Alpha
Auto polo was an early 20th-century sport that replaced horses with stripped-down Model Ts. Each car carried a driver and a malletman, who leaned from the side to strike a ball while the vehicles swerved, collided and frequently overturned. Popularized in 1911 by Ford dealer Ralph “Pappy” Hankinson as a sales stunt, it became an attraction at fairs across America and Europe. It was invented to demonstrate the Model T’s durability; the resulting repair bills eventually helped end it.
Alvin “Shipwreck” Kelly was an American stunt performer who turned flagpole sitting into a national craze during the 1920s. Beginning with a 13-hour publicity stunt, he toured 28 cities, eating, shaving and sleeping on tiny platforms while crowds paid to watch from nearby rooftops. In 1930, he spent 49 days and one hour atop a 225-foot flagpole above Atlantic City’s Steel Pier. Kelly called himself “the luckiest fool in the world.” For a few years, America made him famous for going nowhere at exceptional height.
Archduke Ludwig Salvator was a Habsburg prince who preferred a steam yacht to court life. He sailed the Mediterranean aboard the Nixe with scholars, sailors, dogs, cats, birds and monkeys, documenting entire islands in lavishly illustrated volumes. On Mallorca, he purchased a 16-kilometre stretch of coastline, protected it from development and filled it with paths and viewpoints. His former Mallorcan home, S’Estaca, is now owned by Michael Douglas.
Asphalt volcanoes form where oil rises through faults in the Earth’s crust and escapes onto the ocean floor. As its lighter components disperse, the thick petroleum left behind spreads and hardens into folds and domes resembling lava. Unknown to science until 2003, examples in the Gulf of Mexico lie around 3,000 metres underwater; others off California are larger than a football field. They are oil deposits that have built their own mountains.
Ato Boldon is a Trinidadian sprinter who won four Olympic medals without ever winning gold. At the 2000 Sydney Games, he took silver in the 100 metres and bronze in the 200 while wearing Oakley Over the Top sunglasses: mirrored lenses held in place by two aluminium-coloured bands arching across his shaved head. The design looked more like protective machinery than eyewear and became one of the most recognizable pieces of equipment in Olympic history.
The Antarctic Snow Cruiser was a 17-metre vehicle built in 1939 to cross Antarctica while carrying living quarters, a laboratory and a small aircraft on its roof. Its four enormous tyres were smooth to prevent snow from clinging to them, but had almost no traction. It moved slightly better in reverse before becoming a stationary shelter. Last seen buried in snow in 1958, its present location remains unknown.
Acoustic Kitty was a 1960s CIA project intended to turn an ordinary cat into a mobile listening device. Technicians equipped the animal with a microphone, transmitter and an antenna concealed in its fur, hoping it could approach conversations between Soviet agents without attracting attention. The electronics worked; directing a cat through real streets did not. The project was abandoned in 1967 as operationally impractical.
Abkhazia is a partially recognized state on the eastern coast of the Black Sea. Currently, nature is reclaiming thousands of ruined buildings across the region, from the concrete skeletons of nondescript townhouses to the solemn grandeur of Tsarist-era sanatoriums and hotels.
The Amber Room is a chamber decorated in amber panels backed with gold leaf and mirrors. The room was looted by the Nazis during World War II and recreated in 2003. The original room is estimated to be worth 500 million dollars. It has yet to be featured on MTV Cribs.
Arthur Koestler began his education in the twilight of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, at an experimental kindergarten in Budapest. His mother was briefly a patient of Sigmund Freud's. In interwar Vienna he wound up as the personal secretary of Vladimir Jabotinsky, one of the early leaders of the Zionist movement. Traveling in Soviet Turkmenistan as a young and ardent Communist sympathizer, he ran into Langston Hughes. Fighting in the Spanish civil war, he met W.H. Auden at a party in Valencia, before winding up in one of Franco's prisons. In Weimar Berlin he fell into the circle of the infamous Comintern agent Willi Münzenberg, through whom he met the leading German Communists of the era: Johannes Becher, Hanns Eisler, and Bertolt Brecht. Afraid of being caught by the Gestapo while fleeing France, he borrowed suicide pills from Walter Benjamin. He took them several weeks later when it seemed he would be unable to get out of Lisbon, but didn't die. Along the way he had lunch with Thomas Mann, got drunk with Dylan Thomas, made friends with George Orwell, flirted with Mary McCarthy, and lived in Cyril Connolly's London flat. In 1940, Koestler was released from a French detention camp, partly thanks to the intervention of Harold Nicholson and Noël Coward. In the 1950s, he helped found the Congress for Cultural Freedom, together with Mel Lasky and Sidney Hook. In the 1960s, he took LSD with Timothy Leary. In the 1970s, he was still giving lectures that impressed, among others, the young Salman Rushdie.