The model for all later American juvenile sports fiction, Merriwell excelled at football, baseball, basketball, crew and track at Yale while solving mysteries and righting wrongs. He played with great strength and received traumatic blows without injury.
In 1953, the fledgling CIA hired professional magician John Mulholland to adapt his techniques of stealth and misdirection to the craft of espionage. Mulholland produced two illustrated manuals featuring a range of tricks from placing pills into drinks to stealing documents and avoiding detection. The classified manuals were believed to have been destroyed in 1973, but the authors discovered a copy in 2007 among recently declassified CIA archives.
From humble origins, the koi has come to be the most precious of all fish, the most beautiful specimens selling for up to $2.2 million.
At the turn of the 20th century, the dueling scar was popularized by upper-class Austrians and Germans who saw it as a mark of their class and of their honor, due to the social importance of dueling societies at Austrian universities at the time. If you were a doctor, lawyer, or professor, the dueling scar was a tattoo that signified your inclusion in an elite social rank, and visitors to university cafes would expect to see young men with bandaged faces.
The McMurdo Dry Valleys are a row of valleys in Antarctica. The Dry Valleys are so named because of their extremely low humidity and their lack of snow or ice cover.
Wanfenglin consists of thousands of mounts in Guizhou, China.
Casa Malaparte is a house on Punta Massullo, on the eastern side of the Isle of Capri, Italy. The house was conceived around 1937 by Italian Rationalist architect Adalberto Libera for Curzio Malaparte. Malaparte actually rejected Libera's design and built the home himself with the help of Adolfo Amitrano, a local stone mason.
Isabelle Eberhardt was a Swiss explorer and writer who lived and travelled extensively in North Africa. For the time she was an extremely liberated individual who rejected conventional European morality in favour of her own path and that of Islam. She died in a flash flood in the desert at the age of 27.
The Loreley is a rock on the eastern bank of the Rhine which soars some 120 meters above the water line. It marks the narrowest part of the river between Switzerland and the North Sea. A very strong current and rocks below the waterline have caused many boat accidents there.
Combining whimsy and rigorous elegance, designer Piero Fornasetti borrowed freely from surrealist and metaphysical artists. His is an art of gestures: a lone parrot on a balustrade evokes the Venetian Renaissance, helium balloons and propellor-driven airplanes conjure up a world of humanized technology. With subversive wit, Fornasetti imaginatively transformed lamps, coffeepots, chairs and plates into agents of humor, provocation and meaning. He produced an endless stream of variations on his personal leitmotifs, including the human hand, the female face, luminescent fish, bizarre creatures of the deep and playing cards.