Category: Newsletters

A few miles from where I live is a small graveyard with one tombstone more decorated than the rest. Offerings of trinkets and candles tell a story about a woman mourned by people who never knew her. No story from the life of this young woman, who died of tuberculosis at the age of nineteen, indicated that she would lead a notorious afterlife. Indeed, no story from the life of Mercy Lena Brown has survived at all, though round-ups of weird history or the dark side of Rhode Island sometimes call her “New England’s Last Vampire.” Illness spreading in her family after she died in 1892 gave root to a story that she was feeding off the life-force of her remaining relatives. This story convinced members of her community of Exeter, observed by the medical examiner, to exhume her body and cut out her heart and liver two months after her death. We do not know anything about Mercy as a human being. The only reconstruction of the nineteen years she lived comes from timelines and assumptions. (via Contingent)

Is there really cocaine in the Library of Congress? The answer is yes

The Library of Congress has more than 170 million items, and they’re definitely not all books. And no, I’m not just talking about old-timey letters and other historical documents. There’s also a lot of…stuff. What kind of stuff? A topographical map of the Grand Canyon made of chocolate, for one. The LoC also plays host to Carl Sagan’s old whiteboard, a 160-year-old wedding cake, and at least one packet of cocaine. Contrary to popular belief, the cocaine in question didn’t belong to Sigmund Freud — but it’s still his fault that it’s there. This story starts in the 1880s, when a young Freud was getting super into cocaine. He wasn’t the only one: The medical journal The Lancet basically couldn’t keep up with all the new research being published on cocaine (probably because researchers were also on cocaine). Freud sent a vial to his fiancée and wrote a monograph called “Über Coca” (On Coca, which, again, he very much was) hyping cocaine’s “promise.” Among many potential uses for cocaine, Freud briefly noted that it might make a good local anesthetic. (via Popular Science)

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 “They thought she was a vampire so they dug up her casket”

A devastating farm accident when he was just two and a half years old became the beginning of an extraordinary journey of resilience, determination and self-belief. After losing both his arms in a grain auger accident on his family’s Ohio farm in 1972, Detwiler refused to let his disability define him. He taught himself to perform everyday tasks using only his feet, eventually managing a 1,300-acre corn and soybean farm. Through his YouTube channel Harmless Farmer, he shared his daily life with millions, proving that limitations often exist only when people stop trying. Because the accident happened so early in life, he later said he had little memory of ever having arms. Through years of patience and practice, he learned to eat, write, brush his teeth, dress himself, cook meals and drive vehicles using only his feet. Those same skills later extended to farming, where he mastered operating tractors and combines, fuelling equipment, repairing machinery, welding and maintaining heavy farm equipment. (via Times of India)

This rare genetic condition could hold a clue to the prevention of cancer

Nestled in southern Ecuador’s network of Andes mountains is the town of Piñas, whose 8,000 inhabitants live in houses scattered across a valley. This remote town is home to an unusually high number of people living with Laron syndrome, a rare genetic condition that prevents the body from growing taller than 1.2m (3.9ft). María Luísa Romero and her twin sister, María del Cisne, both have the condition. Living with Laron syndrome can be challenging, the sisters say. But researchers believe it may provide an unexpected advantage – the incidence of diseases such as cancer and diabetes among Laron patients is lower than in the general population. They hope that studying this could lead to the development of treatments to prevent cancer. Those who have Laron syndrome, also known as growth hormone insensitivity, are unable to use the growth hormone that their body makes. The genetic mutation  is named after paediatrician Zvi Laron, who identified it while treating patients in Israel, 60 years ago. (via the BBC)

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 lost his arms at two but grew up to run a 1,300-acre farm”

The dream of discovering buried treasure came true for a California couple who found a real pot of gold while walking their dog. The largest such hoard ever found in the U.S. is comprised of 1,411 gold coins, minted between 1847 and 1894, worth an estimated $10 million in today’s market. The coins are now known as the Saddle Ridge Hoard, after a feature on the couple’s property. Both the location of the land and the couple’s identity are being kept secret. According to an interview given to the coin company that will market the hoard, the discovery was made on a path they had used for years. Spotting the side of a rusted can barely emerging from a hillside, they dug it out with a stick and carried it home. Subsequent trips to the site turned up several more treasure-filled cans. Most of the coins are $20 gold pieces, known as double eagles. All of those were made at the San Francisco mint, founded in 1854 to process the nuggets that prospectors were finding in the newly discovered California gold fields. (via National Geographic)

