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Some interesting articles to catch your attention.
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Please noteArticles about 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, to avoid making 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". |
Of the over six million articles in the English Wikipedia there are some articles that Wikipedians have identified as being somewhat unusual. These articles are verifiable, valuable contributions to the encyclopedia, but are a bit odd, whimsical, or something one 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 an article to this list, the article in question should preferably meet one or more of these criteria:
- The article is something a reasonable person would not expect to find in a standard encyclopedia.
- The subject is a highly unusual combination of concepts, such as cosmic latte, death from laughter, etc.
- The subject is a clear anomaly—something that defies common sense, common expectations or common knowledge, such as Bir Tawil, Märket, Phineas Gage, Snow in Florida, etc.
- The subject is well-documented for 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 notorious hoax, such as the Sokal affair or Mary Toft.
- The subject might be found amusing, though serious.
- The subject is distinct amongst other similar ones.
- The article is a list or collection of articles or subjects meeting the criteria above.
This aa definition is not precise or absolute; some articles could still be considered unusual even if they do not fit these guidelines.
Each entry on this list should be an article on its own (not merely a section in a less unusual article) and of decent quality, and in large meeting Wikipedia's manual of style. For unusual contributions that are of greater levity, see Wikipedia:Silly Things.
In this list, a star ( ) indicates a featured article. A plus ( ) indicates a good article.
Places and infrastructure [edit]
Aphrodite's artistic nudity shows itself not far from Mount Olympus.
Good golly, Miss Molly – jus' love your folly!
Breast-shaped hill | Laid bare in many places around the world. May have given their name to Manchester. |
Eiffel Tower replicas and derivatives | Not as unique as you might have thought. |
Folly | Buildings prized for their uselessness. |
Gravity hill | A hill that gives the illusion of objects rolling up it. |
List of micronations | Ever wanted to start your own country? |
List of tautological place names | Place names that contain truisms and say what they are. |
Pizza farm | All the ingredients of pizza, grown in one convenient location! |
Recursive islands and lakes | Islands in lakes in islands in lakes in islands... |
Spite house | Various houses built solely out of spite for their neighbors. |
Africa [edit]
| Bir Tawil | One of the few places on Earth not claimed by any country. An American trekked there and claimed it in 2014 as the Kingdom of North Sudan so he could make his daughter a princess. |
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Congo Pedicle | What happens when a tyrannical king decides he wants to hunt game in a swamp. | |
Gaet'ale Pond | A small lake in Ethiopia that was created in 2005 after an earthquake. It's not bitter, it's just really, really salty. | |
Jacob's Ladder | It's all very downhill from here. | |
Lake Nyos | A lake in northwestern Cameroon that exploded in 1986, killing 1,746 people. One of 3 known exploding lakes, the others being Lake Monoun and Lake Kivu. | |
N/A | Mountains of Kong | A non-existent trans-African mountain range that appeared on Western maps of the 19th century. |
N/A | Mountains of the Moon | Another non-existent African mountain range, this time serving as the source of the Nile. |
N/A | Null Island | A fictional island in the Gulf of Guinea, at 0°N 0°E, or where the prime meridian and equator meet. The site is currently occupied by a weather buoy. |
Oklo Mine | The former site of the world's only natural nuclear fission reactors. | |
Peñón de Vélez de la Gomera | A rock on the Moroccan coast connected to the mainland by an 80-metre-wide (260 ft) tombolo. Which is part of Spain. | |
Republic of Benin (1967) | One of the shortest-lived states in history, it was independent for only seven hours (07:00 to 14:00 on 19 September 1967). |
Antarctica [edit]
Mawson Peak | The tallest mountain in Australia is not on the mainland, but on a barren, uninhabited island more than 3,800 kilometres (2,400 mi) away. | |
McMurdo Dry Valleys | An area of Antarctica that a) contains the world's second-most-saline body of water and b) has not experienced rainfall for over two million years. |
Asia [edit]
Roughly 50,000 people lived in that.
Artsvashen | An Armenian town surrounded and controlled by Azerbaijan. One of a number of similar towns on this border; others include Yukhari Askipara, Barxudarlı and Karki. | |
Atar, Padang Ganting | An Indonesian village with a monument resembling a photocopier. | |
Camp Bonifas | The bunkers on this golf course feature machine-guns and landmines. | |
Dahala Khagrabari | India inside Bangladesh inside India inside Bangladesh. Formerly the only third-order enclave in the world. | |
Darvaza gas crater | A flaming, 70 m (230 ft) wide, 30 m (98 ft) deep crater in the middle of the Karakum Desert, on fire since 1971. | |
Dhekelia Power Station | A Cypriot power station that provides power to a British military base that surrounds it. | |
| Diomede Islands | Two islands in the Bering Strait separated by 4 kilometres (2.5 mi) and 21 hours' time difference. |
Gangkhar Puensum | The tallest mountain nobody has ever summitted, as Bhutanese law prohibits anyone from climbing a mountain over 6,000 metres (20,000 ft) high. | |
Gate Tower Building | A skyscraper in Japan that has a highway offramp passing through its fifth, sixth and seventh floors. | |
Hallstatt (China) | An ongoing replica construction of a town in Austria. | |
Jewish Autonomous Oblast | In the depth of Eastern Siberia there's a place with street names in Yiddish, even though 99% of its population is not Jewish. | |
Kai Tak Airport | A major international airport closed in 1998 where planes literally almost crashed constantly into the city due to a right-hand turn over the city. | |
Karni Mata Temple | A marble temple famous for 25,000 revered black rats that live in the temple who are considered the ancestors of Charans. | |
Kijong-dong | A village in North Korea characterized by mainstream media as a North Korean propaganda Potemkin village. | |
Korea Central Zoo | A zoo with such wondrous animals as a chimpanzee with a smoking habit, a parrot that sings the praises of Kim Il-sung, and some of the few legally owned dogs in Pyongyang. | |
Kowloon Walled City | An enclave in the city of Hong Kong, known for its extremely high population density, food courts that served dog meat, and claustrophobic dwellings. | |
Living root bridge | Double-decker suspension bridges formed of living plant aerial roots of rubber fig trees by tree shaping common in the southern part of the Northeast Indian state of Meghalaya. | |
Love Land | An erotic-themed sculpture park on Jeju island in South Korea. | |
Nahwa | One of only eight counter-enclaves (enclaves of enclaves). | |
Ōkunoshima | An island between the Japanese home islands of Honshu and Shikoku formerly home to a chemical weapons plant in WW2, now home to a huge population of feral but largely tame rabbits. | |
Peanut Hole | A delightfully named patch of ocean in the Sea of Okhotsk that is totally surrounded by Russia's EEZ but not inside it. Often the subject of foreign overfishing. | |
Robot Building | That's not a giant robot looming in Bangkok; it's just a bank's headquarters | |
Ryugyong Hotel | Once, it would have been the world's tallest hotel – except it lacked windows, fittings or fixtures for over twenty years. | |
N/A | San Serriffe | A lesser-known island in the Indian Ocean, subject of the April1, 1977 Guardian. |
Sansha | A disputed prefecture-level city in Hainan consisting of a collection of atolls and reefs throughout the South China Sea. | |
Seikan Tunnel Tappi Shakō Line | The closed funicular that connects an underground train station inside the Seikan Tunnel with a museum. | |
Soʻx District | An exclave of Uzbekistan enclaved within Kyrgyzstan with a 99% Tajik population. | |
Tashirojima | An island in Japan notable for being full of cats. | |
Tomb of Suleyman Shah | One of the burial sites of the first Ottoman emperor's grandfather is part of Turkey despite being 27 kilometres (17 mi) south of the country's border with Syria. | |
Tsu Station | By kana, the tersest railway station in Japan, serving the capital of an equally terse prefecture. By stroke count, the tersest in the world. By transliteration, only second-tersest. | |
Wonderland Amusement Park (Beijing) | The largest abandoned amusement park in Asia. | |
X-Seed 4000 | The tallest building ever designed, standing 4 kilometres (2.5 mi) tall and housing 500,000 to 1,000,000people on 800floors. It is, however, "never meant to be built". | |
Yongning Pagoda | A 6th-century pagoda that was possibly the tallest structure in the world until it was destroyed by lightning 18 years after its completion. | |
Zheltuga Republic | An illegal gold mining settlement that developed into a thriving unrecognised country, only surviving because the Chinese government was unaware that it existed. |
Europe [edit]
Argleton | A non-existent town in Lancashire, England that appeared on Google Maps. | |
Baarle-Hertog | Two municipalities, one of Belgium and one of the Netherlands, that surround each other twice and many times over. Some houses and shops are in both countries. | |
Baarle-Nassau | ||
Barcelona Supercomputing Center | A supercomputer in a medieval chapel. | |
Barentsburg | A completely Russian town, inhabited by Russians, with Russian buildings, supported financially by the Russian government, located in Norway. | |
Beans and Bacon mine | With such little ventilation, visitors may want to avoid any source of ignition. Nearby mines are not to be outdone and have the following names: Mule Spinner, Frogs Hole, Cackle Mackle and Wanton Legs. | |
Berlin Brandenburg Airport | A construction-finished but unfinished in other areas airport in Berlin. Construction was finished in 2012; however, the opening date was repeatedly pushed back as the fire suppression system was installed incorrectly. It finally opened in October 2020. | |
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 1668. | |
The Broomway | The most dangerous path in the world? Would you join a hundred others who died walking the invisible path? | |
Brusio spiral viaduct | The title says it all, really. | |
Büsingen am Hochrhein | A German town that is fully contained within Switzerland. | |
Butt Hole Road | A tiny residential street in the UK that was so infamous for its name that it became a tourist attraction. | |
Carpatho-Ukraine | The third shortest-lived state in history (see Benin Republic in Nigeria); it was independent for only 24 hours. | |
Cerne Abbas Giant | An indecent chalk man in the English countryside. | |
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. | |
Colletto Fava | A 1,500-metre (4,900 ft) hill with a 61-metre (200 ft) 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. | |
Ferdinandea Island | The island that disappeared. And rose again. And sank again. And rose again. And sank again. | |
Flannan Isles Lighthouse | Located on Eilean Mór, this lighthouse to the west of Scotland is the subject of an enduring mystery over the disappearance of its keepers in 1900. | |
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. | |
Leaning Tower of Suurhusen | Beating the world-famous Leaning Tower of Pisa by 1.22 degrees. | |
List of destroyed landmarks in Spain | Over 60 interesting buildings, including larger castles, royal palaces, leaning towers, city gates which were completely or partially demolished and no longer exist, with their respective articles and images. | |
Llanfairpwllgwyngyll | Or Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch, if you want to get technical. | |
Magic Roundabout | Only in the United Kingdom would you find a large roundabout with six mini-roundabouts. (Not to be confused with the "Magic Roundabout"s in Colchester, Swindon or High Wycombe – or, for that matter, this "Magic Roundabout".) | |
| Märket | A lighthouse built on this island led to a redefinition of the border between Sweden and Finland. |
Monte Kaolino | A ski resort without snow. | |
Mount Athos | An autonomous polity in Greece home to 20 monasteries, notable for being the only political subdivision in the world in which women (as well as female animals) are prohibited from entering for any reason. | |
Municipalities of Liechtenstein | The blotchy, angular borders between these divisions seem almost arbitrarily strange. The UAE's are similarly weird. | |
Neutral Moresnet | A tiny European region – approximately 1.4 square miles (3.6 km2) – that existed for a century as neutral territory between Germany and Belgium. | |
Newhaven Marine railway station | A railway station that was technically open between 2006 and 2020, despite (a) no passenger trains serving the station during that time, (b) an inability to buy tickets to the station and (c) the station itself being demolished in 2017. | |
Other World Kingdom | A micronation and BDSM resort whose ultimate goal is "absolute matriarchy" – for all men to be enslaved by women. | |
Papa Westray Airport | An unassuming coastal airport in the Orkney Isles, where you can take a scenic flight to the nearby island of Westray, and enjoy all 47 seconds to 1 minute and 30 seconds of it. | |
Paradiskullen | A ski jumping hill with a landing area that goes under one of Sweden's busiest railroads. | |
| Pheasant Island | An uninhabited river island which switches sovereignty between France and Spain every six months. |
Principality of Sealand | A micronation located 6 miles (9.7 km) off the coast of Suffolk, England whose population rarely exceeds ten. | |
Reality Checkpoint | A lamppost with its own name. | |
Röstigraben | The "Coarsely Grated Potato Ditch" in Switzerland, dividing Swiss-German and Swiss-French cuisine. | |
Saatse Boot | A piece of Russian territory through which a 900-metre (3,000 ft) stretch of Estonian road passes. Although people are allowed to drive on the road without a permit or visa, it is prohibited to travel on foot, or to stop the vehicle for any reason. | |
Schwerbelastungskörper | A piece of Nazi architecture in Berlin, built with the sole purpose of being heavy. | |
Scottish Court in the Netherlands | A former Dutch NATO base called Camp Zeist was briefly ceded to Scotland to enable the trial of the Pan Am Flight 103 bombers. | |
Sedlec Ossuary | A Christian chapel decorated by the bones of approximately 40,000people. | |
Sexi (Phoenician colony) | An ancient ruins, also known as Sex or Ex, with several Roman-era suburbs, including Pænis, Socordia and Villa Fatuus Maximus. | |
Shell Grotto, Margate | A grotto with a mosaic of 4.6 million seashells, hidden underneath a backyard. Nobody knows who built it, when, or for what purpose. | |
Smallest House in Great Britain | Only 5.49 square metres (59.1 sq ft) in size, in North Wales. | |
Sovereign Military Order of Malta | A sovereign state with no land? How is that possible? | |
Spreuerhofstraße | The world's narrowest street. | |
Svalbard Global Seed Vault | If a global famine occurs, you better hope you live in Svalbard. | |
Uffington White Horse | A giant chalk figure that has to be hit with hammers regularly to maintain it. | |
UFO-Memorial Ängelholm | A memorial to a reputed UFO landing in Sweden. | |
Unst Bus Shelter | The only of its kind on the island of Unst, Shetland. It is periodically refurnished and contains a sofa and TV. | |
Vennbahn | A disused railway in Belgium which separates five pieces of Germany from the rest of Germany. | |
Weißwurstäquator | The "White Sausage Equator" in Germany. | |
Whip-Ma-Whop-Ma-Gate | And the best street name has to go to this street in York, England. Also said to be the shortest street in the city too! |
North America [edit]
This lake hides many islands. And lakes in those islands. And islands in those lakes.
