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The Authors Of Curious George Were On The Run From Nazis
Today, Curious George is a world-famous star of children's books -- but back in the day, his name was Fifi, and his creators, the Rey couple, were de…
5 years, 11 months ago
People Used To Straight Up Drink Gold
For millennia various luminaries have claimed precious metals have special curative powers -- and, back in the day, people used to actually drink it.…
5 years, 11 months ago
New Zealand's Tragic (And Pretty Hilarious) Exploding Pants Epidemic
For a brief span of time, farmers in New Zealand were baffled by a bizarre phenomenon -- their pants were smoldering, catching fire, and sometimes ex…
5 years, 11 months ago
That Time Trainwrecks Became a Spectator Sport
Nowadays, most people use the term 'trainwreck' to describe a situation gone catastrophically wrong, but back in the glory days of the railroad, trai…
5 years, 11 months ago
Miguel de Cervantes and the Case of the Fake Don Quixote
Nowadays, "The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha" has no shortage of accolades. You'll hear it called the first modern novel, one of the g…
5 years, 11 months ago
The CIA Paid War Spies with Stuff From the Sears Catalog
When CIA agent Jon Wiant began growing a spy operation in Vietnam, he ran into a pickle: the locals he wanted to hire lived in rural areas along the …
5 years, 11 months ago
The Bottle Jumping Hoax (And Riot)
In 1749 London, a mob of people gathered outside The Theatre Royal -- the city was abuzz with excitement over a recent advertisement promising an ama…
5 years, 11 months ago
The Bizarrely Disturbing History of People Jumping Out of Cake
It's an old trope, and a familiar one: Four and twenty blackbirds flying from a pie, a scantily-clad woman emerging from a giant cake. Nowadays it's …
5 years, 11 months ago
HL Hunley: The Mysterious Demise of a Civil War Submarine, with Rachel Lance
On the evening of February 17th, 1864, the HL Hunley became the first submarine in history to successfully sink an enemy ship. Immediately after this…
5 years, 11 months ago
Dromomania: The Wanderlust Disease
In the 1890s, France found itself in the groups of a bizarre, troubling epidemic -- scores of men were, apparently, wandering off in a trance-like st…
6 years ago