The famous Stanford prison experiment didn’t show what everyone thinks it did

It’s true that Zimbardo’s famous prison experiment is one of the two or three most famous experiments in the history of psychology. But it’s not true that it’s depicted in all introductory psychology textbooks. I’m the author of one such textbook. One of the questions I’m frequently asked about the book by professors who teach from it is, “Why don’t you include Zimbardo’s prison experiment like all other textbook authors do?” Here’s why. I read carefully the original report on the experiment by Zimbardo and his colleagues, and I also read a methodological critique of it by Ali Banuazizi and Siamak Movahedi After reading both, and thinking carefully about them, I decided that I could not in good conscience present the experiment with its usual interpretation. I decided to omit it completely (a decision I made also concerning many other research studies that in my mind were poorly conceived and improperly interpreted). In the years since then, I have found some new evidence that validates my original decision. (via Psychology Today)

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Continue reading “Who buried $10M in gold coins found by a California couple?”

As Chelsie Marie Anderson rode through the desert, leaning her head against the bus window, she kept thinking, This is how I’m going to die. Anderson stuck out among the other passengers: an American woman with bleached-blonde tips, huge brown eyes, and olive skin on a bus in rural Mexico. The next day, she arrived at a gated community in a small city, sore and exhausted. Waiting for her was a stranger with a similar story. Like Anderson, Nicole Burns was from the region of South Carolina known as “the Upstate,” and like Anderson, she was also fleeing the police. It was May 2020, and both women had become key cogs in a vast drug network that South Carolina’s attorney general — in the largest narcotics-conspiracy investigation in state history — would later prosecute in a 103-person indictment called “Prison Empire.” For years, Mexican cartels had worked with South Carolina Department of Corrections prisoners to distribute meth, heroin, and cocaine. To sell the product outside prison walls, the inmates turned to women like Anderson and Burns. (via The Cut)

Anthony Burgess said Clockwork Orange was inspired by real events but it was all a lie

In April 1944, Clockwork Orange author Anthony Burgess’s wife Lynne was working in London. Returning home from work after midnight, she was approached by four U.S. soldiers in civilian clothing, who grabbed her purse and tried to pry the golden wedding ring from her finger. One soldier “was prepared to break or even cut the finger,” according to Burgess. Lynne screamed for help, but none arrived; her yells were silenced by punches to her body and kicks were the last thing she recalled as she fainted to the ground. She happened to be pregnant at the time and lost the child. The attack inspired an early passage in A Clockwork Orange, in which a gang terrorizes a young couple in a cottage by physical assaulting the husband and raping the wife. This is the account you will read — or a slight variation thereof — if you open almost any non-fiction biography, newspaper article, book, or encyclopedia on Burgess and his famous novel. The only issue with the story is that none of it is true. (via The Memory Hole)

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 “How a suburban mom wound up working for a Mexican cartel”

A Montana police officer spotted the giant banana rolling through Billings and did what countless law enforcement officers have done before him: He pulled it over. For Steve Braithwaite, owner, builder and full-time driver of the 23-foot-long Big Banana Car, the stop was less of a surprise than a tradition. After 15 years, he has learned that driving a giant banana attracts attention. Especially from cops. Braithwaite figures he spent the better part of a decade as one of the most frequently pulled-over drivers in America. Not for speeding, but simply because he was driving a giant banana. Often officers wanted photographs. Other times they invented reasons to start a conversation. The whole thing began in a gas station in 2008. Braithwaite, a hot-rod enthusiast, had become bored attending car shows. Then he watched an episode of the show “Top Gear” featuring bizarre custom-built vehicles, including a street-legal garden shed and a drivable couch. For the next month, his brain worked overtime. (via Cowboy State Weekly)

Her work was cited by Stephen Hawking and she turned down a $1M job offer

At just 12 years old, Sabrina Gonzalez Pasterski began making a Zenith CH 601 XL single-engine aircraft from a kit. The project took nearly two years to complete, with Pasterski doing much of the work herself. By the age of 14, she was already flying the plane all alone — years before she was legally old enough to get behind the wheel of a car. During her time at the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy she became a semifinalist for the US team at the International Physics Olympiad. She also interned at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center and Blue Origin. Pasterski completed her physics degree in just three years, graduating in 2014 with a perfect 5.0 GPA. After MIT, she joined Harvard University for a PhD under theoretical physicist Andrew Strominger. NASA reportedly approached her with a job offer. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos also wanted her to join Blue Origin, his private space company. Brown University is widely reported to have offered her an assistant professorship worth about $1.1 million. (via The Economic Times)

