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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Alfred Jarry
Notre Grande Chasublerie
His ceilings were 1.65 metres high, which suited him perfectly. Every guest he ever received had to crouch.
The ceilings were 1.65 metres. He stuffed broken windows with newspaper, wore the whitewash that rubbed from above, and called his bicycle 'that which rolls.' At the centre, a stone phallus from Rops. Alfred Jarry lived around it for nine years.
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The Man Who Was Grimaldi
What does it cost a man to teach the world how to fall down for a living?
The Toothbrush at Holloway
She trained Emmeline Pankhurst to throw rocks under a fir tree at twilight, and the first one flew backwards.
The Weatherman Was Wrong Again
For ten years, a Chicago dishwasher kept a secret diary grading the local weatherman against reality.
The Code That Wasn't
For decades scholars thought a Swiss novelist's tiny notebooks were a secret code written from inside an asylum.
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 Woman Who Drew Sound
She quit the BBC Radiophonic Workshop within months of founding it, because the hearing-protection rule was applied only to her.
The Man Who Saw With His Ears
What does geometry sound like when you can only hear it described?
Minding the Heavens
What does it take for an 18th-century woman, raised in a kitchen, to become the first person ever paid by the British Crown for science?
The Necessary Jew
A terrified little man taught crafts to bored teenagers in Drohobycz and wrote two of the strangest books of the twentieth century, until the SS officer next door decided he wanted a Jew of his own.
The Butterflies of the Soul
He won the 1906 Nobel Prize for proving the brain is built from separate cells. He found out by drawing them, on an ink-stained tablecloth, for fifty years.
The Birthday Cake
A deaf arithmetic teacher in a Kaluga log cabin derived the rocket equation between marking schoolboys' sums, and kept a trapdoor in his ceiling his family called the door to outer space.