The short and tragic lives of Violet and Daisy Hilton

From Danny Dutch: "In 1934, Violet Hilton walked into a New York marriage licence bureau hand-in-hand with her fiancé, Maurice Lambert. On her left stood her ever-present conjoined twin sister, Daisy. Their entry caused a commotion, drawing typists and clerks out of their offices to gawk at this unusual trio. However, the stir quickly turned to rejection when a city official refused Violet’s request to marry. The reason? The official deemed the union akin to bigamy. For Violet and Daisy Hilton, this public denial was only one of many challenges they faced in a life that veered between the extraordinary and the deeply tragic. Conjoined twins, vaudeville stars, and societal outcasts, their story is a testament to both human resilience and the cruelty of exploitation."

He taught rats how to trade in foreign exchange markets

From The Atlantic: "Mr. Lehman could predict the prices of foreign-exchange futures more accurately than he could call a coin flip. But, being a rat, he needed the right bonus package to do so: a food pellet for when he was right, and a small shock when he was wrong. (Also, being a rat, he was not very good at flipping coins.) Mr. Lehman was part of “Rat Traders,” a project overseen by the Austrian conceptual artist Michael Marcovici, whose work often comments on business and the economy. For the project, Marcovici trained dozens of rats to detect patterns in the foreign-exchange futures market. To do this, he converted price fluctuations into a series of notes played on a piano and then left it up to the rat to predict the tone of the note that followed."

A lake suddenly exploded in Cameroon and killed over a thousand people

From How Stuff Works: "Lake Nyos had long been quiet before it happened. Farmers and migratory herders in the West African country of Cameroon knew the lake as large, still and blue. But on the evening of Aug. 21, 1986, farmers living near the lake heard rumbling. At the same time, a frothy spray shot hundreds of feet out of the lake, and a white cloud collected over the water. From the gro­und, the cloud grew to 328 feet tall and flowed across the land. When farmers near the lake left their houses to investigate the noise, they lost consciousness. The heavy cloud sunk into a valley, which channeled it into settlements. In Nyos an­d Kam, the first villages hit by the cloud, everyone but four inhabitants on high ground died. The valley split, and the cloud followed, killing people up to 15.5 miles (25 kilometers) away from the lake."

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. And I appreciate it, believe me!

This soccer play had a 10-year career with multiple teams and never played a game

From Wikipedia: "Carlos Henrique Raposo, commonly known as Carlos Kaiser, is a Brazilian con artist and former footballer. Although his abilities were far short of professional standard, he managed to sign for numerous football teams during his decade-long career. He never actually played a regular game, the closest occurrence ending in a red card whilst warming up, and hid his limited ability with injuries, frequent team changes, and other ruses. His fraud consisted of signing a short contract and stating that he was lacking match fitness so that he would spend the first weeks only with physical training where he could shine. When he had to train with other players, he would feign a hamstring injury."

He wanted to be nobility so he invented a royal family including a fake coat of arms

From The Nutshell Times: "Being an ambitious and accomplished sailor in 16th century Spanish Empire could only get you so far. Despite being a hero of the Battle of Lepanto in 1571 against the Ottomans, saving two ships in the failed attack of the Invincible Armada on the English in 1588  and sailing the world over, Petar Grgurić might have been an admiral but he faced a glass ceiling: he had no noble blood and could not reach the very highest echelons of the society. To progress to the very highest ranks of the Spanish empire he needed to show that four out of eight of his great-grandparents were of noble birth and Catholic from both parental sides. First off, was changing the last name and claiming origin from a Bosnian noble family. Then, he tied that to Hrelja Krilatica, a figure in local epic poetry based on a high ranking nobleman."

It's not a circus performance in Las Vegas, it's a mega-church in Texas

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