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’s been pulled over hundreds of times in his banana car”

If you like baseball and use social media, you’ve likely already encountered the Savannah Bananas. The team is something of a social-media darling, especially on TikTok – the Bananas’ more than 6m million followers on the app significantly outnumber those of every franchise in Major League Baseball (as well as every team in the NFL, NBA and NHL). The factors driving the Bananas’ online success are obvious. In-game clips of players swinging flaming baseball bats, pitching from atop stilts, and performing choreographed dance routines are tailor-made for social media. The Bananas competed in the Coastal Plains League (CPL), a competitive collegiate summer league. Outside of the standard CPL season, however, the Bananas began playing exhibition games which featured significant rule changes: fan-caught foul balls counted as outs, bunts were outlawed, stealing first base was permitted and ‘walks’ were replaced by ‘sprints,’ among other modifications. Games played under this new set of rules were appropriately christened “Banana Ball”. (via The Guardian)

In Sparta a competitive sport involved jumping and kicking oneself in the butt

The Bibasis, a dance of men and women, was of the gymnastic kind. The dance consisted in springing rapidly from the ground, and striking the feet behind; a feat of which the Spartan woman Lampito, in the Lysistrata of Aristophanes, prides herself. She derives her strength and her beauty essentially from this exercise. The text reads: μάλα γ’ οἰῶ, ναὶ τὼ σιώ· γυμνάδδομαί γα καὶ ποτὶ πυγὰν ἅλλομαι (It’s true, I think, by the Twin Gods. I do take exercise, and I jump-kick my butt.) The dance consisted in kicking one’s own buttocks, to music, as rapidly as possible. The number of successful strokes was counted, and the most skilful received prizes in competitions. We are told by a verse from an epigram, which has been preserved by Pollux, that a Laconian girl had won by dancing the Bibasis a thousand times, which was more than had ever been done before. (via Wikipedia)

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Continue reading “The hottest sport around is something called Banana Ball”

Qin Jianping had only intended to stop off in Haikou, capital of China’s Hainan province, for a few days. He drove to a seaside plaza to take an evening stroll along a seawall. He remembers slipping in the darkness, losing his balance, and suddenly falling over the edge into the sea. After plunging into the deep, dark, icy water, Qin quickly fought his way to the surface. He felt disoriented but could still hear the buskers playing for tourists taking a late-night stroll. In those first few minutes, he was confident someone would soon spot him and call for help. But then the waves began slowly dragging him further from shore. It would be another six days before he reached land again. To survive in open water, the 41-year-old entrepreneur says he clung to buoys, ate raw crabs, and attempted to keep warm using his own urine, all the while enduring an onslaught of jellyfish. On the day he was finally rescued by two fishermen, the Chinese authorities and his family had already begun to believe he was dead. (via Sixth Tone)

How many books is too many to have in your apartment? His landlord said 10,000 is

For a young Jewish scholar named Mendel Uminer, books are the wellspring of enlightenment. So when he scored a studio apartment a block away from Central Park on Manhattan’s Upper East Side a year ago, he brought his books with him — all 10,000 of them. What followed, at least for a little while, was a charmed existence in his 600-square-foot temple of knowledge. Towering stacks of Judaica lined the walls, heaps of film criticism and opera history filled the prewar bathroom, piles of plays and poems blocked a window, and Uminer slept on a floor mattress engulfed in dog-eared novels. Waking up around noon, he spent his afternoons on his sunlit chaise, devouring the works of Yiddish writers like Chaim Grade and critics like Edmund Wilson, nourishing his mind while the city churned outside. This past winter, he received a notice from building management. “You are maintaining the Premises in a severely overcluttered condition; permitting the over-accumulation of books in the Premises; creating a fire hazard by over-accumulating combustible books.” (via the NYT)

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 “A Chinese businessman survived six days in open water”

A convoy of police cars, lights flashing, tail the large yellow truck up to the back gates of London’s British Museum. It’s just before 3 a.m. on July 10, a date that has been kept under wraps for months. After the truck pulls into the museum’s loading bay, four men open its back doors to reveal a cage-like rectangular crate. Inside it is another crate, inside that crate is a metal shell, and inside that shell, folded back and forth on itself 28 times, is a precious and fragile artifact, nearly a thousand years old.The journey this truck has made over the previous 10 hours, by road and rail from northern France, was undertaken in great secrecy, due to the importance and value of the cargo within (reported to be insured for over a billion dollars). The Bayeux Tapestry is perhaps the most celebrated artwork to have survived from the Middle Ages. It is remarkable purely as an object: a narrative piece some 225 feet long. (via National Geographic)

