It is easy to miss California’s biggest environmental disaster. Driving north on Highway 111, you wouldn’t expect to find an inland sea. If it’s summer, the thermometer in your car could read 115 degrees. But amid the shimmering heat, there are signs of water. All around you, rows of broccoli, lettuce, and alfalfa stretch in every direction. In the fields, farmworkers bend and straighten. The air is sharp with cow dung. A pall of dust hangs over everything. You are sixty miles north of the Mexican border. You’re driving out of poverty and into money, away from one of the poorest counties in California and toward towns named for oases. Palm Springs. Rancho Mirage. The left turn is easy to miss, the brown sign a seeming anachronism: “Bombay Beach.” Surely there is no town here, you think, let alone a beach. But if you continue, you’ll see hints of life. In the distance, a squat building hangs on under the punishing sun. (via The Believer)
Three-year-old chess prodigy becomes youngest player to earn official rating
India’s Sarwagya Singh Kushwaha has become the youngest player in chess history to earn an official Fide rating at the age of three years, seven months and 20 days. The chess prodigy edged out the previous record of compatriot Anish Sarkar, who was three years, eight months and 19 days when he reached the milestone in November last year. Kushwaha, who is enrolled in nursery school in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, holds a rapid rating of 1,572. To achieve a rating from Fide, the International Chess Federation, a player needs to beat at least one Fide-rated player. A rating is a score that measures a chess player’s strengths based on their performances and is not the same as a ranking. World No 1 Magnus Carlsenis the top in rapid chess with a rating of 2,824. Kushwaha defeated three rated players in events across his state and other parts of the country to secure his record-breaking status. (via The Guardian)
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He got the police to arrest the mayor and stole thousands of dollars but became a folk hero
On a crisp October morning in 1906, a man in an immaculate Prussian captain’s uniform marched into the Berlin suburb of Köpenick and coolly carried out one of the most extraordinary confidence tricks in modern European history. His name was Wilhelm Voigt, a 57-year-old shoemaker with a long, unhappy acquaintance with the German penal system. For a few hours on October 16, Voigt, armed with nothing more than authority borrowed from a uniform, seized control of a town hall, arrested its mayor, and walked away with 4,002 marks and 37 pfennigs of municipal funds. The affair would become legendary: a pointed satire of Prussian militarism and unquestioning obedience. When Voigt was released from prison in February 1906, he attempted to go straight, but his attempts to get official permission to live and work in Berlin all failed. These bureaucratic obstructions, layered onto years of marginalisation, pushed Voigt towards a desperate, almost theatrical solution. (via Amusing Planet)
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.
This scientist thinks he has found the comet that became the Star of Bethlehem
Astronomers have long sought a cosmic explanation for the Bible’s Star of Bethlehem, the shining celestial object that, so the story goes, guided the wise men, or magi, from Jerusalem to greet the baby Jesus. One long-standing hypothesis held that the Star of Bethlehem was in fact a conjunction, perhaps between Jupiter and Saturn. But this holiday season, a scientist has presented a new contender: a comet. Reports of a comet are found in Chinese records from 5 B.C.E., according to research published on December 3 in the Journal of the British Astronomical Association by Mark Matney, a planetary scientist at NASA, who conducted the research independently of the agency. Matney recalls how, as a student, he worked at a planetarium that ran a Christmas sky show telling the story of the Star of Bethlehem, which rose in the southern sky until it appeared to come to a stop overhead. The planetarium show said that no known astronomical object could act that way.“I remember sitting there saying, ‘Oh, I know one that could do that,’” Matney says. (via Scientific American)
In Wales if someone shows up with a horse skull and starts singing you have to respond in kind
The Mari Lwyd is a Welsh tradition in which a group of people carry a horse skull mounted on a pole — draped in a white sheet with the operator hidden underneath — to your door at Christmas and demand entry through song. You are expected to refuse, also through song. What follows is essentially a medieval rap battle: the Mari Lwyd party sings their case for why they should be let in, you sing back why they shouldn’t, and this continues until someone runs out of verses. If you lose, the skeletal horse and its entourage get to come inside, and you have to give them food and drink. The tradition dates back to at least 1800, and the groups typically included the horse carrier, a leader, and people dressed as stock characters like Punch and Judy. Folklorists have debated whether “Mari Lwyd” means “Holy Mary” (as in the mother of Jesus) or “Grey Mare.” (via Boing Boing)
One of the greatest talk show entrances of all time with Peter O’Toole and a camel
