Month: April 2018
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 …
Did you know that golfers can get ‘golf ball liver’ from licking their balls, the first mention of golf made it illegal and that Tolkien had an alternative golf origin …
Among Hunt’s inventions are a restaurant steam table, a tree-felling saw, a ships ice-breaker, inkstands, a rifle, a cartridge, hard-coal-burning stove, ice plough, shoe heel, and a ceiling-walking circus device. …
There is a Scottish tartan designed for Mars exploration. That’s right, a Martian Tartan. The tartan was designed by Geoffrey (Tailor) Highland Crafts on behalf of Charles Cockell, astrobiology …
