Rollie Free
Rollie Free was a motorcycle racer who broke the American motorcycle land speed record in 1948. He was prone to wearing a bathing suit.
Atavism
Atavism is the tendency to revert to ancestral type. In biology, an atavism is an evolutionary throwback, such as traits reappearing which had disappeared generations before.
Howard Marks
For 20 years, one man - Oxford-educated Howard Marks - was responsible for running an international drug market that shipped marijuana into the US by the ton.
Seawise Giant
Seawise Giant was a supertanker and the longest ship ever built, and possessed the greatest deadweight tonnage ever recorded. Fully laden, her displacement was 657,019 tonnes.
Ron Galella
Ron Galella is an American photographer, known as a pioneer paparazzo. Dubbed "Paparazzo Extraordinaire" by Newsweek and "the Godfather of the U.S. paparazzi culture" by Time Magazine and Vanity Fair. On June 12, 1973, notoriously-reclusive actor Marlon Brando punched Galella without warning outside a restaurant in Chinatown in New York City, breaking the photographer's jaw and knocking out five of his teeth on the left-side of his mouth.
Great Siberian Ice March
After Admiral Kolchak's White Russian Army abandoned Tomsk and Omsk and fled eastward along the Trans-Siberian Railway, they came to a halt on the shore of Lake Baikal near Irkutsk. With the Red Army in hot pursuit, the White Army had to escape southward to China across the frozen Lake Baikal in sub-zero temperatures. About 30,000 White Army soldiers, their families and all their possessions as well as the Tsar's gold, made their way across the lake toTransbaikalia. As the Arctic winds blew unobstructed across the lake, many in the army and their families froze to death. Their bodies remained frozen on the lake in a kind of tableau throughout the winter of 1919–20. With the advent of spring, the frozen corpses and all their possessions disappeared in 5,000 feet of water.
Percy Fawcett
Percy Fawcett was a British artillery officer, archaeologist and South American explorer. Along with his son, Fawcett disappeared under unknown circumstances in 1925 during an expedition to find "Z" — his name for what he believed to be an ancient lost city in the uncharted jungles of Brazil.
Granite Mountain Records Vault
The Granite Mountain Records Vault is a large archive and vault owned by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints excavated 600 feet into the north side of Little Cottonwood Canyon. The Granite Mountain facilities feature a dry, environment-controlled facility used for long-term record storage, as well as administrative offices, shipping and receiving docks, a processing facility and restoration laboratory for microfilm. Records stored include genealogical information contained in over 2.4 million rolls of microfilm and 1 million microfiche. This equals about 3 billion pages of family history records. The vault's library of microfilm increases by up to 40,000 rolls per year. Since 1999, the church has been digitizing the genealogical microfilms stored in the vault. The church makes the records publicly available through its Family History Centers, as well as online at its FamilySearch website.
Abe Hirschfeld
Abe Hirschfeld was a Polish-born New York real estate developer known for his eccentric endeavors, love for publicity, $2 neckties, strong Yiddish accent, and murder-for-hire plot against a former business partner.
À la Belle Poule
The Belle Poule was a French frigate of the Dédaigneuse class, designed and built by Léon-Michel Guignace, famous for her duel with the English frigate HMS Arethusa on 17 June 1778, which began the French involvement in the American War of Independence. One of the most fashionable hairstyles of the eighteenth century, À la Belle Poule, commemorated the victory of a French ship over an English ship in 1778. À la Belle Poule featured an enormous pile of curled and powdered hair stretched over a frame affixed to the top of a woman's head. The hair was then decorated with an elegant model of the Belle Poule ship, including sails and flags.