“Winter is our busy season,” Lucy tells me apologetically, explaining why her co-workers are reluctant to commit to interviews. It never occurred to me that morticians would be slammed in Q1, though in retrospect the reason is obvious—pneumonia, influenza, and now COVID-19 return each year. I met
British author Roald Dahl had enough adventures to last several lifetimes before he found his calling writing children's books. It all started during World War II when Dahl left his oil industry job in Tanzania to enlist in the Royal Air Force in 1939. Despite measuring well over
A man in his 20s showed up to a UK hospital with the hilt of a knife sticking out of his face. The 15 mm-wide blade hidden within went completely through his right eye and through his brain, with the tip of the blade hitting the top of his
While some Americans may recall that the US's largest state, Alaska, was part of Russia for nearly 70 years, the Russian Empire's only permanent overseas colony, known as Russian America, also extended into California from 1812-1842. In fact, Russians settled in California decades before newly
The Three Christs of Ypsilanti: A Narrative Study of Three Lost Men is an American book-length psychiatric case study by Milton Rokeach, concerning his experiment on a group of three males with paranoid schizophrenia at Ypsilanti State Hospital in Ypsilanti, Michigan, United States. The book details the interactions of
Written in June 1942 and rejected by the New Yorker, “The Man of To-morrow’s Lament” was penned two years after Nabokov emigrated from Russia to the U.S., with the Lolita author focusing on the American cultural icon and jumping into one of the biggest debates in comic
Take the Money and Run is a piece of artwork by Jens Haaning, commissioned by the Kunsten Museum of Modern Art Aalborg in Denmark in 2021. The artwork consists of an empty canvas, intended to act as a commentary on poor work wages. The Kunsten Museum commissioned Haaning to reproduce
From TheForce.net: "Here's how that came about: My co-producer was Tony Bongiovi. Jon Bon Jovi was his little cousin and by little I mean we were all in our 30s and early 40s but Jon at that time was 17 years old. And we were
From Gareth Edwards at Every: "In September 1974, Ed Roberts was sitting at the bank in a foreclosure meeting. His once-profitable calculator company, Micro Instrument and Telemetry Systems, was on the verge of bankruptcy. But Roberts was soliciting a $65,000 loan. Not to spend on calculators, he
From Amitha Kalaichandran for Undark: "In May, I was invited to take part in a survey by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine to better delineate how long Covid is described and diagnosed as part of The National Research Action Plan on Long Covid. The survey had
From Chris Lewicki: "Some mistakes feel worse than death. A February evening in 2003 started out routine at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, CA. I gowned up in cleanroom garb and passed into the High Bay 1 airlock in Building 179 where nearly all of NASA’
Links that interest me, and maybe you
CrowTrax, a website started eight years ago by Jim O’Leary, a Vancouver resident, has received more than 8,000 reports of crow attacks in the leafy city, where crows are relatively abundant. And such encounters stretch well beyond the Pacific Northwest. A Los Angeles resident described crows attacking his
From a building nearby, York Factory, once a hub of Canada’s fur trade but now a historic site, a groundskeeper noticed what he thought was a wolf on the river’s edge. A Norwegian musher and adventurer, 29-year-old Steffen Skjottelvik, was due to arrive that day. They
February 18, 1745, is the birthday of the great Italian physicist Alessandro Volta, credited with what many consider to be the most important invention in the history of electricity: the voltaic pile, or battery. The ability to convert chemical energy into continuous electricity was a definite game changer, and Volta
A few hours after driving down Washington Boulevard, I received an email from reader Chris Dwyer. “This summer, I was with my family on the median of Washington Boulevard during a street festival,” he wrote. “Sure enough, there was a vault about 10'x15' and 8-10'
Halfway up a steep street in Margate, in a residential area a short walk from the town centre, is a nondescript building. Walk in, pay a small fee, and head down. You’ll find yourself in a labyrinthine passage, dimly lit. It covers over 2,000 square feet. And around
Ukraine’s unprecedented drone rescue of a wounded soldier from the battlefield has shown once again how battlefield necessity can spur innovation. The operation was revealed just days after separate Ukrainian drones designed for casualty evacuation were deployed for frontline testing — taking a step beyond the US military’s decades
On Sept. 30, 1996, Marc Roode was at home in Fairbury watching his Dallas Cowboys battle the Philadelphia Eagles on Monday Night Football when he noticed some strange, decidedly non-pigskin-related commotion on the Veterans Stadium sideline. The Phillie Phanatic — the taxonomically cryptic mascot of the city’s baseball
In 1983, as the residents of Calcata, a small town 30 miles north of Rome, prepared for their annual procession honoring a holy relic, a shocking announcement from the parish priest put a damper on festivities. “This year, the holy relic will not be exposed to the devotion of the
Adventurer Karl Bushby completed a multi-day swim of the English Channel, stepping foot on UK soil after a 28-year journey. Bushby, 57, left Chile, South America, on 1 November 1998, following two self-imposed rules – not to use transport to advance and not to return home until the
In December, 1940, Rita Levi-Montalcini rode a train from the station near her home in Turin, Italy, for 80 miles to Milan to buy a microscope. On her return to the Turin train station, two police officers stopped her and demanded to see inside the cake-sized box that
Detective work by a team of space-weather experts has discovered the truth about a historical event that had been thought to be the first-ever case of technological disruption by geomagnetic activity from the sun, but has now been shown to have taken place seven years later. From it
On a balmy, quiet evening in June 2020, Otto’s elderly mother, Doria, was fading in her Munich apartment. As she lay with her eyes closed, her pale face, framed by her white hair, was calm. Otto, masked, gloved and draped in a sterile apron, dozed in a chair beside