In November 2017, exclusive 'by appointment only' restaurant 'The Shed at Dulwich' hit #1 on TripAdvisor's top-rated London restaurants. It was a literal garden shed in suburban south-west London. Writer Oobah Butler created a website with faked food photos and used paid-for reviews to build up the 'restaurant's' reputation.
Psychological delusions are scary for their sufferers, but life can be a nightmare for sufferers of the Truman Show delusion. Named for the 1998 movie, sufferers believe their lives are staged reality shows, or that they are being watched on cameras. One sufferer travelled to NYC after 9/11 to see whether it was real or just a staged plot twist in his reality show.
Finland developed the ‘Molotov cocktail’ during the 1939-40 Winter War to attack Soviet tanks in response to Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov declaring on state radio that bombing missions over Finland were humanitarian food deliveries. In naming their improvised fire bomb, the Finns called it the ‘Molotov cocktail’ - “a drink to go with the food".
In 2013, American Airlines flight from Los Angeles to New York made an unscheduled stop at Kansas City, Missouri. The reason? A passenger refused to stop singing Whitney Houston’s ‘I will always love you’. When leaving the plane in handcuffs at Kansas City, passengers heard one final “And IIIIII...”
Until writing developed in Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq), there was no record of people's names. The first person in history whose name we know is 'Kushim', an accountant. Around 3200BC he signed a receipt on a clay tablet which read "29,086 measures barley 37 months Kushim".
Glenda Blackwell of North Carolina was sick of her husband wasting money on lottery tickets. So on 24 October, 2016 when her husband asked her to buy Powerball tickets, she bought a $10 Carolina millions scratch-off ticket instead to spite him and prove they're a waste of money. She won $1M.
Before the germ theory of disease, humans had interesting ways to 'prevent' illness. For example, during the Great Plague of London (1665-1666), 'doctors' advised people to keep foul-smelling remedies to breathe in when exposed to infection - diluting the 'bad air' with something as potent. And the quickest way to keep something smelly on hand? Store your farts in a jar.
While most people might associate tea with the British, it was an American who invented the tea bag in 1908, and entirely by accident. New York tea merchant Thomas Sullivan, decided that it was cheaper to send small samples to potential customers in silk bags instead of boxes. Some assumed that the silk bags were supposed to be used in the same way as metal infusers, putting the entire bag into the pot rather than emptying the contents. Customers soon started specifically requesting more of Sullivan’s ‘tea bags’.
On 1 February, 2003, the Space Shuttle Columbia broke apart on re-entry, tragically taking the lives of its seven crew. Accident investigators were so thorough that not only did they collect 84,000 pieces of debris across Texas and Louisiana, they also found several murder victims and a handful of meth labs.
