From The Guardian: “One autumn morning, I boarded a plane from Port Moresby, the capital of Papua New Guinea, to Buka, the capital of the Autonomous Region of Bougainville. A collection of islands and atolls the size of Puerto Rico, Bougainville is located 600 miles east of Moresby, across the Solomon Sea. Over the previous months I had become transfixed instead by the strange tale of Noah Musingku, a Bougainvillean scam artist who had made a fortune, lost it, then retreated to a remote armed compound in the jungle, where he declared himself the islands’ king. Musingku’s purported con – a vast, millenarian Ponzi scheme called U-Vistract – had, since the late 90s, raked in some $232m, perhaps far more, and near as I could tell, it was still plodding on. In 2006, a militia allegedly aligned with the ABG stormed Musingku’s hideout and almost killed him. Not since 2012, it seemed, had a reporter set foot in the Royal Kingdom of Papaala, Musingku’s name for his compound in the village of Tonu.”
Vatican City had the highest per-capita murder rate in the world in 1998
From Wikipedia: “The Vatican murders occurred on 4 May 1998, when Swiss Guard lance corporal Cédric Tornay shot and killed the commander of the Swiss Guard, Alois Estermann, and his wife before killing himself. The murder happened the same day that Estermann was confirmed in his position as commander, after a period of being acting commander. Estermann had previously disciplined Tornay for infractions; as a result, he rejected Tornay for the Benemerenti medal, which Swiss Guards usually receive. Tornay wrote a suicide note to his family complaining about Estermann and the supposed injustices he had inflicted against him. The case shocked the Vatican and initiated a media frenzy. Due to Vatican City’s low population, this double homicide gave the country the highest annual murder rate in the world, at over 200 per 100,000 people.”
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San Francisco was once home to the largest swimming pool in the United States
From the SF Zoo: “Fleishhacker Pool, the largest swimming pool in the US, was located next to the soo for 47 years. Its storied history includes movie stars the 1920’s and 1930’s such as Johnny Weismuller, Esther Williams and Ann Curtis. The pool — so large that lifeguards used wooden row boats to make their way across — was also used by the military for drills and exercises. The pool was 1,000 feet long and 150 feet wide. A diving pool measured 50 feet square and 14 feet deep with a tiered diving tower. The main pool had a capacity of six million gallons and could accommodate 10,000 swimmers. Salt water was pumped into the pool at high tide through a pipeline from the ocean and then pumped out at low tide. The pool closed in 1971 after years of deterioration and a lack of modern operational systems that could meet modern health standards.”
Hi everyone! Mathew Ingram here. I am able to continue writing this newsletter in part because of your financial help and support, which you can do either through my Patreon or by upgrading your subscription to a monthly contribution. I enjoy gathering all of these links and sharing them with you, but it does take time, and your support makes it possible for me to do that. I also write a weekly newsletter of technology analysis called The Torment Nexus.
Scientists have discovered the Earth’s oldest impact crater in Australia
From Scientific American: “We have discovered the oldest meteorite impact crater on Earth, in the very heart of the Pilbara region of Western Australia. The crater formed more than 3.5 billion years ago, making it the oldest known by more than a billion years. Curiously enough, the crater was exactly where we had hoped it would be, and its discovery supports a theory about the birth of Earth’s first continents. Many geologists think these ancient rocks formed above hot plumes that rose from above Earth’s molten metallic core, rather like wax in a lava lamp. Others maintain they formed by plate tectonic processes similar to modern Earth. A few years ago, we published a paper suggesting that the energy required to make continents came from outside Earth, in the form of one or more collisions with meteorites many kilometres in diameter.”
The phrase ‘to curry favor’ entered the English language from an unusual source
From Weird Medieval Guys: “Our story begins in 14th century France, with a poem called The Romance of Fauvel. Its main character is a horse. The 3,820 rhyming lines that make up the poem are dedicated to telling the reader in great detail of Fauvel’s misdeeds and character deficiencies. For starters, his coat is fallow, the colour of mud, barren fields, and vanity. Our next clue to Fauvel’s unsavoury nature is his name. Spoken aloud, it sounds like faux veil, or “veil of falsehood.” It’s also an acronym, wherein each letter stands for one of the vices that Fauvel embodies. Fauvel was raised from the ranks by Lady Fortune herself in a sneaky coup against Lady Reason. Fortune swaps out Fauvel’s stable for the royal palace and bestows immense power and privilege upon the steed so that he may reign over the world of men. Humans of all walks of life, from humble peasants to the King himself, travel from across the land to prostrate themselves before him and groom his coat in the hopes of gaining his favour.”
Travellers in the 1950s sometimes carried flasks disguised as books
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
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