🇺🇸 United States
Oddlets from United States.
The Hatchery Sessions
What does a composer do when the bulldozers show up before the last take is finished?
The Weatherman Was Wrong Again
For ten years, a Chicago dishwasher kept a secret diary grading the local weatherman against reality.
Play a Strawberry
Who feeds a band one cup of soybeans a day for a month and calls it rehearsal?
The Rubber Man
The man who invented vulcanized rubber spent $30,000 he didn't have to build a palace of rubber furniture inside a building made of glass.
The Surgeon Who Wouldn't Give It Back
She was exchanged man-for-man for a Confederate major, and that wasn't even the strangest thing about her wedding.
The Off-Center Wheel
Why would the man who invented the bit build a unicycle that bobbed up and down on purpose?
Prizes Are For Boys
What does it take to invent modern estate planning, compose polytonal symphonies on weekends, and then leave a Pulitzer-winning piece in a drawer for thirty-six years?
The Tidy Man
Who lobbies the League of Nations, twice, to adopt a calendar he designed himself?
The Man Who Knew Paris
He kept a shoebox labeled Mouse Material; the archivist who finally opened it found the contents of a vacuum cleaner.
The Autobiography No One Has Read
If you sealed your life story in an ancient jar, hid it with a chest of gold, and someone paid $48,000 for it six years ago — would you want to know why they never cracked the wax?
The Man Who Sewed Up a Heart
What happens when a former barber decides to stitch a beating heart by lamplight, twelve years after the most famous surgeon on Earth said it couldn't be done?
The Saint Who Never Applied
What happens when colonists canonize a dead chief they never asked, dress up in bucktail hats, and dance "in the style of those people" while actual Native delegations watch from the docks?