Satan was bent on home-improvement the night of the Furry Dance. He was flying through the air carrying a huge boulder with which to (probably) set off Hell’s entrance. …
Randall Zwinge or the Great Randi started offering his own money in 1964 for proof of supernatural powers. One of Randi’s friends, the Internet pioneer Rick Adams, donated a million …
A man in a horse’s skin called the ‘Obby Oss’ dances around the English village of Padstow in Cornwall. Dozens of accordion players accompany the Oss as the Teasers dance & urge …
Walpurgis Night is the ‘other Halloween’, only saluting the start of summer, rather than winter. It’s held exactly six months before the better-known festival. Let’s call it Spring-o-ween. On …
Stationery – sound boring enough for you? It turns out your office drawer, pencil case or supply closet contains enough juicy, sticky and colorful back stories to fill a …
Here’s something to cheer us up on a Monday which also happens to be Talk Like Shakespeare Day. Even Shakespeare had some stinkers. Shakespeare introduced about 1,000 new words …
An Antipope is someone who sets himself up as a rival pope or imposter. (impopester?) It must be good to be the pope; there’ve been at least 42 Antipopes. …
In Zürich, Switzerland, a giant, exploding snowman called the Böögg predicts Spring. The Böögg is an 11-foot-tall (3 and 1/2 meters) snowman stuffed with straw, cotton—and dynamite. The faster the …
Here’s a fact for Scrabble Day (April 13th): Scrabble was originally called ‘It’. It was invented in 1938 by an architect called Alfred Mosher Butts who’d lost his job …
The Thirteen Club dined 13 to a table, walked under ladders and open umbrellas, rented cats and donkeys * – all to debunk the number 13 superstition. Other meetings included …
No matter how healthy or otherwise your deskfast (breakfast at your desk), a colleague probably won’t challenge you to duel by sausage. According to legend, a sausage was the …
First Lord Sea Admiral Arthur Wilson called submarines “underhanded, unfair, and damned un-English”. Their sailors should be “hanged as pirates”. Wilson went on to say that the undersea boats …
