Wikipedia:Unusual articles: Difference between revisions
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| '''[[Cuteness in Japanese culture]]''' |
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| It's not just [[Hello Kitty]] and [[Pikachu]]. |
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Revision as of 10:17, 11 May 2012
Please note Articles of things considered unusual may be accepted in Wikipedia if they otherwise fulfill the criteria for inclusion. This page is not an article, and the only criterion for inclusion is consensus that an article fits on this page. Lists of unusual things in Wikipedia mainspace (see Category:Lists of things considered unusual) should have an external reference for each entry that specifically classifies it as unusual, not to make it a point of view (POV) fork of original research. Still, all such lists risk being deleted for lack of a neutral definition of what counts as "unusual". |
This page is for Wikipedians to list articles that seem a little unusual. These articles are valuable contributions to the encyclopedia, but are a bit odd, whimsical, or something you would not expect to find in Encyclopædia Britannica. We should take special care to meet the highest standards of an encyclopedia with these articles lest they make Wikipedia appear idiosyncratic. If you wish to add articles to this list, a broad consensus amongst contributors has identified two main guidelines. If the article in question meets any of these categories then it could possibly be deemed unusual:
- The article is something you would not expect to find in a standard encyclopedia.
- The article contains some form of juxtaposition that most people would find unusual, such as "killer cockroach", "Henry VIII in space", "edible computers" – and so on.
- The subject is an anomaly: something that defies common sense, common expectations or common knowledge, such as Bir Tawil, Märket, Phineas Gage, List of snow events in Florida etc.
- The subject has gained unexpected notoriety, or an unplanned cult following at extreme levels, such as Ampelmännchen or All your base are belong to us.
- The subject is a successful or revered hoax, such as Nacirema or Mary Toft.
- The subject might be found amusing, though serious.
- The article is a list or collection of articles/subjects meeting the criteria above.
This definition is not precise. Some articles may still be considered unusual even if they do not fit these guidelines.
For unusual contributions that are less worthwhile, see Wikipedia:Silly Things.
A star () indicates a featured article. A plus () indicates a good article.
Places and infrastructure
Aerican Empire | A micronation with bizarre land claims, such as a mysterious cow pasture and the entire northern hemisphere of Pluto. |
Fictional island nations | These islands have not been mistaken for submarines. |
Folly | Buildings prized for their uselessness. |
Gravity hill | A hill that gives the illusion of objects rolling uphill. |
List of places with fewer than ten residents | You could be the town manager, police chief, and town custodian all rolled up into one person! |
Parking chair | Using household objects to reserve parking spaces. |
San Serriffe | A nation conceived by a British newspaper made up of two islands (Upper Caisse and Lower Caisse), whose capital city is Bodoni, and which features two ports—Clarendon and Baskerville. |
Spite house | Various houses built solely out of spite for their neighbors. |
Americas
Action Park | A defunct amusement park in New Jersey that was famous for the thrills produced by the very real dangers of the attractions. |
Badlands Guardian | A natural topographic feature in Canada which, when viewed from above, looks remarkably like a human wearing a Native American headdress and earphones. |
Beatosu and Goblu, Ohio | Two non-existent Ohio towns that appeared on Michigan's official highway map as a reference to the University of Michigan and their rivals, Ohio State University. |
Bubbly Creek | The branch of the Chicago River that is so contaminated with blood from the Stock Yards that it bubbles to this day. |
Centralia, Pennsylvania | A town that's been on fire since 1962. |
The Compound | A tract of land in Palm Bay, Florida for which a housing development was proposed. After the developer went bankrupt, it was used for flying model planes, paintballing and cocaine drops from Miami and Cuba. |
Dixie Square Mall | A shopping mall that has now been abandoned for over twice as long as it was in business. It is a popular target for urban explorers and was featured in the 1980 film The Blues Brothers. |
Florence Y'all Water Tower | A Northern Kentucky town's unique "welcome" sign. |
Free Stamp | A really big stamp in Cleveland, Ohio. |
Greater Green River Intergalactic Spaceport | Consists entirely of a deeply rutted unmanned strip of soil/gravel and a windsock. |
Interstate 180 (Wyoming) | An Interstate Highway with five traffic lights, that isn't really a highway at all. |
Republic of Indian Stream | An area of land in northern New Hampshire, USA, that was an independent country from 1832 to 1835. |
Island of California | The third largest U.S. State was formerly an island – on paper. |
Jerimoth Hill | The highest natural point in Rhode Island. For years, one of the toughest highpoints in the U.S. to scale, not because of its (812-foot) height, but because of an angry old man who lived nearby. |
Lost counties, cities, and towns of Virginia | All the places that are no longer found in Virginia, USA – and a few that never were – including Walton's Mountain and Illinois County (currently the home of Chicago, Illinois). |
Mary Ellis grave | A grave that found itself in the middle of a movie theater parking lot. |
Michigan left | Directions are more complicated in Michigan. |
Mill Ends Park | The smallest park in the world – 452 in² (0.3 m²) – located in Portland, Oregon. |
Mojave phone booth | A public phone booth that stood for several years in the middle of a desert, miles away from any roads or other structures. |
Mollie's Nipple | There are at least seven of them. |
Pyramid mausoleums in North America | Arizona Governor George Hunt will hereafter be addressed as "Pharaoh George I". |
Republic of Molossia | A one-person micronation in Nevada, USA which takes the meaning of the phrase "a man's home is his castle" to new extremes. |
New York City Subway chaining | For obscure political reasons a third of the NYC Subway is measured from the point where a tangent line from 6th Ave at West 4th St. intersects the New Jersey border in Raritan Bay. |
Original Spanish Kitchen | A Los Angeles restaurant that suddenly and unexpectedly closed in 1961, giving rise to an urban legend about the fate of its proprietors. The restaurant's contents – even as far as the place settings – remained untouched for decades. |
Point Roberts, Washington | When defining international boundaries, sometimes a straight line isn't the best solution. |
Raising of Chicago | During the 1850s, the city was raised on jacks, building by building. |
Rio Rico, Texas | A city that was ceded by the United States to Mexico in 1977 as a result of an earlier diversion of the Rio Grande. |
Rough and Ready, California | A currently populated, unincorporated mining town in the United States that seceded from the Union in 1850, forming the "Great Republic of Rough and Ready." Secession was rescinded less than three months later when its citizens noticed that they could not celebrate US independence. |
Sam Kee Building | Known as the world's narrowest commercial building. |
S.N.P.J., Pennsylvania | A municipality consisting solely of a Slovenian fraternity's recreation center, established (in part) to get around liquor laws. |
Spiral Island | An artificial island, now destroyed, built from thousands of empty floating plastic bottles. |
Tower of Wooden Pallets | Now replaced by an apartment building, its site remains City of Los Angeles Historic Cultural Monument #184. |
Wedge | It's harder than you think to construct the state of Delaware with a ruler and compass. |
World's littlest skyscraper | The result of a fraudulent investment scheme, it's a four-storey brick building constructed in 1920 in downtown Wichita Falls, Texas, that has only one room on each of its four floors. |
Winchester Mystery House | A house believed to be haunted by the ghosts of individuals killed by Winchester rifles. |
Africa
Bir Tawil | One of the few places on Earth not claimed by any country. |
Antarctica
Emilio Palma | An Argentine national who is the first person known to be born on the continent of Antarctica. |
Religion in Antarctica | There's more of it than you might suspect, including five churches. |
Asia and Oceania
Baldwin Street, Dunedin | A short suburban road in Dunedin, New Zealand, reputedly the world's steepest street. |
Camp Bonifas | The bunkers on this golf course feature machine-guns and landmines. |
Cardrona Bra Fence | An eccentric tourist attraction in New Zealand. |
Coober Pedy, South Australia | A mining town where most of the residents live underground. |
Cross Cafe | A Hitler-themed Indian restaurant, formerly known as "Hitlers' Cross" [sic]. |
Gate Tower Building | A skyscraper in Japan that has a highway passing through its fifth, sixth and seventh floors. |
Helengrad | A right-wing nickname for Wellington, New Zealand, derived from former Prime Minister Helen Clark's apparent steel grip on her cabinet. |
Jewish Autonomous Oblast | Far away in the depth of Eastern Siberia there's a place with street names in Yiddish, even though 95% of its population is not Jewish. |
Kowloon Walled City | A former Chinese enclave in Hong Kong, known for its extremely high population density, food courts which served dog meat, and claustrophobic dwellings. |
Love Land | An erotic-themed sculpture park on Jeju island in South Korea. |
Ryugyong Hotel | Once, it would have been the world's tallest hotel – except it lacked windows, fittings, or fixtures for over twenty years. |
Shingō, Aomori | Did you know that Jesus escaped his crucifixion and raised a family in Japan? |
X-Seed 4000 | The tallest building ever designed—houses 500 thousand to one million people and stands 4 kilometers (2.485 miles) tall with 800 floors in Tokyo. Although the building "is never meant to be built". |
Europe
Argleton | A non-existent town in Lancashire, England, that appeared on Google Maps. |
Baarle-Hertog | A municipality of Belgium, consisting in part of twenty-three exclaves within the Netherlands, some of which in turn contain Netherlands exclaves. (Some houses and shops are in both Belgium and the Netherlands.) |
Baarle-Nassau | A municipality of the Netherlands, containing small exclaves of Belgium, which in turn contain even smaller exclaves of the Netherlands. (The borders mean that there are houses and companies which are in both Belgium and the Netherlands.) |
Barcelona Supercomputing Center | A supercomputer in a medieval chapel. |
Bielefeld Conspiracy | The Bielefeld-Verschwörung tries to hide the horrible truth about a city in Westphalia, Germany that doesn't exist... well, maybe. |
Brennender Berg | A German coal mine on fire since 1688. |
Büsingen am Hochrhein | A German town that is fully contained within Switzerland. |
Carpatho-Ukraine | Possibly the shortest-lived state in history; it was independent for only 24 hours. |
Colletto Fava | A 5,000-foot hill with a 200-foot stuffed pink bunny on top. |
Ebenezer Place, Wick | The world's shortest street. |
Fallen Monument Park | A Russian park best known for its toppled statues. |
Ferdinand Cheval | A postman, who, for thirty-three years, collected stones while making his rounds and used them to build a surreal Palais Idéal ("Ideal Palace") of astonishing proportions and intricate detail. |
Ferdinandea | An island that is constantly mistaken for a submarine. |
Forest swastika | A gigantic swastika made of larch trees that went unnoticed for nearly sixty years. |
Gropecunt Lane | A street name found in English towns and cities during the Middle Ages. |
Icelandic Phallological Museum | A museum in Iceland solely devoted to the collection of penis specimens and penis-related art. |
JASON reactor | The only nuclear reactor in a 17th century building. |
Magic Roundabout | Only in the United Kingdom would you find a large roundabout with five mini-roundabouts. (Not to be confused with the "Magic Roundabout"s in Colchester, Hemel Hempstead or High Wycombe – or, for that matter, this "Magic Roundabout".) |
Märket | A lighthouse originally built in the wrong country due to inexact maps is reason behind the very peculiar border between Sweden and Finland on the island of Märket. |
Monte Kaolino | A ski resort without snow. |
Neutral Moresnet | A tiny European region (approx. 3.5 km²) that existed for a century as neutral territory between Germany and Belgium. |
Other World Kingdom | A micronation and BDSM resort whose ultimate goal is "absolute matriarchy" – for all men to be enslaved by women. |
Principality of Sealand | A micronation located six miles (10 km) off the coast of Suffolk, England, whose population rarely exceeds ten. |
Reality Checkpoint | A lamp-post with its own name. |
Sedlec Ossuary | A Christian chapel decorated by the bones of approximately 40,000 people. |
Smallest House in Great Britain | Only 5.49 square metres (59.1 ft2) in size. |
Spreuerhofstraße | The world's narrowest street. |
UFO-Memorial Ängelholm | A memorial to a reputed UFO landing in Sweden. |
Weißwurstäquator | The "White Sausage Equator" in Germany. |
- See also
Mathematics and numbers
−0 | Zero has a negative flavor in the worlds of computing, experimental science and statistical mechanics. |
0.999... | An infinitely long way to write 1. |
12407 | A number which is interesting because it is uninteresting. |
2 + 2 = 5 | FREEDOM IS SLAVERY...TWO AND TWO EQUALS FIVE. |
Calculator spelling | 8008135 |
The Complexity of Songs | A treatise on space complexity of songs by venerable computer scientist Donald Knuth. |
Erdős–Bacon number | Combination of the degree of separation from actor Kevin Bacon and mathematician Paul Erdős. |
Extravagant number | Don't take it shopping. Not very friendly with the frugal number either. |
Graham's number | A number so large that the observable universe is not big enough to write it all down. |
Happy number | Not just a cheery song on the radio. |
Hexakosioihexekontahexaphobia | For beastly people bored of triskaidekaphobia. |
Illegal prime | Does the government forbid knowledge of the existence of certain prime numbers? |
Indiana Pi Bill | A notorious attempt to legislate the value of pi. |
Infinite monkey theorem | An infinite number of monkeys typing on an infinite number of typewriters will produce all possible written texts. |
Look-and-say sequence | Also known as the Cuckoo's Egg. |
Mathematical fallacy | Trying to prove that 2 = 1 or that 1 < 0. |
Monty Hall problem | The counter-intuitive way to prevail at playing Let's Make a Deal. |
Narcissistic number | The pluperfect digital invariant says "Count me in"! |
Nothing up my sleeve number | A number which is "above suspicion". |
Numbers station | [Six bars of The Lincolnshire Poacher play] "¡Atención! ¡Atención! One, four, seventeen, twenty-four..." |
Minkowski's question mark function | A function with an unusual notation and possessing unusual fractional properties. |
Ulam spiral | A bored mathematician discovers an unusual numerical pattern while doodling. |
Undecimber | In Java, the thirteenth month of the year. |
Vampire number | Integers with real bite; some even have multiple pairs of fangs. |
Will Rogers phenomenon | Also known as the Will Rogers paradox; the apparent paradox obtained when moving an element from one set to another set that raises the average values of both sets. |
Zeroth | An ordinal number popular in computing and related cultures. |
Dates and timekeeping
Ruth Belville | She followed her parents in the business of selling people Greenwich Mean Time. |
Chrismukkah | A fictional Christmas-Hanukkah hybrid, popularized by the television show The O.C. |
Dagen H | September 3, 1967: the day that Sweden changed its traffic directionality. |
February 30 | Not as completely fictional as you might think. |
Festivus | December 23: Holiday celebrated by the Costanza family on the television show Seinfeld, since appropriated by many. |
International Talk Like a Pirate Day | Shiver my timbers (a-harrr!) every September 19. |
January 0 | Thought the day before New Year's Day would be in the previous year? Think again. |
Manhattanhenge | Twice every year, the setting sun aligns with Manhattan's street grid. |
Phantom time hypothesis | A theory by Heribert Illig that the Early Middle Ages (614–911) never occurred. Therefore, we are in 1727 rather than 2024. |
Pi Day | The day – March 14 – on which the constant π is celebrated. |
Square Root Day | Any date when the day and month are both the square root of the last two digits of the year (the next one being 4th April 2016). |
Time Cube | Time is cubic, not linear. There are four simultaneous days in a single rotation of the Earth. "Singularity is a damnable lie" – and so on... |
Towel Day | Don't forget to bring a towel, terrible or otherwise. |
Year 2038 problem | The computing problem that will arise due to the Unix time representation used in many computers. |
Year 10,000 problem | The collective name for all potential software bugs that will emerge as the need to express years with five digits arises. |
Year zero | Was there a year between 1 BC and AD 1? |
Language
Antiqua–Fraktur dispute | A dispute over which typeface was more "German". At first, the Nazis were for Fraktur... |
Apples and oranges | According to scholars, comparing the two may be easier than previously thought. |
