Bruges-la-Morte is a short novel by Georges Rodenbach, first published in 1892. It tells the story of a widower overcome with grief, who takes refuge in Bruges, where he becomes obsessed with a dancer he sees at the opera Robert le diable who is the exact likeness of his dead wife. The book is notable for its poetic evocation of the decaying city and for its innovative form.
Czeslaw Slania is one of the world's most prolific postage stamp and banknote engravers.
Project Iceworm was a top-secret US military project from the cold war. Powered, remarkably, by the world’s first mobile nuclear generator and known as “the city under the ice”, the camp’s three-kilometre network of tunnels, eight metres beneath the ice, housed laboratories, a shop, a hospital, a cinema, a chapel and accommodation for as many as 200 soldiers. Its personnel were officially stationed there to test Arctic construction methods and carry out research. Scientists based at the camp did, indeed, drill the first ice core samples ever used to study the earth’s climate, obtaining data still cited today. In reality, the camp served as cover for something altogether different. Project Iceworm, presented to the US chiefs of staff in 1960, aimed to use Camp Century’s frozen tunnels to test the feasibility of a huge launch site under the ice, close enough to fire nuclear missiles directly at the Soviet Union.
Archaeopteryx is the earliest and most primitive bird known.
Spirograph is a geometric drawing toy.
Raised by foster parents in Brooklyn and Long Island, the young Dallesandro was expelled from school for punching the principal, which was followed by a spate of petty gangland crime. He had a successful escape from a rehabilitation center for boys in New York's Catskill Mountains, where he had been held for a year after crashing a stolen car. A pioneering figure in the sexual revolution, he was a teenage tearaway turned icon of rebellious youth and sexuality. Perhaps now best known as the torso on The Smiths' debut album or as that bulge on the cover of The Rolling Stones' Sticky Fingers.
Adolf Wölfli was a Swiss outsider artist. He was abused both physically and sexually as a child, and was orphaned at the age of 10. He thereafter grew up in a series of state-run foster homes. He was later convicted of attempted child molestation, for which he served prison time. After being freed, he was re-arrested for a similar offense and in 1895 was admitted to the Waldau Clinic, a psychiatric hospital in Bern where he spent the rest of his adult life. He was very disturbed and sometimes violent on admission, leading to him being kept in isolation for his early time at hospital. He suffered from psychosis, which led to intense hallucinations.
The hoopoe is a colourful bird found across Afro-Eurasia, notable for its distinctive crown of feathers.
Yoshiro Nakamatsu is a Japanese inventor claiming to hold the world record for number of inventions with over 3,000, including "PyonPyon" spring shoes and the basic technology for the floppy disk, the CD, the DVD, the digital watch, CinemaScope, armchair "Cerebrex", sauce pump, and the taxicab meter.
Klerksdorp spheres are small objects, often spherical to disc-shaped, that have been collected by miners and rockhounds from 3-billion-year-old pyrophyllite deposits. Geologists agree that the Klerksdorp spheres originated as concretions, which formed in volcanic sediments, ash, or both, after they accumulated 3 billion years ago.