Month: December 2025

Posted on

One of my favourite stories of the year

If you didn’t see the image at the top of this post, it appeared on the photo wires and in many newspapers and other media outlets following the brazen robbery of the Louvre in Paris, where a group of thieves stole jewellery and other artifacts worth about $100 million (some of the thieves have since been caught). But the theft itself isn’t my favourite part of this story — not even the part where the password the Louvre allegedly used for their video surveillance system was the word “password.” The photo instantly went viral because of the extremely dapper individual in the fedora and vest with the umbrella — “please let this be the French detective assigned to the case,” said one post.

The best part was when the dapper chap’s real identity was revealed a few days later: his name is Pedro Elias Garzon Delvaux, and he is a 15-year-old who lives with his parents and grandfather in Rambouillet, 30km from Paris. He is a fan of Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot, and just likes dressing up in that kind of outfit, especially when he is going out to visit places like the Louvre. He just happened to be walking by the police cordon when a photographer snapped that shot. It’s just so perfect, so serendipitous. And he sounds like a terrific young man — he says “I like to be chic — I go to school like this.” But not with the fedora, that’s reserved for weekends, holidays and museum visits.

Posted on

He thought he found gold but it was a 5 billion-year-old meteor

In 2015, David Hole was prospecting in Maryborough Regional Park near Melbourne, Australia. Armed with a metal detector, he discovered something out of the ordinary – a very heavy, reddish rock resting in some yellow clay. He took it home and tried everything to open it, sure that there was a gold nugget inside the rock – after all, Maryborough is in the Goldfields region, where the Australian gold rush peaked in the 19th century. Hole tried a rock saw, an angle grinder, a drill, and even doused the thing in acid. Unable to open the rock, Hole took the nugget to the Melbourne Museum for identification. A scientist there said that after 37 years of working at the museum and examining thousands of rocks, only two of the offerings had ever turned out to be real meteorites, and Hole’s rock was one of those two. He published a scientific paper describing the 4.6 billion-year-old meteorite, which he called Maryborough. (via ScienceAlert)

In the 16th century cadavers were embalmed with honey and then turned into medicine

A mellified man, also known as a human mummy confection, was a legendary medicinal substance created by steeping a human cadaver in honey. The concoction is detailed in Chinese medical sources of the 16th century, which reports that some elderly men in Arabia, nearing the end of their lives, would submit themselves to a process of mummification in honey to create a healing confection. The mellification process would ideally start before death. The donor would stop eating any food other than honey, going as far as to bathe in the substance. Shortly, the donor’s feces and even sweat would consist of honey. When this diet finally proved fatal, the donor’s body would be placed in a stone coffin filled with honey. After a century or so, the contents would have turned into a sort of confection reputedly capable of healing broken limbs, which would then be sold in street markets at a hefty price. (via Wikipedia)

Note: This is a version of my When The Going Gets Weird newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

Continue reading “He thought he found gold but it was a 5 billion-year-old meteor”