Vela
Vela was the name of a group of satellites developed by the United States to detect nuclear detonations to monitor compliance with the 1963 Partial Test Ban Treaty by the Soviet Union.
B. Traven
B. Traven was the pen name of a writer who wrote his books originally in the German or English language and whose real name, nationality, date and place of birth and details of biography are unknown or are subject of dispute among literary scholars. What is only certain is that B. Traven lived for the most part of his life in Mexico, where the action of the majority of his novels and short stories is also set. There are many, sometimes fantastic, hypotheses on the true identity of B. Traven. Scholars usually identify him with the theatre actor and anarchist known as Ret Marut, who lived in Germany in the early 20th century and who supposedly left Europe for Mexico around 1924. There are also speculations that Traven's real name was Otto Feige and that he was born in Schwiebus, modern-day Świebodzin in Poland.
Luther Blissett
Luther Blissett is a multiple-use name, an "open reputation" informally adopted and shared by hundreds of artists and social activists all over Europe and South America since 1994. In Italy, between 1994 and 1999, the Luther Blissett Project (an organized network within the open community sharing the "Luther Blissett" identity) became an extremely popular phenomenon. An example: January 1995, Harry Kipper, a British conceptual artist, disappears at the Italo-Slovenian border while touring Europe on a mountain bike, allegedly with the purpose of tracing the word 'ART' on the map of the continent. The victim of the prank is a famous missing person's prime-time show on the Italian state television. They send out a crew and spend taxpayers' money to look for a person that never existed. They go as far as London, where novelist Stewart Home and Richard Essex of the London Psychogeographical Association pose as close friends of Kipper's. The hoax goes on until "Luther Blissett" claims responsibility for it.
Karosta
Karosta was constructed in 1890-1906 as a naval base for the Russian Tsar Alexander III, and later served as a base for the Soviet Baltic Fleet. When the Russian army left Latvia in 1994 after Latvian independence, Karosta became largely uninhabited and most structures fell to ruin. In the late 1990s, the area was troubled by high unemployment, street crime and drug problems. Some remaining residents are considered neither Latvian nor Russian and hold alien passports.
Midnight magazine
Midnight is an extremely scarce, early, bedsheet, crime magazine that initially featured a mixture of fiction, true confessions, and exposes, but later became all fiction under the names Midnight Mysteries and Midnight Mystery Stories. Some of the early issues were destroyed by court order as being too risque.
Antonio Ligabue
Antonio Ligabue was and was an Italian painter, one of the most important naïve artists of the 20th century.
Frank Chu
Frank Chu is one of San Francisco's best-known eccentrics. His street protests against US Presidents, corporations, and a distinctive concept he calls the 12 Galaxies have been held in San Francisco and nearby locales since at least 1995. In early 1985, Chu, then 24 years old, took 11 members of his family hostage in his home in Oakland and was reported to have beaten one or more with his fists.
Wombles
The Wombles are fictional pointy-nosed, furry creatures that live in burrows, where they help the environment by collecting and recycling rubbish in useful and ingenious ways. Wombles were created by author Elisabeth Beresford, originally appearing in a series of children's novels from 1968. The characters later became nationally famous in the mid-1970s as a result of a popular BBC children's television show using stop motion animation. A number of spin-off novelty songs also became major hits in the British music charts.
Sheats Goldstein Residence
Sheats Goldstein Residence is a house designed and built between 1961 and 1963 by American architect John Lautner in Beverly Hills, California. The house has been featured in several movies, including Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle, Bandits, and The Big Lebowski.
Mountain men
Mountain men were trappers and explorers who roamed the North American Rocky Mountains from about 1810 to the early 1840s. Mountain men were ethnically, socially, and religiously diverse. Most were born in Canada, the United States, or in Spanish-governed Mexican territories, although some European immigrants moved west in search of financial opportunity. Mountain men were primarily motivated by profit, trapping beaver and selling the skins, although some were more interested in exploring the West.