Arcaicam Esperantom | How do you make things look "old" in an artificial language? By inventing a new one! |
Behind the sofa | Where young British children hid from menacing scenes in sci-fi TV, now recalled humorously and nostalgically by British adults. |
Brainfuck | Not what you think it is – unless, maybe, you're a computer geek... |
Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo. | A meaningful, grammatical construction that has inspired linguists to talk about bullying amongst New York's bison population. |
Bushism | Any of a number of peculiar words, phrases, pronunciations, malapropisms, semantic or linguistic errors that have occurred in the public speaking of former United States President George W. Bush. |
Colorless green ideas sleep furiously | A sentence contrived by Noam Chomsky to demonstrate that a sentence can be grammatical yet nonsensical. |
Controversies about the word "niggardly" | How a simple word can cause so much controversy. |
Cryptophasia | The secret language of identical twins, also called idioglossia. |
Disambiguation (disambiguation) | For when you're really not sure what you mean. [disambiguation needed] |
Dord | A nonexistent English word, supposedly meaning "density", which was listed in the second edition of Webster's New International Dictionary from 1935 to 1939. |
The dozens | A usually good-natured African American ritual in which two competitors, usually male, exchange trash-talk until one has no comeback. |
Engrish | Attempts by East Asian people – especially the Japanese – to construct English words and phrases. |
ETAOIN SHRDLU | Cryptic echoes from the days of hot metal typesetting. |
Faux Cyrillic | Give text some of that Яussiaи flavour. |
Fedspeak | A deliberately confusing, carefully rehearsed cryptic language, whose delphic dialect is used to effectively prevent the understanding of Fed policy. |
Fictitious entry | The content may be fictitious, but the entry is a fact. |
Fnord | Deliberately misleading, irrelevant or false information meant to suggest conspiracy. A popular word among Discordians. |
Ghoti | As good an argument as any for English spelling reform. |
How now brown cow | A way to greet those well versed in rhetoric. |
Hyphen War | A dash between communism and independence. |
Inherently funny word | Some influential comedians have long regarded certain words in the English language as humorous because of their sound or resemblance to other words. Poodle, wankel, ni... |
Intentionally blank page | The self-refuting meta-reference that is "This page intentionally left blank". |
James while John had had had had had had had had had had had a better effect on the teacher | Repetition gone wrong. |
Latin profanity | Latin for the profane. |
Leet | Th3 1@ngu/\&e 0f H@xx0rz. |
List of English words containing Q not followed by U | A Scrabbler's dream article. |
List of ethnic slurs | Ever wondered why they got so angry at you? |
List of lists of lists | Wrap your head around that one. |
List of words that comprise a single sound | Uttering a single sound may sometimes suffice to express an entire idea. |
Longest word in English | Floccinaucinihilipilification, supercalifragilisticexpialidocious and other contenders. |
Mamihlapinatapai | The Guinness World Record holder for the "most succinct word". |
Martian language | Chinese language + Internet = new language. |
Metal umlaut | Gïvë thë lögö för ÿöür hëävy mëtäl bänd ä töügh Gërmänïc fëël. |
Mother insult | What is this article about? Your Mom! |
Phaistos Disc | Ancient spirals of undeciphered hieroglyphs. |
Placeholder name | You know, thingamajigs, doohickeys, whatchamacallits... |
Pompatus | All Steve Miller's fault. |
RAS syndrome | ...which is itself an example of RAS. |
Russenorsk | A Slavic-Scandinavian hybrid that lasted only 150 years. |
Robert Shields | You think you are hooked on recording every detail of your life..? |
Society for the Prevention of Calling Sleeping Car Porters "George" | An association formed to oppose the custom of addressing railway sleeping car porters as "George" regardless of their actual name. |
Thinking about the immortality of the crab | A colorful Spanish idiom for daydreaming; try using this one if your teacher notices you becoming inattentive in class. |
Toynbee tiles | Tiles found embedded in asphalt, usually sporting cryptic messages. |
Unknown unknown | Things that we don't know we don't know. |
Voynich manuscript | An undeciphered illustrated book written six hundred or so years ago, by an anonymous author using an unidentified alphabet. |
Names
Adolf Lu Hitler Marak | A politician in the Indian state of Meghalaya, where people are commonly given names such as "Lenin R. Marak", "Stalin L. Nangmin", "Frankenstein W. Momin" and "Tony Curtis Lyngdoh". He claims to be "happy with [his] name, although I don't have any dictatorial tendencies". |
Aptostichus stephencolberti | A trapdoor spider named after Stephen Colbert. Naturally, because he asked for it. |
Dick Assman | A Saskatchewan service station owner whose name garnered international attention in 1995. |
Praise-God Barebone | Christened Unless-Jesus-Christ-Had-Died-For-Thee-Thou-Hadst-Been-Damned Barebone; not to be confused with Nicholas If-Jesus-Christ-Had-Not-Died-For-Thee-Thou-Hadst-Been-Damned Barbon. |
Bill Gates' flower fly | A flower fly, Eristalis gatesi, named after Bill Gates. |
Cox-Zucker machine | Algorithm named after its inventors. |
Deportivo Wanka | An unfortunately named Peruvian football team whose strips are remarkably popular in Britain. |
Disambiguation (disambiguation) | Too bad we need to know what the first word means to understand what a disambiguation page is. |
Donaudampfschiffahrtselektrizitäten-hauptbetriebswerkbauunter-beamtengesellschaft | An officials' association in pre-war Vienna, Austria of a shipping company for transporting passengers and cargo on the Danube. |
Gaylord Silly | A long distance runner from the Seychelles who also works as a tree surgeon. |
GoldenPalace.com Monkey | A new species of monkey that was officially named after the GoldenPalace.com internet casino. |
Lazarus taxon | Leaping Lazarus! Somewhat like Monty Python's Dead Parrot, it's not really dead, it's just resting. |
Jennifer 8. Lee | A New York Times reporter whose middle name is the number eight. |
Leone Sextus Denys Oswolf Fraudatifilius Tollemache-Tollemache de Orellana Plantagenet Tollemache-Tollemache | If you think that's a bad name, his brother was "Lyulph Ydwallo Odin Nestor Egbert Lyonel Toedmag Hugh Erchenwyne Saxon Esa Cromwell Orma Nevill Dysart Plantagenet Tollemache-Tollemache". |
List of names for the Wild Turkey | Not included: "the Wild Turkey". |
List of people with reduplicated names | Boutros Boutros-Ghali and Neville Neville. |
Seán Dublin Bay Rockall Loftus | An Irish politician who changes his name to emphasize political affiliations. |
Mannanafnanefnd | A committee in Iceland that determines whether a name is suitable for integration into the Icelandic language. Apparently voted yes about themselves. |
Mothers against decapentaplegic homolog 3 | Actually, it's a polypeptide. |
Neville Neville | The father of Phil Neville and Gary Neville, English footballers. |
NAMBLA | The North American Man/Boy Love Association (NAMBLA). Declared pedophile organization. |
Pikachurin | An extracellular matrix-like retinal protein named after Pikachu. |
Richard Plantagenet Campbell Temple-Nugent-Brydges-Chandos-Grenville | A warning to us all about taking double-barrelled surnames too far... |
Scrotum humanum | Nothing to do with trouser snakes, but lizards of an entirely different scale. |
Setaceous Hebrew Character | A European moth with wing markings bearing a chance resemblance to a letter in the Hebrew alphabet. |
States Rights Gist | A Confederate general during the US Civil War. |
Covered smut, False loose smut, and Loose smut | You may snicker now, but if you had any one of those, I guarantee you wouldn't be laughing much. |
Sonic hedgehog | A protein in the vertebrate hedgehog family that was officially named after Sega's video game character Sonic the Hedgehog. |
Strigiphilus garylarsoni | A biting louse named for cartoonist Gary Larson of Far Side fame. |
Thursday October Christian I | The son of Fletcher Christian, leader of the mutiny on the Bounty. |
Wallsend Metro station | All railroads lead to Rome. With "no smoking" signs, although tobacco was unknown to ancient Romans... |
Wolfe+585, Senior | Longest name ever given. |
Zombie taxon | Paleontology of the undead. |
Zyzyxia lundellii and Zyzzyva | The last plant name and animal name in the dictionary, respectively. |
Science
Archaeoacoustics | Can ancient pottery be used to play back recorded voices from the distant past? |
Ota Benga | The tragic story of a Pygmy man from the Belgian Congo who was briefly exhibited in the Bronx Zoo. |
Buttered cat paradox | If a cat always lands on its feet and toast always lands buttered-side-down, what if...? |
Colors of noise | Including white, pink, purple, blue... |
Demon core | This chunk of metal only killed twice! |
Vladimir Demikhov | Eminent Soviet biologist and father of the canine head transplant. |
Natasha Demkina | Russian girl who claims to have X-ray vision. |
Drake's Plate of Brass | A forgery-related practical joke that went horribly awry. |
Elvis taxon | A taxon (species, genus, family etc.) that is believed to be extinct but is falsely claimed by someone to still exist. |
Fecal anthropology | The study of our ancestors' poop. |
Flying ice cube | They happen to live inside the computers of scientists trying to simulate molecules. |
Gimli Glider | Due to an input error, a Boeing 767 plane runs out of fuel mid-flight and becomes a glider. |
David Hahn | A 17-year old, known as the Radioactive Boy Scout, who irradiated his back yard attempting to build a nuclear breeder reactor from spare parts. |
The Hum | A phenomenon involving a persistent and invasive low-frequency noise of a humming character and unknown origin, not audible to all people, reported in various geographical locations. |
ISO 3103 | The ISO standard cup of tea. |
List of Ig Nobel Prize winners | Nobel Prize meets Weird Science. Result: Award-winning papers like "Injuries Due to Falling Coconuts" and "Chickens Prefer Beautiful Humans". |
List of unusual units of measurement | Fortnights and nibbles, super feet and Sagans. |
Magic smoke | An alternative theory of integrated circuits: once the smoke is released they no longer work. |
'Pataphysics | A parody of science that purports to study what lies beyond the realm of metaphysics. |
Pathological science | A pejorative term for scientific ideas that will simply not "go away", long after they are given up on as wrong by the majority of scientists in the field. |
Pauli effect | Something in the lab not working? Technical difficulties? Blame this guy. |
Quantum suicide and immortality | An infinite number of parallel universes means that any one person will always live forever. |
Raven paradox | First, you'll grant that all ravens are black, yes...? |
School bus yellow | A color especially formulated for use on U.S. school buses. |
Smoot | A strange unit of distance used to measure the Harvard Bridge. |
Sokal affair | Physicist Alan Sokal demonstrates that at least some postmodernists can't see an emperor with no clothes. |
Sound of fingernails scraping chalkboard | Urrrgggh! |
Toilet-related injury | Not all injuries and deaths linked to toilets are urban legends. |
Toilet paper orientation | On the pros and cons of letting toilet paper hang over or under the roll. |
Vomit Comet | Lack of gravity is not good for the stomach. |
Wrap rage | Ever been driven mad by packaging that just won't open? |
Earth sciences
Bloop | Does a mystery sound from the bottom of the sea indicate that Cthulhu may awake...? |
Expanding earth | A theory that earth is growing. |
Flat Earth society | A British society that holds the belief that Earth is flat, not spherical. |
List of snow events in Florida | Yes, snow is not unknown in the "Sunshine State". |
Mumbai "Sweet" Seawater Incident | Salty creek becomes sweet for one tide cycle. |
Raining animals | When it's literally raining cats and dogs. |
Red rain in Kerala | Did blood rain from the sky? |
Reversed map | A reversed map of the world, against conventional projections which have north at the top. |
S. A. Andrée's Arctic balloon expedition of 1897 | An ill-fated attempt to reach the North Pole. |
Roy Sullivan | An unlucky park ranger who got hit by lightning seven times. And survived them all. |
Waffle House Index | The U.S. government's alternative measure of disaster impact. |
Chemistry and material science
Dihydrogen monoxide | A commonly used chemical that can be deadly to all forms of plant and animal life, contributing to global warming, erosion, acid rain, and countless other maladies. |
List of chemical compounds with unusual names | Some a consequence of their constituents or origins, others simply the work of whimsical chemists. |
Mole Day | A day in celebration of Avogadro's number, 6.02×1023. |
Nanoputian | A series of organic molecules having a structure that looks human. |
New car smell | Ahh, that new car smell. |
Pykrete | A bullet-resistant frozen-water compound. |
Thiotimoline | A fictional chemical which dissolves before it comes into contact with water. |
Trimethylaminuria | Do you smell something fishy? It may be you! |
Unobtainium | A term used to describe any material with properties that are unlikely or impossible for any real material to possess. |
Space and astronomy
Cosmic latte | The colour of the Universe: a slightly beige white. |
Embryo space colonization | A proposal for colonizing space using embryos raised by robots. |
Extraterrestrial real estate | Want to buy a housing plot on the Moon? |
Ann Elizabeth Hodges | The first human in recorded history to have been verifiably injured by a falling meteorite. |
List of hypothetical Solar System objects | The planets that could have been. You think Pluto had it rough? At least it got its fifteen minutes of astronomical fame. |
Lunarcrete | Perfect for building your own cut-price moon base. |
Jupiter brain | Planet-sized computer |
Moon landing conspiracy theories | Fake photos, slow-motion cameras and secret studios. All directed by Stanley Kubrick. |
Moon Museum | Only two people have ever seen its exhibits in person. |
Nazi UFOs | Did the Luftwaffe, in fact, explore the final frontier and make contact with alien races? Whether the secret Nazi base is on the Moon or in Antarctica, the truth is apparently out there. |
Sex in space | And when you've exhausted the list, here's something new to try! |
Space advertising | Plans to launch giant billboards into space. |
Medicine and health
Accessory breast | Some people have more than two. |
Alien hand syndrome | An unusual neurological disorder, also known as "Dr. Strangelove syndrome", whereby one of the sufferer's hands seems to take a life of its own. |
Autofellatio | Acts of oral self-stimulation. |
Bananadine | Exactly how psychedelic are those dried banana peels? |
Bristol Stool Scale | Taking a close look at a toilet bowl for the sake of science. The scale was inspired by eye charts. |
Cello scrotum | Don't worry, boys, it's a hoax. |
Charles Bonnet syndrome | Millions of perfectly sane people are having freakish hallucinations - and just not admitting it. |
Dimples of Venus | For fans of those dimples you don't find on a face. |
Eigengrau | The color seen by the eye in perfect darkness. |
Exploding head syndrome | Ever woken up after an hour or two of sleep thinking you've just heard a massive explosion? |
Fart lighting | The act of igniting gases produced by human flatulence. |
Fecal anthropology | The study of our ancestors' poop. |
Female hysteria | A once-common diagnosis of a range of symptoms in women, cured through masturbation to orgasm. |
Five-second rule | The belief that food dropped on the floor is safe to eat only as long as it's picked up within five seconds. |
Human–animal breastfeeding | If you have breast milk to spare, a puppy, piglet or monkey would like to hear from you. |
Phineas Gage | A 19th-century construction worker who survived a three-foot-long tamping iron going through his skull. His resultant behavioral changes have made him an important figure in the development of neuroscience. |
Gerbilling | An urban legend about a sexual practice purportedly observed by some male celebrities. |
Gynecomastia | Also known as "man boobs". |
Hamster zona-free ovum test | A test, sometimes called a hamster test, involving human semen, hamster eggs, and a petri dish. |
Homokaasu | "Gay gas"—mysterious chemical substance conspiracy theory. |
Human penis size | Scientific data on average size, racial variations, surgical enlargement and urban legends. |
Hypertrichosis | Also known as "Human Werewolf Syndrome". |
Jenkem | Huffing the gas from fermented human feces for a hallucinating effect. |
Mad Gasser of Mattoon | A figure said to have terrorized the town of Mattoon, Illinois in 1944. |
Maggot therapy | The use of fly larvae in medical practice. |
Male lactation | Given the right conditions, just about any male can do it. Go ahead and try! |
Male pregnancy | Don't expect humans to do this, but seahorses can. |
Maple syrup urine disease | Not quite as tasty as it sounds. |
Lina Medina | A Peruvian girl who gave birth to a son when she was five years old, becoming the youngest human mother on record. |
Mellified Man | A legendary medicinal substance from Arabia. |
Lithopedion | The rare condition of an unborn fetus transforming to stone. |
MK-ULTRA | When a late-night radio host claims to have been brainwashed by the CIA, you may want to think twice. |
Möbius syndrome | A disease, most envied by poker players, that makes facial expressions impossible. |
Mucophagy | The consumption of mucus. |
