In 2014, I began a series on my Facebook and Twitter called today's whacked-out Wikipedia whimsy, in which I wrote about my favourite unusual articles. I've archived these here for posterity. See the 2014 entry on my Wikipedia timeline to find out how this came to be (in short: a weird bug with Wikipedia's main edit counter). Links have been preserved as they were originally.
2014
edit- 25 March: Mary Toft, an 18th-century woman who tricked some of the most eminent medical professionals at the time into believing that she had given birth to rabbits.
- 27 March: "Beautiful railway bridge of the silv'ry Tay/ Alas! I am very sorry to say/That ninety lives have been taken away/On the last sabbath day of 1879/Which will be remember'd for a very long time."
So begins the most famous poem by the worst poet in the English language, William McGonagall. His life story is a hoot!
- 31 March: the Rhinoceros Party of Canada, which among other things promised to declare war on Belgium because a character in a Belgian comic killed a rhino.
- 3 April: the Collyer brothers, legendary compulsive hoarders and recluses. When they were both found dead in their home in 1947, they were surrounded by more than 25,000 books, fourteen pianos along with other musical instruments, and other assorted junk like baby carriages, rusted bicycles, and glass chandeliers.
- 8 April: Nix v. Hedden, a US Supreme Court decision which ruled that a tomato is a vegetable, not a fruit.
- 14 April: Douglas "Wrong Way" Corrigan, not the first Transatlantic flier, but probably the most interesting. in 1938 he told authorities that he was flying his dishevelled homemade plane from Brooklyn, New York to Longbeach, California, but accidentally on purpose ended up in Dublin, Ireland.
- 25 April: S. A. Andrée's ill-fated Arctic Balloon Expedition of 1897. For a start, Mr. Andrée had no real idea how to steer his balloon, and the steering apparatus he had constructed fell off shortly after the start of the expedition. And it just got worse from there ...
- 15 May: Mary Malone, better known as Typhoid Mary, a cook who was an asymptomatic carrier of typhoid fever. Unfortunately she was, well, quite contrary, and outbreaks of the disease followed her like the little lamb that belonged to her other nursery rhyme namesake.
- 20 June: fan death, the belief common in South Korea that sleeping in an enclosed room with a running fan will cause a person to freeze to death or suffocate. Proof that having the world's fastest Internet doesn't stop people from believing in crazy things.
- 4 July: Hetty Green, a 19th-century American businesswoman known for her stinginess. Despite amassing between 100 and 200 million dollars (equivalent to 2–4 billion dollars today), she mostly ate 15-cent pies, tried to have her son admitted to a poor hospital when he broke his leg, and refused a hernia operation because it cost $150.
- 7 August: Drake's Plate of Brass, an early 20th-century forgery of the brass plaque that Francis Drake had posted upon landing in Northern California in 1579. A practical joke that went spectacularly out of control, it fooled scientists for forty years.
- 14 August: Timothy Dexter, an 18th-century American businessman who sold coals to Newcastle and woollen mittens to the West Indies.
- 7 September: Keith Moon, drummer – and cheif hotel-room wrecker – of the Who. He was fond of blowing up toilets and destroying television sets.
- 11 September: English As She Is Spoke, the most useless – but amusing – phrasebook ever written. It would totally impress an English speaker if their guest told them: "That pond it seems me many multiplied of fishes. Let us amuse rather to the fishing."
- 17 September: Exploding whale, an attempt to dispose of a whale carcass by the Oregon Highway Division that spectacularly blew up in their face.
- 20 September: If Day, a simulated Nazi invasion of Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. The only casualties were a cut thumb and a sprained ankle.
- 23 September: Larry Walters, who went up, up and away in his beautiful, his beautiful, balloon-powered lawnchair.
- 28 September: the FFF system of measurement. It'll take you more than a few microfortnights to read this article.
- 30 September: Florence Foster Jenkins, perhaps the world's worst professionally recorded opera singer. Despite her lack of rhythm, pitch and tone, she managed to fill up Carnegie Hall.
- 8 October: the Tanganyika groundnut scheme, a catastrophically ill-thought-out farming project carried out by the British government from 1946 to 1951 in modern-day Tanzania. It cost them 49 million pounds to produce just 2000 tons of peanuts.
- 14 October: Joshua Abraham Norton, a San Franciscan citizen who proclaimed himself Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico. In 1872 he decreed that anybody who called his home city "Frisco" would be slapped with a 25-dollar fine.
- 28 October: The Shaggs, a trio of sisters with absolutely no musical talent who were forced to form a band in 1968 because a fortune-teller told their father that they would rise to stardom.
- 6 November: Resignation from the British House of Commons. This has been illegal since 1624.
2015 and onwards
edit- 14 March 2015 (Pi Day): the Indiana Pi Bill, which proclaimed (among other things) that pi is exactly 3.2!
- 1 April 2015: The Nacirema, a tribe of people who use the elibomotua for transport and the tenretni for communication.
- 15 August 2015: Hirō Onoda, who was fighting World War II until 1974.
- 29 August 2016: Robert Liston, a crazy surgeon in the pre-anaesthesia days. In one case, he "Amputated the leg in 21⁄2 minutes, but in his enthusiasm the patient's testicles as well." Oopsies!
- 12 May 2017: Banned in Boston ... Boston may have a liberal reputation now, but that wasn't always the case. They banned 14th-century literature, a Pulitzer Prize-winning play, and hit songs like "Wake Up Little Suzie" and "Beans in my Ears"!
See also
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