11 foot 8+8 Bridge | Try driving a truck under this bridge in North Carolina. Actually, please don't. | |
33 Thomas Street | A windowless skyscraper in New York. Not suspicious at all. | |
A Mountain | Also known as Sentinel Peak, this hill in Tucson, Arizona literally has a big letter "A" on it. | |
Agloe, New York | A fictional town in New York. | |
Aroma of Tacoma | "What an incredible smell you've discovered" could have been this Washington city's motto. | |
Badlands Guardian | A natural topographic feature in Alberta, Canada, which, when viewed from above, looks remarkably like a human wearing a Native American headdress and earbuds. | |
Beatosu and Goblu | 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 was so contaminated with blood from the Stock Yards that it gained this appetizing moniker. | |
Bullfrog County, Nevada | A former county in Nevada established around a mountain which was to become a radioactive waste disposal site. As of 2020, it is the only uninhabited county-equivalent to ever be created in the United States. | |
| Canusa Street | A road that's in both Canada and USA. |
Cat Girl Manor | A manor described as "the Playboy Mansion of the kitten play community". | |
Centralia, Pennsylvania | A town that's been on fire since 1962. | |
Clinton Road (New Jersey) | In addition to having the longest traffic light in the country, the road is also notorious for reported occurrences of paranormal activity. | |
Colma, California | A town where the dead outnumber the living by 1000 to 1. | |
Corporation Trust Center (CT Corporation) | A small single-story building where over 285,000 companies, or over 15% of all companies in the United States, are legally based. | |
Crush, Texas | A temporary "city" established as the site of an 1896 publicity stunt, a staged train wreck. The wreck unexpectedly caused two deaths and numerous injuries among spectators. | |
Dixie Square Mall | A shopping mall that stood abandoned for over twice as long as it was in business until it was finally demolished in 2012. It was featured in the 1980 film The Blues Brothers and became a popular target for urban explorers. | |
Ernst Thälmann Island | An island off the coast of Cuba that was (sort of) ceded to East Germany and thus (sort of) remains part of East Germany, which doesn't exist anymore (sort of). | |
Fenelon Place Elevator | The shortest and steepest railroad in the world, (supposedly) located in a town of around 60,000 people. | |
Florence Y'all Water Tower | A Northern Kentucky town's unique "welcome" sign. | |
List of former counties, cities, and towns of Virginia | All the places that are no longer found in Virginia, such as Illinois County, and a few that never were (including Walton's Mountain). | |
Gann Valley, South Dakota | The county seat of Buffalo County, South Dakota, despite nearby Fort Thompson having a population more than 90 times larger than Gann Valley. | |
Greater Green River Intergalactic Spaceport | Consists entirely of a deeply rutted unmanned strip of soil/gravel and a windsock. | |
Gum Wall | A brick wall in Seattle burdened by chewing gum. Cleaned in 2015, only to be turned into a memorial for Paris. | |
Hawaii 2 | A quaint island in Maine purchased by Cards Against Humanity in 2014. | |
Hess Triangle | This used to be part of a bigger plot of land but a road destroyed it but the planners couldn't plan correctly so it left this piece of land. | |
Horace Burgess's Treehouse | A treehouse built by a minister who received a vision from God. | |
Interstate 180 (Wyoming) | An Interstate Highway that isn't really a freeway at all. | |
Interstate 19 | The only U.S. highway marked in metric units, a relic of a historical push for metrication. | |
Island of California | The third-largest U.S. state was formerly an island – at least on paper. | |
Island of the Dolls | Located in Mexico City, this is an island full of broken and deteriorated dolls of various styles and colors, originally placed by the former owner of the island. | |
Jackass Flats | The aptly named test site for the world's first and only nuclear-powered rocket engines. | |
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 (247 m) height, but because of an angry old man who lived nearby. | |
Just Room Enough Island | This island is about one-thirteenth of an acre in size but that didn't stop the Sizeland family from building a house on it. | |
Landsat Island | A lonesome island with a frankly humorous tale. | |
List of gaps in Interstate Highways | Traffic-lighted intersections, drawbridges, and other oddities in the Interstate Highway System which violate the standards. | |
List of Las Vegas casinos that never opened | What happened on the drawing board stayed on the drawing board. | |
London Bridge | An over century year old authentic English bridge...that now resides in the middle of the desert. | |
M-185 (Michigan highway) | The only state highway in the country that bans motor vehicles. If you thought Texas State Highway 165 was an exceptional state highway, well... | |
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. | |
Mickey pylon | A power line pylon with a shape reminiscent of a certain fictional rodent. | |
Mill Ends Park | The smallest park in the world – 452 in2 (0.292 m2) – in Portland, Oregon. | |
Mojave phone booth | A public phone booth that stood for several decades in the middle of a desert, miles away from any roads or other structures. | |
Monowi | A village in Nebraska with a population of one. Hi, Elsie! | |
National Raisin Reserve | Created after World War II to control raisin prices. Run by the Raisin Administrative Committee, of course. | |
Nettilling Lake | Located on Baffin Island, Nunavut, Canada. It's the largest lake on an island and also contains the largest lake on an island on a lake on an island, which in turn contains the world's largest island in a lake on an island in a lake on an island. | |
Nitt Witt Ridge | A house in California, built out of beer cans, abalone shells, car parts, and other garbage previously tossed out by local residents, is now a historic landmark. | |
Plymouth, Montserrat | A national capital with zero population. | |
Point Roberts, Washington | When defining international boundaries, sometimes a straight line isn't the best solution. | |
Polar Bear Holding Facility | A prison for polar bears. | |
Prada Marfa, Texas | For your luxury shopping bug, a Prada store in the desert. | |
N/A | Pyramid mausoleums in North America | Arizona Governor George Hunt will hereafter be addressed as "Pharaoh George I". |
Rabbit Hash, Kentucky | A town whose mayors, since 1998, have all been dogs. | |
Raising of Chicago | During the 1850s, the city was raised on jacks, building by building. | |
Republic of Indian Stream | An area of land in northern New Hampshire that was an independent country from 1832 to 1835. | |
Republic of Molossia | A 34-person micronation in Nevada which takes the meaning of the phrase "a man's home is his castle" to new extremes. | |
Río Rico, Tamaulipas | A city that was ceded by the United States to Mexico in 1977 due to 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 U.S. 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. | |
State of Scott | Scott County in northern Tennessee seceded and formed its own state in opposition to Tennessee joining the Confederacy. It remained this way for over a century until it rejoined Tennessee in 1986. | |
Tower of Wooden Pallets | Now replaced by an apartment building, its site remains City of Los Angeles Historic Cultural Monument no.184. | |
Track 61 (New York City) | A secret train platform located below the Waldorf Astoria New York designed for use by U.S. Presidents when they would visit the hotel. | |
U Thant Island | An island in the East River with a surprisingly in-depth history for only being 2,000 square feet (190 m2) in area. | |
War of the Roses | The historical rivalry between Lancaster and York. Not to be confused with Wars of the Roses, the historical rivalry between Lancaster and York. | |
Wedge | It's harder than you think to construct the state of Delaware with a ruler and compass. | |
Whittier, Alaska | A city in Alaska where (almost) all of its residents live in one building: Begich Towers. | |
Winchester Mystery House | A house believed to be haunted by the ghosts of individuals killed by Winchester rifles. | |
World's littlest skyscraper | The result of a fraudulent investment scheme, it's a four-story brick building constructed in 1920 in downtown Wichita Falls, Texas that has only one room on each of its four floors. | |
Zilwaukee, Michigan | "Is this Milwaukee?" "Uh...yeah, it sure is!" | |
Zone of Death | The part of Yellowstone National Park in Idaho, where any crime can technically be committed without punishment – but don't tempt fate! |
Oceania [edit]
Baldwin Street | A short suburban road in Dunedin, New Zealand, reputedly the world's steepest street. | |
Ball's Pyramid | A nearly 600-metre-tall (2,000 ft) stone stack in the middle of the ocean. | |
Banjawarn Station | Did a Japanese apocalypse cult test a nuke in the middle of rural Australia? | |
Bayswater Subway | Bridge in Perth that has been hit by trucks 50 times between 2014 and 2020. | |
Burning Mountain | A straightforwardly-named mountain that has been on fire for over 6000 years. | |
Cardrona Bra Fence | An eccentric tourist attraction in New Zealand. | |
Coober Pedy | A mining town where most of the residents live underground. | |
Concrete bus shelters in Canberra | These brutalist cylindrical bus shelters are an icon of Australia's capital city. | |
Egmont National Park | This national park's boundaries created a circular forest. | |
Horizontal Falls | This pair of Australian "waterfalls" appear to be falling straight across the land. | |
Hunga Tonga | An island that was created in 2015 after a volcano erupted between two islands and connected them. | |
Jellyfish Lake | A lake where jellyfish have evolved without stingers due to a lack of predators. | |
Jervis Bay Territory | Briefly ceded to the ACT to give it access to the sea despite not bordering the ACT. | |
Kalawao County, Hawaii | The least populous county in the United States, with a population of 90 as of the 2010 United States Census. Established as a leper colony in 1866, it occupies a peninsula on Molokai and is not connected by road to the rest of the island. | |
Kingman Reef | It's designated as its own US overseas territory despite having an area of only 0.03 square kilometres (0.012 sq mi) and being almost entirely underwater during low tide. | |
Macquarie Island | The only place on earth where rocks from the Earth's mantle get exposed to the surface. | |
Mount Wycheproof | Considered a mountain when only 43 metres (141 ft) above surrounding terrain and 143 metres (469 ft) above sea level. There are parts of Sydney which have a higher elevation and are not considered a mountain. | |
Murray Valley Highway | A 671-kilometre (417 mi) road that has a road route number of B400 for 668 kilometres (415 mi) in the Victorian section and unmarked for 3 kilometres (1.9 mi) in the New South Wales section making the Victorian road network not connected to the New South Wales Network in that area. | |
Nelson–Blenheim notional railway | A road that was officially considered to be a railway by the New Zealand Government for 22 years. | |
New Zealand State Highway 78 | A road in Timaru, New Zealand, that is designated a highway despite being only 900 metres (3,000 ft) long. | |
Pink Lake | A lake that is naturally pink, but suddenly turned blue in 2010. | |
Princes Freeway (east) | A freeway with houses, traffic lights and a 60-kilometre-per-hour (37 mph) limit in some areas. What are VicRoads thinking? | |
Sandy Island | An island which was shown on Google Maps satellite view until 2012 despite not existing. | |
That Wanaka Tree | A tree named after a hashtag on Instagram. | |
Taumata | With a full name consisting of 85 characters, this hill may be the longest place name in the world. | |
Te Urewera | A forested area in New Zealand that is also a legal person (see below). | |
Whanganui River | A river in New Zealand that is legally a person. | |
Wedding Cake Rock | A rock that looks exactly like a wedding cake. | |
Whangamōmona | A self-declared republic in New Zealand, whose past presidents include a goat and a poodle. |
South America [edit]
| Darién Gap | This journey is impossible with the modes you have selected. |
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Devil's Island | A notorious penal colony off the coast of French Guiana. | |
Fordlândia | The man himself was not without his abject failures in Brazil. | |
Hacienda Nápoles | The luxurious estate of the deceased drug lord Pablo Escobar that may lead to an invasive hippopotamus population in Colombia. | |
Isla Apipé | An Argentine island in the Paraná River surrounded by Paraguayan waters. | |
Lençóis Maranhenses National Park | Wait, deserts don't seasonally flood. They just don't. Or do they? | |
Nazca Lines | A line museum, exhibited outdoors in southern Peru. | |
Y Wladfa | A series of towns in Argentina's Chubut Province with a minority of Welsh speakers. |
History [edit]
Abul-Abbas | An Asian elephant given to Carolingian emperor Charlemagne by the Abbasid caliph Harun al-Rashid. |
Architecture terrible | An architectural style advocated by French architect Jacques-François Blondel. |
Burned house horizon | The horizon which consumed cultures in the Balkans and around the Black Sea. |
Cadaver Synod | A deceased Pope was exhumed and put on trial! |
Charles II of Spain | The last Habsburg King of Spain who was so inbred that he could barely rule his nation. |
Count of St. Germain | The original Tommy Wiseau, an eighteenth century polymath who made a number of contradictory claims about his origins, including that he was 500 years old. People have also claimed he is an important theosophical figure who many have claimed to have met years after his supposed death in 1784. |
Crocker Land Expedition | An expedition to a non-existent island created to swindle a businessman. |
Dancing plague of 1518 | In 1518 around 400 people took to dancing for days without rest, and, over the period of about one month, some of those affected died of heart attack, stroke, or exhaustion. |
Daughter of Emperor Xiaoming of Northern Wei | A disputed first female monarch of Chinese history before Wu Zetian, whom the Empress Dowager Hu declared was a boy and was emperor for a day before being replaced by another infant. |
Defenestrations of Prague | When was the last time throwing someone out of a window started a war? |
Emilio Palma | An Argentine national who was the first person to be born in Antarctica. |
Erfurt latrine disaster | It's incredible how quickly someone's life can go to shit. |
George Psalmanazar | A Frenchman who was so successful in convincing 18th-century Britain he was a Taiwanese man, that he wrote an elaborate and blatantly fictitious history of the island. |
Glass delusion | Believing oneself to be made of glass was quite in vogue among Renaissance-era European nobility. |
Great Molasses Flood | A storage tank burst and flooded the streets of Boston with a 25-foot (7.6 m) high wave of molasses. |
Great Moon Hoax | An infamous article by The Sun that claimed that animals such as unicorns and bat-winged humans were found living on the moon. |
Great Stink | A London summer so smelly it prompted government action. |
Gregor MacGregor | That's his real name. Possibly the only honest thing about him. |
John Bentinck, 5th Duke of Portland | A reclusive English nobleman who built a vast maze under his home. |
Kingdom of Sedang | A French adventurer created a kingdom in Vietnam. |
Kottabos | The world's first drinking game. Care to play? All you need is a bronze "lamp stand" with a tiny statuette on top and some wine. |
London Beer Flood | Nine people drowned by a flood of over 300,000 gallons of beer. |
Mathias Rust | The West German who landed on a bridge in Moscow in 1987. |
Moose cavalry | The superposed moose cavalries of Sweden and Russia. |
Mutiny on the Bounty | The true story starting with a stern captain and a lustful crew on a Royal Navy ship and ending with the British-Polynesian Seventh-day Adventist culture of the Pitcairn Islands. Plenty of drama in-between. |
Norwegian butter crisis | A massive inflation of butter prices caused illegal smuggling and an "emergency appeal" from a Danish television show. |
Pepsi fruit juice flood | A PepsiCo warehouse collapse flooded the streets of Russia with an assortment of juices. |
Pope Benedict IX | He became pope at twenty, and later sold the papacy. He was pope three times. |
Puyi | He became the last Emperor of China at the age of two and died as an ordinary citizen, ending 2,133 years of dynastic rule in China. In his twilight years, he also did community theater. |
Sacred Band of Thebes | An elite fighting force consisting of a hand-picked groups of 150 pairs of male lovers. |
Taiping Rebellion | One of the most lethal wars in history centers around a Chinese man claiming to be the brother of Jesus Christ. |
Tank Man | An unidentified man who achieved widespread recognition after standing in front, and blocking the procession of a column of tanks, the morning after the bloody suppression of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. |
The Miracle of 1511 | When the people of Brussels protested against their rulers by building satirical and pornographic snowmen. |
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion | This one isn't exactly funny, but it is a hoax and an extraordinarily inflammatory one at that. |
Timothy Dexter | Genius or loony? |
Weather Station Kurt | That time when the Nazis landed in North America. |
Mathematics and numbers [edit]
−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. |
2 + 2 = 5 | ...or perhaps it equals 1984... |
616 (number) | The real number of the beast? |
Belphegor's prime | 1 followed by 13 zeros followed by 666 followed by 13 zeros followed by 1. |
Bertrand's postulate | Despite now being a theorem, still conventionally called a postulate. |
Calculator spelling | 5318008! |
The Complexity of Songs | A treatise on the computational complexity of songs by venerable computer scientist Donald Knuth. |
Erdős–Bacon number | A combination of the degrees 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 in full in decimal notation or even scientific notation. |
Happy number | Not just a cheery song on the radio. |
Hilbert's paradox of the Grand Hotel | A fully occupied hotel cannot accommodate any more guests. Or can it? Or, once it can, can it not? |
Illegal number | Does the US government forbid knowledge of the existence of certain numbers? |
