How glitter helped solve a brutal crime in California

From Popular Mechanics: "Megan Barroso was looking forward to her Fourth of July plans in 2001. Perhaps because the 20-year-old Moorpark College student had no intention to be alone: She was going to attend a friend’s family barbecue in the suburbs northwest of Los Angeles, then watch the fireworks with friends at Silver Strand Beach. The gatherings began to blend into one another, in the way college-age social events do: The friends got milkshakes; they ended up at another party at a friend’s house in Thousand Oaks. Somebody sprinkled red glitter over everyone’s heads.Around 2:45 a.m., the group decided to head home. Barroso departed in her Pontiac Sunfire, a rental she was driving while her car was in the shop, and drove about 15 minutes before a friend called to let her know she’d accidentally left with someone else’s cellphone in her purse. Barroso turned around to bring the phone back. She never made it."

How did an expensive Ferrari sports car wind up buried in someone's backyard?

From Now I Know: "In early 1978, a couple of boys were hanging out in their yard in Los Angeles, digging in the dirt. Their family had just moved into the home – a rental – a few months earlier, and the kids were exploring as kids do. As they dug, they hit something oddly metallic and definitely not something that should have been buried in their yard: a 1974 Dino 246 GTS, an expensive sports car made by Ferrari. The car was wrapped in plastic, albeit imperfectly. Towels were stuffed in the exhaust pipe, as if to keep soil-dwelling bugs from getting in. There was even a carpet placed along part of the top of the car, to protect it from, well, who knows what. It looked like whoever buried the car had tried to preserve it, in hopes of recovering it later. But who, and why? And how do you bury a fancy sports car in the middle of Los Angeles without anyone noticing?"

A criminal gang has been stealing hundreds of copies of rare Russian classics from libraries

From Economist: "Between April 2022 and November 2023, as many as 170 first editions of the works of some of Russia’s greatest 19th-century writers — above all by Pushkin, but also by Mikhail Lermontov, Nikolai Gogol and others — were stolen from national and university libraries across Europe. In addition to the libraries in Paris and Vilnius, institutions in Berlin, Geneva, Helsinki, Lyon, Munich, Prague, Riga, Tallinn, Vienna and Warsaw were targeted. Most of the books were replaced by fakes, some of astonishingly good quality.French police described Zamtaradze as just one node in a “well-structured, organised and itinerant” web of Georgian criminals who orchestrated every aspect of the thefts, from scouting libraries to spiriting away the original texts. For many European investigators, this was the most audacious series of book thefts they could remember — yet the thieves’ clever methods were only the outermost layer of intrigue in these continent-spanning heists."

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.

She yawned so hard that she broke her neck

From Oddity Central: "A 36-year-old woman in the UK almost lost her life after yawning so forcefully one morning that she broke her neck and required emergency surgery. Hayley Black had just woken up one morning to heat her daughter Amelia a bottle of formula when she saw the baby yawning and instinctively followed her example. It was a casual thing, but the 36-year-old mother instantly felt an “electric shock sensation” shoot through her body, leaving her arm stuck in the air. Black immediately realized that something was wrong, so she asked her husband, Ian, to call an ambulance. When she arrived at the hospital in Milton Keynes, she was in excruciating pain, but doctors struggled to understand what was going on because their scans didn’t really show anything. It was only after taking scans of the woman’s neck that they realized the C6 and C7 bones in her neck had “shot forward into her spine."

Maps that show north at the top and south at the bottom are a fairly recent development

From the BBC: "Given a long history of human map-making, it is perhaps surprising that it is only within the last few hundred years that north has been consistently considered to be at the top. In fact, for much of human history, north almost never appeared at the top. North was rarely put at the top for the simple fact that north is where darkness comes from, and west was also very unlikely to be put at the top because west is where the sun disappears. Confusingly, early Chinese maps seem to buck this trend. But even though they did have compasses at the time, that isn’t the reason that they placed north at the top. Early Chinese compasses were actually oriented to point south, which was considered to be more desirable than deepest darkest north. But in Chinese maps, the Emperor, who lived in the north of the country was always put at the top of the map, with everyone else, his loyal subjects, looking up towards him."

They created a garbage can that moves to catch the garbage when it is thrown

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