Mount Wycheproof: The Properly Tiny Mountain
An Australian peak officially crowned the world's smallest 'registered' mountain - and it behaves like a very dignified garden ornament.Read More 
It Rains Glass on That One Exoplanet and Everyone's Very Calm About It
There is an exoplanet so rudely equipped with sideways glass rain and hurricane winds that your brolly would file a formal complaint.Read More 
The Voynich Manuscript: The Codex That Mocked Scholars
A 15th-century book in an unmade-up language, full of daft plants and bath diagrams, that has spent six centuries laughing at everyone cleverer than you.Read More 
Max Headroom's Midnight Broadcast Heist
In 1987 a masked prat in a Max Headroom costume booted into Chicago television twice, delivered a stream of daft rambling and rude gestures, and vanished like a very smug magician.Read More 
The Cliffhanger Monastery
Xuankong perches on a Chinese cliff on long oak beams, blends three religions and achieves architectural cheekiness older than your aunt's manners.Read More 
How Victorians Quieted Babies With Opium (Politely)
In proper Victorian fashion the remedy for a crying infant was often a spoonful of opium; the etiquette was ghastly and impeccably dreary.Read More 
Why Italy Hates Seventeen
The number 17 is treated like a mildly dangerous relative in Italy - an ancient Roman insult, a hotel-room nuisance, and a perfect excuse for bureaucrats to be theatrical.Read More 
The Man Who Moved House To A Pillar And Stayed
Simeon Stylites spent decades living on a tiny column in Syria and somehow made it look like a lifestyle brand for saints.Read More 
When a Church Decided Bones Were Decorative
In a Czech chapel a 19th century woodcarver rearranged some 40,000 skeletons into chandeliers, coats of arms and a most unsettling sense of taste.Read More 
Sewer Alligators, My Dear
Yes, New York once found a stray baby gator or two, but the grand notion of an organised, subterranean alligator republic is deliciously wrong.Read More 