Lucille Ball said she caught Japanese spies with her teeth

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From Cracked: "According to Lucy, she was driving home from MGM one evening when “all of a sudden, I heard music!” The beat was really thumping so Lucy looked down to turn off the car radio — except it wasn’t on. The music got louder as she drove, understandably freaking her out as she realized the groove was coming from inside her mouth. The next day on the studio lot, Lucy told the story to Buster Keaton, as one does. Keaton told her to chill, explaining the phenomenon of receiving AM radio through teeth fillings. On a drive home via an alternate route, Ball’s bridgework once again picked up a signal. She described the pulses in her mouth: Da da da dut! Da da da dut! Her pearly whites continued to vibrate with dots and dashes, which she now identified as Morse code. Eventually, Ball claims, her whole jaw was vibrating “and then I got the hell out of there.” She rushed into the MGM security office the next morning, and according to Ball, “they found an underground Japanese transmitting radio station!”

Smedley Butler foiled a high-level plot to overthrow the US government in the 1930s

From Damn Interesting: "In the early 1930s, a secret collection of prosperous men are said to have assembled in New York City to discuss the dissolution of America’s democracy. To assist them in their diabolical scheme, the resourceful plotters recruited the assistance of Major General Smedley Darlington Butler, a venerated, highly decorated, and considerably jaded former Marine. It was the conspirators’ earnest hope that their army of 500,000 Great War veterans, under the leadership of General Butler, could overpower the US’ feeble peacetime military and reconstitute the government as a more economical fascist dictatorship. After Butler revealed the plot, MacGuire and the wealthy men he allegedly represented all denied involvement in any such plot, referring to such suggestions as “a joke, a publicity stunt.” But the investigative HUAC committee concluded that there was indeed compelling evidence of a plot.

Composer Philip Glass worked as a plumber even after he started to become famous

From The Honest Broker: "Legendary composer Philip Glass worked at a variety of jobs throughout his life, including in the Bethlehem steel plant, and moving furniture. He even worked as a plumber after he had already become known as a composer. “I never considered academic or conservatory work,” he later recalled in his autobiography Words Without Music. “Of course, I was never offered a job anyway.” The first time Philip Glass got an inquiry—not even an offer, just a conversation—about teaching, he was 72 years old. In a 2001 interview, Glass talked about how he went to install a dishwasher in a loft in SoHo. While working, he suddenly heard a noise and looked up to find Robert Hughes, the art critic of Time magazine, staring at him in disbelief. "But you’re Philip Glass! What are you doing here?" Hughes said. Glass replied that he was installing Hughes' dishwasher and told him he would soon be finished. "But you are an artist," Hughes protested. "I explained that I was an artist but that I was sometimes a plumber as well and that he should go away and let me finish."

This founder had to train his AI model not to Rickroll people

From TechCrunch: "Flo Crivello was monitoring outputs from the AI assistants his company Lindy makes when he noticed something strange. A new client had asked her Lindy AI assistant for a video tutorial that would help her better understand how to use the platform, and the Lindy responded in kind — that’s when Crivello knew something was wrong. There is no video tutorial. The video the AI sent the client was the music video to Rick Astley’s 1987 dance-pop hit “Never Gonna Give You Up.” Rickrolling is a bait-and-switch meme that’s over 15 years old. In one incident that popularized the meme, Rockstar Games released the much-hyped “Grand Theft Auto IV” trailer on its website, and some people posted the video onto other sites like YouTube. One 4chan user decided to play a prank and share the link to Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up,” and the prank became an internet meme." (Thanks for this David Weinberger!)

A Russian academic kept two dozen mummified bodies displayed in his apartment

From Wikipedia: "Anatoly Moskvin is a Russian former linguist, philologist, and historian who was arrested in 2011 after the mummified bodies of twenty-six girls and women between the ages of 3 and 29 were discovered in his apartment. After exhuming the bodies from local cemeteries, Moskvin mummified the bodies himself before dressing and posing them around his home. Moskvin's parents, who shared the apartment with him, knew of the mummies but mistook them for large dolls. A psychiatric evaluation determined that Moskvin had a form of paranoid schizophrenia. In May 2012, he was sentenced to court-ordered psychiatric evaluation and has since been held in a psychiatric hospital. A former lecturer in Celtic studies, Moskvin previously worked at the Institute of Foreign Languages. Moskvin speaks thirteen languages and has written several books, papers, and translations, all of which are well known in academic circles."

Zion Clark probably goes faster with no legs than you do with two

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