Nacirema | An obscure New World tribe with some interesting practices. |
Navel lint | A study proves that most belly button fluff is blue and that women are less likely to have it. |
Nasal sebum | Yes, that stuff on the surface of your nose. |
Chandre Oram | A man in India with a 13-inch tail. |
Osteo-Odonto-Keratoprosthesis | A tooth in the eye (is worth two in the foot?). |
Parasitic twin | A medical condition where one of two conjoined twins lacks essential organs and must rely on the other for survival, often leeching its blood. An especially rare variant of this, fetus in fetu, involves one partially formed fetus developing within the body of the other. |
Persistent genital arousal disorder | Not as funny as it may sound. |
Photic sneeze reflex | People who sneeze when suddenly exposed to bright light. |
Rapunzel syndrome | Chewing on your hair is one thing, but actually eating it can have some untoward results. |
Schmidt Sting Pain Index | Created by an entomologist, after having been stung by almost everything, to compare the overall pain of insect stings on a four-point scale. |
Sleep sex | A form of parasomnia (similar to sleepwalking) that causes people to engage in sexual acts while they are asleep. |
Thumb twiddling | Maybe this is unusual to you. |
Mary Toft | An English woman who hoaxed doctors into believing that she had given birth to rabbits. |
Trepanation | A form of surgery where a hole is drilled or scraped into the skull. It was thought that such a procedure could cure problems like epilepsy or allow a person to enter into a higher state of consciousness. |
Uncombable hair syndrome | Not just a bad hair day. |
Nervous system and behaviour
Bananadine | Exactly how psychedelic are those dried banana peels? |
Capgras delusion | When you're sure a friend or loved one is an impostor. |
Charles Bonnet syndrome | Millions of perfectly sane people are having freakish hallucinations - and just not admitting it. |
Cotard delusion | Suffered by people, very much alive, who believe they're dead. |
Dancing mania | Unknown forces cause large groups of people to dance hysterically until dropping from exhaustion in multiple incidents in Europe from the 13th to 17th centuries. |
Death from laughter | Don't laugh – it's happened! |
Electromagnetic hypersensitivity | For those allergic to Wi-Fi |
Exploding head syndrome | Ever woken up after an hour or two of sleep thinking you've just heard a massive explosion? |
Female hysteria | A once-common diagnosis of a range of symptoms in women, cured through masturbation to orgasm. |
Foreign accent syndrome | A rare medical condition whereby sufferers speak their native language with a foreign accent. |
Fregoli delusion | The belief that different people are actually one person in disguise. |
Gerbilling | An urban legend about a sexual practice purportedly observed by some male celebrities. |
Homokaasu | "Gay gas"—mysterious chemical substance conspiracy theory. |
Jumping Frenchmen of Maine | Like Tourette's syndrome, but more Gallic. |
Klüver–Bucy syndrome | A behavioral disorder with some very odd symptoms, including "hypersexuality" and a desire to examine objects with the mouth. Named after two doctors who gave psychotropic drugs to lobotomized monkeys. |
MK-ULTRA | When a late-night radio host claims to have been brainwashed by the CIA, you may want to think twice. |
Möbius syndrome | A disease, most envied by poker players, that makes facial expressions impossible. |
Nacirema | An obscure New World tribe with some interesting practices. |
Paris Syndrome | Particularly common amongst Japanese tourists. Not to be confused with Jerusalem Syndrome or Stockholm Syndrome. |
Penis panic | A colloquial term referring to a type of mass hysteria or panic where males grow fearful of removal or shrinking of the penis. |
Schmidt Sting Pain Index | Created by an entomologist, after having been stung by almost everything, to compare the overall pain of insect stings on a four-point scale. |
Sleep sex | A form of parasomnia (similar to sleepwalking) that causes people to engage in sexual acts while they are asleep. |
Stendhal syndrome | A psychosomatic illness that causes rapid heartbeat, dizziness, fainting, confusion and even hallucinations when an individual is exposed to art. |
Tanganyika laughter epidemic | What happens when contagious laughter becomes an actual epidemic. |
Target fixation | To become so fixated on an object you are trying to avoid that you collide with it. |
Tip of the tongue | A memory-related phenomenon familiar to us all. |
Triskaidekaphobia | Fear of the number 13. |
The Truman Show delusion | Those afflicted feel they are being watched all the time by a television audience, like Jim Carrey in the 1998 movie The Truman Show. |
Animals
Anophthalmus hitleri | Rare blind beetle named after Adolf Hitler, poached by collectors of Hitler memorabilia. |
Animals in space | An annotated list of the various animals used in space programs. |
Apophallation | Can't extract your penis? Amputate and deploy your spare. |
Bird strike | One of the more unusual aviation hazards. |
Blast fishing | An illegal fishing technique that involves the use of dynamite. |
Bobbit worm | "Armed with sharp teeth, it is known to attack with such speeds that its prey is sometimes sliced in half." |
Candiru | A small parasitic freshwater catfish that swims into the gill openings of other aquatic species – or human penises. |
Cattle mutilation | The alleged killing and subsequent mutilation of cattle, sheep or horses by unknown perpetrators. Some say they may be aliens. |
Chicken eyeglasses | Tiny spectacles for chooks, to stop them from seeing red. |
Chicken hypnotism | Have you ever wanted to hypnotize a chicken? If not, why not? |
Chief Mouser to the Cabinet Office | The cat of the official residence to the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. |
Chicken sexer | A person who has been specially trained to determine the sex of chicken hatchlings. |
Christmas tree worm | A worm that looks like... a Christmas tree. |
Cow magnet | A plastic-coated magnet fed to cows to prevent gut damage by ingested bits of metal. |
Cow tipping | The act of pushing over sleeping cows. |
Depopulation of cockroaches in the ex-USSR countries | A great ecological problem indeed. |
Deer penis | It is said to enhance sexual potency in men and was banned by the Chinese government from the 2008 Olympics. |
Domesticated silver fox | Soviet Russia subsidizes the breeding of silver foxes. |
Elysia chlorotica | A sea slug that can photosynthesise and has stolen various genes required to do so from algae. |
Emerald cockroach wasp | A wasp that can ride a cockroach – and drive it, too. |
Enumclaw horse sex case | An unfortunate case of a horse riding a man, as opposed to a man riding a horse. |
Exploding toads | An as-yet unexplained phenomenon observed in April 2005 in districts of Hamburg, Germany and near a lake at Låsby, Denmark. |
Exploding whale | Real whales exploded in Oregon in 1970 and Taiwan in 2004. |
Fainting goat | A breed of goat whose muscles freeze for about 10 seconds when it is startled. |
Flying pig | The classic impossibility has been officially proved possible by the Internet Engineering Task Force: "With sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine." |
Globster | Blobs of organic matter found washed up on beaches, which are frequently as mysterious as they are disgusting. |
Guided rat | Implanted electrodes let researchers "steer the animal over an obstacle course, making it twist, turn and even jump on demand". |
Hardware disease | A condition in bovines caused by ingesting stray bits of metal. |
Hollywood Freeway chickens | A colony of feral chickens that have been living underneath a highway off-ramp since 1970. |
Humanzee | A hypothetical(?) human/chimpanzee hybrid. |
Ichthyoallyeinotoxism | Some fish produce a toxin with hallucinatory effects. |
Killer Badger | Man-eating creatures introduced to Iraq by the British military. Or not. |
List of animals displaying homosexual behavior | Everything from salmon to seagulls to dragonflies. |
List of animals with fraudulent diplomas | Your pet may be smarter than you. |
London Underground mosquito | A species of mosquito that lives only in underground railways |
Love dart | Hermaphroditic snails play Cupid. |
Montauk Monster | Actually a decaying raccoon... or is it? |
Nightingale excrement as facial | Droppings of a nightingale variety used in facials. Some claim that it helps with acne. |
Odd-eyed cat | One of the national treasures of Turkey. As owned by Muhammad. |
Orbiting Frog Otolith | A NASA frog experiment, sending two bullfrogs into space to test their sense of balance. |
Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus | An endangered creature, whose major predator is the sasquatch. Apparently. |
Panda pornography | Pornographic movies created to achieve sexual arousal for Giant pandas, which have been proven to be unaffected by the popular drug Viagra. |
Paracerceis sculpta | A species of isopod that has some males that mimic females and others that mimic juveniles, allowing them to mate without the alpha males realising. |
Pasilalinic-sympathetic compass | The snail telegraph hoax. |
Penis fencing | A l̶i̶t̶e̶r̶a̶l̶ figurative variety of cockfighting between some species of flatworm. |
Phantom kangaroos | They're not just found in Australia. |
Prostitution among animals | Did you know that prostitution exists among animals? |
Pig-faced women | A lesson to never compare a person's children to pigs when pregnant, lest you be cursed. |
Rat king | Not the rodent monarch familiar from The Nutcracker, but a rare (some say nonexistent) phenomenon in which a group of rats grow up with their tails tangled in a knot. |
Ravens of the Tower of London | Ravens used as soldiers in the Tower of London |
Rhinogradentia | A fictitious mammal order documented by an equally fictitious German naturalist. |
Soviet space dogs | That wacky Cold War! |
Spherical cow | "Consider a spherical cow in a vacuum..." |
Stephens Island Wren | Made extinct by feral cats, possibly the offspring of one pregnant female. |
Stray dogs in Moscow | Some of them have figured out how to commute using the subway system. |
Stray animals at Indian airports | Talk about wild protesters! |
Supernumerary body part | Having an extra body part, be it as simple as an eleventh finger or as extreme as a second head! |
Thagomizer | A feature of Stegosaurus anatomy named after a Far Side comic strip. |
Traumatic insemination | A form of mating in invertebrates in which the male stabs the female in the abdomen with his penis, and injects his sperm through the wound. |
Weasel war dance | The behavior of extremely excited ferrets who are enjoying themselves too much. |
Worm charming | No spade? No worries! There's a better way to get hold of earthworms. |
Individual animals
Adwaita | Possibly the oldest creature of modern times, this 255 year-old tortoise was the former pet of Robert Clive of the British East India Company. |
Benson | A fish. A big fish. Called Benson. |
Jack Black | Queen Victoria's officially appointed rat-catcher and mole destroyer. |
Bubbles | A chimpanzee who used human toilet facilities, moonwalked, and (allegedly) attempted suicide. |
Bummer and Lazarus | Two stray dogs that roamed the streets of San Francisco, California in the early 1860s and were exempted from local ordinances. |
Casper | A cat famed for travelling on a bus around Plymouth, England. |
Cat Mandu | The late co-leader of one of Britain's more unusual political parties. |
Courtaud | Even the city walls aren't safe. Wolves and the medieval psyche. |
Dusty the Klepto Kitty | Redefining the term "cat burglar". |
George | A lobster weighing 20 pounds, estimated to be 140 years old. |
Handsome Dan | The various incarnations of Yale University's athletic mascot. "In personal appearance he seemed like a cross between an alligator and a horned frog...". |
Henry the Hexapus | An octopus missing two arms due to an unfortunate birth defect. |
Hoover the talking seal | Hoover. A seal. Which talked. |
Jenny Haniver | A grotesque-looking sea monster made from the corpse of a ray. |
Khanzir | Possibly the world's loneliest pig. Even more lonely during the swine flu outbreak. |
Lily Flagg | A Jersey cow who made a lot of butter and got a sizable neighborhood named for her. |
Lin Wang | A Taiwanese elephant made famous for his participation in the Second Sino-Japanese War. |
Mary | Makes the phrase "hung like an elephant" take on a whole new meaning. |
Mike the Headless Chicken | A rooster that lived for 18 months with its head cut off. |
Nigger | A black dog whose portrayal in The Dam Busters (1955) somehow had to be edited out, overdubbed, or renamed. Nigger's grave remains unredacted, though. |
Nils Olav | A King Penguin who is Colonel-in-Chief of the Royal Norwegian Guard. |
Oscar the Cat | A hospice cat who was featured in the New England Journal of Medicine for his purported ability to predict the impending death of terminally ill patients. |
Owen and Mzee | Hippo and tortoise that befriended each other after the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami. |
Paul | A now-deceased psychic octopus who could predict the winner of football games, notably during the 2010 FIFA World Cup. |
River Thames whale | In 2006, a Northern Bottlenose swam into London and on to the front pages of the British newspapers. |
Rose | A goat that was married to a Sudanese man in 2006. |
St Guinefort | A 13th-century French dog unofficially venerated as a saint until the 1930s. |
Tama | The official station master of a railway station in Japan. |
Tamworth Two | In 1998, two pigs escaped from an abattoir in Wiltshire and made news, both in the United Kingdom and worldwide. (Their story was turned into a TV movie in 2003.) |
Tillamook Cheddar | The world's most successful and widely shown animal artist. |
Timothy | A tortoise that was present during the bombardment of Sevastopol during the Crimean War in 1854 and survived until 2004. |
Tirpitz | A pig who survived the sinking of one warship, to become the mascot on one of the ships that had sunk his first home. Tragically he was then auctioned off and eaten. |
William Windsor | A Cashmere goat that is a lance corporal in the British Army's 1st Battalion of the Royal Welsh infantry. |
Wojtek | A soldier of the 22nd Artillery Supply Company of the Polish II Corps who also happened to be a Syrian Brown Bear. He enjoyed beer and cigarettes. |
- See also
- List of U.S. state dinosaurs (does not include any of the List of U.S. state fossils)
- List of historical pigs
Plants
Arbre du Ténéré | A solitary acacia that was once the most isolated tree on Earth before being run over by a drunken Libyan truck driver. |
Gernikako Arbola | The Basque national tree, centre of a number of political disputes, once put under armed guard. |
Moon trees | Trees planted from seeds that were taken into space by Apollo 14. |
Penis Plant | A cactus the Germans call Frauenglück, or "Women's Joy". |
Queens Giant | A tulip tree located in northeastern Queens New York City, that is confirmed to be the oldest living thing in the New York metropolitan area, as well as the tallest tree in the NY metro area. As of 2005, it is up to 450 years old and 134 feet tall. It was alive before the birth of Shakespeare. |
Tree of Knowledge (Australia) | Killed by ignorance. |
Tree That Owns Itself | An oak tree in Athens, Georgia which is popularly regarded as owning itself. |
Vegetable Lamb of Tartary | Money doesn't grow on trees, but maybe sheep do. |
- See also
Technology, inventions and objects
Aglet | The largely unacknowledged invention which revolutionised shoelaces. |
Ampelmännchen | The East German "traffic-light little-man" ("Ampel männchen"). |
Brannock Device | The foot-measuring device found in shoe stores everywhere. |
British Rail flying saucer | Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it's the 10:13 to Venus. |
Canard Digérateur | Or "Digesting Duck", an automaton built to simulate a duck eating, digesting, and excreting. |
Cat organ | A keyboard instrument in which the keys cause cats to miaow. |
Centennial Light | A hundred-year-old light bulb that has been burning nonstop for 30 years. |
Chicken gun | Valuable for the mitigation of damage from bird strikes. The chicken carcass must be thawed first, though. |
Digital sundial | Unlike an analog sundial, a clock that indicates the current time with numerals formed by the sunlight striking it. |
Dreamachine | A device made with a light bulb and a record turntable that reportedly induces lucid dreaming. (And you thought the makers of Die Another Day made it up. There's still no news about invisible Aston Martin V12 Vanquishes.) |
Dymaxion car | A 1933 concept car with 3 wheels. It was 20 feet (6.1 m) long, carried up to 11 passengers, could go at speeds of up to 120 miles per hour (190 km/h), and had a steering wheel that turned the car in the opposite direction. |
Electronic voice phenomenon | Alleged spiritual voices heard in white noise and radio interference. |
Fictional elements, isotopes and atomic particles | Not actual periodic elements. Many end in '-ite'. Some of the elements may indeed be minerals. |
Marvin Heemeyer | Why it's always a bad idea to put the guy next door out of business if he has a ten-ton armor-plated bulldozer in his garage. |
History of perpetual motion machines | The concept has eluded and baffled the greatest minds for thousands of years – and will continue to elude anyone who tries to build one. |
Hollowed-out book | Why books are popular in prisons. |
Human mail | Why buy an expensive ticket when you can go by mail? |
Interactive Urinal Communicator | A talking urinal made for advertising purposes. |
