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Motorcycle chariot racing was an eccentric 1920s and 1930s spectacle in which men dressed as Roman charioteers stood behind pairs of riderless motorcycles and steered them using reins. Early versions sometimes used chariots made from wine barrels; later races appeared at British stadiums and Australian police carnivals, encouraged by the popularity of Ben-Hur. It remains one of the few occasions in which motorcycles were treated as livestock.

The Leningrad Human Chess Match was played across Palace Square in 1924 using people as pieces. Members of the Red Army formed the black side, while the Soviet Navy played white; horses carried several of the larger pieces. Chess masters Ilya Rabinovich and Peter Romanovsky directed them by telephone as around 8,000 spectators watched. For one afternoon, an imperial square became a chessboard and the military obeyed two men seated at tables.

E.1027 is a small modernist house built by Eileen Gray and Jean Badovici on the French Riviera between 1926 and 1929. Its coded name combines their initials: E for Eileen, 10 for J, 2 for B and 7 for G. Gray designed everything from the windows to the movable furniture, treating the house as a machine adjusted to its occupants. Years later, Le Corbusier stayed there and painted eight large murals across its white walls—with Badovici’s permission, but without Gray’s. She considered them vandalism. Le Corbusier subsequently tried to buy the house and, failing that, built himself a cabin next door.

Adam Rainer was an Austro-Hungarian man. He is the only person in recorded history to have been both a dwarf and a giant.

Sulfur: A Literary Tri-Annual of the Whole Art was an influential, small literary magazine founded by American poet Clayton Eshleman in 1981. The name Sulfur references sulphur, a butterfly with orange and yellow wings, bordered in black, as well as the element sulfur in particular in its role in alchemical processes of combustion and transformation. By referencing a butterfly in the title, Eshleman linked the magazine with Caterpillar a previous magazine he founded and edited from 1967 to 1973. By linking the magazine with alchemy, Eshleman was also associating it with Jungian interpretations of alchemical symbols.

Tiger Tateishi was a Japanese painter, picture book artist, and ceramic artist.

Allegra Kent was a ballerina with an otherworldly stage presence, innocent sensuality, and tendency to go outside technique to move in beautiful and strange ways.

Edmond Roudnitska was a French perfumer and author. He is perhaps most known for creating Dior's Eau Sauvage.

In physics, the twin paradox is a thought experiment in special relativity, in which a twin makes a journey into space in a high-speed rocket and returns home to find he has aged less than his identical twin who stayed on Earth. This result appears puzzling because each twin sees the other twin as traveling, and so, according to the theory of special relativity, paradoxically each should find the other to have aged more slowly.