They Soak Fish In Lye And Eat It
They take dried cod, bathe it in caustic soda until it turns to jelly, wash the death out and serve it with pride - proper daft, innit.Read More 
They Ate Arsenic For a Pretty Face, Honestly
Victorian ladies popped arsenic tonics and 'complexion wafers' to look pale and flawless, then wondered why their teeth fell out and their skin joked back.Read More 
Diogenes Lived In A Jar And Told Alexander To Move
He abandoned sofas, installed himself in a single enormous pithos, and famously told Alexander to 'stand out of my sun' with the kind of decorum only an ancient eccentric could muster.Read More 
The Guy Who Outsmarted the Ocean for 76 Days (Yes, Really)
He spent seventy-six days alone on a life raft, lived on raw fish and rain, invented a desalination trick, and somehow came back polite enough to write a book about it.Read More 
France Made Supermarkets Give It Away
In 2016 the French actually outlawed binning edible supermarket food and made shops donate it instead - and I love that for them.Read More 
When Greenwich Outsourced Zero Longitude and Lost a Football Pitch
The famous line at the Royal Observatory is not where modern satellites say zero is - GPS puts it about 102 metres to the east, and the resulting geography of pretension is delicious.Read More 
The Shark That Time Forgot
Picture a fish that treats a 400th birthday like a Tuesday - Greenland sharks can live nearly four centuries and only reach proper adulthood at about 150.Read More 
The Ridiculous Little Plot That Lived Inside a Country Inside a Country
There was once an itty-bitty Indian scrap of land so bizarrely nested inside Bangladesh and India again that it became the world's most polite geopolitical onion.Read More 
Spotted Hyenas: The Ladies Who Mean Business
Meet the hyena females who pee, mate and give birth through a showy faux-penis and run the joint-ruthless, regal, and oddly elegant.Read More 
The North Pond Hermit Who Outsourced Society
He spent twenty-seven years in a Maine woodlot, surviving on what he nicked, a radio, and a principled disdain for small talk.Read More 