1 Van Gogh’s Cousin Rejected Him
In August 1881, Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh declared his love and proposed marriage to his recently widowed cousin, Cornelia “Kee” Vos-Stricker, who was seven years older and had an eight-year-old son. She rejected him with the words, “No, nay, never.” Late that November, Van Gogh traveled to Amsterdam, but Kee refused to meet him, and her parents wrote that his “persistence is disgusting.” Her father insisted they would not marry, largely because Van Gogh could not support himself, and the distraught artist responded by holding his left hand in a lamp flame while asking to see her.
2. Konami released Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots in 2008 with an unusually cinematic approach to storytelling. Guinness World Records lists its longest single non-interactive cutscene at 27 minutes. During the game’s climax, however, several connected cutscenes run for 71 minutes as they explain events following the conclusion of the story. The game has a total of over 8 hours of cutscenes.
3. Future French emperor Napoleon III, then known as Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, escaped from the fortress of Ham on May 25, 1846, while serving a life sentence for a failed attempt to seize power. Renovations allowed him to disguise himself as a laborer and walk through the main gates carrying a large plank over his shoulder to conceal his face. He fled to London, returned after the French Revolution of 1848, and won the presidency with 74% of the vote. Following an 1851 coup and a referendum, he became Emperor of the French in 1852, just over six years after his escape.
4. Actor Christian Bale still drives a secondhand 2003 Toyota Tacoma (as of October 2026) despite becoming one of Hollywood’s highest-paid stars. During a Ford v Ferrari interview, Bale corrected someone who called it a 2006 truck by replying, “2003, thank you very much. And secondhand!” His co-star Matt Damon said Bale kept the truck because he hoped to carry a motorcycle in its bed, which Bale confirmed. Bale has also said that he sees no reason to replace a vehicle while it still works.
5. An American dentist named Henry D. Cogswell built free drinking fountains across major U.S. cities because he believed access to cool water would make people consume less alcohol. He aimed to install one temperance fountain for every 100 saloons and personally designed many of the elaborate granite structures. Communities often disliked the grandiose statues, while faulty installations sometimes delivered hot, high-pressure water instead of cool streams. In 1894, a group of self-professed art lovers tore down a Cogswell fountain in San Francisco.
6 Peter Vamplew’s Profane Paper Passed
In 2014, an Australian IT professor named Peter Vamplew answered a spam email from the International Journal of Advanced Computer Technology by submitting a paper consisting almost entirely of the phrase “Get me off your fu*king mailing list.” Scientists David Mazieres and Eddie Kohler had written the paper in 2005 to protest another conference’s spam and lax acceptance standards, repeating the phrase throughout its text and diagrams. The journal’s peer-review process rated the paper’s suitability as “excellent” and accepted it with minor editorial changes. Vamplew prevented its publication by refusing to pay the required $150 processing fee.
7. Handfasting is often described as an ancient Celtic custom that allowed couples to try marriage for a year and a day. The practice usually referred to a legally binding betrothal or unofficial marriage and was especially associated with English, Norse, and Scottish communities. Accounts from the late 1600s describe men in the Scottish Hebrides taking women as wives for one year, after which they could marry them and legitimize their children or return them to their parents.
8. From November 2013 to December 2015, a mysterious Mathematics Stack Exchange user called “Cleo” posted 39 correct answers to advanced integration problems that had stumped other users. The answers often appeared within hours and contained no working, while the profile claimed that Cleo was a woman whose unspecified medical condition made lengthy explanations difficult. Internet investigators uncovered Cleo’s identity in January 2025 after connecting the account to an email belonging to an Uzbekistani-American software developer and mathematician named Vladimir Reshetnikov. Reshetnikov confirmed that he created Cleo to attract attention to mathematical problems that forum users had largely ignored.