Illumination Problem | A room with a bit of a shadow. |
Indiana Pi Bill | A notorious attempt to legislate the value of pi as 3.2. |
Infinite monkey theorem | An infinite number of monkeys typing on an infinite number of typewriters will (almost surely) produce all possible written texts. |
Interesting number paradox | Either all natural numbers are interesting or else none of them are. |
Legendre's constant | After 91 years and much effort, this legendary constant was found to be ... 1. Just 1. |
Look-and-say sequence | Also known as the Cuckoo's Egg. |
Mathematical fallacy | Trying to prove that 2 = 1 or that 1 < 0. |
Mathematical joke | Complex numbers are all fun and games until someone loses an i. That's when things get real. |
Minkowski's question-mark function | A function with an unusual notation and possessing unusual fractal properties. |
Monty Hall problem | The counter-intuitive way to prevail when playing Let's Make a Deal. |
Moving sofa problem | What is the largest area of a sofa that can be manoeuvred through an L-shaped corner? |
Narcissistic number | The pluperfect digital invariant says "Count me in"! |
Nothing-up-my-sleeve number | A number which is "above suspicion". |
Number of the beast | For beastly people bored of the number of unluckiness. |
Numbers station | [Six bars of The Lincolnshire Poacher play] "¡Atención! ¡Atención! One, four, seventeen, twenty-four..." |
Potato paradox | If potatoes consisting of 99% water dry so that they are 98% water, they lose 50% of their weight. |
Ramanujan summation | What do you get when you add all positive integers, up to infinity? You get a negative fraction. |
Schizophrenic number | Can numbers have mental disorders? |
Sexy prime | Prime numbers that differ from each other by sex. Er... six. |
Six nines in pi | A mathematical coincidence, the sequence "999999" appears a mere 762 digits into the decimal expansion of pi. |
Spaghetti sort | An algorithm for sorting rods of spaghetti. |
Taxicab number | Never tell a Numberphile that a number is uninteresting. |
Tetraphobia | Sometimes found in conjunction with triskaidekaphobia (see below) in East Asian cultures. More prevalent in Japan, where 49 is associated with "suffering until death". |
Titanic prime | Surprisingly, not discovered by Leonardo DiCaprio. |
Tits group | The perfect sporadic group doesn't exi- |
Triskaidekaphobia | No, it's not related to the Code of Hammurabi. No, it's not always considered unlucky. Yes, space exploration has been touched by it. |
Ulam spiral | A bored mathematician discovers an unusual numerical pattern while doodling. |
Vampire number | Integers with real bite; some even have multiple pairs of fangs. |
Will Rogers phenomenon | When moving an element from one set to another set raises – counter-intuitively – the average values of both sets. Also known as the Will Rogers paradox. |
Zenzizenzizenzic | You know how x3 is called "x cubed"? Well, x8 is called... |
Zeroth | An ordinal number popular in computing and related cultures. |
Dates and timekeeping [edit]
11:11 (numerology) | The time where all 4 digits are 1s |
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. |
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. |
List of non-standard dates | Including, among other things, January 0, February 30, and May 35. |
Manhattanhenge | Twice every year, the setting sun aligns with Manhattan's street grid. |
Mole Day | The Avogadro constant is celebrated on October 23rd starting at exactly 6:02 am. |
Phantom time hypothesis | A theory by Heribert Illig that the Early Middle Ages (614–911) never occurred. Therefore, it is now 1724 rather than 2021. |
Pi Day | The day – March 14 – on which the constant π is celebrated. |
Pocky & Pretz Day | A day in Japan celebrating long, thin biscuits. Due to their shape, it is celebrated on 11/11. |
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 being 5th May 2025). |
Star Wars Day | May the 4th be with you. |
Swatch Internet Time | In 1998, Swatch tried to reshape our timing system. |
Thanksgivukkah | A Thanksgiving-Hanukkah hybrid when the two overlap in November in the US; maybe your Hanukkah present can be a Thanksgiving Dinner. |
Towel Day | Don't forget to bring a towel, terrible or otherwise. |
Undecimber | In Java, the thirteenth month of the year. |
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. |
Year 2000 problem | A possible computing problem in the 1990's that was supposed to have occurred when the 21st century and 3rd millennium arrived. Of course, that never happened. |
Year 2038 problem | The computing problem that will arise due to the Unix time representation used in many computers. |
Year zero | Was there a year between 1 BC and AD 1? |
Language [edit]
A Book from the Sky | A must-see for connoisseurs of gibberish. |
Académie de la Carpette anglaise | A satirical French organisation that awards prizes to "members of the French élite who distinguish themselves by relentlessly promoting the domination of the English language over the French language in France and in European institutions". |
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 a constructed language? By inventing a new one! |
Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo | A meaningful, grammatical construction that has inspired linguists to talk about bullying amongst Western New York's bison population. |
Colorless green ideas sleep furiously | A sentence contrived by Noam Chomsky to demonstrate that a sentence can be grammatical yet nonsensical. |
Comparative illusion | More people have researched these nonsensical sentences than I have. [sic] |
Controversies about the word niggardly | How a simple word can cause so much controversy. |
The Chaos | The poem that mocks English spelling and pronunciation. Try to read it out loud! |
Chinese word for "crisis" | More notable among Americans than among the Chinese, apparently. |
Cryptophasia | The secret language of identical twins, also called idioglossia. |
Dipstick | The name of this measuring device can also mean idiot. |
Disambiguation (disambiguation) | Sometimes people do dumb things. |
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. |
Duck test | A humorous abductive reasoning test based on the activities of a duck. |
Engrish | Attempts by East Asian people – especially the Japanese – to construct English words and phrases. |
Eskimo words for snow | The claim that Eskimo languages have an unusually large number of words for "snow". |
Etaoin shrdlu | Cryptic echoes from the days of hot metal typesetting. |
Faggin–Nazzi alphabet | What? That's its real name. What did you think it was about? |
Faux Cyrillic | Give text some of that Яussiaи flavour. |
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-language spelling reform. |
Hopi time controversy | A long-lived academic debate about the concept of time in the Hopi language. |
How now brown cow | A way to greet those well-versed in rhetoric. |
Hyphen War | A dash between communism and independence. |
Ingressive sound | In many languages and dialects around the world, a loud inhalation means "yes". |
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". |
Irony punctuation | Is your irony too subtle? |
Ithkuil | Try learning this in a weekend! |
James while John had had had had had had had had had had had a better effect on the teacher | Repetition gone wrong. |
Kebabnorsk | The delicious-sounding ethnolect prevalent in multi-ethnic Oslo. |
Latin profanity | Latin for the profane. |
Law of holes | If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging! |
La plume de ma tante (phrase) | One of the first sentences you'll learn in French, and one of the least likely to ever actually be used. |
List of English words containing Q not followed by U | A Scrabbler's dream article. |
Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den | A 92-character poem written in Classical Chinese, in which every syllable has the sound "shi" (in different tones) when read in modern Mandarin Chinese. |
List of common false etymologies of English words | Believe it or not, "crap" did not originate from Thomas Crapper. |
List of ethnic slurs | Ever wondered why they got so angry at you? |
List of English words without rhymes | Does anything rhyme with orange? Or silver? |
List of proposed etymologies of OK | There's more than you think, OK? |
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. |
Maternal insult | What is this article about? Your mom! |
Metal umlaut | Gïvë thë lögö för ÿöür hëävÿ mëtäl bänd ä töügh Gërmänïc fëël. |
My postillion has been struck by lightning | A perfectly normal thing to say, as recommended by 19th century multilingual phrasebooks. |
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. |
Response to sneezing | Achoo! A great fortunate occurrence! |
Russenorsk | A Slavic-Scandinavian pidgin that lasted only 150 years. |
Robert Shields | You think you are hooked on recording every detail of your life...? |
Scientific wild-ass guess | Please excuse my SWAG. |
Scots Wikipedia | What happens when an American teenager writes 23,000 articles in a language he has no idea how to speak? |
Shibboleth | A type of slang used to identify an individual with a very specific region, usually with accompanied value judgments. Also, a funny word. |
Shit happens | A statement of philosophical existentialism boiled down to two words. |
Spelling of Shakespeare's name | What is the correct spelling of the famous English playwright? |
That that is is that that is not is not is that it it is | Punctuation matters, people. |
The Moon is made of green cheese | Is it really made out of cheese? |
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. |
Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana | Another example of syntactic ambiguity. |
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. |
Wine-dark sea | Homer's epithet that raise a theory that Greeks of Homer's time were color blind. |
Unusual names [edit]
See Nominative determinism for the idea that people gravitate toward careers that fit their names, e.g. urologists named Splat and Weedon.
Abcde | 328 people were named this in the United States between 1990 and 2014. |
Adolf Lu Hitler Marak | This Indian politician does not dispraise his parents' questionable name choice. |
Amandagamani Abhaya of Anuradhapura | A king of Anuradhapura whose name has way too many As for me to be comfortable with. |
Argel Fucks | A Brazilian footballer with a socially problematic last name. An unforgettable newspaper headline once declared "Fucks Off to Benfica". |
C. H. D. Buys Ballot | No evidence of electoral fraud by the chairman of a precursor to the World Meteorological Organization. |
Cesar Chavez | Formerly Scott Fistler, this right-wing, pro-business politician changed his name to match the Hispanic left‑wing labor activist in an attempt to get more votes. |
Cox–Zucker machine | An algorithm named after its inventors. |
Deportivo Wanka | An unfortunately named Peruvian football team whose strips are remarkably popular in Britain. |
Dick Assman | What? He was a celebrity for four months! |
Donaudampfschiffahrtsgesellschaft | An officials' association in pre-war Vienna, Austria, of a shipping company for transporting passengers and cargo on the Danube. |
Gregor Fučka | A Slovenian-born Italian basketball player with another socially problematic last name. |
Henry Lizardlover | Yes, he appreciates reptiles. |
Hubert Blaine Wolfeschlegelsteinhausenbergerdorff Sr. | Longest name ever given. |
Ima Hogg | American society leader, philanthropist, patron and collector of the arts, and one of the most respected women in Texas during the 20th century. |
Jakob Fugger | One of the richest men in history, with a quite unfortunate surname. |
John le Fucker | His surname probably didn't mean what you think it might mean. |
Jennifer 8. Lee | A former New York Times reporter whose middle name is the number eight. And you thought Harry S. Truman had an exceptional middle name... |
John B. Goodenough | Being good enough, this guy invented random access memory and the lithium-ion battery. |
Leone Sextus Tollemache | Or Leone Sextus Denys Oswolf Fraudatifilius Tollemache-Tollemache de Orellana Plantagenet Tollemache-Tollemache to his friends. |
Lyulph Ydwallo Odin Nestor Egbert Lyonel Toedmag Hugh Erchenwyne Saxon Esa Cromwell Orma Nevill Dysart Tollemache | Leone's older brother, whose initials stand for Lyonel the Second. |
List of examples of Stigler's law | Bode didn't discover Bode's Law, and Pascal didn't discover Pascal's Triangle. |
List of people with reduplicated names | …such as Boutros Boutros-Ghali and (see below) Neville Neville. |
Mansfield Smith-Cumming | The first head of MI6, whose name became appropriate as he promoted the use of semen as invisible ink. |
Mister Mxyzptlk | Sometimes called Mxy, a fictional impish character who appears in DC Comics' Superman comic books. |
Metta World Peace | An NBA player who wants to promote World Peace and has a reputation for on-court brawls. |
Mannanafnanefnd | A committee in Iceland that determines whether a name is suitable for integration into the Icelandic language. Apparently voted yes about themselves. |
Naming law in Sweden | An odd Swedish law regulating children's names, which has led to disgruntled parents submitting names such as Brfxxccxxmnpcccclllmmnprxvclmnckssqlbb11116, A, and Metallica. |
Neville Neville | The father of English footballers Phil Neville and Gary Neville. |
Praise-God Barebone | Christened Unless-Jesus-Christ-Had-Not-Died-For-Thee-Thou-Hadst-Been-Damned Barebone; not to be confused with his son Nicholas If-Jesus-Christ-Had-Not-Died-For-Thee-Thou-Hadst-Been-Damned Barbon. |
Preserved Fish | A historical New York City shipping merchant. |
Pro-Life | A perennial political candidate with strongly held views. |
Public Universal Friend | An 18th century Quaker who died, and was then revived, becoming an evangelist, gaining this unusual name, and becoming one of the earliest instances in recorded history of a person identifying as genderless. |
Richard Plantagenet Campbell Temple-Nugent-Brydges-Chandos-Grenville, 3rd Duke of Buckingham and Chandos | A warning to us all about taking double-barrelled surnames too far... |
Rinderkennzeichnungs- und Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz | And that's the short title of this German beef labelling law. |
Roger Fuckebythenavele | Perhaps the first use of the word fuck. |
Seán Dublin Bay Rockall Loftus | An Irish politician who changes his name to emphasize political affiliations. |
Sjokz | Commentator with an equally unpronounceable real name (Eefje Depoortere). Watch out! Eep! |
States Rights Gist | A Confederate general during the American Civil War. |
Téa | This name is surprisingly French and not English. |
Tiny Kox | A Dutch politician. |
Thursday October Christian I | The son of Fletcher Christian, leader of the mutiny on the Bounty. |
Tokyo Sexwale | Despite not being Japanese or a sperm whale, he has control over the global diamond industry. |
Tonibler | A name given in Kosovo in honor of a certain British politician. |
Turnipseed | Only the most hardcore turnip farmers have this name! |
Science [edit]
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 toast phenomenon | But only if you're eating at a table. |
Buttered cat paradox | If a cat always lands on its feet and toast always lands buttered-side-down, what if...? |
Cneoridium dumosum (Nuttall) Hooker F. Collected March 26, 1960, at an Elevation of about 1450 Meters on Cerro Quemazón, 15 Miles South of Bahía de Los Angeles, Baja California, México, Apparently for a Southeastward Range Extension of Some 140 Miles | This scientific paper has the longest article name on Wikipedia. The paper itself only has five words, though. |
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 extinct but is later imitated by others. |
Further research is needed | Some journals have banned this infuriating and redundant cliché. Some researchers are researching its effects, but FRIN... |
Gilbert U-238 Atomic Energy Laboratory | You may have had a chemistry set when you were a child. I bet it didn't come with radioactive substances in the box. |
Lazarus taxon | Leaping Lazarus! Somewhat like Monty Python's Dead Parrot, it's not really dead; it's just resting. |
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". |
'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. |
Project Steve | A wildly successful list of scientists in which all signatories (1) support evolution, (2) oppose intelligent design, and (3) are named Steve or a variation of that name (Steven, Stephan, Stephanie, etc.). |
Raven paradox | First, you'll grant that all ravens are black, yes...? |
Sokal affair | Physicist Alan Sokal demonstrates that at least some postmodernists can't see an emperor with no clothes. |
Timeline of the far future | The ultimate list of spoilers. Also gives you an existential crisis. |
Women-are-wonderful effect | A phenomenon found in psychological and sociological research which suggests that people associate more positive attributes with the general social category of women compared to men. |
Physics [edit]
Anatoli Bugorski | What happens when you stick your head in a particle accelerator? |
Colors of noise | Including white, pink, purple, blue... |
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. |
Demon core | A two-time radioactive killer. |
Fictional elements, isotopes and atomic particles | Not actual periodic elements. Many end in '-ite'. Some of the elements may indeed be minerals. |
Fourth, fifth, and sixth derivatives of position | Named after a famous cereal phenomenon. |
Flying ice cube | They happen to live inside the computers of scientists trying to simulate molecules. |
Frog battery | A curious experiment to determine the existence of animal electricity. |
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. |
Impossible color | Try to see it! |
Kundt's tube | A serious piece of scientific apparatus whose name has induced sniggering among English-speaking schoolchildren for over 150 years. |
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. |
Oh-My-God particle | Proof that physicists have a dramatic flair. |
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. |
Ranque-Hilsch vortex tube | What happens when you blow in a hole in a tube? Hot air comes out one end and cold air comes out the other. No consensus reached on why it happens yet. |
Smoot | A strange unit of distance used to measure the Harvard Bridge. |
Sound of fingernails scraping chalkboard | Urrrgggh! |
Earth sciences [edit]
"It's flat and that's all there is to it."