iLoo | Microsoft's attempt to bring you the internetz at the portable public loo. |
Iron Dobbin | A mechanical horse made in 1933 for the Italian Fascist Youth Movement. |
Japanese toilet | The most advanced toilets in the world with computers, nozzles and flashing lights. |
Jesus nut | Not someone crazy about Jesus, but the bolt on the top of a helicopter that connects it to the rotor blades. |
Klerksdorp sphere | Spheres with three parallel grooves dated to be three billion years old... Evidence of ancient intelligent life? An unusual natural phenomenon? Who knows... |
Knork | In contrast to the spork (see below), here's a knife/fork combo. |
Koteka | An unusual traditional garment of western New Guinea, also known as the "penis gourd". |
Hedy Lamarr | Film actress co-invents communication system later used in cell phones, Wi-Fi and other forms of wireless technologies. |
List of inventors killed by their own inventions | Perilous parachutes, lethal lighthouses and murderous motorcycles! |
Lloyds Bank turd | Possibly the largest example of fossilised human feces ever found, discovered under the future site of a Lloyds Bank in England. |
Loose wheel nut indicator | Yes, those little yellow tags you see on truck wheels really do have a purpose. |
Method of exercising a cat | A rather unusual patent; some say it's pointless. |
The Mississauga Blob | A flaming object that fell from the heavens onto a back-yard picnic table in Mississauga, Ontario, Canada in 1979. The mystery of its true nature drew worldwide attention and speculation. Turns out it was a frisbee. |
Mosquito laser | A bug zapper with a difference. |
Oliver Cromwell's head | This English political leader's head has an interesting journey after its owner is posthumously executed. |
One red paperclip | A man's small piece of metal turns out to be worth more than expected. |
Pasilalinic-sympathetic compass | A telegraph system using telepathic snails. |
Passenger train toilets | Why passengers must be discouraged from flushing or using toilets while the train is at a station. |
Peel P50 | The world's smallest production car |
Pigeon photography | Pigeons were used by the Germans for aerial surveillance in World War I, and apparently also in World War II. Not to forget the CIA's own pigeon camera. |
Pointy hat | A distinctive feature of a wide range of people during history. |
Project Cybersyn | Chilean robo-socialism control chamber invented by a Brit with a gigantic beard. |
Reliant Regal | A three-wheeled car formerly manufactured in England that could be driven with a motorcycle license. |
Rocket mail | The delivery of mail by rocket or missile, attempted by various organisations in many different countries, with varying levels of success. |
Royal Mail rubber band | One billion are used every year and often seen littering the streets of UK cities. |
RP FLIP | A manned ship designed to be capsized at a 90° angle for weeks on end. |
Russian floating nuclear power station | Self-contained, low-capacity, floating nuclear power plants. |
Screw-propelled vehicle | Get there by screwing. |
Shipping container architecture | The concept and art of using intermodal containers to build stuff. |
South Pointing Chariot | An ancient Chinese mechanical compass which took a millennium to reproduce. |
Spork | A cross between a spoon and a fork. Not to be confused with a knork. |
Stainless steel soap | Metallic soap that removes odours from the hands. |
Tempest Prognosticator | Meteorology by frightened annelid. |
Tin foil hat | Headgear that allegedly prevents a person from having their minds read or controlled. |
Turboencabulator | A device whose sole function is to expose technological ignorance. |
Uncanny valley | How to measure your emotional response to androids. |
Whizzinator | A fake penis used to beat drug tests (complete with dried urine, heater, syringe). Comes in white, tan, latino, brown, and black. |
Xianxingzhe | A Chinese robot, according to the Japanese, that will save its country from corporate capitalism with its crotch cannon. |
Computing
Blinkenlights | DAS KOMPUTERMASCHINE IST NICHT FÜR DER GEFINGERPOKEN UND MITTENGRABEN! |
The Book of Mozilla | A well-known computer Easter egg found in the Netscape and Mozilla series of browsers. |
Brian's Brain | He's so smart, he has a cellular automaton! |
Bush hid the facts | Revelations of a vast right-wing conspiracy, or just a glitch? |
Chudnovsky brothers | A pair of mathematicians who built a supercomputer out of spare parts. |
The computers take over | A science fiction scenario in which a supercomputer becomes intelligent and views humans as a threat to its safety. The computer will then try to wipe out the human race, or at least take control of it. Examples include The Terminator and The Matrix. |
The Cruelty of Really Teaching Computer Science | A 1990 academic paper which argues that computer programming should be understood as a branch of mathematics, and that the formal provability of a program is a major criterion for correctness. |
Esoteric programming language | Refers to programming languages designed as a test of the boundaries of computer programming language design, as a proof of concept, or as jokes, and not with the intention of being adopted for real-world programming. |
Guru Meditation error | If you thought the blue screen of death was bad, this computer error would hamper your quest to reach Nirvana. |
I Am Rich | You must be if you could afford this US$999.99 iPhone application that did, well, not very much of anything. |
iFart Mobile | Setting the precedent for useless iPhone apps everywhere. |
IP over Avian Carriers | An internet protocol for sending data packets using homing pigeons. |
iSmell | A computer peripheral designed to emit smells for websites and emails, later named one of the "Worst Tech Products" by PC Magazine. |
Lenna | How an image of a nude Playboy model became the industry-standard digital image compression test subject. |
lp0 on fire | Want to panic a Unix user? Display an error that their printer is on fire. |
MacQuarium | Vintage Macintosh computers-turned-fishtanks. |
MONIAC Computer | A water-based analogue computer used to model the United Kingdom economy, bringing a new meaning to the term liquidity. |
Reality distortion field | Surely an obscure quantum-physics phenomenon? Nope! |
Scunthorpe problem | Spam filtering based on text strings can cause problems. Just ask the residents of S****horpe. |
Self-balancing unicycle | The ongoing academic effort to teach robots to ride unicycles. |
Trojan room coffee pot | The fascinating target of the world's first webcam: a coffee machine at the computer science department of Cambridge University. |
Typographical personification | Have you ever recevied a visit frm teh Typo Fairy? |
Utah teapot | A 3D model which has become a standard reference object (and something of an in-joke) in the computer graphics community. |
Popular culture, entertainment and the arts
The Aristocrats | A joke considered to be both "the world's funniest" and "the world's worst". Also a 2005 documentary of the same name. |
Bigipedia | A unique experiment in "broadwebcasting", Bigipedia is the website on your radio. In association with Chianto—"Officially recognised by the EU as a wine-type product". |
Boys are stupid, throw rocks at them! controversy | T-shirt slogan aimed towards young women, rocks aimed towards young men. |
George P. Burdell | A fictitious student officially enrolled at Georgia Tech in 1927, and who has been continuously enrolled at the school ever since. |
The Bus Uncle | A Hong Kong resident gets into an uncomfortably tense argument with a fellow passenger—all caught on video. |
Conan the Librarian | A perennial parody of Conan the Barbarian that has appeared in film, television, comics, and fan fiction. |
Croydon facelift | A hairstyle peculiar to parts of England. |
Cultural depictions of Napoleon | Fictional characters believing they are Napoleon are often used to suggest mental ill health. |
Cuteness in Japanese culture | It's not just Hello Kitty and Pikachu. |
Donkey punch | Allegedly a sex move involving punching one's partner in the back of the head during intercourse. |
Drop bear | A fictitious Australian marsupial supposedly related to the koala. |
Evil clown | A recent development in American popular culture in which the playful trope of the clown is rendered as disturbing through the use of dark humor and horror elements. |
Evil Overlord List | How to avoid the movie clichés. |
Flash mob | Wherein a group of people quickly meet up, engage in a random action such as a pillow fight, then disappear just as quickly. |
Fuck for Forest | Do your bit to save the rainforest—have an orgy! |
Garden Gnome Liberation Front | Vive la révolution des gnomes! |
Ghost ride | One of the latest trends to be popularized by hyphy culture. |
Gurn | A Western term for creating odd appearances of the face. |
Happy slapping | Hurting someone while taking a picture of them, usually with a camera phone. |
Human rainbow | A huge gathering of colours. |
Issei Sagawa | Writer, commentator, minor celebrity, murderer, and cannibal. |
Kayfabe | In professional wrestling, the portrayal of events within the industry as real. |
Love padlocks | A fence in the southern Hungarian town of Pécs where lovers clamp padlocks |
Masturbate-a-thon | A charity fundraiser that involves self-pleasure. |
Mehran Karimi Nasseri | An Iranian refugee who lived in Charles de Gaulle Airport from 1988 until 2006. |
Meta-joke | A joke that refers to itself as the joke. |
Metafiction | Fictional fiction. |
Mile High Club | Soaring members. |
Mooning the Cog | Bad weather isn't the only reason to avoid the summit of Mount Washington. |
Muffin top | A marketing mishap, many well-meaning young women, and vanity came together to form this demographic. |
Nazi chic | The approving use of Nazi-era style, imagery, and paraphernalia in clothing and popular culture. |
No soap radio | A prank joke intended to fool one of its listeners into believing that it is a joke. |
Obay | A fictional mind-control drug that's at the center of a viral marketing campaign. |
Pieing | A slapstick stunt, or a kind of political protest. |
Pen spinning | An activity in which assorted tricks are used to manipulate a pen in aesthetically pleasing ways. |
Le Pétomane | A French entertainer famous in Victorian times for being able to break wind at will. Practitioners of this... art are called flatulists. |
Aron Ralston | One tough guy who, to escape from death, cut off his own arm with a dull knife after a boulder fell on it. |
Real-life superhero | All you need is a cape and a dream. |
Rickrolling | Careful: that link you're about to click on might take you to a video of Rick Astley's Never Gonna Give You Up. |
Sardarji jokes | Popular jokes in India, based on stereotypes of Sikhs. |
Shoe tossing | The practice of throwing footwear, whether for humorous or political purposes. |
Three Wolf Moon | A T-shirt with wolves howling at the moon that gained popularity after one person wrote a sarcastic review for it at Amazon.com. |
Toilet humour | Humor based upon bodily functions. |
Treacle mining | The fictitious mining of treacle (molasses) in a raw form similar to coal. |
Us Tareyton smokers would rather fight than switch! | An ad campaign that figured the best way to sell cigarettes is to show all the consumers with black eyes. |
Vodka eyeballing | Here's looking at you, kid. |
Larry Walters | Successfully piloted a lawn chair to 16,000 feet over Los Angeles. |
The World Famous Bushman | A street entertainer in San Francisco who makes a living by pretending to be a bush. |
Games
The Game | A mind game in which players try not to think about The Game – which means that, by reading this, you just lost The Game. |
Guyball | A game involving a topmiler; where you do not leave the parish; stickles can be random, orthodox or alternate; and you are encouraged to splice the Matterhorn. |
Kancho | A Japanese children's game that simulates anal probing. |
Mornington Crescent (game) | A deceptively tricky game of navigating the London Underground—don't be caught in knip! |
Polybius (video game) | A supposed arcade game that made players go insane. Symptoms included intense stress and anxiety, horrific nightmares, and even suicidal tendencies. |
War on Terror, the boardgame | A boardgame satire of the real "war on terror" that has proved so popular, it has ended up in national museums, in a TV sitcom, as part of a military training simulation and as a teaching aid in higher education institutions. |
Art
Banksy | A graffiti artist who smuggles his works into world-class museums. |
Bog Standard Gallery | It's a museum... inside a portable toilet. |
Boll Weevil Monument | The only known monument built to honor an agricultural pest. |
Bottle Rack | A modern art piece created by Dada artist Marcel Duchamp. His sister, who mistook it for trash, threw it out. |
Chamber of Art and Curiosities | A cabinet of curiousities created by Ferdinand II, Archduke of Austria in the 16th century. |
Earring Magic Ken | How Barbie's boyfriend, in an attempt to look cooler, became a gay icon. |
Dinny the Dinosaur | A larger-than-life, 150 ton sculpture of a brontosaurus in the desert of Southern California west of Palm Springs. Dinny's companion is "Mr. Rex," a 150 ton sculpture of a Tyrannosaurus Rex. |
Fallen Astronaut | A small statuette which is the only piece of art on the moon. |
Fourth plinth, Trafalgar Square | The horse is missing. |
Gävle goat | A giant straw Yuletide goat that is the target of frequent arson attacks and vandalism. |
The Headington Shark | Oxford man has had a 25-foot (7.6 m) long sculpture of a shark embedded headfirst into the roof of his unassuming house since 1986. |
Katrina refrigerator | Loot this! Free meal inside! |
Knitta Please | NY Hip hop graffiti knitters. |
La Princesse | A 13-metre mechanical spider which stomped about Liverpool in 2008. |
Le Rêve | A Picasso painting that purportedly would have sold for a record price had its owner, Steve Wynn, not accidentally poked a hole in it. |
Largest photographs in the world | Includes information on print and digital photos that are reputedly the world's largest. |
McDonald's Sign (Pine Bluff, Arkansas) | One of the few single-arched McDonald's signs left. |
Mexican Perforation | A French artistic movement that expresses itself in underground places. |
Museum of Bad Art | A Museum "dedicated to the collection, preservation, and exhibition of really awful artwork". |
Paintings by Adolf Hitler | The Nazi dictator and perpetrator of one the worst genocides was also a painter. |
Pink Lady | In 1966, a woman secretly painted a 60-foot tall portrait of a nude woman over a tunnel and sued when the county tried to take it down. |
Roundabout dog | Seen any dog on the loose while out driving lately? Chances are it's a roundabout dog. |
Sacred Cod of Massachusetts | There's also a "Holy Mackerel", Batman. |
Scandinavian Institute of Comparative Vandalism | Mine is better than yours. |
Superlambanana | A statue in Liverpool that's half-lamb, half-banana. |
Tillie | An odd painting of a grinning face, that used to be on the Palace Amusements building in Asbury Park, New Jersey before it was demolished. |
Comics and animation
Acme Corporation | Their products have been used and endorsed by all the best cartoon characters. |
Afghanis-tan | Central Asian history has never been cuter. (Osama bin Laden makes an appearance as a turban-wearing stray cat.) |
Archie Meets the Punisher | The team-up you thought would never happen.... |
Arseface | A comic book character from none other than DC Comics. |
Bobobo-bo Bo-bobo | Name of a Japanese manga (comic) whose subject matter is as surreal as its title. |
Cartoon physics | In animation, humour takes precedence over the ordinary laws of physics. |
Clan McDuck | A fictional family in the style of a Scottish clan, from which a great number of Walt Disney Company's comic book characters held their origin.. |
Gorillas in comics | A curious abundance of gorillas in comic book plots during the Silver Age of Comics. |
Homosexuality in the Batman franchise | For half a century, Batman and Dick Grayson have been rumored to have a relationship. |
Jenny Everywhere | An open-source webcomic character. |
Moe anthropomorphism | In this time and age even a washing machine can be the girl of your dreams. |
Mr. Immortal | A Marvel Comics superhero with no special powers except immortality, who has been killed in ways including crushing, burning, self-impalement on giant novelty scissors, bear trap, cannon, chainsaw, piranhas, ferrets, spear, and python, and alcohol poisoning (three times). Prone to fits of rage upon returning to life. |
My Balls | Terror. Madness. Villains. Evil plots. And, most of all ... balls. From Japan, naturally. |
Tentacle erotica | Human-cephalopod sexual relations, popular in hentai. |
Literature
112 Gripes about the French | A handbook produced to help American soldiers understand the French. |
Aldiborontiphoskyphorniostikos | Published in 1825 as a Victorian children's book and described as "a round game for merry parties", the object of the game was to quickly recite alphabetical tongue-twisting mock-Latin gibberish. |
Anthropodermic bibliopegy | The practice of binding books in human skin. |
Atlanta Nights | A group of science fiction authors get together and deliberately write an absolutely horrible novel to fool and embarrass a "vanity publisher". |
The Book of Heroic Failures | A book which glorifies failure. Started off The Not Terribly Good Club of Great Britain. The book was a success and thus declared a "failure as a failure". |
Bookseller/Diagram Prize for Oddest Title of the Year | Who can forget such classics as Greek Rural Postmen and Their Cancellation Numbers, How to Avoid Huge Ships or Natural Bust Enlargement with Total Power: How to Increase the Other 90% of Your Mind to Increase the Size of Your Breasts? |
