This gonzo journalist from the '30s said he ate human flesh

From LARB: "An early 20th-century journalist and travel writer, William Seabrook was once among the most successful wordsmiths of his day, a progenitor of both gonzo journalists and contemporary Vice contributors, his work anticipating the former by decades and the latter by almost a century. He joined camel raids in Arabia, attended voodoo rites in Haiti — after which he helped popularize the word “zombie” — and supped with cannibal kings in Africa. Along the way, he became friendly with Aleister Crowley, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, and many other notorious figures of his era. Committed to telling stories as truthfully as he could, he would later bribe a French morgue attendant to slice off a bit of neck flesh from a cyclist killed in an accident. Have you heard that human flesh resembles veal? You likely learned as much from Seabrook, who had the cut prepared three different ways by the chef of an acquaintance."

John Tesh came up with the melody for the NBA theme and left it on a voicemail for himself

From Why Is This Interesting? "Tesh was traveling to cover the Tour de France in 1989 when he woke up suddenly in Megève, France, with an idea. Knowing how easily it could vanish, he called his own answering machine back home in the States to capture it, humming energetically into the phone. When he returned home, Tesh took this voicemail, placed the answering machine literally onto his keyboard, and began riffing, gradually bringing in his band to turn a rough voice memo into the iconic, polished composition. The kicker: NBC had put out the call for a new NBA theme song to legendary composers like John Williams and Hans Zimmer. But against the odds, they chose the enthusiastic melody that Tesh first captured in a half-awake voicemail, cementing it as the NBA’s iconic musical signature for more than a decade, becoming the soundtrack to Michael Jordan’s reign and the league’s growth through the 1990s."

The jellyfish known as the Portugese Man o' War is actually a colony of organisms

From Wikipedia: "The Portuguese man o' war is a member of the neuston, the community of organisms that live at the surface of the ocean. It has numerous microscopic venomous cnidocytes which deliver a painful sting powerful enough to kill fish, and even, in some cases, humans. Although it superficially resembles a jellyfish, the Portuguese man o' war is in fact a siphonophore. Like all siphonophores, it is a colonial organism, made up of many smaller units called zooids. Although they are morphologically quite different, all of the zooids in a specimen are genetically identical. These different types of zooids fulfill specialized functions, such as hunting, digestion and reproduction, and together they allow the colony to operate as a single individual. Seven different types of zooids have been described in the man o' war, and all of these are interdependent on each other for survival and performing different functions."

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 most expensive vending machine dispenses million-dollar cars

From Now I Know: "The machine sits in a 15-story building and resembles a Matchbox car collector’s box, and that’s by design. It’s the brainchild of Gary Hong, the general manager of Autobahn Motors, a Singapore-based luxury car dealer. Hong was inspired by a vertical display of Matchbox cars while shopping at the toy store with his son. It solves a very practical problem that car dealers in the densely-populated city-state have — there’s just not a lot of horizontal space for a showroom. Going up is a great solution. But making this a display wasn’t enough. Hong’s vision was to make the building into a self-service way for car aficionados to press a few buttons and, voila, they get to take a test drive or buy their dream car outright. Customers on the ground floor choose from a touchscreen display which car they wish to see. The car arrives within one to two minutes thanks to an advanced system that manages vehicle retrieval.”

Archaeologists unearthed 1,300-year-old flush toilets at a palace in South Korea

From The Smithsonian: "The Donggung palace complex in present-day South Korea was once an elaborate lakeside retreat with at least 26 buildings used for hosting festivals and banquets. Now, archaeologists have also discovered several innovative “flush” toilets at the 1,300-year-old site, including one that likely drained into a nearby waterway. During recent excavations at the complex, researchers found a small two-room building with a hole in the middle of a cut granite slab, according to a statement from the Korean Heritage Service. On either side of the hole, they found wide stepping stones. Experts think waste from the toilet funneled into an underground holding chamber, similar to those used in outhouses or portable toilets. A servant likely poured water into the hole to flush the waste down a drain and into the chamber."

A banner cloud over the Rock of Gibraltar

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