Aachenosaurus | A fossil plant that was mistakenly identified as a dinosaur. |
Andrée's Arctic balloon expedition | An ill-fated attempt to reach the North Pole in 1897. |
Bloop | Does a mystery sound from the bottom of the sea indicate that Cthulhu may awake...? |
Continental drip | A playful theory devised to explain why the continents are tapered toward the south. |
Expanding Earth | A theory that the Earth is growing. |
Snow in Florida | Yes, snow is not unknown in the "Sunshine State". |
Kentucky meat shower | Several minutes of raining meat. |
List of unexplained sounds | Must've been the wind. |
Mumbai "sweet" seawater incident | Salty creek becomes sweet for one tide cycle. |
Rain of animals | When it's literally raining cats and dogs. |
Red rain in Kerala | Did blood rain from the sky? |
South-up map orientation | The crew of Apollo 17 snapped Earth with Antarctica on top. NASA followed Ptolemy and rotated it "back". |
Roy Sullivan | An unlucky park ranger who was hit by lightning on seven separate occasions. He survived them all, but came to his own tragic end. |
Tinnunculite | A recently discovered mineral that forms from bird feces. |
Waffle House Index | The U.S. government's alternative measure of disaster impact. |
Chemistry and material science [edit]
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, torture and countless other maladies. Or... that's what they want you to think. |
26th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union | Largest gem diamond ever found in Russia. |
Azidoazide azide | An extremely sensitive explosive chemical. |
List of chemical compounds with unusual names | Some a consequence of their constituents or origins, others simply the work of whimsical chemists. |
Thomas Midgley, Jr. | Inventor of two of the world's most severe pollutants – and a machine that killed him. |
Nanoputian | A series of organic molecules having a structure that looks human. |
New car smell | Ahh, that new car smell. What do you mean, it might be toxic? |
Pitch drop experiment | The world's most viscous liquid dripping out of a funnel since 1927. There's been 9 drops so far. |
Proton-enhanced nuclear induction spectroscopy | A nuclear magnetic resonance technique with a very long name, so we can just call it penis. |
Pykrete | A bullet-resistant frozen-water compound once used in an attempt to create an aircraft carrier. |
Cummingtonite | A hard rock. |
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 [edit]
Cosmic latte | The average colour of the Universe: a slightly beige white. |
Cydonia (Mars) | You've heard of the man on the Moon, now get ready for the "Face on Mars", well, sort of... |
Elon Musk's Tesla Roadster | Driving in space becomes reality. |
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? |
Fallen Astronaut | A small statuette which is the only sculpture on the Moon. |
Fe, Fi, Fo, Fum, and Phooey | Five mice who circled the Moon 75 times on Apollo 17. Among the last eight Earthlings to travel to the Moon, upon returning to Earth the four remaining living mice were soon murdered and dissected in the name of science ("That's one small squeak...") |
Gauss's Pythagorean right triangle proposal | Proposal of Pythagorean theorem "drawing" to be constructed in the Siberian tundra as a signal for extraterrestrials. |
Hot, dust-obscured galaxies | Hot DOGs, anyone? |
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. |
Mariner 3 | A Mars mission that failed after the spacecraft housing failed to open following launch. It was unable to deploy its solar panels and ran out of power. It is still orbiting the Sun. |
Mars Climate Orbiter | Another failed Mars mission that disintegrated in the Martian atmosphere due to a unit conversion error. |
Matrioshka brain | Star-sized computer. |
Milkdromeda | The birth of a future galaxy, and the death of our own. |
Mimas (moon) | A moon that looks like the Death Star. |
The Moon is made of green cheese | Scientific consensus says it isn't, but are there people (or wolves) who think so? |
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. |
Phobos 1 | Yet another failed Mars mission, this time due to a poorly-designed user interface causing an end-of-mission command to be accidentally transmitted to the spacecraft, permanently cutting off the power. |
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. |
Space elevator competitions | How high can you go? |
Spaghettification | What happens when you fall into a black hole. |
Stolen and missing Moon rocks | The rocks were out of this world! Unfortunately, they fell into the wrong hands. |
Solway Firth Spaceman | "Wasn't there when I took the pic – honest!" |
Sylacauga (meteorite) | The first fallen meteorite in recorded history to have verifiably injured a human. |
Tabby's Star | A star that has been suggested to have an alien megastructure surrounding it. |
Timekeeping on Mars | How Martians know when they are. |
Voyager Golden Record | A compilation of sounds and images of humanity on a phonograph record made of gold-plated copper. It was sent to space in 1977 and is currently the farthest man-made object from Earth. |
WASP-76b | A hot Jupiter exoplanet where it rains liquid iron. |
Wow! signal | Alien radio transmission, or, at least, the strongest candidate for that role. |
Writing in space | How do you write in space? |
iPTF14hls | A star that seems to have exploded 6 times in the past 70 years. |
Medicine and health [edit]
Put them where the sun doesn't shine.
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 on a life of its own. |
Anal wink | Here's looking at you! |
Auto-brewery syndrome | Like a microbrewery in your digestive system. |
Banana equivalent dose | A banana for scale. |
Black hairy tongue | Really? |
Bristol stool scale | Taking a close look at a toilet bowl for the sake of science. The scale was inspired by eye charts. |
ChIA-PET | Chromatin Interaction Analysis by Paired-End Tag sequencing, that is. |
Coffee enema | A bizarre type of alternative medicine. |
Dimples of Venus | For fans of those dimples you don't find on a face. |
Dr. Young's Ideal Rectal Dilators | Forcibly withdrawn after officials clamped down on them. |
Eigengrau | The color seen by the eye in perfect darkness. |
Fart lighting | The act of igniting gases produced by human flatulence. |
Five-second rule | The notion that food dropped on the floor is safe to eat only as long as it's picked up within five seconds. |
Gynecomastia | Also known as "man boobs" or "moobs". |
Hair-grooming syncope | Who knew that brushing your hair could be deadly? |
Human–animal breastfeeding | If you have breast milk to spare, a puppy, piglet or monkey would like to hear from you. |
Hypertrichosis | Also known as "Human Werewolf Syndrome". |
Hypoalgesic effect of swearing | Got hurt? Swear the pain away! |
Jenkem | Huffing the gas from fermented human feces for a hallucinating effect. |
Maggot therapy | Those hungry, wriggling little larvae will clean up festering wounds because they are hungry. |
Male lactation | Given the right conditions, just about any male can do it. |
Maple syrup urine disease | For once, a sweet smell you don't want your infants exuding. |
Medical students' disease | A condition frequently reported in medical students who perceive themselves to be experiencing the symptoms of the diseases they are studying. |
Mellified Man | A legendary medicinal substance from Arabia involving honey. |
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. |
Osteo-odonto-keratoprosthesis | A tooth in the eye (is worth two in the foot?). |
Paleofeces | Our ancestors' poop. Worth a close look, apparently. |
Peanut butter test | A diagnostic test for Alzheimer's disease which measures subjects' ability to smell peanut butter through each nostril. |
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. |
Retained surgical instruments | An unfortunate possible side-effect of surgery. |
Schmidt sting pain index | An entomologist is stung by just about everything known to sting and, en route, describes the pain involved in terms of a four-point comparative scale. |
Supernumerary nipple | A condition in which one has an additional nipple. Apparently 1 in 18 people have this condition. |
Thumb twiddling | Maybe this is unusual to you. |
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. |
Human sexuality and reproduction [edit]
Autocunnilingus | Like autofellatio (see below), but much more difficult. |
Autofellatio | Acts of oral self-stimulation. |
Bathroom sex | Ever wanted to defecate and have sex at the same time? Well now you can! |
Bread dildo | A supposed Ancient Greek sex toy, made of bread. |
Breast Tax | An unusual tax meant to enforce the caste system in an indirect way. |
Cello scrotum | A hoax illness allegedly affecting male cello players. |
Coregasm | An orgasm caused by exercising of the core abdominal muscles. |
Donkey punch | Allegedly a sex move involving punching one's partner in the back of the head during intercourse. |
Female hysteria | A once-common diagnosis of a range of symptoms in women, cured through masturbation. |
Gerbilling | An urban legend about a sexual practice purportedly conducted by some male celebrities, most notably Eminem. |
Hamster zona-free ovum test | A test – sometimes called a "hamster test" – involving human semen, hamster eggs and a petri dish. |
Human penis size | Scientific data on average size, racial variations, surgical enlargement and urban legends. |
Koro | A condition where one (mistakenly) believes that his or her genitals are slowly disappearing. |
Lithopedion | The rare condition of an unborn fetus calcifying. |
Male pregnancy | For now, it's just a seahorse thing, but... |
Napoleon's penis | (Allegedly) cut off after his death and, among other things, displayed at a museum in Manhattan. |
National Masturbation Day | Not related to the week, and certainly not related to the month. |
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. |
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. |
Persistent genital arousal disorder | Not as funny as it may sound. |
Puppy pregnancy syndrome | A condition found in remote regions of India in which people believe they have conceived a puppy shortly after being bitten by a dog. |
Rumpology | Theory that a person's buttocks reveal a person's past and future. |
Self-inflicted caesarean section | A harrowing practice, verified to have occurred at least five times. |
Sleep sex | A form of parasomnia (similar to sleepwalking) that causes people to engage in sexual acts while they are asleep. |
Individual patients and staff [edit]
This skull's owner didn't even get a headache – but he was a changed man.
Jaxon Buell | A child born with only 20% of a brain. He lived for 5 years despite doctors' expectations that he would only live for 1 year. |
Jeanne Calment | A Frenchwoman with the longest verified human lifespan in recorded history. She was 122 at the time of her death. |
Stubbins Ffirth | An American trainee doctor who went to unusual lengths in his quest to prove that yellow fever is not contagious. |
Phineas Gage | A 19th-century construction worker who survived a three-foot-long (0.91 m) tamping iron going through his skull. His resultant behavioral changes have made him an important figure in the development of neuroscience. |
Genie | A feral child who was neglected by her father and was locked in a room for the first 13 years of her life. |
James Harrison (blood donor) | An Australian man whose 1,173 blood donations have saved over 2.5 million babies. |
Abby and Brittany Hensel | Conjoined twins with separate heads but joined bodies. |
Eugene Landy | A psychologist who developed a form of 24-hour therapy and later became business partners with one of his many celebrity patients, Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys. |
Hans Langseth | A guy who had the longest beard recorded in history. |
Robert Liston | A 19th-century Scottish surgeon who, among other things, performed what has been described as "The only operation in history with a 300 percent mortality rate". |
Barry Marshall | A doctor who, against the consensus of mainstream medicine, drank a vial of bacterial culture to prove that stomach ulcers were caused by bacteria rather than stress, spicy foods, and too much acid as was believed at the time. He won the Nobel Prize for it, too. |
Alexis St. Martin | A 19th-century French-Canadian fur trader who survived a gunshot wound and was left with a hole in his stomach, which allowed revolutionary experiments on digestion to be conducted. |
Lina Medina | A Peruvian girl who gave birth to a son when she was five years old, becoming the youngest human mother on record. |
Billy Milligan | A man with 24 personalities, popularized by the book The Minds of Billy Milligan. |
Wenceslao Moguel | A Mexican man suspected of working with the Mexican Revolution who survived his execution and continued to live 61 years afterward. |
Chandre Oram | A man in India with a 13-inch (33 cm) tail. |
Adam Rainer | The only person known to be both a dwarf and a giant. |
Tarrare | Tarrare (c. 1772 – 1798), sometimes spelled Tarare, was a French showman and soldier, noted for his unusual eating habits. |
Mary Toft | An English woman who hoaxed doctors into believing that she had given birth to rabbits. |
Nervous system and behaviour [edit]
Alice in Wonderland syndrome | Distortions of perception that may include one's surroundings appearing too large or too small, faint noises sounding loud, or time slowing to a trickle. |
Anton syndrome | People who are blind but convinced they can see. |
Bananadine | Exactly how psychedelic are those dried banana peels? |
Capgras delusion | When you're sure a friend or loved one is an impostor. |
Cortical homunculus | A distorted representation of the human body based on areas of the brain dedicated to processing motor functions for different body parts. |
Cotard delusion | Suffered by people, very much alive, who believe they're dead. |
Conversion disorder | Blindness and similar disabilities caused by anxiety. |
Cute aggression | The reason why people want to squeeze cute things without harm. |
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. |
Electromagnetic hypersensitivity | For those allergic to Wi-Fi. |
Encopresis | Voluntary or involuntary defecation in persons who are toilet trained (older than 4 years of age.) |
Exploding head syndrome | Ever woken up after an hour or two of sleep thinking you've just heard a massive explosion? |
Expressive aphasia | You know when you have a word on tip of your tongue but you just can't remember it? It's that, but with every word. |
False memory | Forming of false memories; sometimes leads to thousands of people having the same false memory. |
Fugue state | You black out and when you wake up years have passed, you're in a different city, you have a new name and have lived a different life while you were unconscious. Also known as dissociative fugue or psychogenic fugue. |
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. |
Geophagia | Eat dirt, pal. |
Homicidal sleepwalking | A real parasomnia that has been successfully used as a defence in court. |
Impossible color | Supposed colors that do not appear in ordinary visual functioning. |
Jumping Frenchmen of Maine | Like Tourette 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. |
Mariko Aoki phenomenon | A Japanese expression referring to an urge to defecate that is suddenly felt after entering bookstores. |
MK-Ultra | When a late-night radio host claims to have been brainwashed by the CIA, you may want to think twice. |
Paris syndrome | Being clinically disappointed by Paris. Particularly common among Japanese tourists. Not to be confused with Jerusalem syndrome or Stockholm syndrome. |
Rosenhan experiment | An experiment involving certifiably sane mental patients. |
Somatoparaphrenia | A type of delusion in which a sufferer denies ownership of a limb or an entire side of the body. |
Stendhal syndrome | A psychosomatic illness that causes rapid heartbeat, dizziness, fainting, confusion and even hallucinations when an individual is exposed to art or natural beauty. |
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 | What what was this article was about again... Wait, I think I am just about to remember... |
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. |
Urophagia | The consumption of urine. Not always for survival reasons. |
Visual release hallucinations | Millions of perfectly sane people are having freakish hallucinations – and just not admitting it. |
Zero stroke | An alleged mental disorder that caused patients to write endless rows of zeroes. |
Phobias [edit]
Cherophobia | Fear of happiness |
Chromophobia | Fear of colors |
Coprophobia | Fear of feces or even defecation, and possibly enjoying constipation |
Dentophobia | Fear of dentists |
Emetophobia | Fear of puking |
Globophobia | Fear of balloons or balloons popping |
Genuphobia | Fear of knees or the act of kneeling |
Koumpounophobia | Fear of buttons |
Mageirocophobia | Fear of cooking |
Numerophobia | Fear of numbers |
Osmophobia | Fear of odors and smells |
Phallophobia | Fear of the erect penis |
Philophobia | Fear of love |
Phobophobia | Fear of having a phobia |
Pogonophobia | Fear of beards |
Takotsubo cardiomyopathy | Yes, you can die from a broken heart. |
Technophobia | Fear of computers and internet |
Telephobia | Fear of making or answering telephone calls |
Animals [edit]
Adactylidium | A mite with a very unusual life cycle. |
Animals in space | An annotated list of the various animals used in space programs. |
Animal attack | Not kidding: death by beavers, bunnies, squirrels, cats and other things you should not have as pets. |
Anting (bird activity) | Not recommended for humans. |
Apophallation | Are you a slug and can't extract your penis? Amputate and change your gender. |
Candiru | Barbed fish allegedly attracted to, lodged in, and extracted from human penises. |
Common Surinam toad | The mother's back is where the eggs are embedded and where they develop. |
Conservation-induced extinction | The extinction of highly endangered parasites at the hands of conservationists. |
Depopulation of cockroaches in post-Soviet states | A great ecological problem indeed complete with fifteen references in Russian. |
Cat–dog relationship | For centuries the two most popular house pets have been fighting like, well, cats and dogs. |