She went from cleaning a space toilet to planning a Mars exploration mission

Cleaning a space toilet while on work experience was Claire Parfitt’s first introduction to a career away from Earth’s orbit. But she never imagined her time at the National Space Centre in Leicester, when she was 14, would one day see her lead a team exploring future Mars missions. Parfitt, originally from Nottingham, now works for the European Space Agency’s European Space Research and Technology Centre in the Netherlands. The 42-year-old joined the space industry after securing a physics degree and a PhD in spacecraft power systems engineering. She has since worked on missions such as the ExoMars Rosalind Franklin rover, which will explore the surface of Mars. She has also worked on the SMILE mission – officially known as the Solar wind, Magnetospheric, Ionic Link Explorer mission – which uses four science instruments to study how Earth responds to the solar wind from the Sun. (via the BBC)

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 “Inside the secret plan to move the famous Bayeux tapestry”

We now think of Dame Barbara Cartland in her hot-pink guise as a romantic novelist, but in the early 1930s she was a sparkier sort of woman. Her early novels and plays raised eyebrows due to their racy nature and she wrote some rather naughty gossip columns. She was also interested in technology. In the summer of 1931, she was involved in a series of experimental glider flights. Gliders had existed in some form for around 75 years but Cartland funded a project to develop long-distance gliders that could be towed into flight by aircraft. Previously, a glider had to be launched manually from a high place or more commonly, towed along a runway by a mechanical winch. The first major flight of the “Barbara Cartland” glider was on the 20th June 1931. A bag of letters was flown from near Maidstone to a destination near Reading. The journey took just over an hour. Its tow aircraft was flown by Flt Lt Ewen Wanless with Cartland as a passenger. This was possibly the first use of “glider mail”. (via Playing Pasts)

Northern Canada has an island in a lake on an island in a lake on an island in a lake

Turns out that Canada is home to the only known location of the most recursive island in the world. Say hello to Yathkyed Lake, Nunavut. As the name suggests, a ‘recursive’ island or lake is like a nesting doll of nature. There is only one (discovered) island in a lake on an island in a lake on island in a lake and that is located in one of the most remote parts of Canada – Yathkyed Lake, which is north of the Manitoba border and right in the heart of Nunavut. Ironically, the lake is just south of the geographical centre of Canada, if you find the mid-point of the East-West and North-South extremities of the country. Unfortunately, knowing that the world’s most recursive lake exists in Canada is about as far as you can get. Notwithstanding the incredibly difficult terrain and lack of infrastructure, Yathkyed Lake appears to be owned by a Canadian mining company, so it’s not even open to the public. (via Curiocity)

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 “This famous romance writer was also an aviation pioneer”

The judge, Norbert Hofer, was a specialist. At the Innsbruck Regional Court, in western Austria, he oversaw a jurisdiction designated for mountain, avalanche, climbing, cable-car, and ski accidents. Cases handled by this department rarely draw much public attention, but the trial of Thomas Plamberger, in February, was different. He was charged with homicide by gross negligence in the death of his girlfriend, Kerstin Gurtner, during an attempt to climb Grossglockner, Austria’s tallest mountain. Hofer was an alpinist himself and a mountain-rescue volunteer. He led groups of young people on summer hikes. The case against Plamberger was nearly unprecedented. Hundreds of unfortunates — hikers, climbers, skiers, snowboarders — die in the Austrian Alps each year, but these fatalities rarely result in criminal charges. Gurtner, thirty-three, had frozen to death a few dozen yards from the Grossglockner summit after Plamberger, then thirty-six, parted ways with her at around 2 a.m. on a winter night. (via the New Yorker)

In Italy they store their cheese in a bank vault because people keep stealing it

Northern Italy. In the dead of night, a group of thieves creeps toward a locked vault. Were they looking for jewels or priceless artwork? Gold bullion? No — Parmesan. And they almost managed it. Around 400 wheels of Parmigiano Reggiano were loaded onto their getaway vehicle before police apprehended the thieves. Credito Emiliano SpA is a local bank in the Emilia-Romagna region, the only place where Parmigiano Reggiano can be produced. Local Parmesan-makers, who have been subjected to multiple organized large-scale thefts over the years, have turned to the bank to store and protect their cheese. Such is the cheese’s worth that the bank also permits the wheels of cheese to be used by producers as collateral against loans. The cheese is in a purpose-built, climate-controlled storage facility that can hold 300,000 wheels (which are worth $950–$1,900 each) known as the “Fort Knox of cheese.” (via Longreads)

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Continue reading “Did a climber leave his girlfriend to die on the mountain?”