9. For much of their modern history, the Olympic Games excluded professional athletes under rules intended to preserve amateur competition. The Soviet Union entered athletes who were officially students, soldiers, or workers, while the state actually paid them to train full time. This system placed self-financed American and Western European athletes at a major disadvantage and significantly contributed to declining American medal totals during the 1970s and 1980s. The Olympics moved toward admitting professional athletes during the 1990s after the Soviet Union collapsed.
10. The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest challenges writers to create the worst possible opening sentence for an imaginary novel. In 2024, an Austin writer named Lawrence Person won the grand prize with “She had a body that reached out and slapped my face like a five-pound ham-hock tossed from a speeding truck.” His deliberately overwrought comparison topped entries across categories ranging from romance and crime to science fiction and horror.
11 Leonardo And Michelangelo Shared Commission
Renaissance masters Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo became artistic rivals in early 16th-century Florence. Their competition peaked in 1504, when officials commissioned Leonardo to paint The Battle of Anghiari on the east wall of the Palazzo Vecchio’s grand council hall and Michelangelo to paint The Battle of Cascina on the opposite wall. Leonardo began his mural but never completed it, while Michelangelo produced preparatory drawings before leaving Florence for Rome. Although neither finished the commission, the public contest between them cemented their famous rivalry.
12. Under tightly controlled conditions, a dark-adapted human eye can detect a single photon, although the experience does not resemble seeing an ordinary object. In 2016, Jonathan Tinsley and his colleagues conducted 30,767 trials with three men in their twenties using a quantum optical device. The participants detected individual photons at a rate slightly above 50 percent, a small but statistically significant improvement over chance. Researchers described the sensation as a fleeting feeling of having seen something, similar to a faint star appearing for one moment and disappearing the next.
13. During the Battle of France and Battle of Britain in 1940, negative g-force during dives flooded the carburetors of Rolls-Royce Merlin engines, causing RAF Spitfires and Hurricanes to lose power. An English aeronautical engineer named Beatrice Shilling designed a precisely sized washer that restricted fuel flow and prevented the flooding without requiring engines to be removed. By March 1941, she was touring RAF stations to install the device, which pilots nicknamed “Miss Shilling’s orifice.” Shilling was also a motorcycle racer who lapped Brooklands at an average speed of 101.85 mph in 1934, becoming only the second woman to earn the British Motorcycle Racing Club’s Gold Star.
14. Tom Holland did not receive the complete Avengers: Endgame script because the filmmakers did not trust him to keep its secrets. Director Joe Russo said Holland received only his own lines and vague descriptions of each scene, leaving him unaware of which characters or actors he was performing opposite. The precautions followed several spoiler slips. Holland recalled another Avengers shoot in which the directors revealed so little that he spent 15 minutes punching the air without knowing whom he was supposed to fight.
15. The popular claim that the prefrontal cortex becomes fully developed at age 25 is a myth. One frequently cited origin involves neuroscientist Jay Giedd, whose brain-imaging research stopped following participants around ages 18 to 20 while their brains were still developing; he later speculated that researchers might need to continue until 25. Research confirms that the prefrontal cortex develops more slowly than many other regions, but it reveals no sudden cutoff or change in executive function at 25. Brain development continues throughout life, while different cognitive abilities mature at different rates.
16 Aspirin Trial Mocked Astrological Subgroups
In 1988, the landmark ISIS-2 trial studied 17,187 suspected heart attack patients and found that aspirin reduced five-week vascular mortality by 23 percent. When journal editors requested subgroup analyses, the researchers divided patients by their 12 astrological signs to demonstrate how random chance could create misleading results. The analysis appeared to show that aspirin provided no benefit to Libras and Geminis, despite its conclusive overall lifesaving effect. The deliberately absurd comparison became a famous warning against trusting post hoc subgroup findings.
17. In 1848, the British East India Company sent Scottish botanist Robert Fortune into China’s interior, where foreigners were forbidden, to steal tea plants, seeds, and manufacturing secrets for British India. Fortune shaved his head, adopted Chinese clothing and a pigtail, and posed as a wealthy official from a distant province so people would overlook his accent. With his servant Wang announcing his arrival, he entered a green-tea factory and learned how workers dried, fired, rolled, and processed the leaves. Fortune ultimately transported about 20,000 tea plants and seedlings to India, helping Britain develop its own industry and weaken China’s control of the tea trade.
