A cabinet of lovable weirdos
Tiny true stories,
lovingly odd.
Weird science, forgotten history, and human quirks — each one true, each under a minute, each a little stranger than you’d expect.
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Grandma Moses
Ribbons for the Jam
At the Cambridge Country Fair, Anna Mary Robertson Moses entered her paintings alongside her preserves, and won ribbons for the jam.
At seventy-six, arthritis ended her embroidery, so she took up painting — house paint on Masonite, glitter for snow. She entered canvases beside her preserves at the county fair and won ribbons for the jam. Her name was Anna Mary Robertson Moses.
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Punctilio
After turning back at 86°14′N, Fridtjof Nansen wintered on Franz Josef Land with one companion in a single walrus-skin sleeping bag, and for 234 nights the two men addressed each other as *De* — the formal you.
Big Chief Mason
The one person on earth who knew Garrett Morgan's 1914 smoke hood really worked was Garrett Morgan, inside it, in disguise as a Native American assistant to a white man selling it as his own.
Fiolxhilde
Johannes Kepler wrote a short story about a witch who sends her son to the Moon; years after the manuscript leaked, his own mother was on trial as a witch.
Montgomery's Ribs
William Harvey, the physician who proved blood circulates, once reached through a hole in a young viscount's ribs and took hold of the beating heart.
After the Shift
A road inspector for Le Corbusier's rationally planned Chandigarh spent eighteen years cycling into a protected forest after work to build a secret twelve-acre kingdom of gods and goddesses out of smashed pottery, broken bangles, and discarded toilet bowls.
Pantographia
In April 1817 a woman in a black turban walked into a Gloucestershire village speaking a language no one recognised; within weeks Oxford scholars had studied her script, a Portuguese sailor had translated her backstory of pirates and peacock palanquins, and Bath had thrown her a ball.
Queen Street
The second person to survive Niagara Falls in a barrel spent fifteen more years chasing bigger stunts, then was undone by a walk down Queen Street in Auckland.
Rhea darwinii
Darwin was halfway through dinner in Patagonia before he realised the small ostrich on his plate was the rare species he'd been hunting for months.
The Bread of Shame
Francis Egerton, 8th Earl of Bridgewater — Fellow of the Royal Society, prebendary of Durham — dined every night in Paris with a dozen dogs in tailored coats and linen napkins, each attended by its own footman.
The Assessor of Heaven
Sweden's chief mining assessor spent thirty years cataloguing iron ore before dining alone in a London tavern, looking up, and being appointed by the Lord to survey heaven.
English in Heaven
In 1922, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle explained that Houdini's dead Jewish mother must have learned English in heaven.
A Dog of Matching Color
Women fainted at Franz Liszt's recitals, fought over his broken piano strings, and pressed him — perfumed letter after perfumed letter — for a lock of his hair.
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