From the BBC: “A young boy was found alive after surviving five days in a game park inhabited by lions and elephants in northern Zimbabwe, according to a member of parliament in that country. The ordeal began when Tinotenda Pudu wandered at least 23 km (14 miles) from home into the “perilous” Matusadona Game Park, said Mashonaland West MP Mutsa Murombedzi. He spent five days “sleeping on a rocky perch, amidst roaring lions, passing elephants, eating wild fruits”, she said. Matusadona game park has about 40 lions. The Zimbabwe Parks & Wildlife Management Authority confirmed the incident to the BBC but said the boy walked 49 km (30 miles) from home. Murombedzi said the boy used his knowledge of the wild and survival skills to stay alive.”
There are unexploded rocket-launched grenades on the moon
From Standing Well Back: “It may seem bizarre, but rocket propelled Ggenades were taken to the moon on a couple of the Apollo missions to the moon in the 1970s. Three were fired, and five were abandoned. So there is an interesting EOD task outstanding on someone’s operational docket for a future mission. One of the ambitions of the Apollo project was to understand the geology of the Moon. Accordingly, a number of passive and active seismic experiments were planned. For one, a number of rocket propelled explosive devices containing varying amounts of explosives were used, and the launch initiation was radio-controlled, with the impact causing the detonation when they struck the moon. In much of the documentation the system is called a mortar but elsewhere the charges are referred to as rocket propelled charges or grenades.”
The vinegar in most UK fish-and-chip shops isn’t actually vinegar
From Virgin Radio: “It seems whenever you have been served fish and chips down the chippy and the server asks you whether you want salt or vinegar, they aren’t actually offering you the real thing. While it might taste like vinegar, chip shops actually serve something called non-brewed condiment, which is a mixture of water, ethanoic acid and various food colourings and flavourings chosen to make the mixture look and taste like real vinegar. But it is not vinegar at all. This isn’t some elaborate plan by chip shops to mess with your head, it’s just quite a bit cheaper and easier to make than the real thing and there are a few other benefits to using it. The first reason being companies can buy it in concentrate which makes it easier to store and transport. The mixture is also halal, and some brands are gluten-free, so it means more people can enjoy it.”
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.
Enigmatic cave-art drawings were likely made by children 14,000 years ago
From Science.org: “Fourteen thousand years ago, hunter gatherer grown-ups in Spain’s Las Monedas Cave were busy making serious cave art. Dozens of charcoal drawings depict reindeer, bison, and other ice age mammals in realistic detail. Kids, meanwhile, were apparently shooed off to their own corner of the cave. There, on a flat stretch of wall at toddler’s eye level, children seem to have etched a series of doodles that wouldn’t be out of place in a modern kindergarten class. The youngsters were between 3 and 6 years old and working alone, a team of archaeologists and child development experts conclude in Hunter Gatherer Research. Previous studies of the role of children in cave art have focused on physical attributes. The small size of handprints and finger fluting in soft clay, for example, indicate children were present in ancient caves.”
The same man invented Cool Whip, Pop Rocks, and Tang orange beverage
From How Stuff Works: “Cool Whip. Quick-set Jell-O. Tang. Pop Rocks. These are the ready-made foods that shaped — and were influenced by — generations of Americans coming of age in the 1960s and 1970s, and they were all invented by William A. Mitchell, a research chemist whose 35-year career coincided with America’s midcentury fascination with convenience foods. “Bill was the inventor at General Foods, said Marv Rudoph in a recorded interview. The two worked together for six years at the company. “Management tried to promote Bill many times, but he said, ‘No, just keep me in my lab. It’s what I want to do,'” he added. Mitchell was awarded more than 70 patents for foods he invented while working at General Foods Corp. from 1941 to 1976.”
He built his own fiberglass UFO-shaped boat in his garage
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