La Bougie du Sapeur | A French newspaper published every February 29th. |
Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest | A contest to find "the opening sentence to the worst of all possible novels". |
Lyttle Lytton Contest | Like the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, but "Lyttler" |
Death poem | The urge to have famous last words, taken to its logical, carefully rewritten extreme. |
Henry Darger | Writer of a 15,000-page manuscript along with several thousand watercolor paintings and other drawings illustrating the story, who went to Mass several times daily. |
Francis E. Dec, Esq. | Self-styled "your only hope for a future", a conspiracy theorist who mass-mailed to the medias outlandish tracts denouncing a "Worldwide Mad Deadly Communist Gangster Computer God" mind-controlling mankind, he has become a cult figure "kook" for the involuntary humor or poetry of his rants. |
Early American editions of The Hobbit | Now collectors' items because of their printing differences. |
English as She Is Spoke | A 19th-century Portuguese–English conversational guide and phrase book that is regarded as a classic of unintentional humour since it was apparently the product of translating a Portuguese–French phrase book by non-English-speaking Portuguese with the help of a French–English phrase book. |
Evil laugh | "Mua-ha-haha-ha-haaa" and the like. |
The Eye of Argon | An infamously bad heroic fantasy novella, written in 1970 by Jim Theis and circulated anonymously in science fiction fandom since then. |
The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women | A 1558 diatribe by John Knox against Mary, Queen of Scots and Mary Tudor. |
Gadsby | A 50,110-word long book famous for not using the letter "e". |
Grammarians' War | At the start of the 16th century, British schoolmasters were insulting one another. In Latin, of course. |
I, Libertine | A non-existent novel that was the subject of a hoax intended to criticize the manner in which best-seller lists are determined. |
Lecherous Limericks | Dirty limericks... by Isaac Asimov. |
"Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den" | A poem written by a Chinese poet in Classical Chinese. It can be comprehended and understood by all who understand the language, even though it consists entirely of the word "shi" repeated 92 times in different tones. |
List of books with the subtitle "Virtue Rewarded" | For some reason the "Virtue Punished" books never sell.... |
Lobby Lud | "You are ____ and I claim my five pounds". |
Magical negro | A racist stock character who helps out white protagonists. |
Marlovian theory | A theory which states that Christopher Marlowe's unnatural death was a hoax and that he continued to write and publish under the pseudonym "William Shakespeare". |
William McGonagall | A writer widely held to be the worst poet in the English language. |
Naked Came the Stranger | Journalists prove a point when their intentionally awful sex novel becomes a bestseller. |
Order of the Occult Hand | "It was as if an occult hand had edited this Wikipedia article." |
On Bullshit | A very serious essay by Harry Frankfurt sketching a philosophical theory of, well, bullshit. |
Philip M. Parker | Writer of “The 2007-2012 Outlook for Tufted Washable Scatter Rugs, Bathmats and Sets That Measure 6-Feet by 9-Feet or Smaller in India” and thousands of other works... by means of a computer program. |
Saddam Hussein's novels | Crimes against literature? |
Shakespearean authorship | A great conspiracy that concealed the identity of the true author of "Shakespeare's" works, implying that all contemporary references to Shakespeare's authorship were fraudulent or mistaken. |
Striking and Picturesque Delineations of the Grand, Beautiful, Wonderful, and Interesting Scenery Around Loch-Earn | Angus McDiarmad, a native Scots-Gaelic speaker, writes a book on a Scottish Highland area with the help of an English dictionary to great comic effect and is termed "the world's worst author". |
Le Train de Nulle Part | A French novel, 233 pages long, written without verbs. |
Music
Animutation | The practice of taking lyrics of foreign songs, "mishearing" them into English, and producing a flash video to go along with it. |
As Slow As Possible | A piece of music by John Cage to be performed until 2640. |
The Boy Bands Have Won | Actually, this album's full title is "The Boy Bands Have Won" followed by a further 151 words. As of August 2009, it holds the record for the longest album title. |
Rosemary Brown | A spiritualist who claimed that dead composers dictated new musical works to her. |
Cigarettes and Valentines | An entire record by Green Day whose master tracks were stolen. |
Curse of the ninth | The superstition that any composer of symphonies, from Beethoven onwards, will die soon after writing their own Ninth Symphony. |
The Dalton Brothers | Not to be confused with the Dalton Gang, this fake country group that opened for U2 in the late 1980s was actually U2 themselves. (Similarly, "The Folksmen", featured in the film A Mighty Wind, is a fake country and folk group supporting Spinal Tap whose members are Spinal Tap themselves.) |
Danger Mouse and Sparklehorse Present: Dark Night of the Soul | Due to a legal dispute, this album was released with a blank CD-R. |
Dark Side of the Rainbow | What happens when you mix Pink Floyd and The Wizard of Oz? |
Das erste Wiener Gemüseorchester | An Austrian orchestra whose musical instruments are made solely from vegetables. |
Earworm | It's got a hook in you. |
Electroencephalophone | A musical instrument controlled by brainwaves. |
Escopetarra | The Colombian gun-guitar |
Elvis sightings | There are many who still believe. |
Greenlandic hip hop | Yes. Greenlandic hip hop. |
Joyce Hatto | A minor pianist who had many doctored recordings falsely attributed to her long after she stopped performing in public. |
Helikopter-Streichquartett | A string quartet that must be played in four circling helicopters, the sound remixed, chopper sounds and all, for an audience on the ground. |
"Hitler Has Only Got One Ball" | Was der Führer only half a man? |
Industrial musical | A musical production performed for the employees of a business, intended to create a feeling of being part of a team, and/or to educate and motivate the management and salespeople to improve sales and profit. |
Jandek | A prolific and pseudonymous singer/songwriter active since 1978 who only grants the occasional interview and has never provided any biographical information. |
"Jeg har set en rigtig negermand" | A Danish #1 single from 1970, extolling the virtues of racial equality while calling a "negro man" "black as a bucket of tar". |
Florence Foster Jenkins | An American soprano famous for her singing ability or lack thereof. |
Katzenklavier | The "Cat piano"; making music from howling cats. |
Leck mich im Arsch | A canon, whose title translates as "Lick Me in the Ass" by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. |
List of songs topping polls for worst songs | We built this city on not being very good. |
Literal music video | What happens when you replace the lyrics in a music video with lyrics that describe what's actually happening in the music video? Hilarity ensues. |
The Lillywhite Sessions | Never officially released, and yet fans and critics can argue that it's the best "album" by the Dave Matthews Band. |
Loudness war | Why music is getting LOUDER over time. |
Metal Machine Music | A 1974 album by Lou Reed that consists of 64 minutes of audio feedback, widely believed to have either been an elaborate joke, or an attempt by Reed to escape from a record label contract. |
Manualism | The little-known art of playing music by squeezing air through the hands. |
The Monty Python Matching Tie and Handkerchief | A three-sided LP |
More cowbell | I got a fever, and the only prescription... is more cowbell! |
MP4 | Rock music and politics does mix. |
Musical saw | The least favourite instrument of Ronnie Wood, The Hollies and The Screaming Trees. |
Musikalisches Würfelspiel | A system written by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, in which the musical piece is decided randomly by playing dice. |
My Way killings | You can get killed for singing Frank Sinatra's signature tune in the Philippines. |
P Funk mythology | An article about the whimsical universe surrounding the P Funk all stars. |
Paul is dead | Was Paul McCartney replaced by a lookalike in the 1960s? |
Pink Floyd pigs | The band's recurring props and references. |
PopMart Tour | Take an unfinished studio album, hold a press conference at Kmart, and put on a show in countries around the world, complete with a spinning mirrorball lemon, a giant martini olive, a large golden arch, and the largest video screen ever toured. That would be U2's 1997–98 tour in a nutshell. |
Publius Enigma | A mystery wrapped in an enigma related to Pink Floyd, which has remained unsolved since it appeared on Usenet in 1994. |
The Shaggs | None of this band's members really wanted to form a band, nor did they really have any musical talent, but hey, a fortune teller predicted success, so off they went... |
William Shatner's musical career | His rendition of Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds regularly wins radio station competitions to find the "worst music of all time". |
William Stirrat | A man who claimed to have written "Unchained Melody" under the pen name Hy Zaret, despite the fact that Zaret was an actual person who did write the song. |
Thai Elephant Orchestra | An orchestra of elephants playing specially designed instruments. |
"To Anacreon in Heaven" | An 18th century drinking song whose melody was later adopted for "The Star-Spangled Banner". |
Kazumi Totaka | A music composer who hides his own song in many video games. |
Tromboon | An unusual instrument, with an even more unusual ⓘ. |
Ugly stick | An instrument in Newfoundland, an insult everywhere else. |
Up to eleven | This article is one louder. |
"Ventolin" | Single by Cornish electronic musician Richard D. James, otherwise known as Aphex Twin; a most abrasive piece of music. |
"You Suffer" | At a full 1.316 seconds in length, the shortest song of all time. |
The Zimmers | A rock band made up of elderly musicians. The lead singer is 90 years old. |
Zombeatles | Paul is undead. |
Television and film
An Alan Smithee Film Burn Hollywood Burn | A movie about a director who makes a bad movie, but can't remove his name from the credits because his real name is Alan Smithee. In reality, the movie about the movie was so bad that director Arthur Hiller was credited as Alan Smithee to disguise himself from the production. |
Al Murray's Compete for the Meat | A British game show where the top prize is a frozen chicken and the second prize is some sausages. |
Alternative 3 | An April Fools joke by an ITV science show leads many to believe that scientists were being kidnapped to prepare for the colonization of Mars. |
Atuk | The only known cursed movie script, which, according to urban legend, was responsible for the deaths of several prominent and portly comedians and maybe a couple of their friends. |
Australia's Naughtiest Home Videos | Forget Turn-On – this never even made it to the end of its only episode. |
Big Dumb Object | A mysterious object (usually of extraterrestrial origin) in a film that is there simply to cause a sense of wonder. |
Blue Harvest | The best way to keep away the paparazzi away from your movie: give the movie a fake title, like this one used by George Lucas for Return of the Jedi. |
The Canadian Conspiracy | A mockumentary released in 1985 that asserts that Canada is subverting the United States by taking over its media. |
Censored Eleven | A group of Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoons pulled from syndication due to their racist depictions of black people. |
Conspiracy 58 | A mockumentary that claimed that the 1958 World Cup was never actually held. Despite being revealed as a hoax at the end, people still believed it. |
The Cure for Insomnia | A movie that runs for 85 hours. Not the longest movie ever screened, however. |
The Day the Clown Cried | A notorious unreleased film about the Holocaust – hey, it's a comedy! |
Empire | A film by Andy Warhol consisting entirely of eight hours of still footage of the Empire State Building. |
The Fantastic Four | Not the 2005 film, but one filmed in 1994 purely to secure the copyright on the characters. |
First on the Moon | Proof that the Soviets got there, thirty years before Armstrong and Aldrin didn't. |
Flemish Secession hoax | Our regular programming is now interrupted to declare independence from Belgium. |
Goofy holler | A stock Disney sound effect. |
Greg Packer | A man on the street, no matter which street you're talking about. |
Jerry Haleva | A political lobbyist who got a film acting career solely based on his resemblance to Saddam Hussein. |
Jumping the shark | Metaphor for the point at which one can speak of a TV show as having had its best days behind it. |
K Foundation Burn a Million Quid | Why did the K Foundation burn a million pounds in cash? |
Michael Larson | A man who won over $100,000 in an American quiz show because he was able to notice a pattern in the flashing lights on the "Big Board." |
Kin-yan Lee | A Hong Kong actor repeatedly cast in Stephen Chow films as a nose-picking, bearded transvestite. |
The Longest Most Meaningless Movie in the World | A movie that runs for 48 hours. Despite its title, it isn't the world's longest movie, but the jury's still out on whether it's the most meaningless.... |
Manos: The Hands of Fate | A low-budget film created by a fertilizer salesman from Texas, which is largely considered to be the worst film of all time. |
MacGuffin | It doesn't matter what it is as long as it drives the plot along. |
Max Headroom broadcast signal intrusion incident | TV signals in Chicago are twice overpowered on 22 November 1987 by broadcasts featuring a person disguised as the 1980s virtual TV character Max Headroom. The source of the broadcasts and the people involved remain unknown. Ten years previously, the sound during a broadcast by the UK's Southern Television is replaced by a voice claiming to be an extraterrestrial named "Vrillon". |
The Metric Marvels | Nothing says 1970s in the USA more than a spinoff of Schoolhouse Rock with superheroes who teach the metric system. |
Monkey Tennis | Hypothetically, the worst television programme it is possible to make. |
Mull of Kintyre test | When can a human penis be shown on British television? |
Night of the Day of the Dawn of the Son of the Bride of the Return of the Revenge of the Terror of the Attack of the Evil, Mutant, Alien, Flesh Eating, Hellbound, Zombified Living Dead Part 2: In Shocking 2-D | As if that wasn't bad enough, it spawned a sequel. |
Pulgasari | A Godzilla-esque film, supposedly an allegory for unchecked capitalism, created by Kim Jong-il and a director whom he kidnapped. |
The Puppy Channel | This cable television channel had a simple premise: nothing but puppies, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. |
Roundhay Garden Scene | The first ever moving picture, which lasted for an epic two seconds. |
Shaken, not stirred | Why 007 prefers his martini shaken. |
Smell-O-Vision | A system designed to enhance films with odors. Used once for the 1960 film Scent of Mystery and never again. |
Soap Opera Rapid Aging Syndrome | A tragic condition suffered by some young characters on soap operas. |
Space Nazis | 'Take me to your Führer'! |
Spaghetti trees | Place a sprig of spaghetti in a tin of tomato sauce and hope for the best. |
SSSSSSS | Dirk Benedict and snakes. Long before the day of Samuel L. Jackson. |
Stay Puft Marshmallow Man | Large marshmallow mascot seen in the film Ghostbusters. |
Stinking badges | Something nobody needs. Possibly the most frequently quoted and misquoted line from a movie ever. |
Taylor Mead's Ass | A film consisting entirely 70 minutes of Taylor Mead's buttocks. |
Tomorrow's Pioneers | A Palestinian children's show produced by Hamas and co-hosted by various costumed characters, including one resembling Mickey Mouse. Most of said costumed characters are killed by Jews in some violent manner. |
Turn-On | An ABC comedy series that was cancelled even before the first episode had finished. |
Very special episode | A genre of television episodes with controversial life lessons interweaved into the storyline, popularized by Blossom. |
Wank Week | A Channel 4 project for all those who think there aren't enough jerks on TV. |
Tommy Westphall | How a child with autism, and Detective Munch, are responsible for more than 200 TV series. |
Steve Wiebe | The star of a film about him setting the world's high score... for Donkey Kong. |
Who's your Daddy? | To win $100,000 adoptees have to pick their biological father out of twenty five men. |
Wilhelm scream | A stock sound effect first recorded in 1951 and used in dozens of films (including all six Star Wars films, two Lord of the Rings films and Kill Bill). |
Video games
Atari video game burial | Are your video games not selling? Why not do what Atari did — bury them in a New Mexican landfill? |
Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing | A racing video game that is considered one of the worst of all time due to its opponents that don't move, the ability to drive through buildings and accelerate infinitely, and a notorious "YOU'RE WINNER !" [sic] message after each race. |
The Book of Mozilla | A well-known computer Easter egg found in the Netscape and Mozilla series of browsers. |
Boss key | A special key or key combination used in computer games to quickly hide the game from superiors or coworkers. |
