Opus

Encyclopædia of the sublime

✎2114 INFO SubscribeRSS FB TW IG

Krazy

Sort:  Alpha  Chrono  Rando

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.

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.

Serge Voronoff

Serge Voronoff was a French surgeon of Russian extraction who gained fame for his technique of grafting monkey testicle tissue on to the testicles of men for purportedly therapeutic purposes while working in France in the 1920s and 1930s. The technique brought him a great deal of money, although he was already independently wealthy. As his work fell out of favour, he went from being highly respected to a subject of ridicule. In 1999, some speculated that the AIDS virus discovered in the 1980s entered the human population through Voronoff's transfer of monkey parts into humans in the 1920s.

Roy Shaw

Roy Shaw is an English millionaire, real estate investor, author and businessman from the East End of London who was formerly a notorious criminal and Category A prisoner. During the 1970s-1980s, Shaw was a well known and respected figure in the criminal underworld of London and was frequently associated with the Kray twins. Shaw is perhaps best remembered today for his infamous careers as both a professional boxer and an unlicensed fighter, becoming a legend in bare-knuckle boxing and during which time he became arch-rival with the also legendary Lenny McLean.

Belgrade Phantom

In 1979, Vlada Vasiljević stole a white Porsche-Targa 911-s, and then, for about ten evenings drove the police mad with his reckless driving to the Slavija Square in Belgrade. During an official visit of the president Tito to Cuba in 1979, the attention of the capital was directed to the phantom in the white Porsche. The mysterious driver that drove like crazy in a stolen car over the square Slavija made in the midnight hours a real spectacle, constantly managed to get away from the police. Over the radio he openly called the police to catch him, which was the first oppositional act in the post-war Yugoslavia. Several tens of thousand people went on the streets to support him.