Cymothoa exigua | A parasitic crustacean that, when female (they are hermaphroditic), attaches to and then destroys a fish's tongue, hooks itself to the remaining stub and becomes the fish's new tongue. |
Epomis | A deceptive beetle larva that entices its own predators by feigning prey-like movements in order to eat its predator. |
Eunice aphroditois | "Armed with sharp teeth, it is known to attack with such speeds that its prey is sometimes sliced in half." As if being a three-metre (9 ft 10 in) worm were not impressive enough. |
Hallucinogenic fish | No, the fish are not trippin'; they will cause hallucinations if ingested. It is not known if hallucinations will occur if one fish consumes another. |
Israel-related animal conspiracy theories | Has an animal looked suspicious? It was probably Israel. |
Jenny Haniver | A grotesque-looking sea monster made from the corpse of a ray. |
Lioconcha hieroglyphica | A type of clam with a shell covered in hieroglyphs. |
List of animals displaying homosexual behavior | Everything from salmon to seagulls to dragonflies. |
List of animal sounds | Snail do "Munch, crunch", Squirrel do "squeak". |
List of animals awarded human credentials | Mostly due to pranks pulled on diploma mills. |
London Underground mosquito | A species of mosquito that lives in underground railways. |
Love dart | Hermaphroditic snails play Cupid. |
Lyall's wren | Made extinct by feral cats, possibly the offspring of one pregnant female. |
Nightingale excrement as facial | Droppings of a nightingale variety used in facials. Some claim that it helps with acne. Project Medicine states that the references are not MEDRS. (MEDical Reliable Source) |
Orbiting Frog Otolith | A NASA frog experiment, sending two bullfrogs into space to test their sense of balance. |
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 what is going on behind their backs. |
Pasilalinic-sympathetic compass | Telepathic communication is not possible in snails no matter how far apart they may be. Nothing else has been ruled out. |
Penis fencing | A |
Polar bear jail | For polar bear criminals. |
Prostitution among animals | Did you know that prostitution exists among animals? |
Rotating locomotion in living systems | Why don't animals have wheels? |
Shortarse feelerfish | Bathumycops brevianalis is a fish so named for its short anal fins – brevianalis meaning "short anus". |
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. |
Trout tickling | Coochy coo! |
Uraba lugens | It's called the mad hatterpillar for a reason... |
Worm charming | No spade? No worries! There's a better way to get hold of earthworms. |
Cats [edit]
Bonsai Kitten | The practice of growing small jar-shaped kittens caused controversy years after it was revealed to be a hoax. |
Cat-burning | A form of entertainment in the Middle Ages, sometimes participated in by royalty. |
Demon Cat | A cat that supposedly haunts government buildings in Washington, D.C. |
Popular cat names | Cat names, ranked by popularity. |
Polydactyl cat | Cats with extraordinary numbers of toes. |
Odd-eyed cat | One of the national treasures of Turkey. |
Pittsburgh refrigerator cat | A "breed" of cat that lived in refrigerators that people actually believed existed. |
Cattle [edit]
Cow tipping | This actually takes up to 14 people to make it happen. |
Hardware disease | A condition in bovines caused by ingesting stray bits of metal. |
Chickens [edit]
Cannibalism in poultry | See: tastes like chicken. |
Chicken eyeglasses | Tiny spectacles for chicks, to stop them from seeing red. |
Chicken Dance, Chicken (dance) | There is a huge difference. |
Chicken gun | Valuable for the mitigation of damage from bird strikes. The chicken carcass must be thawed first, though. |
Chicken hypnotism | Have you ever wanted to hypnotize a chicken? If not, why not? |
Chicken or the egg | Which came first? |
Chicken sexer | A person whose job is to determine the sex of chicken hatchlings. |
Chicken powered nuclear bomb | A British project to lay nuclear mines in West Germany during the Cold War that were planned to be kept warm by live chickens. |
Empathy in chickens | Have some empathy when eating crunchy chicken nuggets. |
Tastes like chicken | But baked, grilled, or fried? |
Squirrels [edit]
Mammals [edit]
Ambergris | Do you really want to know what your fancy perfume was made from? |
Berserk llama syndrome | The result of being too friendly with llamas. |
Danish Protest Pig | A pig bred to look like the flag of Denmark, to circumvent prohibition of the flag. |
Deer penis | It is said to enhance sexual potency in men and was banned by the Chinese government from the 2008 Olympics. |
Diving horse | A short-lived attraction during the 1880s. |
The dog ate my homework | Instead of a pathetic excuse for an article, an article about a pathetic excuse. |
Domesticated silver fox | Soviet Russia subsidizes the breeding of silver foxes. |
Exploding whale | The next time a whale washes on shore in one Oregon county, the authorities will leave the dynamite at home. |
Fainting goat | A breed of goat whose muscles freeze for about 10 seconds when it is startled. |
Flying primate hypothesis | Hypothesis that megabats are primates like us. |
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". |
Human | An article that reads as if non-humans wrote it. |
Overtoun Bridge | A bridge from which dogs keep leaping to their death. |
Quokka | An Australian animal which has developed a habit of posing for selfies with humans. |
Panda pornography | Pornographic movies created to achieve sexual arousal for Giant pandas, which have been proven to be unaffected by the popular drug Viagra. |
Revival of the woolly mammoth | Plans to clone the woolly mammoth and re-introduce them to Siberia. |
Rhinogradentia | A fictitious order of mammal invented by a German zoologist with a sense of humour. |
Street dogs in Moscow | Some of them have figured out how to commute using the subway system. |
Weasel war dance | The behavior of extremely excited ferrets who are enjoying themselves too much. |
What Is It Like to Be a Bat? | Life's most important questions. |
Whale fall | The ecological consequences associated with a dead whale sinking to the seafloor. |
Individual animals [edit]
52-hertz whale | Dubbed the "world's loneliest whale", it vocalizes at a frequency used by no known whale species. |
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. |
Bubbles | A chimpanzee who used human toilet facilities, moonwalked, and (allegedly) attempted suicide. |
Casper | A cat famed for traveling on a bus around Plymouth, England. |
Dusty the Klepto Kitty | Redefining the term "cat burglar". |
Enumclaw horse sex case | An unfortunate case of a horse riding a man, as opposed to a man riding a horse. |
Fungie | Ireland's favourite dolphin.. |
George | A lobster weighing 20 pounds (9.1 kg), estimated to be 140 years old. |
Grape-kun | A Humboldt penguin who gained worldwide fame after apparently falling in love with a cutout of an anime character. |
Grumpy Cat | Unfortunately, this cat couldn't turn that frown upside down. |
Harambe | A gorilla killed to prevent it killing a child it was saving. Became a meme. |
Henry the Hexapus | An octopus missing two arms due to an unfortunate birth defect. |
Hoover the talking seal | Hoover. A seal. Which talked. |
Jack | A Baboon who took over for his paraplegic owner as an employee of the Cape government railway. |
Jackie | A dalmatian dog who was taught by his owner to do the Nazi salute, long before Count Dankula did. |
Jeremy | A left-coiled snail who became famous after a campaign to find another left-coiled snail so he could mate. |
Jonathan | Oldest known living terrestrial animal in the world (if it weren't Adwaita). He made the reverse of the 5p of Saint Helena. What have you done? |
Jumbo | An elephant with gigantism |
Khanzir | Possibly the world's loneliest pig. Even more lonely during the swine flu outbreak. |
Lily Flagg | A Jersey cow that produced record amounts 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. |
Lonesome George | The last known individual of the species Pinta Island tortoise. He was known as the rarest creature in the world. |
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. |
Nim Chimpsky | A chimpanzee, subject of long-running studies into animal language acquisition, named punningly for linguist Noam Chomsky. |
Osama bin Laden | An elusive elephant who terrorized the jungle of Assam. He was eventually shot, but there are those who question the official story of his death. Much like his famous namesake. |
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. |
Potoooooooo | Actually, it's pronounced "potatoes". |
Ravens of the Tower of London | Ravens used as soldiers in the Tower of London. |
River Thames whale | In 2006, a Northern Bottlenose swam into London and on to the front pages of the British newspapers. |
Sergeant Reckless | A horse that held an official rank in the US military, fought in the Korean War and participated in an amphibious landing. |
Tamworth Two | Two pigs who, in 1998, escaped an abattoir in England and attracted media attraction. Thanks to a newspaper, they were never made into bacon, ham or sausages. |
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. |
Topsy | An elephant that was electrocuted, as the event was filmed by the Edison Manufacturing Company. |
Turra Coo | An insurance protest gone too far. |
Unsinkable Sam | A cat that has survived the sinking of three ships |
William Windsor | A cashmere goat who served as a lance corporal in the 1st Battalion, the Royal Welsh, an infantry battalion of the British Army. |
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. |
Names in biology [edit]
Anophthalmus hitleri | Rare blind beetle named after Adolf Hitler, poached by collectors of Hitler memorabilia. |
Aptostichus stephencolberti | A trapdoor spider named after Stephen Colbert. Naturally, because he asked for it. |
Bill Gates' flower fly | A flower fly, Eristalis gatesi, named after Bill Gates. |
GoldenPalace.com Monkey | A new species of monkey that was officially named after the GoldenPalace.com online casino. |
Harryplax | A genus of crab named in part after the titular character of the Harry Potter franchise. The sole species of this genus is named after the coldly hostile, yet emotion-concealing character from the same franchise. |
Mini | A genus of tiny Madagascar frogs containing 3 species: Mini ature, Mini mum, and Mini scule. |
Mothers against decapentaplegic | Actually, it's a protein. |
Mountain Chicken | Is it a frog or a chicken? |
Neopalpa donaldtrumpi | A moth remarkable for its orange head and small genitalia. |
Pachygnatha zappa | A spider whose abdominal markings resemble a very famous mustache |
Pikachurin | An extracellular matrix-like retinal protein named after Pikachu. |
Setaceous Hebrew character | A European moth with wing markings bearing a chance resemblance to a letter in the Hebrew alphabet. |
| You may snicker now, but if you had any of these, 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. |
Spongiforma squarepantsii | A type of mushroom named after SpongeBob SquarePants. |
Strigiphilus garylarsoni | A biting louse named for cartoonist Gary Larson of Far Side fame. |
Synalpheus pinkfloydi | A species of snapping shrimp named after the famous English rock band. |
Thaumatodryinus tuukkaraski | A wasp named after NHL goaltender Tuukka Rask as both are acrobatic, and have a killer glove hand. |
Zombie taxon | Paleontology of the undead. |
Zyzyxia lundellii and Zyzzyzus warreni | The last plant name and animal name in the dictionary, respectively. |
- See also
- List of organisms named after famous people
- List of U.S. state dinosaurs (does not include any of the List of U.S. state fossils)
- List of individual pigs
Plants [edit]
Bialbero di Casorzo | A cherry tree that grows upon a mulberry tree in Italy. |
Chandelier Tree | A 300-foot-tall (91 m) redwood with a giant hole cut through the middle for cars to drive through. |
Echinopsis lageniformis | A cactus the Germans call Frauenglück, or "Women's Joy". |
Olympic oaks | Gifts from the Führer. Some are still alive. |
Moon tree | Trees planted from seeds that were taken into space by Apollo 14. |
Nepenthes lowii | A plant that lures animals to release their droppings into a pitcher. |
Mimosa pudica | A plant that rapidly closes or folds its leaves after they are touched. |
Old Man of the Lake | A 30-foot tree stump that has been floating around Oregon's Crater Lake since at least 1896. |
Pando | An 80,000 year old quaking aspen colony that is believed to be one of the oldest and heaviest organisms on the planet. |
Plant arithmetic | Plants can do math! |
Plant rights | If other living beings like humans and animals can have rights, then why not plants? |
Pomato | It's both potato and tomato! |
Tree of Knowledge (Australia) | Killed by ignorance. |
Tree of Ténéré | A solitary acacia that was once the most isolated tree on Earth before being run over by a drunken Libyan truck driver. |
Tree That Owns Itself | Its owner loved it so much that he granted it ownership of itself. |
- See also
- List of individual trees
Technology, inventions and products [edit]
Antikythera mechanism | An analog computer built in Ancient Greece. |
Canard Digérateur | Or "Digesting Duck", an automaton built to simulate a duck eating, digesting, and excreting. |
Centennial Light | A hundred-year-old light bulb that has been burning nonstop for 119 years. |
Clocky | An alarm clock that hides from its owner. |
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.) |
Electronic voice phenomenon | Alleged spiritual voices heard in white noise and radio interference. |
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. |
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... |
List of inventors killed by their own inventions | Perilous parachutes, lethal lighthouses and murderous motorcycles! |
Mosquito laser | A bug zapper with a difference. |
My Friend Cayla | That doll is a spy! |
One red paperclip | A man's small piece of metal turns out to be worth more than expected. |
Parking chair | Using household objects to reserve parking spaces. |
Pigeon photography | Pigeons were used by the Germans for aerial surveillance in World WarI, and apparently also in World WarII. Not to forget the CIA's own pigeon camera. |
Project Cybersyn | Chilean robo-socialism control chamber invented by a Brit with a gigantic beard. |
Pythagorean cup | When the cup is filled beyond a certain point, it will empty itself. |
Quartz crisis | Not a comic book story arc, but the upheaval in watchmaking caused by the introduction of quartz watches. |
Royal Mail rubber band | One billion are used every year and often seen littering the streets of UK cities. |
Russian floating nuclear power station | Self-contained, low-capacity, floating nuclear power plants. |
Splayd | 33.3% spoon, 33.3% knife, 33.3% fork. |
Spork | A cross between a spoon and a fork. Not to be confused with a knork. |
Tempest Prognosticator | Meteorology by frightened annelid. |
Turboencabulator | A device whose sole function is to expose technological ignorance. |
Uncanny valley | How to measure your emotional response to androids. |
Useless machine | In most cases, toys for adults. |
Wheat lamp | A type of lamp used by miners that is unrelated to wheat. |
Wrap rage | Ever been driven mad by packaging that just won't open? |
Xianxingzhe | A Chinese robot, according to the Japanese, that will save its country from corporate capitalism with its crotch cannon. |
Hygiene and sanitation [edit]
Committee to End Pay Toilets in America | A 1970s organization whose campaign was to end pay toilets in the United States of America. |
"Darkie" toothpaste | Racist toothpaste from Taiwan. |
Fatberg | A congealed lump of fat and non-biodegradable buildup in sewer systems. A 250-metre-long, 140 tonne specimen was discovered under London in September 2017. |
Female urination device | Used by women when needing or wanting to pee standing up. |
Groom of the Stool | The most intimate Royal office. |
Hotel toilet-paper folding | Ever wondered why it was so? |
Interactive Urinal Communicator | A talking urinal made for advertising purposes. |
iLoo | Microsoft's attempt to bring you the interwebzzz inside the portable public loo. |
Jack Black | 19th century rat catcher who bred unusually colored rats and sold them as pets. |
Japanese toilets | The most advanced toilets in the world with computers, nozzles and flashing lights. |
List of people who died on the toilet | You could say they died on the throne |
Lloyds Bank turd | Possibly the largest example of fossilised human feces ever found, discovered under the future site of a Lloyds Bank in England. |
Shit flow diagram | This is the technical term. |
Stainless steel soap | Metallic soap that removes odours from the hands. |
Toilet-related injury | Not all injuries and deaths linked to toilets are urban legends. |
Toilet papering | Art or vandalism? |
Toilet paper orientation | On the pros and cons of letting toilet paper hang over or under the roll. |
Whizzinator | A fake penis used to beat drug tests (complete with dried urine, heater, syringe). Comes in white, tan, Latino, brown, and black |
World Toilet Day | International holiday declared by the United Nations. |
Clothing and accessories [edit]
The dress | The biggest question of 2015: Is it white and gold or black and blue? |
Fatsuit | Yes, this makes you look fat. |
Gorilla suit | What to wear when you don't want to look human. |
Koteka | An unusual traditional garment of western New Guinea, also known as the "penis gourd". |
Meat dress of Lady Gaga | A dress made of flank steak. Currently preserved as jerky in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. |
Muffin top | A marketing mishap, many well-meaning young women, and vanity came together to form this demographic. |
Shoe tossing | The practice of throwing footwear, whether for humorous or political purposes. |
Sweater curse | Think your loved one will be pleased if you knit them a sweater? Think again. |
Three Wolf Moon | A T-shirt with wolves howling at the moon that gained popularity after one person wrote a parodic review for it on Amazon.com. |
Tin foil hat | Headgear which allegedly prevents a person from having their minds read or controlled. |
Transport [edit]
The day Sweden turned to the right side.
