Opens history book — uh oh
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)
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Continue reading “Choirboy with the voice of an angel became a global conman”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)
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Continue reading “She found out that her friend was actually her long-lost sister”Due to a typo
Ode to the lunch lady
Are you crabs yet?
How a mafia boss helped the US invade Sicily in World War II
A luxury ocean liner burned and capsized in New York Harbor on Feb. 9, 1942. The SS Normandie, being converted into a troopship, caught fire during welding work and took 6,000 tons of water from firefighting efforts before rolling onto its side in the Hudson River. The Navy immediately suspected sabotage. German U-boats had sunk 120 American merchant ships in the first three months after Pearl Harbor, and fears of Axis agents operating along the waterfront ran high. Naval Intelligence started looking into local dock workers. Italian and German workers controlled by organized crime networks remained silent when federal investigators asked them questions. Commander Charles Haffenden of the Office of Naval Intelligence needed help investigating the incident and protecting the waterfront. He turned to the one man who could make dock workers talk, Charles Lucky Luciano, who was serving 30 to 50 years in prison. (via Military.com)
This Finnish inventor has more patents than Edison or Nikola Tesla
The legacy of the Finnish inventor and engineer Eric Magnus Campbell Tigerstedt (1887–1925) is not very widely known, even among the Finnish public. Nevertheless, Tigerstedt’s short yet prolific life touched and crossed several cultural and national boundaries: he was born to a Swedish-speaking aristocratic family in Russia’s Grand Duchy of Finland, but he studied in Germany, worked in Denmark and died in the United States at the age of 37. During his ill-fated career, Tigerstedt managed to create around 70 novel electrical devices and methods, which received over 100 patents from all over the world. Many of his inventions were aimed at creating a functioning and commercially viable sound film technology, including various amplifiers, loudspeakers and microphones. Even inventions such as the Cryptographone and an electronic hearing aid can be seen as side products of his ultimate dream of recording and reproducing synchronised sound with film image. (via Helsinki.fi)
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Continue reading “How a mafia boss helped the US invade Sicily in World War II”What’s wrong, babe?
Tired of the same old angel and devil?
Coffee cake is a scam
Good riddance but now what?
by Ogden Nash
Two strangers, a terrorist bomb and an amazing tale of courage
In the early hours of Friday, January 20, 2023, a dirty blue car parked outside St. James’s hospital in Leeds. The car was filled up to its windows with junk. Mohammad Farooq sat behind the steering wheel in the cold and dark, surrounded by his mess. His phone was in his hand. He was 27, overweight and round-faced, with black hair shaved neatly at the sides and swept over on top. His heart was pounding, and breathing took effort. It was, he decided, time to show them. At 12:53 a.m. he sent a carefully composed message to a senior nurse on ward J28, St. James’ acute assessment unit. “I’ve placed a pressure cooker on J28. It will detonate in one hour. Let’s see how many lives you will save.” He had read ISIS terror manuals that suggested causing an evacuation, then setting off a bomb, or stabbing or shooting those that emerged. He watched out of the window and waited for the sirens. (via Bungalow)
Rumoured to be a witch, she died in 1813 but wasn’t buried until 1998
For 185 years her skeleton was an object of derision, ridicule, and fascination. Joan Wytte is believed to be a local North Cornish woman known as the ‘Fighting Fairy Woman of Bodmin’ — abused and persecuted as a witch. Since her death, aged 38 in 1813 she has been in motion: stored in Bodmin Jail, used in a séance, examined, and hung in a museum. After her death the anatomist, William Clift, requested Joan’s body for scientific research, yet never bothered to collect her. William Hicks, the governor of the Bodmin Asylum in the 1840s and 50s, used her bones as a prop in a séance. Subsequently, Joan was derided as an item of ridicule and her bones were locked in storage until the prison closed in 1927. During the 1930s and 1940s she was in the custody of a Cornish doctor. It seems Joan was neglected until a ‘showman’ acquired her at auction in the 1950s for his new business venture — a Museum of Witchcraft and Magic. (via RebelBuzz)
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Continue reading “Two strangers, a terrorist bomb and an amazing tale of courage”Police catch 12-year-old hitman after he shoots the wrong person
Dubbed the “Child Assassin” by Swedish media, the unnamed minor was reportedly paid 250,000 Swedish crowns ($27,000) to travel to the city of Malmö and kill a certain person, but ended up shooting a 21-year-old man who was hanging out with some friends. It is unclear who ordered the killing and why, but authorities have reasons to believe that this wasn’t the 12-year-old’s first hit job. Swedish newspaper Expressen reported that the young suspect was apprehended on Tuesday, December 16, following eyewitness reports of the shooting. The minor had run away from his grandmother’s house in another city, where he had lived since he was 7 years old, and is believed to have become involved with violent gangs. (via Oddity Central)
A doctor invented sugar cubes after his wife hurt her hand breaking sugar
Jacob Christoph Rad invented sugar cubes in 1841. Until then, sugar could only be bought in the form of cones or cobs. These sugar cones were up to 1.50 metres high and hard as a rock. If you wanted to sweeten your coffee with them, you needed tools: a hammer, tongs and a sugar crusher. When Juliane Rad injured her hand (presumably for the umpteenth time) while breaking sugar, she demanded – so the story goes – that her husband finally do something to get sugar into a user-friendly form. Jacob Christoph Rad was just the man to do it, because he ran a sugar factory in the Moravian town of Datschitz. In his sugar factory, Rad experimented with a model resembling today’s ice cube moulds into which he filled moistened sugar mass, pressed it and let it dry. (via the DPM)
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Continue reading “Police catch 12-year-old hitman after he shoots the wrong person”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.
Continue reading “The Ingram Christmas Letter for 2025”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)
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Continue reading “He’s been running a DnD campaign for over 40 years”