A $10M sports-forgery scam ended with a grisly death
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)
Her conjoined twin just got married but she says that she is still single
Conjoined twins Carmen and Lupita Andrade are opening up about how they navigate boundaries in Carmen’s marriage to husband Daniel McCormack. The couple — who met on the dating app Hinge in 2020 — quietly tied the knot in October 2024 on Lover’s Leap Bridge in New Milford, Conn. Since then, people have had a lot of questions. Asked how she and Daniel, 28, handle intimacy while honoring Lupita’s boundaries, Carmen says it's by "constantly talking." "I don't know how else to put it,” she adds. Ultimately, if her sister isn't comfortable with something, be it cuddling or something the couple talks about, Carmen says "we just respect that." For her part, Lupita says, “I have headphones and a phone. I don’t care." The conjoined twins, 25 and originally born in Mexico, have defied odds through the years and have lived far past expectations. They share some ribs, their circulatory system as well as their digestive and reproductive systems, but each has their own heart, lungs and stomach. (via People)
Hi everyone! Mathew Ingram here. I am able to continue writing this newsletter in part because of your financial help and support, which you can do either through my Patreon or by upgrading your subscription to a monthly contribution. I enjoy gathering all of these links and sharing them with you, but it does take time, and your support makes it possible for me to do that. I also write a weekly newsletter of technology analysis called The Torment Nexus.
As the flooding gets worse in Britain they are trying a new solution: beavers
Until two years ago, West London's Greenford Tube station used to flood whenever it rained heavily. The train tracks are aboveground, but the ticket office would often get inundated. Sandbags still line the corridor. But in October 2023, a new family moved in nearby, determined to halt the water. The family members built their house from scratch with local wood and kept odd hours, sleeping all day and working only at dawn and dusk. They even put their young children to work. The new neighbors were beavers. The beavers are part of an unlikely effort to bring back a vanished species and help Britain adapt to a very modern problem: climate change. Britain is famous for drizzle, but climate change is making rainfall heavier and more erratic. Places that didn't used to flood are now waterlogged. In West London, conservationists got a government license to resettle a family of five beavers in a 20-acre urban park near the Greenford Tube station. (via NPR)
Korean is the only modern language with an alphabet that was created by one person
Nobody knows who invented the letter A, or any other letter of any writing system used by any other major language on Earth. The Latin alphabet evolved from the Etruscan script over the course of several centuries, with no identifiable inventor and no contemporaneous documentation of why its letters take their specific shapes. In every case, the writing system was the cumulative product of incremental adaptations across many generations of anonymous users. Hangul is the only major writing system that does not work this way. Hangul, the Korean alphabet, was designed by a single person, for a specific reason, in a specific year. King Sejong of the Joseon dynasty designed each consonant to physically represent the position of the tongue and lips during the corresponding sound, and the explanatory document King Sejong commissioned and approved has survived intact for 583 years and is still readable. (via Space Daily)
Rocketman put a 230 pound pulsejet engine on a 1965 Sears 12-foot fishing boat
Acknowledgements: I find a lot of these links myself, but I also get some from other places that I rely on as "serendipity engines," such as The Morning News from Rosecrans Baldwin and Andrew Womack, Jodi Ettenberg's Curious About Everything, Dan Lewis's Now I Know, Robert Cottrell and Caroline Crampton's The Browser, Clive Thompson's Linkfest and Why Is This Interesting by Noah Brier and Colin Nagy. If you come across something you think should be included here, feel free to email me at mathew @ mathewingram dot com
