Category: Misc

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Choirboy with the voice of an angel became a global conman

Kenner Elias Jones was a performer from a young age. As a choirboy with “the voice of an angel”, aged 19 he carried a cross leading a procession at Prince Charles’s 1969 investiture in Jones’s Caernarfon hometown, watched by hundreds of millions worldwide. But that flair for putting on a show helped him forge a life of deception and fraud across three continents. The virtuous choirboy persona was perhaps his first con. Another chorister should have carried the cross that day, but Jones approached the bishop and told him all the other boys agreed he should do the job in front of the world’s cameras. His first conviction happened in Sheffield in 1973 for obtaining money by deception. A second fraud conviction at the Old Bailey in London in 1975 saw him enter prison for 12 months. Later, facing fraud charges, he fled the UK for a remote part of Kenya where not only did he claim to be an Anglican deacon but also a retired cardiac surgeon. (via the BBC)

He invented a beer that is also a vaccine-delivery system but not everyone likes it

hris Buck stands barefoot in his kitchen holding a glass bottle of unfiltered Lithuanian farmhouse ale. He swirls the bottle gently to stir up a fingerbreadth blanket of yeast and pours the turbulent beer into a glass mug. He has just consumed what may be the world’s first vaccine delivered in a beer. It could be the first small sip toward making vaccines more palatable and accessible to people around the world. Or it could fuel concerns about the safety and effectiveness of vaccines. Buck’s unconventional approach illustrates the legal, ethical, moral, scientific and social challenges involved in developing potentially lifesaving vaccines. Buck isn’t just a home brewer dabbling in drug-making. He is a virologist at the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Md., where he studies polyomaviruses, which have been linked to various cancers and to serious health problems for people with weakened immune systems. He discovered four of the 13 polyomaviruses known to infect humans. (via Science News)

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.

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She found out that her friend was actually her long-lost sister

I grew up in a small town in Connecticut. I always knew I was adopted: my mum told me that, as well as her, I had my “tummy mummy”. I was adopted from the Dominican Republic. My mum there was called Julianna, and she and my dad gave me up for adoption because they were poor. Fast-forward to 2013, and I was 24 and working in a restaurant in New Haven. One day, one of my co‑ workers, Julia, noticed my Dominican Republic flag tattoo. She told me she was from there, too. I said I was adopted from there, and she said she was as well. Julia was 23 – we’re 17 months apart. We hit it off right away. People would always tell us we looked alike. We would joke and say: “That’s because we’re sisters.” We decided to compare our adoption paperwork, but our birth mother’s names were different, as was the place we were born. It was anticlimactic. After that, we let it go. We only worked together for about six months, but stayed in touch. In 2018, my mum got me a 23andMe kit for Christmas. (via The Guardian)

Three encrypted notes from the 1900s allegedly describe the location of hidden treasure

In 1885, an author named James B. Ward published a pamphlet telling of a long-lost treasure available to anyone clever enough to solve a puzzle. Ward reported that around 1817, a man named Thomas Jefferson Beale had been the leader of an expedition to the American Southwest primarily concerned with hunting buffalo and/or bears. Beale’s group had instead stumbled upon gold and silver deposits in what is now Colorado. Agreeing to keep it all a secret, Beale’s team had spent the better part of two years quietly mining, then had taken the metals to Virginia by wagon and buried them in a vault underground between 1819 and 1821. Beale had written three notes explaining where the treasure was and who had legal rights to shares in it, encrypting each of these using a different text. However, Beale had vanished after leaving the notes with a friend. Eventually, the second of the three texts was deciphered. It specified which county in Virginia the treasure was hidden in, and referred the reader to the first of the notes for details. But the first⁠⁠ — and the third ⁠⁠— notes remained stubbornly undeciphered. (via Damn Interesting)

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.

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The Ingram Christmas Letter for 2025

Yes, it’s everyone’s favorite time of the year — time for the annual Ingram Christmas Letter! I know that you’re as excited as I am 🙂 I’ve been doing this now for about a quarter of a century, I think. And yes, I know sometimes it feels like longer than that (imagine how I feel). I’ve been pulling together all the previous versions and publishing them as blog posts at mathewingram.com/work, but since we’ve moved several times, and I’ve switched internet providers and computers multiple times, piecing those old letters together was harder than I thought it would be! When the first one came out I think Caitlin was ten, Meaghan was six and Zoe was one. Caitlin is now 36 and has two children, Meaghan turned 32 this year, and Zoe is 27. What’s really surprising is that Becky and I haven’t aged at all!

