’t simply be nudged back into conscious awareness. But occasionally, people do wake unexpectedly — in about 1 out of every 1,000 to 2,000 surgeries, patients emerge from the fog of anesthesia into the harsh light of the operating room while still under the knife. One question that has dogged researchers over the past several decades is whether women are more likely to find themselves in these unfortunate circumstances. A number of recent studies, including a 2023 meta-analysis, suggest that the answer is yes. Now, a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences helps untangle some of the mystery. In a series of experiments in mice and in humans, the researchers found that females do wake more easily from anesthesia and that testosterone plays an important role in how quickly and deeply we go under, and how easily we wake up. (via Nautilus)
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Continue reading “They won a £1-million lottery jackpot for the second time”