Whiskey
W. Reginald Bray was an English accountant who spent decades testing what the postal service was willing to deliver. Beginning in 1898, he mailed unwrapped turnips, a bowler hat, a rabbit’s skull, his dog and postcards addressed only with riddles or drawings. In 1900, he had himself delivered to his parents’ house, earning the name “the Human Letter.” He also mailed autograph requests to thousands of public figures, eventually building a collection of more than 15,000 replies.
Wood’s cycad was discovered in South Africa’s oNgoye Forest in 1895 as a single clump of male plants. No other wild specimen—and no female—has ever been found. The original clump was gradually removed, while its offsets were propagated in botanical gardens worldwide. Because cycads have separate male and female plants, the species cannot reproduce naturally. Encephalartos woodii survives not as a population, but as one male plant copied many times.
Starting in airshows and barnstorming during the 1920s, wing walking is the act of moving on the wings of an airplane during flight. The earliest known instance of a wing-walking on a powered aircraft was an experimental flight in England involving a biplane built by Colonel Samuel Franklin Cody in 1911. Cody wished to demonstrate how his Flying Cathedral biplanes had the greatest lateral stability even with a passenger three meters away from the aircraft's center of gravity. The first wing walker to perform daring stunts was 26-year-old Ormer Locklear. Legend has it that he first climbed out onto the lower wings during his pilot training in the Army Air Service during World War I. Undaunted, Ormer just climbed out of the cockpit onto the wings in flight whenever there was a mechanical issue and fixed the problem.
Wild Orchid is film directed by sleaze maven Zalman King. A female lawyer becomes mesmerized by a self-made millionaire (Mickey Rourke) during an encounter in Rio setting off a series of erotic encounters.
Ludwig Wittgenstein is a philosopher many read and few understand.
The White City refers to a collection of over 4,000 Bauhaus or International style buildings built in Tel Aviv from the 1930s by German Jewish architects. Tel Aviv has the largest number of buildings in this style of any city in the world.
Wu-Tang Clan is a rap group.
Wolfgang Tillmans is a German photographer.
Wang Wusheng is a Chinese photographer who shoots mainly the Huangshan mountain range. Shot mostly in black and white, these images of dark craggy peaks floating in swathes of white mist combine stunning grandeur with a subtlety that rewards meditative viewing.
Wendingen was an art magazine that appeared from 1918 to 1932. The magazine gained recognition not only through its content but also by its remarkable square format and the striking typography of architect El Lissitzky, Vilmos Huszar and others.