From Texas Monthly: “FBI Special Agent Curt Hunt was working in the yard of his San Antonio home one quiet Saturday morning when the call came in: The Texas Commerce Bank off Loop 410 had been robbed. Motor bank? In his 22 years as an agent, the intense, wiry Hunt had worked a lot of bank robberies—there are about twenty a year in San Antonio—but they almost always involved a robber walking into a bank lobby, pointing a gun at a teller, and demanding all the money in the drawer. How could anyone possibly get past the locked doors and bulletproof glass of a motor bank? It was September 21, 1991. Hunt rushed to the scene to begin investigating what would turn out to be the biggest bank robbery in San Antonio history. Grim bank officials told Hunt that someone had gotten away with almost $250,000—all the more astonishing considering that the average bank robber gets no more than $2,000. The robber had reached the vault—another rarity—and then made his escape so efficiently that a customer waiting several yards away for the bank to open did not even know there had been a robbery.”
Norwegian princess married a shaman who says he once came back from the dead
From the BBC: “Princess Märtha Louise, 52, and Durek Verrett, 49, announced their engagement in 2022. The princess – a former equestrian and the eldest of Norwegian King Harald’s two children – was previously married to the late writer and artist Ari Behn. Mr Verrett says on his site that he is a sixth generation shaman, “servant of god and energy activator” who “demystifies spirituality” through his “no-nonsense teachings”. In an interview with Vanity Fair magazine, he claimed to have risen from the dead and said that when he was a child a relative had predicted he would one day marry the princess of Norway.Märtha Louise has long attracted controversy in Norway for decades for her involvement in alternative treatments. In 2007, she announced she was clairvoyant and ran a school which taught students to “create miracles” and talk to angels.
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Scientists have figured out why the Earth vibrated for nine days in 2023
From the Wall Street Journal: “A geologic mystery that has lingered for the past year has finally been solved: What caused an odd cascade of vibrations to ripple across the globe for nine days? Using classified seafloor maps from the Danish military, a global network of seismic sensors used to detect earthquakes, drone video of debris washed high up on a remote rock face in eastern Greenland and other evidence, researchers finally pieced together the strange sequence of events. It started when seismic sensors at monitoring stations around the world detected a signal in September 2023 that looked nothing like the squiggles made by earthquakes. This signal oscillated at 90-second intervals and continued for days. An earth-science detective squad of 68 experts who, with seismic recordings, satellite images, field measurements, drone video and computer simulations, reconstructed what happened. The evidence revealed that 33 million cubic yards of rock and ice—the volume of 10,000 Olympic-size swimming pools—had plunged into a fjord in eastern Greenland, triggering a tsunami.”
When writer Aldous Huxley dropped some LSD and helped coin the term psychedelic
From JSTOR Daily: “Around Christmas Eve 1955, Alfred Matthew Hubbard turned Aldous Huxley on to LSD. Their meeting took place at Huxley’s home in the Hollywood Hills. Seemingly from different universes, these two figures found a curious point of convergence via lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), the hallucinogen first synthesized in a lab in Switzerland in 1938. Humphry Osmond, a British psychiatrist who’d moved to Canada in 1951, arranged the meeting, at Huxley’s request. A friend of Huxley’s, Osmond had given the writer mescaline—a naturally occurring hallucinogen—in 1953. Osmond and Huxley had discussed possible neologisms to describe the impact such drugs had on the body and mind. Huxley suggested the word “phanerothyme,” from the Greek words for “to show” and “spirit,” but Osmond instead chose “psychedelic,” from the Greek words psyche (for mind or soul) and deloun (for show).”
The Golden Gate bridge in San Francisco has a hum that is as loud as a jackhammer
From Unanticipated Consequences: “In 2014, the decision was made to add a protective net to the Golden Gate bridge to deter suicides from leaping off the deck. Woven from stainless steel rope, the netting would be extensions of the vertical struts and be all but invisible from street level. But the weight of the net and the additional struts required that the bridge lose some weight elsewhere to stay within the margin of safety. The original railing was made of H-shaped balusters connected to a substantial handrail, but the new, weight-saving design swapped the balusters for simple vertical plates that would be far lighter but would also let the famed San Francisco ocean breezes blow thru the railing. This would have been fine, except that during certain winds, a very loud hum at 440 Hz would emanate from the bridge at 100 dB, the same as the sound of a jackhammer 1 meter away. It could be heard as far as a mile away.”
Would you go underwater in this guy’s homemade submarine?
Acknowledgements: I find a lot of these links myself, but I also get some from other newsletters that I rely on as “serendipity engines,” such as The Morning News from Rosecrans Baldwin and Andrew Womack, Jodi Ettenberg’s Curious About Everything, Dan Lewis’s Now I Know, Robert Cottrell and Caroline Crampton’s The Browser, Clive Thompson’s Linkfest, Noah Brier and Colin Nagy’s Why Is This Interesting, Maria Popova’s The Marginalian, Sheehan Quirke AKA The Cultural Tutor, the Smithsonian magazine, and JSTOR Daily. If you come across something interesting that you think should be included here, please feel free to email me at mathew @ mathewingram dot com