Communist Mutants from Space | A Cold War Space Invaders clone in which you do battle with the Mother Creature, driven mad by radioactive vodka. |
Don't Buy This | A rare example of truth in advertising. |
Gibs | The little bits of gore you get when someone or something in a video game explodes. |
Great Giana Sisters | A game that was withdrawn from the shelves virtually as soon as it went on them. |
Hong Kong 97 | A video game where the dead Deng Xiaoping is a weapon of mass destruction. |
JFK: Reloaded | A video game released in 2004 where the player gets to assassinate president John F. Kennedy. |
MissingNo. | A Pokémon species that only appears as the result of a glitch, and has since been the subject of many sociological studies. |
Penn & Teller's Smoke and Mirrors | A compendium of computer games all created to allow the owner to scam his or her friends. Includes "Desert Bus": a painstakingly realistic 8 hour bus journey from Tucson, Arizona to Las Vegas through a featureless desert in real time. |
Polybius | An arcade game that supposedly causes it's players to go insane. |
Video games notable for negative reception | And we were so sure Aquaman: Battle for Atlantis would be a hit! |
Internet memes and online culture
All your base are belong to us | A phrase that originated in the 1989 video game, Zero Wing and sparked an Internet phenomenon in 2001 and 2002. |
Boobquake | Female users of social networking websites agree to determine whether their scandalous clothing can cause earthquakes. |
Carstuckgirls.com | An erotic(?) website devoted to women trying to free their cars from various obstacles. |
Cute cat theory of digital activism | ""Web 1.0 was invented to allow physicists to share research papers. Web 2.0 was created to allow people to share pictures of cute cats." — Ethan Zuckerman |
Every time you masturbate... God kills a kitten | If that's not a good enough reason why you shouldn't, I don't know what is. |
Guy Goma | A bloke who was at the BBC for a job interview is instead interviewed on its news channel about the Apple Corps v. Apple Computer lawsuit. |
The Hampster Dance | A web page featuring dancing hamsters set to music. The music (itself a sample) was sampled in a song, and made No.4 in the United Kingdom in 1999. |
How does one patch KDE2 under FreeBSD? | An Internet meme in the Russian internet culture. Various heads of state at Internet press conferences were asked this question – here are their answers. |
Internet Watch Foundation and Wikipedia | Talk about a major violation of WP:CENSOR and WP:POINT. |
Numa Numa | Or how a fat kid dancing to the O-Zone song "Dragostea din tei" in front of his computer became very popular. |
O RLY? | The sarcastic owl image that is becoming increasingly ubiquitous on the Net. |
OS-tan | A small Internet phenomenon where certain types of software (including various Microsoft and Linux operating systems) are depicted as young anime women. |
Mark V Shaney | A fake Usenet user whose computer-generated postings were created using Markov chain techniques. |
Shock site | Don't look! (No, really.) |
John Titor | The name of a purported time traveller from the year 2036. He posted on several time travel-related Internet bulletin boards during 2000/2001. |
Tourist guy | The picture of a Hungarian man and how it relates to 9/11. |
Unusual eBay listings | The strangest things people can sell on the internet. |
Festivals
Testicle Festival | Would you like to supersize those? |
Toy piano festival | A concerto of toy pianos. |
- See also
- List of Hitchcock cameo appearances
- List of films that most frequently use the word "fuck"
- List of films considered the worst
- List of television series canceled after one episode
- List of television series canceled before airing an episode
Food, drink, and products
Banana production in Iceland | More weird than Björk? |
Beer goggles | Does drinking a certain beverage make other people more attractive to you? |
Berserk llama syndrome | The result of being too friendly with llamas. |
Bird's nest soup | Asian delicacy. |
British Rail sandwich | Definitely not an Asian delicacy. |
Boneless Fish | A frozen fish scaled, gutted and deboned and then glued to its original shape using a food-grade enzyme without cooking. |
Cannabis foods | Various foods containing cannabis. |
Carmine | A common food dye manufactured from insects. |
Casu marzu | Italian maggot cheese. Cheese designed to be eaten while it is infested with cheese fly larvae. |
Century egg | A Chinese dish which involves preserving a duck, chicken or quail egg for several weeks to several months before eating. |
Chubby bunny | A common (but sometimes lethal!) game played with marshmallows. |
Civet coffee | Not coffee made from civets, but rather from ordinary coffee beans the civet has, well, excreted. |
Cola wars | A marketing battle between Coca-Cola and Pepsi. |
"Darkie" toothpaste | Racist toothpaste from Taiwan. |
Deep-fried Mars bar | A Scottish delicacy. |
Deep-fried Twinkies | America's answer to the above. |
Durian | King of fruits. |
Flies graveyard | A delicacy in the United Kingdom. |
Fried spider | Exactly what it sounds like, and a regional delicacy in Cambodia. |
Gay Fuel | An energy drink marketed towards the gay community. |
Grapefruit juice effect | Be careful – that delicious food item could be dangerous to prescription-drug users. |
Greenwashing | This article is environmentally-friendly! |
Hamburger University | Where McDonald's employees learn their stuff. |
Heart Attack Grill | Noted for its 8,000-calorie "Quadruple Bypass Burger". |
Hitler bacon | Is it kosher? |
Hotel toilet-paper folding | Ever wondered why it was so? |
Hufu | For all you vegetarian cannibals out there, the tofu product designed to look and taste like human flesh. |
If-by-whiskey | A famous speech successfully both attacking and defending booze. |
Ketchup as a vegetable | Makes junk food seem healthier. |
Kosher locust | Can Jews eat grasshoppers? |
Luther burger | described as the "cardiologists worst nightmare" |
Michel Lotito | Known as "Monsieur Mangetout" – "Mr Eat-all". |
Milbenkäse | A type of German cheese containing live mites, which are eaten along with the cheese. |
McDonald's urban legends | Is that worm meat in your Big Mac? |
McWords | Words created in popular culture as a result of the influence of McDonald's restaurants, e.g. "McJob" or "McMansion". |
Modern Toilet | A restaurant chain whose furniture and decor is based on – yes – toilets. |
Monkey brain | A Chinese delicacy that has been made famous through films. |
OpenCola | The world's first open-source beverage. |
Products produced from The Simpsons | Fictional trademarks gone real. |
Rhubarb Triangle | A recipe or a dangerous area to fly through? |
Roadkill cuisine | Yes, Skunk a la Michelin sounds tasty to some people. |
Sannakji | Small octopuses eaten alive with sesame oil. |
Sealed crustless sandwich | A patented peanut butter and jelly sandwich. |
Snake wine | A type of Vietnamese wine that includes a whole venomous snake in the bottle. |
Soda and candy eruption | Diet Coke + Mentos = geyser. |
Spoo | The most delicious foodstuff amongst all alien species of Babylon 5. |
Stargazy pie | A Cornish fish pie that looks back at you. |
Stinky tofu | Fermented soybean curd is apparently a delicacy for some people. One external link describes its scent as "a used tampon baking in the desert." |
Surströmming | A Swedish dish consisting of rotten herring, said to have the worst smell in the world. |
Takeru Kobayashi | A slightly built Japanese competitive eater. He has consumed 63 Nathan's Famous hot dogs and buns in 12 minutes and holds a host of eating records for other foods. |
Tarrare | A French showman and soldier noted for his unusual eating habits. Among other things, he ate a meal intended for 15 people in a single sitting, ate live cats, snakes, lizards and puppies, and swallowed an eel whole without chewing. |
Tastes like chicken | But baked, grilled, or fried? |
Tim Tam Slam | An Australian method for drinking tea through Tim Tam biscuits. |
Tomatina | A gigantic food fight with a ham-topped greased pole as the start. |
Turducken | A de-boned turkey stuffed with a de-boned duck, stuffed with a small de-boned chicken. |
Sonya Thomas | What weighs 105 pounds and eats more hot dogs in 12 minutes than most people do all summer? |
Unusually shaped vegetable | "While some examples are just oddly shaped, others are heralded for their amusing appearance, often representing a body part such as the buttocks." |
Vegetarianism of Adolf Hitler | Hitler believed that a vegetarian diet could both alleviate his personal health problems and spiritually renew the Aryan race. |
Who Ate All the Pies? | A chant sung by football fans in England and Scotland, aimed at supposedly overweight footballers, officials or opposing supporters. |
Whole stuffed camel | A claimed favorite dish of sheiks for their wedding banquets. |
Sports
Ali Dia | A guy who tricked his way into English soccer team Southampton F.C. by claiming he had won 12 caps for Senegal, was related to George Weah and had played for Paris St Germain. In 2007, The Times branded him the worst-ever player in top-flight soccer. |
Argélico Fucks | A Brazilian footballer with a socially problematic last name. |
Baseball metaphors for sex | Basic Instinct..? No, Baseball Instinct. |
Paula Barila Bolopa | A swimmer from Equatorial Guinea, who – much like Eric Moussambani below – competed in the Sydney Olympics. Her time in the 50m freestyle is apparently the longest in Olympic history. |
Steve Bartman | A Chicago Cubs fan best known as a scapegoat for the Cubs' failure to advance to the World Series in 2003. |
Bladderball | Yale University's contribution to the world of team sports. |
Blood-vomiting game | "Go" is serious business. |
Bog snorkelling | The noble art of competitive snorkelling through cold, noxious bog water. |
Philip Boit | How many other Kenyan skiiers can you name? |
Bottle-kicking | A ruleless drunken rugby-like sport played every Easter Monday since the 1700s in Hallaton, Leicestershire. |
Buzkashi | Something like rugby, played on horseback, with a dead goat. |
Chess boxing | A sport that alternates rounds of speed chess and boxing. |
Competitive eating | In which the main goal is the quick and vast consumption of food. |
Conger cuddling | The "most fun a person could have with a dead fish". |
Cooper's Hill Cheese-Rolling and Wake | An annual event held each May at Cooper's Hill near Gloucester. |
Curse of Billy Penn | How a skyscraper in Philadelphia kept the city's sports teams from winning championships for over 20 years. |
Curse of the Colonel | Colonel Harland Sanders wreaks revenge from beyond the grave on a Japanese baseball team. |
Disco Demolition Night | What could go wrong with encouraging people to bring unwanted disco albums to a baseball doubleheader and blowing up the records between games? |
Dock Ellis | Baseball pitcher who, among other things, threw a no-hitter while under influence of LSD, and once tried to hit every batter in the Cincinnati Reds lineup. |
Dwarf tossing | A humorous sporting competition where well-padded dwarfs are thrown by competitors. |
East Africa rugby union team | Did this rugby team really select a future dictator to play for them? |
Eddie 'the Eagle' Edwards | A British sportsman famous for coming last in the 1988 Winter Olympics ski-jump competition. |
Eton wall game | A sport played annually on St. Andrew's Day on a 5-metre-by-110-metre field. The last goal was scored in 1909. |
Extreme ironing | A sport whereby participants take an ironing board to a remote location and iron a few items of clothing. |
Fair catch kick | A little-known way to score points in American football left over from rugby. It was last used successfully in the pro game in 1976. |
Fatso the Fat-Arsed Wombat | Sydney's other Olympic mascot. |
Fierljeppen | A sport from the north of the Netherlands, where the objective is to jump over a trench. |
Ferret legging | A sport that involves putting two live ferrets inside one's trousers with the cuffs and belt clinched firmly and no underpants worn. Current record is 5 hours 26 minutes. |
Football tennis | Wimbledon meets Wembley... in Czechoslovakia. |
Football war | A four day war between El Salvador and Honduras, fuelled by a game of soccer. |
Fox tossing | A popular sport in 17th and 18th century Europe that involved tossing foxes and other live animals as high as possible into the air. |
Eddie Gaedel | A 3'7", 65-pound baseball player. Career on-base percentage: 1.000. |
Goose pulling | Hang a live goose from a rope, gallop under it on a horse and pull its head off. What could be simpler? |
Hamster racing | A uniquely British response to foot and mouth disease. |
Henley-on-Todd Regatta | An Australian boat race that is canceled when there is water in the river. |
Human chess | Enacted by costumed "pieces" on a scaled-up chessboard. |
Prince Hubertus of Hohenlohe-Langenburg | A blue blooded Alpine skier, from the frozen wastes of Mexico City. |
International Rutabaga Curling Championship | Rutabaga curling originated in the frosty December climes of Ithaca, New York. |
Isner–Mahut match at the 2010 Wimbledon Championships | A record-breaking 11 hour, 5 minute tennis match at the 2010 Wimbledon Championships. |
Jamaican Bobsled Team | The real life inspiration for the film Cool Runnings. |
Kudu dung spitting | Games for conservationists. |
Barry Larkin | The man who made the Olympic Flame pants. |
Lawn mower racing | Leaves the lawn in a very poor condition. |
Legend of the Octopus | If you're going to an ice hockey game in Detroit, be sure to bring your octopus. |
Lingerie Football League | "Uniforms consist of helmets, shoulder pads, elbow pads, knee pads, garter belts, bras, and panties." |
Jeffrey Maier | The twelve-year-old who helped the Yankees win the pennant. |
Mendoza Line | Baseball's standard for underperformance. |
Eric Moussambani | A swimmer from Equatorial Guinea who, in the Sydney Olympics, took twice as long as anyone else in the 100m freestyle. |
Mythical national championship | When is a champion not exactly a champion? |
New Testament athletic metaphors | Blessed are the healthy in heart... |
Octopus wrestling | A sport which once attracted crowds of thousands to watch free divers wrestle North Pacific Giant Octopus from the waters of the Puget Sound. |
Oorang Indians | An all-Native American National Football League team put together as a marketing gimmick to sell Airedale Terriers and known more for its halftime dog shows than for its football play. |
Pillow Fight League | The first rule of Pillow Fight League is that you do not discuss Pillow Fight League. |
Plainfield Teacher's College | Their football team was un-beaten, un-tied...and non-existent. |
The Play | Before going onto the field for your postgame musical performance, make sure the game is over. |
Poole – HAL 9000 | "I'm sorry, Frank, I think you missed it..." |
Rabbit show jumping | Watership up, Watership Down. Watership up, Watership Down. Watership... |
Rocket Racing League | A racing league intending to use rocket-powered aircraft to race a closed-circuit air racetrack. |
Sark national football team | Also known as The Bad Lions, the only national team that failed to ever score a goal. |
Fuahea Semi | As though being a luger from Tonga wasn't unusual enough, he tricked the world's media and the International Luge Federation for more than two years into believing that he bore the same name as a German lingerie firm. |
Smiggin Holes 2010 Winter Olympic bid | During the 2002 Winter Olympics, the two Australian comedians who gave the world Fatso the Fat-Arsed Wombat (see above) launched a bid to host the 2010 Winter Olympics in New South Wales, Australia. |
Snail racing | Ready, steady, slow! |
Sports-related curses | A variety of excuses for bad performance. |
Squirrel fishing | A sport of skill and patience. |
Taro Tsujimoto | An imaginary ice hockey player drafted because a manager was reportedly "fed up with the slow drafting process via the telephone". |
Teddy bear toss | A Christmas tradition in minor league ice hockey. |
Traditions and anecdotes associated with the Stanley Cup | An ice hockey trophy with a long history of abuse, superstition, and tests of buoyancy. |
Tropical nations at the Winter Olympics | More than just Jamaican bobsledders. |
Turkey bowling | So much for "don't play with your food". |
Underarm bowling incident of 1981 | An infamous end to an international cricket match that was arguably not cricket at all. |
USA Rock Paper Scissors League | Organised finger sport. |
Vinkenzetting | Finch-singing in Belgium. More competitive than you might think. |
Wife-carrying | One need not carry one's own wife to take part. |
Wooden spoon | A Cambridge University tradition adopted by rugby league and rugby union, the Wooden Spoon is awarded to the last-placed team in a competition. |
Yak racing | A spectator sport held at traditional festivals in Tibet and Mongolia, among other places. |
Zui Quan | An ancient martial art wherein one imitates the motions of a drunkard. |
Folklore
Bird people | The widely recurring motif in legends and fiction of birds who are people, or people who are birds. |
Bigfoot trap | Believed to be the world's only Bigfoot trap. |
Bonnacon | A mythical ox which flings burning dung at its enemies from its rear and horn. |
Cottingley Fairies | A successful photographic hoax in 1910s England |
Dog spinning | Do Bulgarians really twizzle their domestic canines to foretell prosperity? The UK Green Party thinks so, and they're not happy about it. |
Fearsome critters | North American lumberjack folklore, with Axhandle hounds and jackalopes. |
Flying ointment | A hallucinogenic ointment said to be used by witches in the Early Modern period. |