18. For more than 15 years (as of 2026), a tiny radio station in Montclair, New Jersey, has broadcast a 60-second excerpt of Boyz II Men’s “I’ll Make Love to You” around the clock on 91.9 FM. A musician named George Louvis originally installed the transmitter above his family’s restaurant in 1999 and used it for advertisements, music, news, and sports commentary. After a friend borrowed the transmitter around 2007, it returned with the song excerpt recorded inside, causing the device to restart the same loop whenever it regained power. Louvis has tried shutting it down, but devoted listeners persuaded him to keep the one-block signal playing until the machine finally dies.
19. Coffee as a drink first appeared in confirmed records in 15th-century Yemen, where Sufi Muslims used it to remain alert during nighttime devotions. Yemen then controlled almost the entire global supply through the port of Mocha. In 1616, a Dutch merchant named Pieter van den Broecke obtained closely guarded coffee bushes from Mocha and carried them to Amsterdam. The Dutch later established plantations in Java, and by 1719, the Dutch East India Company supplied Europe with Java coffee.
20. Australia’s high-capacity regular passenger transport sector has recorded no hull losses or fatal accidents involving passenger jets, a record the Australian Transport Safety Bureau described as the world’s best. However, this distinction does not cover every foreign flight traveling to or from Australia. In 1974, Pan Am Flight 812, a Boeing 707 scheduled to stop in Sydney, crashed near Denpasar, Bali, killing all 107 people aboard.
15 Most Controversial & Costly Blunders in History
21 Nguyen Leads Iceland’s Hereditary Surnames
Because most Icelanders use patronymic surnames, Nguyen is the country’s most common hereditary family name. Nguyen is also Vietnam’s most common surname, with an estimated 30 to 39 percent of Vietnamese people carrying it. Vietnamese emigration spread the name worldwide, making it common in countries including Australia, Norway, and the Czech Republic.
22. Child voice actor Jordan Nagai, who played Russell in Pixar’s 2009 film Up, never intended to audition for the role. He only came to support his older brother Hunter, who was auditioning, and sat nearby until the casting team invited him over. Director Pete Docter heard Jordan talk about judo and found his voice funny, sweet, and innocent. Nagai won the role, later appeared in several Up-related shorts and one episode of The Simpsons, and then largely left acting.
23. In 1938, J.R.R. Tolkien received a request from Berlin publisher Rutten & Loening for proof of his “Aryan descent” before it would publish The Hobbit in German. Tolkien objected and gave British publisher Stanley Unwin two possible replies, including one that mocked the publisher’s misuse of “Aryan” and said he regretted having no ancestors among the “gifted” Jewish people. No one knows which draft reached Berlin, but the deal collapsed. A German translation of The Hobbit appeared only in 1957.
24. A researcher named Saul Newman argued that the celebrated Blue Zone secret to longevity rests on poor record-keeping and unregistered deaths rather than exceptional lifestyles. He examined hotspots including Okinawa, Sardinia, and Ikaria and found that many combined unusually high reported ages with poverty, missing birth certificates, and lower average lifespans than surrounding regions. A 2010 Japanese government review supported his doubts by finding that 82 percent of people listed as older than 100 had already died, including Japan’s oldest man, whose daughter hid his body for 30 years while collecting his pension. In 2024, Newman received an Ig Nobel Prize for his research.
25. In the Netherlands, employers must continue paying sick employees for up to 2 years, providing at least 70% of their normal wages during both years. Employment contracts or collective labor agreements can require a higher rate, and many raise first-year sick pay to 100%. If 70% falls below the legal minimum wage, employers must cover the difference during the first year but not the second. Employers must also help sick employees return to work, while the employees must cooperate with those reintegration efforts.