As usual, the photos that I link to here are in a Google photo album, and you can also find them all on the Ingram Photo Server (if that link doesn’t work let me know and I will ask Meaghan to turn the server back on — it’s sitting on the coffee table at their house in Kingston). You can also find an old-fashioned web version of this letter, complete with old-timey Santa images, on my website. If you have any questions, you can reach me by email at [email protected] — unless you have a criticism, in which case please email [email protected].

It’s not every day you get a new member of the family, but this year we got two, although the way we got them was very different :-). The first was the inestimable Casey Graham Hemrica, who came into the world on March 31, to be greeted by big sister Quinn and family. He is a wise old man of nine months or so now, and he has already learned how to pull himself up on things, and has mastered the front crawl (the land version) after spending a little time trying out the combat crawl (which features the arms only). He has a number of thoughtful opinions on the issues of the day, including food — which he thinks is fantastic — and the fire in the fireplace, which he is also a big fan of. 

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He’s been running a DnD campaign for over 40 years

On 25 April 1982, two teenage boys in the small town of Borden, Saskatchewan, Canada began playing the relatively new fantasy role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons. Today, 43 years later and more than 2,000 km away, Robert Wardhaugh’s D&D campaign is still going strong. The Dungeon Master, who is today also a history professor at the University of Western Ontario, is the proud holder of the GWR title for the longest running D&D campaign (homebrew). He estimates that around 500 player characters have passed through the ranks of the Party of the Pendant over the last four decades, which corresponds to over four centuries of in-game time. Characters have come and gone, empires have risen and fallen, magical items – taken from cursed tombs or dragon’s hoards – have been handed down through generations of player characters. (via Guinness)

The Top Gun anthem might not have existed if not for Billy Idol

Electronic drums. A naval deck and the first hint of early morning sun. Synths, and the murmur of an F14. Then lift-off – cue Danger Zone. Harold Faltermeyer’s Top Gun Anthem is so synonymous with the film from which it takes its name that it’s hard to imagine it being used anywhere else, but it turns out that it almost ended up in a very different kind of movie. The anthem’s iconic melody was originally intended for a dream sequence in 1985 neo-noir comedy Fletch, in which Chevy Chase imagines that he’s starring for the LA Lakers basketball team. While Faltermeyer was working on the theme, it was overheard by Billy Idol, who was recording in the studio next door. “That’s great – you should use it for Top Gun,” the singer said. And the more Faltermeyer thought about it, the more he agreed with Idol. (via Music Radar)

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.

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What does a butcher with a whip have to do with Christmas?

Hi everyone — Mathew Ingram here. This is a special Christmas edition of When The Going Gets Weird, and it is the last newsletter of the year. Hope you and your loved ones have a great holiday (if you celebrate a winter festival of some kind) and we’ll see you again in 2026!

A butcher, a man with a whip, and a jolly bishop walk into a bar. This is not, in fact, the opening line of a twisted joke — it’s preparation for the biggest day of the year in Nancy, an elegant city in France’s Lorraine region. St. Nicholas Day is celebrated across many European countries on December 6 or the weekend following it. Each evening in Nancy from late November till early January, a lights display projects a story onto the opulent façade of the Hôtel de Ville. The expectant crowd watches as three children knock on the door of a local butcher, only to be chopped up into little pieces and left to cure in a salting pot. Falling snowflakes are replaced with chunks of veal. You might be wondering what this gruesome scene has to do with St. Nicholas, who is the predecessor of Santa Claus. Often throughout Europe, St. Nicholas is said to be accompanied by an evil nemesis designed to frighten children into good behavior. (via Atlas Obscura)

Bob Rutan has one of the best Christmas stories of all time thanks to playing Santa for Macy’s

Santa Claus was nursing a beer at an uptown dive bar. The neighborhood was gentrifying, and management seemed eager to accommodate — there was scented soap in the bathroom and twenty-two-dollar lobster rolls. But the place couldn’t outrun the regulars. They drank tumblers of Irish whiskey filled to the brim, illicit pours they secured with ten-dollar tips to a curvy Dominican bartender. Santa — Billy — was fiftyish, with a modest gut, gray hair, a lustrous beard, and a caddish gaze that followed the bartender up and down the rail. He was dressed in sweatpants and a T-shirt. For the price of three beers, he told me his story. As a young man, Billy had come to New York to be an actor, but over time he began to feel like an extra in his own life, watching it happen without any control over its direction, the way a person does sometimes. These were bad years, shameful even. He lost his job. He lost his wife. Lost touch with his young son too. He was overweight and undershaved. A friend had a weird idea: Billy could try playing Santa Claus at Macy’s. And that’s what Billy did. (via Esquire)

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.

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