Gef the talking mongoose | A poltergeist-like creature which claimed to have been an 80-year-old Indian mongoose, alleged to have haunted a Manx cottage during the 1930s. |
Global Orgasm | Make love, not war... all over the world! |
Jersey Devil | A mythological creature said to inhabit the New Jersey Pine Barrens. |
Kaspar Hauser | A German youth who claimed to have grown up in the total isolation of a darkened cell, and was once thought to be linked to the princely House of Baden. |
Liver bird | A legendary cormorant or eagle that is the symbol of a major English city. |
Liver-Eating Johnson | A 19th-century mountain man with a penchant for revenge and the consumption of livers. |
Lluvia de Peces | It's raining fish in Honduras. |
Machine elf | An entity that people claim they become aware of after having taken tryptamine based psychedelic drugs such as DMT. |
Man-eating tree | A cryptobotanical anomaly claimed to have been seen by early travellers to Madagascar and elsewhere. |
Mongolian death worm | A large, bright red worm that kills using acid and electrical discharges – allegedly. |
Monkey-man of New Delhi | Reports in 2001 of a strange monkey-like creature appearing in New Delhi at night and attacking people. |
Phantom social workers | Mysterious claims of "social workers" seeking to abduct infants and children. |
Pickled dragon | A publicity stunt that landed a contract. |
Pole, Hungarian, two good friends | A two-nation proverb often cited, usually while drinking, in both Poland and Hungary. |
Popobawa | A bat-winged monster from Zanzibar said to sodomize people during election campaigns. |
Reptilian humanoid | A recurring theme in fiction, especially science fiction, pseudoscientific theories, and conspiracy theories. |
Rods | Photographic anomalies which some think are undiscovered flying creatures or miniature UFOs. |
Sidehill gouger | Fictional creatures said to inhabit the Rocky Mountains of British Columbia and the southwestern sandhills of Saskatchewan. |
Spring Heeled Jack | A mysterious character said to have existed in England during the Victorian age. |
Sweater curse | Think your loved one will be pleased if you knit them a sweater? Think again. |
Tanuki | A creature from Japanese folklore best known for its huge testicles. |
Tsukumogami | According to Japanese folklore, if you keep your straw sandals (or any other household items) around for 100 years, they may become "alive and aware" and develop eyes and sharp teeth. |
Vagina dentata | The tooth, and nothing but the hole tooth. |
Vampire pumpkins and watermelons | A folk legend from the Balkan peninsula of south-eastern Europe based upon the idea that any inanimate object left outside during the night of a full moon will become a vampire. |
Vril | A belief that aliens controlled Nazi Germany and helped Hitler and others to escape to the South Pole when the war was lost. |
Well to Hell | A 9-mile borehole drilled by Soviet scientists uncovers the sounds of millions of damned souls. Hot stuff. |
Society, economy and law
Acoustic Kitty | A failed CIA experiment at using a cat for covert surveillance. |
Angie Sanclemente Valencia | A former lingerie model alleged to have run one of the largest drug cartels in the world |
Bagism | A social ideology created by the Beatle John Lennon and his wife Yoko Ono which involves wearing a bag over one's entire body to promote peace and equality. |
Beard Liberation Front | A British interest group which campaigns in support of beards and opposes discrimination against those who wear them. |
Billboard-Utilising Graffitists Against Unhealthy Promotions | Or "BUGA-UP" for short. An Australian group of subversive artists who live up to their self-description by defacing tobacco and alcohol billboard advertisements to promote healthy living. |
Biotic Baking Brigade | Pie-throwing anarchists. |
Bling Ring | Star of reality TV show gets involved with group who burgles star of another reality TV show. |
Burning money | Which can provide for behaviour modification, political notoriety and a warm fireplace. (See also K Foundation Burn a Million Quid in the "Television and film" section above.) |
Flatulence tax | When you keep a lot of cattle, you're contributing significantly to the greenhouse effect ... aren't you? |
Fourth International Posadist | Trotskyism and UFOs. Yes, really. |
Guerrilla gardening | "Quick... torch on... plant those carrots!" |
Go Topless Day | A day to advocate topfreedom for women |
Let's trim our hair in accordance with the socialist lifestyle | A television show produced by the communist government of North Korea intended to educate the public on good and bad hairstyles. |
Đorđe Martinović | How the insertion of a beer bottle into the rectum of a Serbian farmer caused a major ethnic and political controversy in Serbia in 1985 and contributed to the collapse of Yugoslavia. |
Montreal-Philippines cutlery controversy | A 7-year-old boy's eating habits became an international incident. |
National Masturbation Day | There is a day dedicated to protect the right to masturbate! |
Nebraska Admiral | The landlocked U.S. state of Nebraska and its "Great Navy". |
Emperor Norton | Emperor Norton I, the man who claimed to be "Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico" in 1859. |
Old Sarum | A notorious rotten borough in Great Britain which, before 1832, was entitled to elect two members of Parliament even though it had only eleven voters and no residents. |
Pink Pistols | They're here, they're queer – and they're armed to the teeth. |
Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks | Amongst other insults and profanity, it supposedly told Sultan Mehmed IV of the Ottoman Empire to fuck his mother. |
Sentinelese people | An autonomous stone-age human tribe which completely avoids contact with the outside world. |
Shanghai Fugu Agreement | A completely fictitious international treaty accepted by the German state of Hesse in 1985. |
Socialist Patients' Collective | You've heard of the lone nut? These are organized nuts. |
John C. Turmel | With a record of no wins and seventy losses in campaigns since 1979, he's probably the world's least-successful would-be politician. |
Voluntary Human Extinction Movement | A movement that calls for the voluntary extinction of the human race. |
Politics and government
Alaska Mental Health Enabling Act | An apparently innocuous piece of congressional legislation that became the subject of outrageous but widely believed conspiracy theories in 1956. |
Animals as electoral candidates | Why be ruled by some monkey when you can get a real chimp, rhino or pig into office? |
Ruth Ellen Brosseau | An assistant bar manager who was elected to Canada's parliament from Quebec despite having never visited the district, barely speaking the language and spending part of the election campaign in Las Vegas. |
Bulb to light all Ramat Gan | How a light bulb caused embarrassment for Israeli political party Likud. |
Conch Republic | As a protest against the actions by the United States federal government, Key West in Florida seceded from and then declared war on the United States, surrendered one minute later and then applied for one billion dollars in foreign aid. |
Donald Duck Party | A non-existent political party, at occasions among the top ten parties in Swedish parliamentary elections. |
Euromyth | Paranoid and imaginative speculations about the bureaucratic excesses of the European Union. |
Evil reptilian kitten-eater from another planet | What else would you call a Canadian politician? |
Gatton by-election, 1803 | Two candidates, only one ballot cast, in this by-election in one of the UK's most notorious rotten boroughs of the early 19th century. |
Handedness of Presidents of the United States | A statistically surprising proportion of recent U.S. presidents were lefties. |
H'Angus | A monkey football mascot who was elected mayor of Hartlepool, England, with a platform of "free bananas for all schoolchildren". |
Ich bin ein Berliner | President Kennedy did not call himself a jelly donut in front of a German audience. |
Jakob Maria Mierscheid | A fictitious politician in the German Bundestag since 1979, originally introduced in the 1920s by Weimar Social Democrats to avoid paying restaurant bills. Discovered the Mierscheid Law. |
Jennifer Gale | A homeless transgender woman that gained some measure of fame for repeatedly running for public office in Austin, Texas and for singing during city council meetings. |
Jimmy Carter rabbit incident | Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter's scrape with a "killer" rabbit. |
Kasongo Ilunga | Although elected Minister of Foreign Trade for the Democratic Republic of the Congo, no one knows whether Ilunga exists or not. |
Pedro Lascuráin | A President for less than an hour. |
Legislative violence | Where politicians actively fight for what they believe in. |
McGillicuddy Serious Party | A satirical political party in New Zealand. |
New shoes on budget day | One of Canada's less grand political traditions. |
Niuas Nobles' constituency | An electoral constituency consisting in just three voters, who elect one of their number to one of the twenty-six seats in the Legislative Assembly of Tonga. |
Official Monster Raving Loony Party | Among other policies, this British political party advocates the banning of semicolons as "no-one knows how to use them". |
Old Sarum | A notorious rotten borough in Great Britain which, before 1832, was entitled to elect two members of Parliament even though it had only eleven voters and no residents. |
Patrol 35 | The most famous group of Neo-Nazi Israelis. |
Polish Beer-Lovers' Party | One of the major political powers in Poland in the early 1990s. |
Resignation from the British House of Commons | Illegal since 1623. |
Rhinoceros Party of Canada (1963–1993) | A former political party in Canada, which often promised outlandishly impossible schemes designed to amuse and entertain the voting public. |
Richard Nixon mask | One of the United States' most popular masks. |
Shanghai Fugu Agreement | A completely fictitious international treaty accepted by the German state of Hesse in 1985. |
Statue of Lenin (Seattle) | How a statue of Lenin made its way from Czechoslovakia to Seattle’s Fremont neighborhood. |
Ilona Staller | A Hungarian porn star elected to the Italian Parliament. |
Stephen Colbert at the 2006 White House Correspondents' Association Dinner | A controversial performance, directed, amongst others, toward an uncomfortable President nearby. |
Tsang Tsou Choi | From the 1970s to his death, he claimed to be the "Kowloon emperor". |
John C. Turmel | With a record of no wins and seventy losses in campaigns since 1979, he's probably the world's least-successful would-be politician. |
Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan | A fictitious scientific study by J.G. Ballard supposedly circulated at the 1980 Republican Convention which, among other things, compared the face of Ronald Reagan to a penile erection. |
Nicolás Zúñiga y Miranda | Mexican eccentric who participated in the presidential elections no less than ten times. He always lost but claimed to be the victor, and considered himself to be the country's president for several decades. |
Business and economics
Alien abduction insurance | As one insurance broker said, "Let’s face it – insurance is so tedious that if I can enlighten my dreary life..." |
Big Mac Index | Big Mac economics. |
Ding Hai effect | A sudden drop in the stock market that follows whenever Hong Kong actor Adam Cheng stars in a new TV show. |
EURion constellations | Not-so-secret recognition patterns you can find on banknotes. |
Men's Underwear Index | An economic indicator popularised by Alan Greenspan. |
Merchant marine of Switzerland | A landlocked country with a significant commercial fleet. |
Rai stones | Stone money, some of which is 3 meters (10 ft) in diameter, and weigh 4 metric tons (8,800 lb). |
Swastika Laundry | A laundry service whose electric vans cheerfully displayed the notorious symbol around Dublin until the 1960s. |
Tanganyika groundnut scheme | A scheme, stymied by a lack of water, to grow peanuts where none had been grown before. |
Law, law enforcement and crime
Acoustic Kitty | A failed CIA experiment at using a cat for covert surveillance. |
A moron in a hurry | A real legal doctrine used in passing-off law. |
Animal trial | Historically, the law in some areas of Europe subjected animals to criminal liability for their conduct. |
Dewey, Cheatem & Howe | A fictional law firm that takes advantage of its clients. |
Free Bench | An unusual English legal custom permitting a widow to inherit her deceased husband's land. In one version, she would have to ride into court backwards on a black ram while reciting a nonsense verse. |
Guano Islands Act | This strange piece of legislation enables citizens of the U.S. to take possession of islands containing guano deposits. |
Not proven | A controversial Scots law verdict for those neither guilty nor innocent. |
Lawsuits against the Devil | C'mon - who do you think's going to have the best lawyers? |
Lawsuits against God | A notoriously apathetic defendant, he/she/it has never turned up for one of his/her/its hearings. |
Leonard v. Pepsico, Inc. | Would you expect to be able to swap 7 million points (worth $700,000) for a Harrier jump jet (worth $22 million)? This man did and took Pepsi to court when they failed to supply him one. Unsurprisingly – to everyone except him – he lost the case. |
Memoirs v. Massachusetts | A U.S. Supreme Court case concerning whether the 1749 book Fanny Hill was entitled to First Amendment protection. One of the dissenting opinions contained an extensive discussion of the supposedly pornographic content. |
McMartin preschool trial | The most expensive trial in U.S. history, a sexual abuse trial in which hundreds of children made bizarre allegations of flying and killing giraffes, orgies at car washes, flying in hot-air balloons, and being flushed down toilets into secret underground rooms where they were abused. |
Miles v. City Council of Augusta, Georgia | Can a city require a business license for a talking cat, and does the cat have free-speech rights? |
Nix v. Hedden | The U.S. Supreme Court decides that the tomato is a vegetable, not a fruit. |
Old Deluder Satan Law | How 17th-century Massachusetts sought to rid itself of the Prince of Darkness. |
Oliver Cromwell's head | Until its burial in 1960, Oliver Cromwell's head, wrenched from his dead body during a storm in 1685, spent most of its time on display. |
Prohibition of death | There are really some places where death is illegal. (Although it is unknown what happens to anyone who breaks this law.) |
Sada Abe | Sensational journalism...from the Land of the Rising Sun. |
Small penis rule | A technique used by authors to avoid libel lawsuits. |
Stambovsky v. Ackley | Also known as the "Ghostbusters case", the court ruled that a house in Nyack, New York was legally haunted by ghosts. |
State of Louisiana v. Frisard | A man is liable for child support even if he does not have sexual intercourse with the child's mother. |
Taxation of illegal income in the United States | Don't worry: you can deduct your illegal activity expenses. |
Keron Thomas | In 1993, aged sixteen, he posed as a motorman on the New York City Subway and managed to operate a scheduled passenger train for over three hours. |
Toy Biz v. United States | Are the X-Men humans under U.S. law? |
United States ex rel. Gerald Mayo v. Satan and His Staff | Who has jurisdiction over Satan? |
United States v. Approximately 64,695 Pounds of Shark Fins | The fins won a case that turned on whether buying something from someone counts as "aiding or assisting" them. |
- See also
- List of fictional U.S. Presidents
- List of frivolous political parties
- List of nicknames used by George W. Bush
- List of political catch phrases
- List of scandals with "-gate" suffix
Religion and spirituality
Abeguwo | A just-so story about the origin of rain. |
As a dog returns to his vomit, so a fool repeats his folly. | An oldie but a goodie from the Bible. |
Asher yatzar | A Jewish blessing, read to praise the ability to excrete urine or faeces. |
Axinomancy | Foretelling the future by looking at an axe or hatchet. |
Banquet of Chestnuts | Enough to make even the most committed and diehard Roman Catholic agree that the church was in a pretty poor state at the time of the Reformation. |
Ben Hana | A homeless man in Wellington, New Zealand who worshiped the Māori sun-god Ra (not to be confused with the ancient Egyptian sun-god Ra). |
Bible errata | A typesetter's complaint finds justification in Psalm 119. |
Cadaver Synod | In 897, Pope Stephen VI had the body of his predecessor Pope Formosus exhumed, dressed in papal vestments and then seated on a throne while he read charges against it and conducted a trial. |
Caganer | A traditional Catalan statue, similar to a garden gnome, that depicts a person defecating. Often included in Catalan nativity scenes or other Christmas decorations. |
Cargo cult | Tribal rites and rituals developed in the belief they will attract the goods, wealth and materials – the "cargo" – of a more technologically advanced and affluent culture. |
Christmas in Nazi Germany | The Nazi Party reinvented Christmas by removing a certain baby boy raised in the Jewish faith. |
Disconnection | The result of a poor signal with Scientology. |
Harold Davidson | A 1930s Church of England clergyman, known as "The Prostitutes' Padre", who was defrocked and later died after being mauled by a toothless lion. |
Descent from Adam and Eve | Some living people actually claim to have traced their genealogy all the way back to Adam and Eve. |
Fluffy bunny | A controversial epithet in Wicca. |