The waves were more than two metres high, tossing the sailing boat around like a walnut shell. Below deck on the Bavaria C50 yacht, just 15m (50ft) long, a Ukrainian diving crew waited nervously. The skipper had seen much worse and before the war he had sometimes enjoyed taking his clients into mild storms. But now he was concerned. “This isn’t diving weather. Are you sure?” he yelled. They were not. One by one the divers voted to abort their mission and return to port. Then the lone woman among them, in her thirties, stood up. I’ll call her Freya. “Let me go alone, I’ll finish quickly,” she said. Freya’s buddy went into the water first and rigged the bomb, a makeshift device fashioned from a diver’s breathing tank. “This will be fun,” Freya called to him. Then she plunged. Freya — whose name, like those of her fellow saboteurs, has been withheld for security reasons — was born in Kyiv in the mid-1980s and raised mainly by her mother. By the time she finished high school she spoke some English and Spanish, and she chose a university course that would allow her to travel. (via The Times)

Scientists say they have found a way to make quantum time run backwards

Scientists have developed a new way to control quantum systems that can make their behavior appear more consistent with time moving backward rather than forward. The research, published in Physical Review X, introduces quantum control protocols that reshape a system’s “arrow of time,” the concept that time naturally moves in only one direction. The approach could eventually support new methods for extracting energy from quantum systems and preparing quantum states. A quantum system, such as a group of qubits, follows the rules of quantum mechanics rather than classical physics. Using the newly developed control protocols, researchers can suppress the usual emergence of the arrow of time or even reverse its apparent direction, making quantum processes look as though they are unfolding backward. As a demonstration of the technique, the team also created a measurement engine that can harvest energy from the act of making quantum measurements. (via Science Daily)

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 “How a former erotic model blew up the Nord Stream pipeline”

From mulled wine at Christmas to hot cross buns at Easter, nutmeg has become an essential spice in Europe. But its widespread adoption — including in the traditional Dutch breakfast pastry of ontbijtkoek — comes on the back of a sordid history of colonial exploitation. From the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, Dutch cultivation of nutmeg and the related spice mace involved “one of very few historical situations where Asian slaves worked on European-owned farms or plantations,” according to anthropologist Phillip Winn. The Banda Islands, once the world’s only source of nutmeg, were home to between 13,000 and 15,000 people until their conquest by the Dutch East India Company (VOC) in 1621. The roughly 1,000 Bandanese who survived were enslaved alongside other laborers under the  perkenier  system, where hundreds of workers toiled on each plantation (in Dutch, perk). (via JSTOR Daily)

He restores and installs free-to-use pay phones in Vermont using VoIP

Remember pay phones? Those relics of telecom’s distant past were once everywhere — on many busy street corners, in bars and restaurants, even built into airliners’ seatbacks. Now, an engineer in Vermont is aiming to give the old-fashioned device some present-day relevance. Patrick Schlott, 32, is an electrical engineer by training who works at the South Burlington, Vt.–based  eVTOL  maker Beta Technologies. Inspired in part by the free-phone projects  Futel  and PhilTel, he’s restored and installed free-to-use pay phones at over half a dozen locations across Vermont. With Schlott’s phones, users can make coinless calls anywhere in the United States or Canada—with each phone routing its calls through local internet connections via a simple Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) gateway. Schlott recently spoke with IEEE Spectrum about the rugged charm of old tech and the joys of reverse engineering. (via Spectrum IEEE)

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 “The violent history behind the humble spice called nutmeg”

Swarms of cyborg insects controlled remotely via electrical implants can now operate underwater, thanks to tiny diving suits supplying them with oxygen – which could one day enable them to explore Mars. Hirotaka Sato at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore and his colleagues first demonstrated in 2021 that Madagascar hissing cockroaches could be remotely controlled with electrodes embedded in sensory organs known as cerci. In 2024, they demonstrated that a swarm of 20 of these cyborg insects could coordinate. Cockroaches breathe through pores called spiracles on their abdomen. But Sato and his team were unhappy with the insects’ inability to search flooded areas, which aren’t uncommon in disaster zones, so they have developed a diving suit to allow them to operate underwater. The researchers 3D printed a watertight resin suit, which protects the abdominal spiracles from water. Tiny hoses run forwards from the suit to connect directly to the thorax. (via New Scientist)