2001 Japan Airlines mid-air incident | Two Japan Airlines aircraft were roughly 135 meters away from causing the deadliest aviation accident in history. |
2003 Angola 727 disappearance | A Boeing 727 was stolen and never found. |
2018 Horizon Air Q400 incident | A ground service agent with no flight experience whatsoever managed to do insanely difficult aerial maneuvers in a stolen plane that was thought to be impossible to do those maneuvers in. |
Aeroflot Flight 593 | A plane that crashed because the pilot let his kids fly it. |
Ampelmännchen | The East German "traffic-light little-man" ( Ampelmännchen ). |
Amtrak paint schemes | Various colors of the National Railroad Passenger Corporation (Amtrak). |
AVE Mizar | This nightmare lovechild of a Cessna Skymaster and a Ford Pinto eventually killed its inventor. |
Billups Neon Crossing Signal | A local inventor's extreme solution to railway crossing safety. |
Boaty McBoatface | What happens when you allow the British public to name a ship in an online poll? |
Brighton and Rottingdean Seashore Electric Railway | What do you do when there's water in the way of your train? Just build the rails underwater and make the train a moving pier on 23 foot high legs, complete with lifeboats and a requirement a ship captain be aboard at all times. |
British Rail flying saucer | Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it's the 10:13 to Venus. |
China National Highway 110 traffic jam | The world's longest-lasting traffic jam, in which some drivers were stuck for up to 5 days, moving only 1km (0.6 miles) per day. |
Cycloped | The entrant into the Rainhill Trial that placed Horse Power against Steam Power. |
Dagen H | September 3, 1967: The day that Sweden changed its traffic directionality. |
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. |
Experiment | A boat with eight horse-powers. Literally. |
Get Out and Push Railroad | Just what it sounds like. |
Ferry Lina | The world's shortest regular ferry located in Sweden that takes 25-30 seconds (depends of how strong you are). |
Gimli Glider | A confusion over units leads to a Boeing 767 plane running out of fuel mid-flight and becoming a glider. |
Human mail | Why buy an expensive ticket when you can go by mail? |
Iron Dobbin | A mechanical horse made in 1933 for the Italian Fascist Youth Movement. |
Jesus nut | Not your local Bible-thumping preacher but the bolt on the top of a helicopter that connects it to the rotor blades. |
Loose wheel nut indicator | Yes, those little red tags you see on truck wheels really do have a purpose. |
M-497 Black Beetle | The New York Central Railroad decided to see what would happen when they strapped two jet engines on a railcar; this was the result. It currently holds the record for fastest train in the Americas at 183.68 mph (295.6 km/h). |
Mile High Club | Soaring members. |
Mehran Karimi Nasseri | An Iranian refugee who lived in Charles de Gaulle Airport from 1988 until 2006. |
Men's parking space | An antonym to women's parking space. The only known instances are two spaces in a garage in Germany. |
Miss Belvedere | A car buried in a time capsule in 1957 and unearthed in 2007, only to discover that it had suffered 50 years of water damage underground and wouldn't start. |
Paternoster lift | Strange European elevators without doors that travel in a loop. Considered by many to be very dangerous. |
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. |
Plastic bicycle | It seems that making bikes out of plastic is not a recipe for success. |
PZL M-15 Belphegor | A Soviet attempt at a turbofan-powered crop duster. It is the slowest jet aircraft to enter production as well as the only jet biplane or jet crop duster to exist. |
Rail transport in Vatican City | It consists of a 680-metre branch line and was constructed as a direct result of the Vatican's recognition as a country. |
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. |
RP FLIP | A manned ship designed to be capsized at a 90° angle for weeks on end. |
Schienenzeppelin | An unholy combination of a Zeppelin and a locomotive. |
School bus yellow | A color especially formulated for use on school buses in the United States. |
Screw-propelled vehicle | Get there by screwing. |
Shipping container architecture | The concept and art of using intermodal containers to build stuff. |
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. |
South Pointing Chariot | An ancient Chinese mechanical compass which took a millennium to reproduce. |
Tall bike | A bike which consists of two conventional bicycle frames connected one atop the other. |
Train surfing | As respectable and practical as drying one's hair in most parts of the world. |
Unused highway | Lost highways, unloved and unused. |
Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 | Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571, later known as the Andes Flight Disaster and the Miracle of the Andes, was a chartered flight that originated in Montevideo, Uruguay, where the passengers were forced to resort to cannibalism after it crashed. |
USGlobal Airways | An active airline founded in 1989 that has never operated a single commercial flight. |
Vomit Comet | Lack of gravity is not good for the stomach. |
Vortech Meg-2XH Strap-On | A discontinued strap-on helicopter designed for amateur construction. Somehow no lawsuits are mentioned in the article. |
Wallsend Metro station | All railroads lead to Rome. With "no smoking" signs, although tobacco was unknown to ancient Romans... |
Westray to Papa Westray flight | The world's shortest passenger flight, lasting as little as 53 seconds. Just don't expect an in-flight meal. |
The wrong type of snow | Possibly the most feeble excuse for why British trains are so awful. |
Computing [edit]
.nu | Niue's top-level domain, which is regulated by Sweden and almost exclusively used by European countries. |
.tv | Sales of websites under this top-level domain name make up 10% of Tuvalu's GDP. |
Any key | Press any key to continue. |
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. |
Brainfuck | An intentionally difficult to use programming language containing only eight commands. |
Brian's Brain | He's so smart, he has his own 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. |
Conway's Game of Life | A simple game with only three rules that people make beautifully complex machines including a computer that runs Conway's Game of Life. |
Electric unicycle | The ongoing academic effort to teach robots to ride unicycles. |
Elvis operator | An operator in programming languages with an unusual name. |
Emojli | A defunct emoji-only social network. Started as a parody of Yo (see below). |
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. |
Evil bit | Indicates if a packet has been sent with malicious intent, so that it can be ignored. |
Guru Meditation error | If you thought the blue screen of death was bad, this computer error would hamper your quest to reach Nirvana. |
Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol | Protocol for controlling and monitoring coffee pots. Attempting to use a teapot while brewing coffee will yield you the "HTTP 418: I'm a teapot" error message. |
I Am Rich | You must be if you could afford this US$999.99 iPhone application that did, well, not very much of anything. |
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. |
Leet | T3h 1@ngu/\&e 0f H@xx0rz. |
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 | A water-based analogue computer used to model the United Kingdom economy, bringing a new meaning to the term liquidity. |
On 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. |
Pentium F00F bug | An Intel Pentium bug with an unusual name. |
Reality distortion field | Surely an obscure quantum-physics phenomenon? Nope! |
Rubber duck debugging | Code debugging by explaining your code to a rubber duck. Quack! |
Rubber-hose cryptanalysis | Cryptography by other means. |
Scunthorpe problem | Spam filtering based on text strings can cause problems. Just ask the residents of S****horpe. |
Send Me To Heaven | A mobile game won by throwing your phone as close to heaven as you can without it getting there. |
Tay (bot) | An artificial intelligence chatbot designed by Microsoft to learn the speech patterns of the Twitter users who interacted with it, Tay lasted 16 hours before becoming too racist to remain online. |
TempleOS | A biblical-themed operating system designed by a single schizophrenic programmer over the course of 10 years after receiving instructions from God. Some assembly required. |
Trojan Room coffee pot | The fascinating target of the world's first webcam: a coffee machine at the computer science department of Cambridge University. |
Utah teapot | A 3D model which has become a standard reference object (and something of an in-joke) in the computer graphics community. |
Yo | A messaging service whose only function was to send "Yo" to people. |
Popular culture, entertainment and the arts [edit]
How far would you go to save yourself?
Allegedly, you can survive a conversation with Kuchisake-onna by saying the word "pomade" three times.
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. |
Baseball metaphors for sex | Two of America's favorite pastimes. |
Beezin' | A fad in which people apply Burt's Bees lip balm to their eyelids. |
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 or by-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, except for his "service" in World War II, 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. |
Cultural history of the buttocks | A cheeky article. |
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. |
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 hermit | In case you are in need of some backyard friends. |
Ghost riding | One of the latest trends to be popularized by hyphy culture. |
Great Stork Derby | What could possibly be in the will of a notorious practical joker? |
Gurn | A Western term for creating odd appearances of the face. |
Human rainbow | A huge gathering of colours. |
Hundeprutterutchebane | Translates to Dog Fart Switchback. It is a flatulence-themed roller coaster. |
Issei Sagawa | Writer, commentator, minor celebrity, murderer, and cannibal. |
Kayfabe | In professional wrestling, the portrayal of events within the industry as real. |
Killer toy | When children's toys attack! |
Kuchisake-onna | A Japanese urban legend (probably). Also known as "the slit-mouthed woman", Kuchisake-onna is asking you if you think she's pretty. No matter what you answer, you're doomed. Except if you say "pomade" three times. |
Lawnchair Larry flight | Successfully piloted a lawn chair to 16,000 feet (4,900 m) over Los Angeles. |
List of defunct amusement parks | I thought Marine World was open! Darn it... |
Love lock | Padlock your love to a fence, and throw away the key. |
Masturbate-a-thon | It's okay – it's for charity! |
Metafiction | Fiction about fiction. |
Mooning the Cog | Bad weather isn't the only reason to avoid the summit of Mount Washington. |
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. |
NUKEMAP | New York got blown up by the Tsar Bomba! Well, at least you can do that in this. |
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. |
Sardarji joke | Popular jokes in India, based on stereotypes of Sikhs. |
Self-referential humor | A joke that refers to itself as the joke. |
Treacle mining | The fictitious mining of treacle (molasses) in a raw form similar to coal. |
World Famous Bushman | A street entertainer in San Francisco who makes a living by pretending to be a bush. |
Voluntary Human Extinction Movement | A group of people trying to get everyone to stop reproducing. |
You kids get off my lawn! | I'm gonna call your parents, you kids! |
Art [edit]
"Surely you can see that THIS is art!"
Ambigram | A type of calligraphic design that includes words which read the same when reversed or flipped upside down. |
America (Cattelan) | A fully-functioning solid gold toilet, on display (and available for use) in one of New York's finest art museums. |
Artist's Shit | A quite literal and humorous meta-art. |
Australia's big things | Giant folk art as tourist traps. |
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. |
Cabazon Dinosaurs | Comprises of "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. Made by people that think dinosaurs never existed. |
Chamber of Art and Curiosities, Ambras Castle | A cabinet of curiosities created by Ferdinand II, Archduke of Austria in the 16th century. |
Cool S | A symbol of uncertain origins often used in graffiti. |
Droste effect | The effect of a picture appearing within itself. |
Earring Magic Ken | How Barbie's boyfriend, in an attempt to look cooler, became a gay icon. |
Equestrian statue of the Duke of Wellington, Glasgow | How a traffic cone became a part of a 19th Century statue |
Fire photography | The act of taking photographs of firefighting operations. |
Fourth plinth, Trafalgar Square | The horse is missing. |
Fremont Troll | An 18 foot, 13,000 pound concrete sculpture of a troll clutching a VW beetle located in the Fremont neighborhood of Seattle, Washington. |
Gävle goat | A giant straw Yuletide goat that is the target of frequent arson attacks and vandalism. |
Geostationary Banana Over Texas | An Argentinian artist's plan(?) to launch a banana-shaped airship over Texas. |
Hahn/Cock | A giant blue cock in Trafalgar Square. |
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. |
He-gassen | Japanese fart art. |
Hellmouth | The entrance to Hell envisaged as the gaping mouth of a huge monster, an image which first appears in Anglo-Saxon art. |
Hobby tunneling | Some people just love to dig. |
Howard Hallis | An artist who attempted to draw the "Picture of Everything", a massive painting containing drawings of thousands of people and items, both real and imaginary. |
Jazz (design) | An iconic 1990s disposable cup design. |
Katrina refrigerator | Loot this! Free meal inside! |
Knitta Please | NY Hip hop graffiti knitters. |
Kryptos | A sculpture on the grounds of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency containing four encrypted messages, only three of which have been solved. |
Latte art | The best art is caffeinated. |
List of largest photographs | Includes information on print and digital photos that are reputedly the world's largest. |
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 of the worst genocides in history was also a painter. |
Pantone 448 C | "Drab dark brown", the least attractive colour, according to research. Used for plain tobacco packaging. |
Phallic architecture | Does the Washington Monument, Ypsilanti Water Tower or Peoples Daily building remind you of something? |
Pink Lady | In 1966, a woman secretly painted a 60-foot (18 m) tall portrait of a nude woman over a tunnel and sued when the county tried to take it down. |
Piss Christ | A photograph of a crucifix submerged in the artist's urine. |
Portland International Airport carpet | A carpet design so famous that it gained a cult following. |
Pricasso | A man who paints with his genitalia. |
La Princesse | A 15-metre (50 ft) mechanical spider which stomped about Liverpool in 2008. |
Abel Ramírez Águilar | A Mexican sculptor who made a name for himself in ice and snow sculpture after winning gold at the 1992 Winter Olympics. |
Le Rêve (Picasso) | A Picasso painting that purportedly would have sold for a record price had its owner, Steve Wynn, not accidentally poked a hole in it, and which eventually did sell for a different record price. |
Reverence (sculpture) | Granite whales diving into a sea of grass near the Ben & Jerry's ice cream headquarters. |
Roundabout dog | Seen any dog on the loose while out driving lately? Chances are it's a roundabout dog. |
Sacred Cod | There's also a "Holy Mackerel", Batman. |
Scandinavian Institute of Comparative Vandalism | Mine is better than yours. |
Seedfeeder | An illustrator who contributed around 48 free-use drawings to Wikipedia, each being sexually-graphic drawings for articles on each (in)appropriate act. Lives up to their name, don't they? |
Superlambanana | A statue in Liverpool that's half-lamb, half-banana. |
Tennis Girl | Photo of a girl with no panties that became so popular politicians began to cosplay it. |
Tillie (murals) | 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. |
Unique Forms of Continuity in Space | At least sixteen casts of this "unique" sculpture exist. Not to mention that the sculptor already made a few similar designs. |
les UX | A French artistic movement that expresses itself in underground places. |
The Woman with the Handbag | A very famous photo taken in Sweden where a woman hit a Neo-Nazi with her handbag. |
Comics and animation [edit]
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. |
Archie vs. Predator | Teenagers somehow become worthy game. |
Arm-Fall-Off-Boy | The first applicant to be rejected from the Legion of Super-Heroes. His superpower was the ability to temporarily detach either arm and use it as a club with the other. |
Arseface | A comic book character from none other than Vertigo 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. |
Censored Eleven | A group of Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoons pulled from syndication due to their racist depictions of black people. |
Cheat Slayer | An isekai manga which lasted for just one chapter before being axed after it was highlighted that many of the villainous characters were rather similiar to the heroes from other isekai. |
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. |
Cow Tools | A comic published by The Far Side that is known as so confusing and unfunny that thousands of people called the author trying to understand its meaning. |
Comic book death | Comic book characters have a tendency to rarely, if ever, stay dead. |
Der Fuehrer's Face | Donald Duck won an Oscar as a Hitler-saluting Nazi. |
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. |
Kuso Miso Technique | A homoerotic, scatological manga that ended up becoming an online meme. |
The Metric Marvels | Nothing says 1970s in the USA more than a spinoff of Schoolhouse Rock with superheroes who teach the metric system. |
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. |
NFL SuperPro | What some Marvel Comics writers will do for free game tickets... |
Syaoran Li Syaoran (Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle, clone) Syaoran (Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle, original) | What happens on Wikipedia when a group of manga artists take a character from one of their earlier works and perform several cross-references and plot twists. |
Tentacle erotica | Human-cephalopod sexual relations, popular in hentai. |
Literature [edit]
"Shíshì shīshì Shī Shì, shì shī, shì shí shí shī... help!!
