Maledicta, The International Journal of Verbal Aggression, is an academic journal dedicated to the study of offensive and negatively-valued words and expressions. Its main areas of interest are the origin, etymology, meaning, use, and influence of vulgar, obscene, aggressive, abusive, and blasphemous language.
The London Necropolis railway station was a special railway station constructed by the London Necropolis Company for funeral trains, specifically to serve their Brookwood Cemetery. The station opened on 13 November 1854 just outside London's Waterloo station. Three-carriage trains took coffins and mourners from the station directly to platforms within the cemetery.
The Toynbee tiles are messages of mysterious origin found embedded in asphalt in about two dozen major cities in the United States and three South American capitals. Since the 1980s, several hundred tiles have been discovered.
The Fortune Teller Miracle Fish is a novelty item or kid's toy. It is a small red plastic fish that will move when you place it in your hand.
Stalag fiction was a short-lived genre of Israeli fiction Nazi exploitation that flourished in the early 1960s, at the time of the Eichmann Trial. Purported to be translations of English-language books by prisoners in concentration camps, these books were highly pornographic accounts of imprisonment, generally of Allied soldiers, sexual brutalization by female SS guards, and the prisoners' eventual revenge, which usually consisted of the rape and murder of their tormentors. The books, with titles like I Was Colonel Schultz's Private Bitch, were especially popular among adolescent boys, often the children of concentration camp survivors. They disappeared almost as quickly as they appeared. Within two years of the appearance of the first publication, the publishers were accused by an Israeli court of distributing pornography and the books were discontinued. Although still available underground, certain titles earned the ire of the establishment, and efforts were made to find and destroy them.
Hidden away in a modern library are the remains of one of the 18th century's most celebrated wunderkammers. The aristocrat Joseph Bonnier de La Mosson didn’t just inherit an incredible fortune, he also inherited a lavish residence with the Hôtel du Lude on the ritzy Boulevard Saint-Germain. With an intense interest in science, it was there he created his cabinet of curiosity, which encompassed objects related to anatomy, chemistry, physics, mechanical devices, optic machines, fine art, and natural history, many of which he collected on his world travels.
The result of a scientific drilling project of the former USSR. The project attempted to drill as deep as possible into the Earth's crust.
Takeshi's Challenge is a Japanese action-adventure video game. The game was developed under the direction of comedian-turned actor and film director Takeshi Kitano. Kitano incorporated many of his unique and controversial ideas into the game. For instance, the player can beat up a yakuza gangster at a pachinko gambling establishment, and take the yakuza's money to exchange for prizes. The player can use a hang-glider to fly over into a strange land called the "Red Country" (an amalgam between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany). The player can gain access the Red Country if they pass over the four other islands, but a huge mountain blocks the way into the country, and the player will be forced to crash into either the mountain or the ground, resulting in an automatic game over screen. There is also a choice on the password-entry screen ("Punch the old man") which also results in an automatic game over, even when the player has not even started the game. Other in-game events include: a game over screen where the player's character is given a funeral, singing karaoke at a pub (using the second controller's built-in microphone), the main character divorcing his wife and paying a settlement, beating up yakuza, or seeing inhumane comments on store signs.
Cymatics is the study of visible sound vibration and shows the transformational nature of sound and matter. Sound guides us and shapes us, yet is an intangible force. We can capture sound in the digital realm where we can see waveforms. But, that only gives us a 2D view. The world of cymatics, however, gives us a different view and provides a major evolution in our understanding of how sound affects all of us. Cymatics gives validity to the fact that everything that we perceive as hard objects, including our bodies, are actually continuously vibrating at their own rates. This study clearly merges the fields of sound, geometry, light and mathematics into one through the presentation of stunning images created by frequencies of all kinds found in our bodies, in nature and beyond.
The Post Office Railway was a narrow-gauge driverless private underground railway in London built by the Post Office to move mail between sorting offices.