🇬🇧 United Kingdom
Oddlets from United Kingdom.
The Drum Generally Heals Up
What kind of man asks his colleagues to poke him awake if he stops breathing, and considers a perforated eardrum a social asset?
The Boy in the Garden
A country doctor famous for birds made two small cuts in his gardener's eight-year-old son — and then did it again, and again, for years.
The Spy Who Wanted to Pants Lenin
A British spy once tried to topple the Bolshevik Revolution without firing a shot — his actual plan involved Lenin, Trotsky, and a tailoring problem.
The Man Without a Face
How do you lose the face of the man who coined the word cell, wrote a law of physics, and rebuilt half of London?
The Wash-and-Be-Clean Man
What did Victorian surgeons do when one quiet Quaker suggested they stop wearing coats stiffened with old blood?
The Blessing of a Good Thick Skirt
She fought a crocodile with a paddle, wore leeches like a fur collar, and insisted to her dying day that trousers were beneath her — so what, exactly, did the skirt save her from?
The Long Walk Home
In 1841 a celebrated English poet walked out of his asylum and covered eighty miles in four days, eating grass and his own pipe tobacco, to reach a childhood sweetheart he was certain was waiting for him.
The Surgeon Who Believed
What does a royal surgeon do after publishing a forty-page pamphlet certifying that a clothier's wife gave birth to rabbits, four days before she confesses?
Lord Berners and the Elephant Problem
What happens when a man Stravinsky called Britain's best composer places a classified ad selling elephants he doesn't own — and names the buyers?
The Giggling Mycologist
What kind of person gets laughed out of the British scientific establishment and leaves giggling?
The Man Who Collected the World by the Ton
What happens when a man's collection outgrows every method of counting except weight?
The Thrupenny Fix
What happens when the Air Ministry is years from a fix, pilots are dying in stalls, and a five-foot carburetor researcher has a home workshop and a motorcycle?