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". |
Cain's Jawbone | A murder mystery puzzle book that only three people have solved since it was published in 1934. |
Codex Seraphinianus | If you're interested in horses with wheels or couples metamorphosing into alligators, this imaginary encyclopaedia is the perfect book for you! |
Confessions of an English Opium-Eater | This highly-popular autobiographical account about the effects of laudanum led several English authors to opium use. |
Dinosaur erotica | Have you ever been Taken by a T-Rex or Ravished by a Triceratops? |
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. |
Empty book | A literal example of why you should not judge a book by its cover. |
Fart Proudly | An essay written by Benjamin Franklin about flatulence. |
Future Library project | Project that collects an original work by a popular writer every year from 2014 to 2114. The works will remain unread and unpublished until 2114; one thousand trees were specially planted for the project; the 100 manuscripts will be printed using paper made from the trees. |
Henry Darger | Writer of a 15,000-page manuscript along with several thousand watercolor paintings and other drawings illustrating the story, who rarely left his small room. His word was worth millions a few years after his death. |
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. |
"For sale: baby shoes, never worn" | Supposedly the shortest story possible in the English language, though Ernest Hemingway had nothing to do with it. |
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. |
Hawking Index | Are you one of the 1.9% to have read Hillary Clinton's Hard Choices from cover-to-cover? |
Help! Mom! There Are Liberals Under My Bed | The perfect picture book for your little conservative. |
Hitler Diaries | A sensational discovery in 1983, which turned out to be an elaborate hoax. |
How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming | No, this isn't about the murder of a Disney character. This is the memoir of the man responsible for declassifying Pluto. |
I Am a Cat | A novel written from the perspective of a cat |
I Am God (novel) | In which God is made to keep a diary to chronicle his love for an atheist. |
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. |
Lesbian vampire | They don't bite...necks. |
"Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den" | A poem written by a Chinese poet in Classical Chinese. It can be read and understood by all who understand the language, even though it consists entirely of the word "shi" repeated 92 times in different tones. |
Lobby Lud | "You are ____ and I claim my five pounds". |
Lopadotemachoselachogaleokranioleipsanodrimhypotrimmatosilphiokarabomelitokatakechymenokichlepikossyphophattoperisteralektryonoptekephalliokigklopeleiolagoiosiraiobaphetraganopterygon | A fictional dish with a quite long name. |
Magical Negro | An outdated stock character who helps out white protagonists. |
Manga Bible | And the Lord said unto John, "Omae wa mō shinde iru". |
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. |
Men in Aida | A homoerotic homophonic translation of Homer: "Men in Aida, they appeal, eh? A day, O Achilles." |
The Meaning of Hitler | Sir Max Hastings called it 'among the best' studies of Hitler |
My Immortal (fan fiction) | A legendarily terrible piece of Harry Potter fan fiction that awkwardly inserted vampires, time travel, and emo/"goff" subcultures into J.K. Rowling's wizarding world. Someone who may have been the author of the piece almost got a major publishing deal for her memoirs. |
Naked Came the Stranger | Journalists prove a point when their intentionally awful sex novel becomes a bestseller. Later the basis of a porn film starring Darby Lloyd Rains. |
Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats | Cat poems by T. S. Eliot. |
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. |
Ossian | "The greatest poet that has ever existed", according to Jefferson. But he didn't. |
Peter Sotos | A writer and musician who explores serial killer and pedophile lore, while simultaneously praising them in his work. For one of his magazine covers, he used an image taken from real child pornography, which he plead guilty to possessing. |
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. |
Political interpretations of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz | Understanding the political context of the mid-to-late 1890s in the United States will give you a different understanding of the gold, silver and emerald symbolism, among other things. |
Rolling Stone (Uganda) | The Uganda version of Rolling Stone is kinda different from the US version. It doesn't cover music, but does list the names of alleged homosexuals, calling for their deaths. |
Amanda McKittrick Ros | The McGonagall of prose. J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis competed as to who could read her longest without laughing. |
Pinocchio paradox | What if Pinocchio said his nose will grow? |
Saddam Hussein's novels | Crimes against literature? |
Shakespeare apocrypha | Anti-Stratfordians (see "Shakespeare authorship question" below) can take heart that there really are works attributed to Shakespeare that weren't written by him! |
Shakespeare authorship question | 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. |
Society of Science, Letters and Art | 19th century bogus literary society which duped learned (and would-be learned) people into purchasing the right to the society's academic dress and letters after their name. |
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". |
Time travel in The Lord of the Rings | Turns out time travel is embedded into The Lord of the Rings in several different ways. |
There once was a man from Nantucket... | A gratifying theme for limericks; some of them obscene. |
Le Train de Nulle Part | A French novel, 233 pages long, written without verbs. |
Music [edit]
27 Club | A number of prominent musicians have died at this age, though statisticians attribute the "club" to apophenia – seeing patterns in random data. See also the related white lighter myth. |
Animutation | The practice of taking lyrics of foreign songs, "mishearing" them into English, and producing a Flash video to go along with it. |
Rosemary Brown | A spiritualist who claimed that dead composers dictated new musical works to her. |
"Brian Wilson is a genius" | A music journalist's meme from the 1960s that arguably destroyed the career of the Beach Boys' main songwriter and producer. (Within three years, Wilson was working as a grocery store cashier.) |
"Clapton is God" | Graffiti that's famous for a photo of a dog urinating on it. |
Clear Channel memorandum | America banning Learn to Fly by Foo Fighters from radio airplay after 9/11 is an odd choice. Though What a Wonderful World by Louis Armstrong brings to mind more questions. |
Curse of the ninth | The superstition that any composer of symphonies, from Beethoven onwards, will die soon after writing their own Ninth Symphony. |
Dark Side of the Rainbow | What happens when you mix Pink Floyd and The Wizard of Oz? |
Earworm | It's got a hook in you. |
Elvis impersonator | People pretend to be Elvis Presley and only him. |
Elvis sightings | There are many who still believe. |
Fogerty v. Fantasy, Inc. | That time John Fogerty was sued for sounding like himself. |
Fyre Festival | The organizers spent so much money promoting the event that they ran out of money to spend on the actual event. They were later faced with eight lawsuits. |
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. |
List of classical music concerts with an unruly audience response | Concerts which didn't work out quite as well as hoped. |
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. |
Loudness war | Why recorded music is getting "louder" over time. |
Manualism | The little-known art of playing music by squeezing air through the hands. |
Marilyn Manson–Columbine High School massacre controversy | News media falsely accused Marilyn Manson and his band of the same name for influencing two mass shooters who actually hated his music. |
"More Cowbell" | I got a fever, and the only prescription... is more cowbell! |
"More popular than Jesus" | A remark that later proved deadly for John Lennon. |
Mozart and scatology | Mozart was fond of toilet humour, his letters to friends and family often contained scatological passages. He even wrote music dedicated to scatology, which was shared among a closed group of most likely inebriated friends, the most infamous of which is Leck mich im Arsch (literally "Lick me in the arse"). |
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 | 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. |
Operation Nifty Package | How do you get a dictator out of an embassy? With Music, of course! |
Rockism and poptimism | What happens when pop music fans take themselves way too seriously? Actually, nothing fun. |
"Up to eleven" | This article is one louder. |
Whamageddon | A festive music challenge where you have to avoid listening to a certain Christmas song throughout the Christmas period. Perfect if you're not a fan of George Michael. |
Instruments [edit]
Blackbird (violin) | A playable violin made out of black stone. |
Cat organ | A keyboard instrument in which the keys cause cats to meow. |
Electroencephalophone | A musical instrument controlled by brainwaves. |
Escopetarra | The Colombian gun-guitar. |
Musical saw | The least favourite instrument of Ronnie Wood, the Hollies and the Screaming Trees. |
Ugly stick | An instrument in Newfoundland, an insult everywhere else. |
Viola jokes | You can tell if a viola player is playing out of tune if you can see the bow moving. |
Genres [edit]
Chap hop | Rap music about being English in the 19th-century. |
Chillwave | The term was invented to make fun of music journalists and bloggers who hype "the next big thing". Ironically, they then wrote about chillwave as "the next big thing". |
Christian ska | Psychedelic worship music. |
Gothabilly | What if Buddy Holly was goth? |
Grunge speak | That time a receptionist convinced The New York Times that "wack slacks" was slang for ripped jeans and "lamestain" meant an uncool person. |
Pirate metal | Heavy metal music combined with pirate mythology and jargon. |
Proibidão | As part of a crackdown on drug cartels in Rio de Janeiro, this uniquely Brazilian form of gangsta rap cannot legally be performed or broadcast on the radio. |
Slutwave | From the same blog that brought you "chillwave". |
Composers, musicians, and performers [edit]
AKB48 Group | Girl group or franchise? Same with her "official" rival group and "spin-off" group as well! |
GG Allin | An anarchist punk-rocker, who would attack people attending his concerts, consisting of hoarse, disheveled vocals. He would also take an excessive amount of drugs, strip naked, and defecate on stage. |
CD Rev | Because nothing says gangsta like being funded by a corrupt communist government. |
Matt Farley | A songwriter who has released over 22,000 songs under at least seventy pseudonyms such as "Papa Razzi and the Photogs", "The Hungry Food Band", and "The Odd Man Who Sings About Poop, Puke and Pee" |
Joyce Hatto | A pianist who had many doctored recordings falsely attributed to her long after she stopped performing in public. |
Bobby Jameson | A hippie singer-songwriter outcast who never received financial compensation for his songs and records. Thought to be dead after the 1960s, but then resurfaced with a blog in 2007 aiming to set the record straight about his life story. |
Jandek | A prolific and pseudonymous singer/songwriter active since 1978 who only grants the occasional interview and has never provided any biographical information. |
Florence Foster Jenkins | An American soprano famous for her singing ability or lack thereof. |
Hanatarash | The Japanese noise band that drove a bulldozer into their concert venue. |
Hatari (band) | In 2019, the band entered Söngvakeppnin (Iceland's Eurovision Song Contest selection competition) as a joke, only to win first place. The band then won third place in Eurovision's semi-finals, advancing to the Grand Final and winning 10th place there. |
Hatebeak | The thing that should not beak. |
Okilly Dokilly | A band that performs metalcore songs about the character Ned Flanders from The Simpsons, while dressed as the character as well. |
Merzbow | A Japanese experimental music group whose most popular album has been affectionately described as "What a bug hears when it's being flushed down the toilet" and "Directly looking at the sun with your ears". |
Moondog | A blind composer, theoretician, poet, and inventor of musical instruments who dressed like a viking and lived as a street musician in New York between the 1940s and 1970s. |
MP4 | Rock music and Members of Parliament do mix. |
R. Stevie Moore | A one-man band who has self-released over 400 albums through his home-based mailing service since 1982. Later noted as a pioneer of DIY music and indie rock. |
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... |
Subway Sect | Not an organization dedicated to the worship of the London Underground, as one may reasonably assume, but a punk rock band who claimed that they despised rock-and-roll. Ironic, seeing how they made rock-and-roll-esque songs and toured with rock-and-roll-loving band The Clash. Believe it or not, some years later, a song was made dedicated to the lead singer Vic Goddard, who had by then quit to become a postman. |
Thai Elephant Orchestra | An orchestra of elephants playing specially-designed instruments. |
Tiny Tim | A crooner with a 6'1" tall and ghoulish appearance who sang in a falsetto voice and played a ukelele. |
Tout-à-Coup Jazz | An African jazz band from the 1970s whose membership included two future Burkinabé leaders, Thomas Sankara and Blaise Compaoré, with the latter overthrowing the other in a 1987 coup. Unbelievably, the band's name was purely coincidental. |
The Vegetable Orchestra | An Austrian orchestra whose musical instruments are made solely from vegetables. |
Wesley Willis | A musician and visual artist who recorded songs about topics such as his home town of Chicago, his schizophrenia, violent confrontations with cartoon superheroes, and bestiality, was fond of headbutting fans, and often ended his songs with "Rock over London, rock on, Chicago" followed by a product slogan |
Gary Wilson | An experimental musician who sings about stalking girls and plays with duct tape, fake blood, powder, and mannequins when on stage. |
Wild Man Fischer | A schizophrenic Los Angeles street entertainer whose big break was recording an album with Frank Zappa. Their collaborations ended when Fischer, in a violent rage, threw a bottle that nearly hit Zappa's daughter. |
The Zimmers | A rock band made up of elderly musicians. As of 2017[update], the oldest member had lived to 101. |
Zombeatles | Paul is undead. |
Musical works [edit]
4′33″ | A three-piece movement composed by John Cage in which the musicians are instructed to not play a single note. |
Adult/Child | A Beach Boys album that their record company refused to release, with songs about waiting in line at a movie, getting an enema, and shaving a tomboy's legs. |
A Rubber Band Christmas | An album of Christmas music created using office supplies. |
All Lights Fucked on the Hairy Amp Drooling | It is extremely likely that you'll never hear this album in its entirety (unless you're Reddit user u/casketjack of course). |
"The Anacreontic Song" | An 18th-century drinking song whose melody was later adopted for "The Star-Spangled Banner". |
As Slow as Possible | A piece of music by John Cage to be performed until 2640. |
Bleach (American band Bleach album) Bleach (Japanese band Bleach album) | What happens to Wikipedia article titles when two different bands with the exact same name both release self-titled albums. |
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. |
"Camouflage" (Chris Sievey song) | A vinyl single from 1983 that contained a computer programme for the song's own music video for the ZX81. Created by a man who later found fame wearing a papier-mâché head. |
Cigarettes and Valentines | An entire record by Green Day whose master tracks were stolen. |
Dark Night of the Soul | Due to a legal dispute, this album was released with a blank CD-R. |
Eat Shit You Fucking Redneck | Pigface doesn't like rednecks so much. |
"Euro-Vision" | The Belgian entry of the Eurovision Song Contest 1980 whose lyrics spoke precisely of the event in which they took part. |
Elvis' Greatest Shit | Not the one he was trying to pass the night he allegedly died. |
Everywhere at the End of Time | A 6 1⁄2 hour series of concept albums depicting the stages of Alzheimer's disease. Consisting of deteriorating jazz records, it became an internet phenomenon in 2020. |
"Flappie" | A Dutch Christmas song about cannibalism. |
Grosse Fuge | A composition written by Ludwig van Beethoven which was universally put down at the time as being "incomprehensible", now accepted as one of his greatest works. |
Helikopter-Streichquartett | A string quartet composition by Karlheinz Stockhausen 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? |
In Search of The | A box set isn't particularly unusual. A box set of 13 full albums that have never been released before, handmade by the artist, is pretty unusual. |
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". |
"Leck mich im Arsch" | A canon, whose title translates as "Lick Me in the Arse", by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. |
The Lillywhite Sessions | Never officially released, and yet fans and critics can argue that it's the best "album" by the Dave Matthews Band. |
List of musical works in unusual time signatures | What's the most absurd time signature you can imagine? 1/12? ⅔/2? How about 32/2 /4? |
List of silent musical compositions | Not to be confused with "The Sound of Silence", these songs don't have really much to hear. |
List of music considered the worst | We built this city on not being very good. |
Metal Machine Music | A 1975 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. |
The Monty Python Matching Tie and Handkerchief | A three-sided LP. |
"The Most Mysterious Song on the Internet" | The name says it all. (Well, almost.) |
"The Most Unwanted Song" | Featuring operatic rapping, a children's choir urging listeners to go to Wal-Mart, bagpipes, cowboy music, and political slogans shouted through a bullhorn. |
Musique pour Supermarché | This album by Jean-Michel Jarre had only a single copy produced, which was then auctioned off like a painting. The master tapes were subsequently destroyed, making the copy unique. |
