An old suitcase and a family fortune lost under Nazi rule

It started with a suitcase hidden under a bed. It was 2009, and Antony Easton's father, Peter, had recently died. As Antony started to engage with the messy business of probate, he came across a small brown leather case in his father's old flat in the Hampshire town of Lymington. Inside were immaculate German bank notes, photo albums, envelopes full of notes recording different chapters of his life - and a birth certificate. Peter Roderick Easton, who had prided himself on his Englishness (and been an Anglican) had, in fact, been born and raised in pre-war Germany as Peter Hans Rudolf Eisner, a member of one of the wealthiest Jewish families in Berlin. The contents of the suitcase shone a light into a past that Antony knew almost nothing about. The revelations would lead him on a decade-long trail, revealing a family devastated by the Holocaust, a vanished fortune worth billions of pounds and a legacy of artwork stolen under Nazi rule. (via the BBC)

He was a championship snooker player but he is mostly remembered for his ability to drink

Bill Werbeniuk was a cult hero in the world of snooker, known for his prodigious consumption of lager. Four times a quarter-finalist in the Embassy world championships at the Crucible in Sheffield, between 1978 and 1983, he achieved a career-high ranking of eighth in 1984-85. At a time when snooker was emerging as a major television attraction, he became one of the game's best loved characters. Born in Winnipeg, Werbeniuk was the son of a Canadian professional champion and former armed robber, fence and drug dealer. Werbeniuk suffered from hypoglaecaemia, a condition which enabled his body to burn off sugar and alcohol exceptionally quickly. He was thus able to cope with drinking at least six pints of lager before a match, a pint per frame during it, and a few sociable ones afterwards. He drank the Scottish professional Eddie Sinclair under the snooker table by consuming 42 pints. At one stage, the inland revenue allowed his spending on lager as a tax deductible expense. (via The Guardian)

Researchers have finally solved the 50-year-old mystery of the Toronto subway deer

For nearly five decades researchers were stumped by the species of a fossil unearthed near the TTC’s Islington Station, but now they have a better idea of the genealogy of what became known as the Toronto subway deer. In 1976, a construction worker uncovered the fossil and contacted the Royal Ontario Museum to have a look at it, bringing about a mystery that would take decades to solve. This specimen, comprised of a partial cranium with incomplete antler beams, dates back 11,300 years, just after the Pleistocene era or Ice Age had ended. It is the only specimen of its kind to be found. The  Torontoceros hypogaeus, the “horned Toronto deer from underground,” had unique antlers, which were thick, heavy, nearly horizontal and protruded in an asymmetrical way not seen in any modern-day deer species. Because of that, researchers thought that it was more closely related to the caribou. (via CTV News)

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.

This 18th-century thoroughbred racehorse's name was Potatoes spelled Potoooooooo

Potoooooooo was an 18th-century British racehorse who won over 25 races and placed higher than some of the most prominent racehorses of his time. He went on to be an important sire, but is best known for the unusual spelling of his name, which was pronounced "potatoes," for Pot-8-Os. The origin of his name has several different versions. According to the most common, his owner, Willoughby Bertie, 4th Earl of Abingdon, intended to call the young colt "Potato" and instructed the stable boy to write the name on a feed bin. The stable boy spelled the name as "Potoooooooo" (Pot followed by 8 "o"s; that is, a failed attempt at spelling phonetically), which so amused Bertie that he adopted the spelling. In The Jockey Club's online database equineline.com, the name is spelled as Pot8O's. The General Stud Book uses Potoooooooo. (via Wikipedia)

Last surviving member of the Everest expedition had no mountaineering experience

Kanchha Sherpa, the last surviving member of the first expedition to successfully scale the summit of Mount Everest, died in the Nepali capital of Kathmandu, aged 92. He was 19 when he accompanied the historic team led by Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay to the top of the world's tallest mountain in 1953. He joined the 35-member expedition as a porter despite having no prior mountaineering experience. On the arduous trek lasting more than two weeks, he carried food, tents and equipment up to base camp - and was one of three Sherpas to make it past an altitude of 8,000m (26,247ft). Fellow Nepali mountain guides have described him as a legend and an inspiration. Kanchha Sherpa worked as an high-altitude porter in the Himalayan mountains for two more decades, until his wife asked him to stop making the journeys. (via the BBC)

Don't watch these selfie jumps if you are afraid of heights

Acknowledgements: I find a lot of these links myself, but I also get some from other newsletters 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, Noah Brier and Colin Nagy's Why Is This Interesting, Maria Popova's The Marginalian, Sheehan Quirke AKA The Cultural Tutor, the Smithsonian magazine, and JSTOR Daily. If you come across something interesting that you think should be included here, please feel free to email me at mathew @ mathewingram dot com