He made a $70 bet and 15 years later he won over $170,000

In 2013, sixteen-year-old Harry Wilson made his international debut as a substitute against Belgium, becoming Wales' youngest ever senior player. His grandfather Peter Edwards, 62, was quoted odds of 2,500/1 when he placed the $70 bet with a bookmaker in Wrexham, and when Wrexham-born Wilson came on in the 87th minute during Wales' 1-1 draw he won more than $170,000. Mr Edwards said Wilson had showed an interest in football from a young age. "When he was about 18 months old he used to chase a ball around on the carpet before he could walk," Mr Edwards said. Mr Edwards, of Corwen, Denbighshire, works as an electrical contractor and so is away from home most of the year, spending one weekend a fortnight with his wife Dorothy, 58. "She is over the moon. I retired immediately. I told my manager before the game that if Harry played I wouldn't be coming back," said Mr Edwards. (via the BBC)

She was kidnapped as a child and later escaped but then went back to live with her kidnappers

Helena Valero was a 12-year old girl in 1932, when her family was attacked by a group of Yanomami foragers in the northernmost part of the Brazilian Amazon. The family fled across the stream and into the forest but left the young girl in hiding to come back later for her and she was found by the Yanomami. She was moved between different warring groups, married and had four children from two different fathers. Twenty four years later, in 1956, she managed to escape and was reunited with her family. She worked in Manaus and in Tapurucuara for 15 years, but never managed to be fully accepted back into the society into which she was born. In 1971 Father Cocco, a Salesian missionary and Yanomami ethnographer, asked for her help in opening up a new mission and she moved back to the village where she grew up, and later died there. (via Strangers Guide)

In 2024 Volkswagen sold more of its custom-made sausages than it sold cars

Volkswagen still sells a lot of cars, but it also makes a whole lot of something else that you might not expect — sausage. Volkswagen's currywurst is legendary, and originally, you were never supposed to be allowed a taste, since the original recipe was created to exclusively feed Volkswagen's employees. Except people loved the taste so much, Volkswagen began selling it to the general public. And now, Volkswagen's making it even easier to sample its sausage by selling it in frozen, microwave-ready form in European grocery stores. Even if you already knew Volkswagen had a special sausage, you might still be surprised by the size of its sausage empire. In 2024 Volkswagen reportedly sold nearly 8.6 million currywursts, and with roughly 5.2 million Volkswagen vehicles sold in the same year, its sausage is arguably more popular than its cars. (via Jalopnik)

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.

The world's largest organism is three times the size of Central Park and glows in the dark

Mushrooms are the fruiting body of the fungus, like the apples on a tree. These are temporary structures, visible above ground. Most of the fungus, however, is underground in the form of a branching network of tubular filaments called the mycelium. The biggest fungus, née organism in the world, occupies an area of 3.7 square miles. That’s about the same size as two Gatwick Airports, three Central Parks or four and a half Monacos. Put it another way, the humungous fungus has roughly the same surface area as 18,500 adult blue whales. The honey fungus grows in North America, where it feeds on trees and spouts mushrooms with honey-brown caps. Its mycelia and rhizomorphs exhibit bioluminescence, which creates a faint green glow known as ‘foxfire’.  The gigantic honey fungus was discovered in 1998, after more than a hundred trees in Oregon’s Malheur National Forest, keeled over and died. (via Discover Wildlife)

This ancient Greek harvest festival was just for women but was held in the winter

In winter, when the days are shorter and the land seems to sleep, ancient Athenian women prepared for one of the most secret and significant events of the year: the Haloa, a festival dedicated to the primordial forces of life—the grain, the vine, and fertility itself. Celebrated mainly in the sacred precinct of Eleusis, this ritual was the almost exclusive domain of women, a space into which men were not allowed to enter. What took place behind those boundaries was a jealously guarded mystery. The general consensus is that it was a festival connected to threshing, the process of separating the edible part of cereal grain after the harvest. But there is an intriguing anomaly: the Haloa was not celebrated in summer, after the harvest, but in the depths of winter, during the month of Poseideon. But why celebrate a harvest festival in winter? (via La Brujula Verde)

This floor routine by gymast Katelyn Ohashi is a joy to watch

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