Flying Spaghetti Monster | The basis of a satirical religion created to make fun of Intelligent Design. |
Gang Bing | After his act of self-castration, he became the patron saint of eunuchs. |
The Great Disappointment | Hundreds of people were convinced the world would end on a very specific date. Turns out they were wrong. Ahem. |
Hell bank note | Apparently, the Chinese afterlife is subject to hyperinflation. |
Holy Prepuce | One of several relics purported to be associated with Jesus. Also known as The Holy Foreskin. (See also Circumcision of Jesus.) |
Homosexuality and voodoo | Surely a troll, you say? No! A perfectly legitimate article! |
Incident (Scientology) | Bubble Gum Incident, Obscene Dog Incident, Bodies in pawn, blah, blah... |
Invisible Pink Unicorn | A satire aimed at theistic beliefs. |
Islamic toilet etiquette | The large number of rules to be followed by Muslims when relieving themselves. |
Islamic views on anal sex | There are fatwas for everything. Even Ayatollah Sistani weighed in on the issue. |
Jedi census phenomenon | A phenomenon in which 390,000 British citizens listed their religion as Jedi Knight on a 2001 census form, which made Jedi Knight the fourth-largest religion in England and Wales. |
Jerusalem Syndrome | For some people a visit there is just too much. |
Jesus H. Christ | Does it stand for Henry? |
Jewish pope Andreas | A Jewish pope? |
Kachchhera | Sikh underwear. |
Kolob | Which star does God live on? |
List of Buddha claimants | Enlighten us, please. |
List of messiah claimants | See above. |
List of names for the Biblical nameless | Not so anonymous, by God. |
List of people who have claimed to be Jesus | Excluding Jesus himself. |
List of people who have been considered deities | What it says. |
List of UFO religions | Our father, which art in spaceship... |
Matshishkapeu | The "fart man" of Innu mythology. Don't cross him or he'll make you constipated. |
The Miracle of the Sun | 70,000 people in Portugal gather to witness a miracle and are treated to an inexplicable solar event. |
Non-canonical books referenced in the Bible | The Bible refers to lost books, and even pagan ones, much more than you would think. |
Open source religion | And we're not talking about the Church of Emacs either. |
Pope Joan | Are medieval documents citing the existence of a female pope proof of a Vatican cover up or a blasphemous slur? |
Pope Michael | Elected Pope in 1990 by a group of Conclavist or post-Sedevacantist Catholics to fill the vacancy they consider to have been caused by the death of Pope Pius XII in 1958. |
Prince Philip Movement | A religious movement on the island of Tanna in Vanuatu which holds that Queen Elizabeth II's husband, Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, is a divine being. |
Pornocracy | The period of the papacy in the early 10th century, beginning with Pope Sergius III from 904 and ending with the death of Pope John XII in 963. During this period, the popes were under the influence of corrupt women (though not necessarily prostitutes), especially Theodora and her daughter, Marozia. This period is also called the "Rule of the Harlots." |
Reincarnation Application | Must be filed by all living Buddha within the People's Republic of China, before they are allowed to reincarnate. |
Religious pareidolia | A tendency to see religious imagery in in the textures of corn chips, cinnamon rolls, toast, clouds, etc, etc. |
Rumspringa | Amish Gone Wild. |
St. Priapus Church | A religion based on the worship of the phallus. |
Space opera in Scientology scripture | L. Ron Hubbard's history of the universe, including alien Invader Forces, "little orange-colored bombs that would talk" and brainwashing episodes in "a railway carriage quite like a British railway coach with compartments." |
Taghairm | A couple of uncomfortable methods of fortune telling. |
Tiberius Iulius Abdes Pantera | Was Jesus' father buried in Germany? |
Turtles all the way down | A myth about the nature of the universe, or perhaps a myth about a myth about the nature of the universe. |
Unfulfilled religious predictions | Doomsdays that didn't. |
United Nation of Islam | Royall, Allah in Person claims to have spent the 1980s in a spaceship with angels who informed him that he was God and instructed him on how to govern the world. Public records say he was a truck driver. |
Universe people | Specific cult in Czech Republic and Slovakia. |
Who is a Jew? | For those having trouble identifying a Jew. |
Wicked Bible | A 1631 reprint of the King James Bible, which contained an infamous printing mistake. |
Winterval | A word created as an alternative name for all the holidays at the end of a calendar year. It came to prominence after Birmingham City Council (the English city) used it in 1998. |
Xenu | An ancient interstellar dictator who unleashed a genocide which created Christianity and psychiatry and whose story is "calculated to kill (by pneumonia etc) anyone who attempts to solve it." |
Zipporah at the inn | God apparently tries (and fails) to kill Moses. |
- See also
Military
3rd Dental Battalion | Even Marines have to keep their teeth clean. |
Anglo-Zanzibar War | The world's shortest war. The Sultan of Zanzibar capitulated after forty-five minutes. |
Battle of Tanga | A World War I battle where 8,000 British troops were defeated by a German-led force of 1,100 Askaris – aided by swarms of angry bees. |
Bicycle infantry | Soldiers have occasionally been trained to use the bicycle for military purposes. |
Boot Monument | In celebration of Benedict Arnold's foot. |
Jack Churchill | A British soldier who fought through World War II armed with a bow and arrows and a claymore. |
Cornfield Bomber | An F-106 jet fighter made a perfect gear-up landing in a farmer's field – after the pilot had ejected at 15,000 feet (4,600 m). |
Emu War | A military operation undertaken in Western Australia against hordes of emus. |
Football war | A six-day war fought between El Salvador and Honduras in 1969 that was triggered by a game of football (soccer). |
Glasgow Ice Cream Wars | In 1984, violent conflicts between ice-cream vendors left six people dead. |
If Day | A simulated Nazi invasion of the Canadian city of Winnipeg, complete with book-burning, arrests of politicians, and newspaper censorship. |
Line-crossing ceremony | An initiation rite performed when a ship crosses the equator. |
List of wartime crossdressers | Because war demands proper fashion. |
Miss Russian Army | A beauty contest minus the swimsuit competition but plus the automatic weapons drills. |
Montauk Project | Real military science experiment or urban legend? Maybe the civilians who were in full view of the military base will be able to tell you. |
NORAD Tracks Santa | A tradition with the American and Canadian military to track Santa Claus for children. |
Hiroo Onoda | A Japanese soldier who hid out in the Philippines during World War II, refusing to surrender until 1974. |
Philadelphia Experiment | An alleged experiment in 1943 involving electromagnetic technology to render vessels invisible. |
Pig War | A war between the United States and the British Empire that almost erupted over one dead pig. |
Portuguese Fireplace | A fireplace in the middle of the New Forest. |
Sacred Band of Thebes | An ancient Greek army consisting of homosexual couples. |
Sergeant Stubby | The only dog to be promoted to sergeant through combat. |
Siachen Glacier | The world's highest battlefield, with very predictable terrain. |
Stanislav Petrov | Potentially averted a nuclear war. |
Three Hundred and Thirty Five Years' War | A "war" that lasted 335 years without a single shot being fired, between the Netherlands and the tiny Isles of Scilly. |
Toledo War | A war between the State of Ohio and the Michigan Territory that resulted in one injury and over a century of bitterness. |
Truelove Eyre | A man who supposedly saved William the Conqueror's life during the Battle of Hastings. |
UFO sightings in Iraq | Something else for Iraqis to worry about. |
Vasiliy Arkhipov | Another guy who potentially averted nuclear war. |
War of Jenkins' Ear | A nine year war, started when Captain Robert Jenkins complained that the Spanish Coastguard had cut off his ear. |
War of the Stray Dog | Greek soldier chases his pooch across the Bulgaria border. Warfare nearly ensues. |
War of the Insane | Hmong revolt against taxing by the French colonial administration in Indochina lasting from 1918 to 1921. |
War Plan Red | U.S. war plans from the 1930s to invade Canada in the unlikely event of war with the United Kingdom. Also see the counterpart war plan Defence Scheme No. 1 (the Canadian war plan to invade the United States). |
Weapons and military equipment
Anti-tank dog | Soviet weapon of the Second World War. |
Antonov A-40 | The "flying tank", an experimental Soviet tank with wings and tailboom, meant to glide into the battlefield, ready for combat. Trials were unsuccessful. |
Bat bomb | A World War II plan to bomb Japan with bats carrying tiny incendiary bombs. |
Bazooka Vespa | Placing France at the cutting edge of weapons system design. |
Bicycle infantry | Soldiers have occasionally been trained to use the bicycle for military purposes. |
Chicken-powered nuclear bomb | In a cunningly misnamed project, domestic chickens were set to wage nuclear warfare. |
Cornfield Bomber | An F-106 jet fighter made a perfect gear-up landing in a farmer's field – after the pilot had ejected at 15,000 feet (4,600 m). |
Double-barreled cannon | A failed civil war era attempt to create a weapon of mass destruction. Now a monument in Athens, GA. |
Gay bomb | A speculative non-lethal chemical weapon that could be dropped on enemy troops to cause "homosexual behaviour". Not to be confused with the fag bomb. |
Grand Panjandrum | Britain's World War II Catherine wheel of death. |
Human torpedo | Human torpedoes or manned torpedoes were secret naval weapons of World War II. |
Most-wanted Iraqi playing cards | A set of playing cards created by U.S. Army soldiers featuring the most-wanted Iraqis, with Saddam Hussein as the Ace of spades. |
Project Habakkuk | A British plan to construct an aircraft carrier out of ice (pykrete). |
Project Pigeon | Bombs guided by pigeon pecks. |
Sticky bomb | The most unpopular weapon the British soldier has ever been asked to use. |
Tachanka | Twentieth century chariot used in combat. |
Tsar Tank | A Imperial Russian tank designed as a tricycle with nine-metre wheels. |
United States military chocolate | Originally designed to taste "little better than a boiled potato." Not much has changed. |
U.S. Navy Marine Mammal Program | A U.S. Navy program which studies the military use of Bottlenose Dolphins and California Sea Lions. |
Who me? | A top secret stench weapon designed to be unobtrusively sprayed on German officers by French Resistance members. |
Zanbatō | An enormous Japanese sword that does not exist. |
- See also
Punishments
Drunkard's cloak | Attire for the village drunk. |
Hanged, drawn and quartered | Dark Ages punishment for high treason |
Scold's bridle | A muzzle for the nagging wife. |
Death
Boston Molasses Disaster | Twenty-one people died in 1919 when a huge tank at a confectionery factory burst, sending a wave of molasses down the streets of Boston. |
Chess-related deaths | Chess can be surprisingly dangerous. |
Collyer brothers | When packratting was taken to a tragic extreme. |
Death erection | It is possible to die happy, even if you've lived a less-than-stellar life. |
Defenestration | The time-honoured tradition of throwing people out of windows. |
Execution by elephant | An unusual form of capital punishment used throughout history. (See also History of elephants in Europe.) |
Fan death | A persistent urban legend in South Korea, where the media, and even many medical professionals, regularly report on people dying because of having left a fan on in a closed room. |
Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead | An early catch phrase used on Saturday Night Live, based upon the dictator's lengthy death. |
Ghost bike | Bicycle rider in memoriam. |
Jack the Stripper | The other unidentified serial killer named Jack. |
Kick the bucket | The heated argument of the origin of this very funny idiom about death. |
Lal Bihari | Indian who, among other things, ran for elected office despite the notable handicap of being officially dead. |
List of expressions related to death | What do 'go home in a box', 'go bung' and 'hop the stick' mean? |
London Beer Flood | In 1814 in London, nine people were drowned by a flood of more than 300,000 gallons of beer. |
London Necropolis railway station | A past station built solely for funeral trains |
Lord Uxbridge's leg | The grisly afterlife of a leg lost during the Battle of Waterloo, formerly owned by Henry Paget, 1st Marquess of Anglesey. |
Maschalismos | The act of mutilating the dead to prevent them from rising again. |
Poe Toaster | A mysterious figure who pays an annual tribute to American author Edgar Allan Poe. |
Post-mortem photography | Back in the early days of photography it was common to take pictures of recently deceased loved ones, propped up to look as if they were alive. |
Republican marriage | A form of execution in which a naked man and woman are tied together and drowned. (What did you think it was?) |
Rookwood Cemetery railway line, Sydney | A former railway line that served a cemetery near Sydney. |
Richard Chase | The only way to stop the Nazi-controlled UFOs from poisoning your macaroni and cheese is to inject yourself with animal blood and eat human brains. |
Safety coffin | Coffins manufactured just in case their tenant is not actually dead before being buried. |
Salish Sea human foot discoveries | Dismembered feet keep washing up. |
Sky burial | It's not really a form of burial. Also known as jhator which means "giving alms to the birds." |
Sogen Kato | Regarded as the oldest man in Tokyo, he turns out to have died at age 79. |
Space burial | Around 150 people have had their remains interred in space. Or would that be ex-terred? |
Spontaneous human combustion | The sudden burning of a person's body without any apparent source of ignition. |
Suicide booth | A common feature in the world of tomorrow. |
Toilet-related injury | As if constipation wasn't enough. |
Valentich Disappearance | An Australian pilot disappeared in the ocean, having seen a strange object above his aircraft. No trace of either his body or the aircraft have been found. |
Video-Enhanced Grave Marker | Graves with video screens and speakers on them. |
Voluntary Human Extinction Movement | "May we live long and die out!" |
- See also
Questions
Wikipedia is not afraid to tackle the tough questions:
How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? | A proverbial question of theology. |
If a tree falls in a forest | Philosophy meets the logging industry. |
Chicken or the egg | Which came first? |
Voulez-vous coucher avec moi? | Lady Marmalade wasn't the only one asking this. |
Where's the beef? | In 1984, people thought this was really funny for some reason. |
Why did the chicken cross the road? | People have asked this for over 150 years. |
Unusual featured pictures
Wikipedia:Featured Pictures contains some unusual images.
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Train wreck at Montparnasse
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The Agassiz statue, Stanford University, California. April 1906
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Grenville Diptych
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Medieval trepanation
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Isometric projection flaw
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Collapse of the Tacoma Narrows bridge
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Defecating seagull
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Aerial turning house
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Tank treads on an airplane
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Maintenance of Mount Rushmore
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One million colors
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Keep your hands to yourself!
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Like a fly on...
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An elaborate flat Earth map drawn in 1893
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Carrots of many colors
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Professional regurgitator Hadji Ali at work
See also
- Category:Images portraying unusual Wikipedia articles at Wikimedia Commons
- Most popular "Did you know?" items
- Category:Adages
- Category:Conspiracy theories
- Category:Famous body parts
- Category:Flatulence
- Category:Hoaxes
- Category:Internet memes
- Category:Ironic and humorous awards
- Category:Profanity
External links
- Funcyclopedia
- Regan, Jim (February 11, 2005). "Remarkable Wikipedia has "unusual" corners". CSMonitor.com. Halifax, Nova Scotia: USA Today. Archived from the original on February 11, 2005. Retrieved 28 March 2011.
- Miller, Andrew (January 25, 2011). "The Least Essential Wikipedia Pages". Something Awful. Retrieved 28 March 2011.
- Frater, Jamie (March 21, 2011). "10 Interesting And Unusual Wikipedia Articles". Listverse. Retrieved 28 March 2011.
- Lih, Andrew (May–June 2006). "Wikipedia Unusual Articles". andrewlih.com. Retrieved 28 March 2011.
{{cite web}}
: CS1 maint: date format (link) - "Weirdest Unusual Article of Wikipedia". Rankopedia. Retrieved 28 March 2011.
- "Interesting and unusual Wikipedia articles". The Straight Dope. June 2009. Archived from the original on 2011. Retrieved 28 March 2011.
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(help) - A Random Collection of Unusual Articles on Wikipedia game on The Nethernet