One afternoon in March 2024, Spanish society gathered at a prestigious Barcelona business school to celebrate Isak Andic, an unassuming Turkish-born entrepreneur who used to sell embroidered blouses in a Barcelona market stand and went on to found the affordable fashion brand Mango, becoming a billionaire in the process, the fifth-richest man in Spain. Nine months later, Andic was dead. On December 14, 2024, he went for a hike on Montserrat, the mountain just outside Barcelona, and plunged to his death from a cliff some 300 feet high. The only person with him was his son, Jonathan, then 43 and the firstborn of his three children. A few nights before Andic died, Mango had hosted a party at Barcelona’s Palau Sant Jordi arena celebrating Mango’s highest turnover in years, €3.3 billion. Now, the future and reputation of the company he built was in doubt, as was the largest fortune in Catalonia, an estimated $4.5 billion. (via The Cut)
A King penguin at the Edinburgh Zoo is the colonel-in-chief of the Norwegian King’s guard
The family of Norwegian shipping magnate Christian Salvesen gave a king penguin to Edinburgh Zoo when the zoo opened in 1913. When the Norwegian King’s Guard visited the Edinburgh Military Tattoo of 1961 for a drill display, a lieutenant named Nils Egelien became interested in the zoo’s penguin colony. When the King’s Guard returned to Edinburgh in 1972, Egelien arranged for the regiment to adopt a penguin. This penguin was named Nils Olav in honour of Nils Egelien, commander of the drill platoon, and Olav Siggerud, contingent commander of HMKG in 1972. Nils Olav was initially given the rank of lance corporal. He has been promoted each time the King’s Guard has returned to the zoo. He was made a corporal in 1982, then promoted to sergeant in 1987. Nils Olav I died shortly after his promotion to sergeant in 1987, and his place was taken by Nils Olav II, a two-year-old near-double. (via Wikipedia)
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Franz Kafka wanted to publish cheap travel guides for different countries
During a trip that they took together in 1911, traveling to Paris, Kafka and Max Brod hit on the idea of creating a new type of travel guide. “It would be called Billig (On the Cheap),” Brod remembered. “Franz was tireless and got a childlike pleasure out of elaborating all the principles down to the nest detail for this new type of guide, which was supposed to make us millionaires, and above all wrest us away from our awful office work. Then I engaged in a very serious correspondence with publishers about our ‘Reform of Guidebooks.’ The negotiations failed because we didn’t want to disclose our precious secret without an enormous advance.” In fact, a letter that Kafka wrote to Brod almost a year later shows that even after so many months, the two of them were still thinking about how to realize their plan. After Brod had spoken to Ernst Rowohlt, Kafka complained: “you didn’t say anything about On the Cheap.” (via The Paris Review)
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The blue paint on this Pompeii room’s walls cost the same as a Roman soldier’s annual pay
At first glance, it is a small room, about nine square meters in size, with walls painted a pale blue reminiscent of the Mediterranean sky. But behind that apparent simplicity, the Blue Room of insula 10 in Regio IX of Pompeii hides a secret that archaeology and materials science have just revealed: its walls are covered with a massive quantity of Egyptian blue, the most valuable synthetic pigment of antiquity. An international team led by MIT and the Pompeii Archaeological Park has managed to calculate that between 2.7 and 4.9 kilograms of this precious pigment were used in the construction of this room. The cost of the raw material alone, according to historical sources, would have ranged between 93 and 168 denarii. To understand the scale of that figure, the authors of the study translate it into the terms of the time: the annual salary of a Roman foot soldier was around 187 denarii. (via La Brujula Verde)
He decided to ship himself home in a box and almost died on the way there
Reginald Spiers was desperate. Growing up, he had a talent for throwing a javelin, and in 1962, competed on behalf of his home nation of Australia in the Commonwealth Games. He travelled to England, competing there in the Northern Hemisphere’s summer, hoping to earn enough points to make Australia’s national team. He finally gave up and decided to come home, but he had a problem — his time in England was expensive, and he didn’t have enough money to buy a ticket home. That’s when he came up with a plan: to ship himself home as cargo, since cargo can often be shipped COD. With the help of a friend and fellow javelin thrower, Spiers built a wooden crate measuring roughly 5 feet by 3 feet by 2½ feet — the largest size Air India allowed for cargo shipments at the time. The box label stated that it contained paint, destined for an Australian shoe company. In fact, it was outfitted with “some tinned food, a torch, a blanket and a pillow, plus two plastic bottles — one for water, one for urine.” (via Now I Know)
Camera catches the moment the sewer drains in Tehran explode into flames
Acknowledgements: I find a lot of these links myself, but I also get some from other places 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 and Why Is This Interesting by Noah Brier and Colin Nagy. If you come across something you think should be included here, feel free to email me at mathew @ mathewingram dot com