Wheeled vehicles existed for 5,000 years before someone thought of the bus

Buses do not seem like the sort of thing that needed to be invented. Anyone can see that the wheel needed to be invented, and that some further innovations were required to build carriages large enough for a substantial group of people to travel in them simultaneously. Once big carriages were invented, however, we might assume that people automatically started running them on regular timetables between fixed locations. The practice is so universal today, and its advantages so obvious, that it does not seem to require active innovation. Surprisingly, however, this is not true. The world had thousands of wheeled vehicles for millennia before it had a single bus. We know exactly who invented buses, when he did so, and how quickly his invention spread across the world. Wheels started being used for transport some time after 3,500 BC. For a very long time, however, wheels were not a world-changing technology. Early carts were precarious, and roads were too bad for them to be very useful. (via Works In Progress)

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Continue reading “A swarm of remote-controlled cockroaches that can swim”

In the last hours of his life, on the morning of July 16, 2025, Brett Lemieux stopped to chat with the workers building his mini-mansion. The crew had already demolished the first of three older homes Lemieux had recently purchased along East Hoover Street, a lane just two blocks long in Westfield, a wooded suburb 20 miles north of Indianapolis.After speaking with the workers and before he was found alone and dead, Lemieux — a 45-year-old remembered by his suburban neighbors as a dog-loving handyman, an enthusiastic baseball coach and a father admired for taking care of his disabled stepson — drove his Range Rover slowly toward his final parking spot, the driveway of one of his houses. Lemieux wasn’t coming out alive. His tinted windows allowed little perspective on his actions, but a goodbye letter he posted on the Facebook group Autographs 101 as he sat there soon exploded across social media. (via Bloomberg)

How the game of snooker got famous thanks to a train-wreck of a player

 The World Snooker Championship was established in 1927 but struggled to outgrow its niche audience. Luckily, in the seventies and eighties, Alex Higgins was playing. Born in Belfast, Higgins was a two-time world champion nicknamed Hurricane. Immediately after shooting, he would jerk his body and cue to the side in a frenetic motion that no one would teach. He drank heavily (including during big matches), smoked eighty cigarettes a day, and was a prodigious gambler. His rebellious, precarious lifestyle connected him to working-class fans, but wrecked his career. After winning the 1972 World Championship, Higgins revealed that he was squatting in condemned buildings. During his appearances on Pot Black, he had prostitutes brought to his dressing room and was found urinating in a sink. He was caught urinating again, this time in an arena flowerpot, after clinching his second world title. He headbutted a tournament official in 1986, and in 1990 punched another in the stomach. (via The Paris Review)

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Continue reading “A $10M sports-forgery scam ended with a grisly death”

Rockwood, Texas is home to a unique business called Starfront Observatories. Owner/operator Bray Falls hosts hundreds of other people’s telescopes in perfect conditions — ultra-dark skies (Class 1 on the Bortle scale), clear weather, and fast internet connections — so astrophotographers from around the world can run their scopes and make observations completely from their computers. Out in the middle of nowhere Texas, a young astrophotographer is running one of the largest telescope ranches on Earth. Stargazers from around the world ship their gear to Bray Falls, who tends 550 telescopes (and counting) on 40 acres outside Brady, the geographic heart of Texas. Customers control the scopes from a laptop anywhere on the planet for as little as 99 dollars a month. The imagery produced by the telescopes on this ranch is impressive. (via Kottke.org)

A teenaged girl’s study on hand-dryer noise was published in an academic journal

When Nora Keegan found her ears ringing after using a hand dryer and noticed other kids holding their ears at the sound of the machines, she decided to investigate. Nora, of Calgary, was 9 years old at the time. Nearly four years later, Nora’s research on the topic has been published in a scientific journal and she is just 13 years old. “Oh, it was crazy,” Nora told “Good Morning America” about learning via email that her research had been accepted into the Canadian journal Paediatrics & Child Health. “I remember I was at school and I was so happy.” Nora began her science experiment in fifth grade by driving around with her parents, both doctors, looking for hand dryers in public places that children frequent, like libraries and restaurants. The family purchased a professional decibel meter for Nora’s experiment and also used a ruler and measuring tape to measure the hand dryers’ volume. (via ABC 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.

Continue reading “This Texas ranch is for remote-controlled telescopes only”