On Sundays, San Francisco’s Church of St. John Coltrane holds ‘sound baptisms’ — three-hour jam sessions, and their general advice is ‘If you ain’t happy, you ain’t listening to enough Coltrane!’.
An newly discovered organism called…
An newly discovered organism called Lithoredo abatanica eats stone and excretes sand. It is a shipworm, a group of burrowing animals known for eating woods and related to clams, but so different from known examples that it is both a new species and genus.
Gargoyles on a 15th century church…
Gargoyles on a 15th century church in Loire-Atlantique, France, now include Gizmo and a Gremlin from “Gremlins” and the xenomorph from “Alien.” The characters were added when the centuries-old church was restored in the 1990s.
Plastic and petroleum were originally…
Plastic and petroleum were originally environmental saviors, because they eliminated the need to kill whales, elephants, turtles, and many other creatures for their materials.
Oregon had the only state-sponsored…
Oregon had the only state-sponsored rock festival in United States history, Vortex I. It was an elaborate ploy to lure young people away from Portland during a planned visit by President Richard Nixon.
Studies in ‘ice cores’ found….
Studies in ‘ice cores’ found in Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania – the mountain which supplies the Nile with its water – have revealed that a drought did take place around 3600 years ago – around the time the Bible sets Joseph’s story in Egypt.
A university in the Netherlands…
A university in the Netherlands offers “Purification Grave” services, where you can lie in a grave for a while to reflect upon life.
A man in China sold his kidney….
In 2011, a man in China sold his kidney to buy a iPhone 4 and iPad 2 when he was 17. Now he is bedridden for life.
During the Cold War a…
During the Cold War a ‘Three world’ model arose to describe nations either aligned with NATO (first world), the Eastern Bloc (second world) or the ‘Third World’. Rather than economic this was a political grouping loosely describing ‘unaligned’ nations in the ‘developing world’.
Anoka, Minnesota was the first….
Anoka, Minnesota was the first U.S. city to put on a Halloween celebration when they did so in 1920 to divert youngsters from Halloween pranks. It was also proclaimed “The Halloween Capital of the World” by Congress in 1937. Today, tens of thousands of people visits Anoka annually for Halloween.