They defy death to help save works of art in war-torn Ukraine

From The Guardian: "Since those early days of the war, with the help of a motley group of intrepid friends, Marushchak has achieved something quite extraordinary. He has organised the evacuation of dozens of museums across Ukraine’s frontline – packing, recording, logging and counting each item and sending them to secret, secure locations away from the combat zone. Among the many tens of thousands of artefacts he has rescued are individual drawings and letters in artists’ archives, collections of ancient icons and antique furniture, precious textiles, and even 180 haunting, larger-than-life medieval sculptures known as babas, carved by the Turkic nomads of the steppe. “At times,” said Chuyeva, “he has been doing almost unbelievable things” – putting himself into extreme personal danger for the sake of often humble-seeming regional museum collections on Ukraine’s frontline."

How Josephine Cochrane invented the dishwasher in 1885

From Neatorama: "Cochrane's husband met his untimely demise leaving her and their two children to fend for themselves. Given that it was also in the 19th century, being a widow with two children to feed and raise, life wasn't going to be rainbows and skittles. Despite not having a formal education in the sciences, Cochrane had been exposed to her civil engineer father and her grandfather, who had first patented the steamboat. And so, she looked for a problem that needed an urgent solution. Cochrane was fed up with chipped, nicked, or cracked dishes and utensils, and she wondered why nobody had ever thought of inventing a machine that could do all of that labor for her. With the help of the local mechanic George Butters, Cochrane was able to invent the first dishwasher and she filed her patent in December 1885 for the "Cochrane Dishwasher". Then came the equally challenging part of the whole process: actually selling the machine."

He lives in a 230-square-foot earthquake shack in San Francisco and loves it

From the San Francisco Standard: "On the northern slope of Bernal Hill sits a tiny blue shack that has been a place of refuge for more than 115 years. It was built in 1906 with a speed and efficiency unfathomable in present-day San Francisco, one of 5,300 miniature emergency homes the city constructed within six months of the great earthquake and fire to shelter the newly houseless through the winter. David Benzler, an artist and sign painter, has lived in the blue shack on Folsom Street for nearly 15 years. The 230-square-foot free-standing house is laid out with a sharp and efficient geometry: There are two main spaces, each roughly the same size, and two smaller cubbies in the rear: one a bathroom; the other, a closet. The front room holds the sun-dappled art studio and kitchen. Benzler insists that, given the choice, he wouldn’t opt for more square footage. “I’m like a lizard or a shark. If you put them in a bigger cage, they just grow to fit their habitat.”

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John Larroquette says he was paid in marijuana for narrating The Texas Chainsaw Massacre

From USA Today: "A low-budget movie calls for some creativity. John Larroquette narrated the prologue of the 1974 horror movie "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" without pay — at least not in the traditional sense. Larroquette, 75, confirmed longstanding rumors that he was paid by late director Tobe Hooper in marijuana. "He gave me some marijuana or a matchbox or whatever you called it in those days. I walked out of the (recording) studio and patted him on the back side and said, 'Good luck to you!'" Larroquette recalled. Larroquette said he and Hooper sparked a friendship years earlier in 1969 when the director was filming a project in Colorado, where he was bartending at the time. They later reconnected when Larroquette moved to LA to begin his acting career." 

How to get into the Olympics even if you're not very good at a sport

From Now I Know: "Elizabeth Swaney’s Olympic resume is short: she competed in the 2018 Winter Games in South Korea in the halfpipe, a freestyle skiing competition. Watching a video of the games, you can see that Swaney just casually makes her way down the course, doing a total of no tricks getting a total of 31.40 points, putting her in dead last by a large margin. Swaney was trying her best. She just isn’t an Olympic-caliber halfpipe skier. So how’d she make it to the South Korean games? She found a loophole. To qualify for the halfpipe competition, skiers need to compete and succeed in championship events sanctioned by the International Ski Federation. Success, though, is a low bar. First, you need at least one top-30 placement in at least one event, and second, you need enough top-30 finishes to amass at least 50 points across all the events you participate in. And in halfpipe, that happens to be very easy."

Retired cops hunt down the thieves who don't return their rented shipping pallets

From the Wall Street Journal: "Wooden pallets keep global supply chains humming, carrying everything from soda cans to washing machines. Yet millions of these portable platforms go missing every month, either lost, stolen or broken. Finding them is an additional load for the multibillion-dollar industry. While the product costs only around $20 each and is typically made of sawed wooden planks held together with nails, suppliers like Brambles own hundreds of millions of pallets. Replacement costs can quickly run to millions of dollars each year. Enter the “pallet detectives”—former law-enforcement personnel on Brambles’ payroll. Their job is to track down leads and hunt out stray pallets so they can be returned to the Australian company, which has a market value of about $14 billion, making it about the same size as Campbell Soup.

An Olympic bicycle race in 1928 featuring penny farthings

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