"Never Learn Not to Love" | The Beach Boys' collaboration with Charles Manson. (Yes, that Charles Manson.) |
"Nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah" | If you can see someone's underwear, here's the tune to tell them by. |
Once Upon a Time in Shaolin | A Wu-Tang Clan album that only had one copy produced, being bought by Martin Shkreli for two million dollars, making it the most expensive work of music ever sold. |
"Prisencolinensinainciusol" | The song where the lyrics are deliberately unintelligible gibberish intended to sound to its Italian audience as if it is sung in English spoken with an American accent. |
Rage Over a Lost Penny | An audience favorite from Beethoven's oeuvre. It's gleefully angry, but the maestro left it unfinished. |
"Ready 'n' Steady" | A song mentioned in a top songs list of a notable magazine, that was long-believed by some to be non-existent because collectors were unable to find a recording or further information on it until 33 years after it was written. |
Sleep | An 8 1⁄2 hour concept album about sleep. Also available in a one-hour version if you're in a hurry. |
Sleepify | Silence is golden, especially when you're trying to fund a world tour. |
Smile | A highly experimental Beach Boys album that was never finished and subsequently became one of the most written-about and mythologized works in popular music history. |
"Timothy" | A top 40 hit in 1970, written by Rupert Holmes of The Piña Colada Song fame, that gained success despite (or due to) the fact it was about cannibalism during a mining disaster. |
"Ventolin" | Abrasive single by Cornish electronic musician Richard D. James, otherwise known as Aphex Twin. |
"You Suffer" | At a full 1.316 seconds in length, the shortest song with a physical single release of all time. |
"You're Pitiful" | The true story of how a Weird Al Yankovic parody caused the article for Atlantic Records to be regularly vandalized |
Film [edit]
100 Years (film) | A movie that your grandchildren and great-grandchildren might be able to enjoy! |
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. |
Ambiancé | A film scheduled to be released on New Year's Eve 2020 that was planned to be 30 days long. A trailer released in 2016 lasted 7 hours 20 minutes. It was planned for the film to be destroyed after its sole showing. It never debuted. |
Big Dumb Object | A mysterious object (usually of extraterrestrial origin) in a film that is there simply to cause a sense of wonder. |
Birdemic: Shock and Terror | The answer to the question: What could be worse than a Sharknado? |
Black and white hat symbolism in film | The hat, sir, whatever could it mean? |
Clownhouse | A 1990 horror film. When the film was in production, the director Victor Salva began sexually abusing the 12-year-old lead actor... much to the chagrin of financier Francis Ford Coppola. |
The Cure for Insomnia | A movie that runs for 85 hours. Not the longest movie ever screened though (see below). |
The Day the Clown Cried | A notorious unreleased film about the Holocaust by Jerry Lewis – hey, it's a comedy! |
Dump months | Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer's favorite time of the year. |
Empire (1964 film) | A film by Andy Warhol consisting entirely of eight hours of still footage of the Empire State Building. |
Empires of the Deep | A $140 million unreleased US-Chinese aqua-fantasy film that sunk to the depths of the sea... |
First on the Moon | Proof that the Soviets got there, thirty years before Armstrong and Aldrin didn't. |
The Flintstones & WWE: Stone Age SmackDown! | The most important WWE/Hanna-Barbera collaboration. |
I Killed My Lesbian Wife, Hung Her on a Meat Hook, and Now I Have a Three-Picture Deal at Disney | "I knew I wanted to be a director, and I did a couple of short films, and this is the only one that haunts me." —Ben Affleck, Academy Award winner |
Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter | What happens when you mix Jesus, lesbians and vampires in a film? |
Lee Kin-yan | A Hong Kong actor repeatedly cast in Stephen Chow films as a nose-picking, bearded transvestite. |
List of films featuring giant monsters | Oh no, there goes Tokyo, go go Godzilla! |
List of films that most frequently use the word "fuck" | Self explanatory. |
Logistics (film) | The world's longest movie ever made, it follows the entire five-week process of making and selling a pedometer in reverse chronological order. |
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.... |
Maidstone (film) | A film where a director runs for president while being targeted for assassination attempts, which is notable for a fight scene that made it into the final cut, where actor Rip Torn hits director Norman Mailer on the head with a hammer. |
Manic Pixie Dream Girl | A type of stock character that is extremely eccentric and girlish. |
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. |
Mockbuster | Not the movie you want, but the bargain-bin equivalent. |
Modern Times Forever (Stora Enso Building, Helsinki) | The second longest film ever shot: ten whole days of one decaying building Life After People-style and first screened in front of itself. The directors have a point. |
Monster a Go-Go | The film that was released to drive-ins when it was only halfway completed. In order to get around this, the ending consists of narration explaining what happened to the main characters and the titular monster. |
Night of the Day of the Dawn | The title of the film series is actually called Night of the Day of the Dawn followed by 29 words. It initially started with the second part as the first part is currently unreleased. As if that wasn't bad enough, it spawned three sequels. |
Nothing Lasts Forever (film) | A completed feature-length film with Bill Murray and Dan Aykroyd that has never been released and may never be released. |
Oscar bait | There are certain rules one follows when making an Oscar film. Including mental illness, the Holocaust and Meryl Streep in your film also helps. |
On the Art of the Cinema | North Korean cinema is best Korean cinema. |
Paint Drying | Created to test the patience of the British Board of Film Classification. |
Plan 9 from Outer Space | The epitome of so-bad-it's-good cinema, and Bela Lugosi's last film. Starring posthumously, Lugosi died before production began. |
Pulgasari | A Godzilla-esque film, supposedly an allegory for unchecked capitalism, created by Kim Jong-il and a director whom he kidnapped. |
Roar (film) | What do you think happens when a family of African wildlife activists gathers together to make an environmentalist movie with over 150 untrained big cats? Seventy members of the cast and crew getting injured, with the worst victim needing 220 stitches; high turnover, with 20 members of the crew leaving en masse; and a combination of financial problems, a broken dam, and destroyed fences resulting in millions in debt. |
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. |
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. |
Surf Nazis Must Die | A film for anyone who thought the Space Nazi trope was insensitive. |
Taylor Mead's Ass | A film consisting entirely 70 minutes of Taylor Mead's buttocks. |
Twin films | When two studios make the same idea at the same time. |
United Passions | A $30 million film sponsored by FIFA about how great they are. Came out right after the 2015 FIFA corruption case came to light. One of the lowest grossing sports movies of all time. |
Who Killed Captain Alex? | A 2010 Ugandan action-comedy film produced on a humongous budget of $85. |
Wilhelm scream | A stock sound effect first recorded in 1951 and used in dozens of films (including seven Star Wars films, two Lord of the Rings films and Kill Bill). |
Zyzzyx Road | Budget: $1.2 million. Box office: 30 bucks. |
Television [edit]
The end of you(r sitcom) looms.
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. |
Anti-Barney humor | An article for all Barney & Friends haters. |
Australia's Naughtiest Home Videos | Forget Turn-On – this never even made it to the end of its only episode. |
The Canadian Conspiracy | A mockumentary released in 1985 that asserts that Canada is subverting the United States by taking over its media. |
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. |
"Dennō Senshi Porygon" | An episode of the "harmless" Pokémon cartoon that caused seizures in almost 700 children. |
Flemish Secession hoax | Our regular programming is now interrupted to declare independence from Belgium. |
Friday night death slot | Where TV shows go to die. |
Gorbachev Pizza Hut commercial | The real former leader of the Soviet Union Mikhail Gorbachev starred in a Pizza Hut commercial. What more can I say? |
Guy Goma | A man who came to the BBC for a job interview is instead interviewed on its news channel about the Apple Corps v. Apple Computer lawsuit. |
Heil Honey I'm Home! | Hitler has his own sitcom. |
History of Pop (American TV channel) | How a TV program guide became an actual channel. |
How to Eat with Your Butt | The plot and the title of this South Park episode are pretty strange. |
I Didn't Know I Was Pregnant | A documentary series on TLC. You can probably guess the plot. |
It's So Funny | A North Korean comedy show which is anything but funny. |
I Wanna Marry "Harry" | An American reality show to find Prince Harry a wife. Meghan Markle was not a contestant. |
John Dillermand | A Danish children's series featuring a man in a red-and-white costume, which extends to his elongated penis, that he gets into all sorts of (family friendly) trouble with! |
Judaism in Rugrats | A Maccababy's gotta do what a Maccababy's gotta do. |
Jumping the shark | Metaphor for when a TV show attempts to become popular again long after its relevance has faded. |
K Foundation Burn a Million Quid | Why did the K Foundation burn a million pounds in cash? |
Michael Larson | A man who won over US$100,000 in an American quiz show because he was able to notice a pattern in the flashing lights on the "Big Board." |
List of Saturday Night Live incidents | From Ashlee Simpson's lip-sync fail to Adrien Brody's possibly racist introduction to Sean Paul. |
Max Headroom signal hijacking | TV signals in Chicago are twice overpowered on 22 November 1987 by broadcasts featuring a person (possibly a male) 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". |
Odagiri effect | Turns out that women find sexy men on TV shows quite appealing. |
Greg Packer | A man on the street, no matter which street you're talking about. |
Sharknado | Exactly what it implies: Sharks + Tornado = the best damn disaster movie on earth. You better know it's got an ungodly amount of sequels and a cult following too! |
Shaun Micallef's Mad as Hell | What's wrong Shaun? Why must you be mad as hell? |
Soap opera rapid aging syndrome | A tragic condition suffered by some young characters on soap operas. |
Southern Television broadcast interruption | A news program in England interrupted by an interstellar message from Vrillon, representative of the mighty Ashtar Galactic Command. |
Spaghetti-tree hoax | Place a sprig of spaghetti in a tin of tomato sauce and hope for the best. |
Star Wars Holiday Special | What do you get when you combine Star Wars and Christmas? One of the worst films of all time. |
Superstar USA | A music competition looking for the worst singers America has to offer. |
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. |
Turner Doomsday Video | When he founded CNN, Ted Turner made sure they would be ready for the end of the world. |
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. |
TV pickup | Britons regularly cause massive power surges by simultaneously making tea during program breaks. |
Who's Your Daddy? (TV series) | To win $100,000, adoptees have to pick their biological father out of twenty five men. |
Video games [edit]
Atari video game burial | Are your video games not selling? Why not do what Atari did—bury them in a New Mexican landfill? |
Bartle taxonomy of player types | What type of gamer are you? |
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 in reverse, and a notorious "YOU'RE WINNER !" [sic] message after each race. |
Battle of B-R5RB | A player-versus-player battle in EVE Online which involved over 7,500 players, lasted 21 hours, and cost over US$300,000 worth of in-game currency. |
Bob's Game | An unreleased homebrew video game, of game, within a game, in a game. All while the developer went on protest against the evil corporation known as "Gantendo". |
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. |
Corrupted Blood incident | An unintentional virtual epidemic in World of Warcraft, which became an important medical case study. |
Cubic Ninja | A video game that ended up being sold for over US$500 due to its ability to let a 3DS run homebrew. |
Dance Dance Immolation | It's like Dance Dance Revolution with flamethrowers. Pointed at you. |
Don't Buy This | A rare example of truth in advertising. |
Eggplant run | A challenge playthrough of Spelunky in which you carry an eggplant and toss it into the final boss's face |
F.A.T.A.L. | The worst-reviewed tabletop role-playing game of all time, where you roll for your character's anal circumference and can listen to a theme song that "sounds like the Cookie Monster chasing a drum kit being pushed down a flight of stairs". |
The 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. |
I am Error | A line said by a character in the 2nd Legend of Zelda game. |
JFK Reloaded | A video game released in 2004 where the player gets to assassinate President John F. Kennedy. |
Kanye Quest 3030 | Just an innocent game about Kanye West. There definitely aren't any secret cults lying around! |
Kanye Zone | Can you keep the disembodied head of rapper Kanye West out of his "zone"? |
Mighty No. 9 | A video game notable for having the longest closing credits of any media, at just under 3 hours and 48 minutes long, in part thanks to the game's sluggish and somewhat mismanaged development and the developers' decision to credit the game's 70,000+ Kickstarter backers. |
MissingNo. | A Pokémon species that only appears as the result of a glitch, and has since been the subject of many sociological studies. |
Overwatch and pornography | Yes, many people would like to, "Nerf This!" |
Phalanx | Who knew that putting an old man playing a banjo in a video game that had nothing to do with him would make for an effective marketing campaign? |
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 (with the occasional road sign) in real time. |
Playing History 2 - Slave Trade | An educational game that featured a minigame where you would fit slaves into a slave ship like Tetris pieces. |
Pokémon Uranium | A fangame set in a region of the Pokémon universe that was victim to a nuclear disaster. |
Polybius | An arcade game that supposedly causes its players to go insane. |
Seaman | A video game where you take care of a fish with a human head. |
Sonic Dreams Collection | This surreal fangame, said to be unfinished Sonic the Hedgehog games on the Dreamcast, pulls no punches to the notorious Sonic fandom. |
Speedrun | People who try to beat games as fast as possible. |
Syobon Action | A platformer known for its levels designed to cause extreme frustration. |
Tetris effect | A psychological effect where Tetris players start arranging blocks in the real world. |
List of video games notable for negative reception | And we were so sure NO MAN′S SKY would be a hit! |
Steve Wiebe | The star of a film about him setting the world's high score... for Donkey Kong. |
Internet memes and online culture [edit]
You can find this guy on talk pages filled with contentious discussions.
2 Hours Doing Nothing | An Indonesian kid who gained fame by staring into his camera for two hours. |
A group where we all pretend to be boomers | A group of Facebook friends who decided to pretend to be elderly. |
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. |
Bernie Sanders' Dank Meme Stash | A Facebook group dedicated to memes about American politician Bernie Sanders. |
Boobquake | Female users of social networking websites agree to determine whether their scandalous clothing can cause earthquakes. |
Bowsette | The Internet was once titillated over this Bowser-Peach fusion. |
British scientists | Not a list of some scientific pioneers from Europe, but a Russian internet meme. |
Bronies | You thought My Little Pony could never be loved by rugged grown men. Wrong. Very wrong. |
Carstuckgirls.com | An erotic(?) website devoted to women trying to free their cars from various obstacles. |
Chad | From the incel forums comes this whole new slang. |
Cinnamon challenge | Unless you enjoy lung damage, please do not try this at home. |
Consumption of Tide Pods | Ever thought a Tide pod looked kind of like candy? Apparently you're not alone. |
Countryballs | A comic genre with balls and other bits for different countries doing what real countries do. |
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 |
Dave rule | "Dave-to-girl ratio" as gender balance criterion. |
Doge | very readers, such article, much wiki |
Elsagate | Here kids, watch these YouTube videos with Elsa and Spider-Man, I'm sure nothing inappropriate will be on them... |
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. |
Extremely online | A state that everybody reading this can probably relate to. |
Florida Man | Superhero native to the state of Florida best known for his frequent run-ins with law enforcement and intoxicating substances. |
Getting to Philosophy | All links lead to Philosophy. |
Godwin's law | Every long, protracted online discussion always ends with comparisons of others to Hitler. Really... |
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. |
Instagram egg | An image of any old egg...is what this egg would be if it didn't take over Instagram and become the most-liked post on the internet. |
Internet Watch Foundation and Wikipedia | Talk about a major violation of WP:CENSOR and WP:POINT... |
It's Decorative Gourd Season, Motherfuckers | A viral online essay celebrating the joys of Autumn. |
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. |
Josh fight | The face-off of the century to determine who could keep the name Josh. |
Lenin was a mushroom | A hoax that Vladimir Lenin consumed large quantities of psychedelic mushrooms and eventually became a mushroom himself. |
Meow Wars | A flame war on Usenet that lasted for over 2 years. |
Miguxês | A brief guide to Portuguese Internet slang. |
No Nut November | ...and its antipode, Destroy Dick December. |
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. |
Philosophical zombie | I am dead, therefore I eat brains. |
Planet X637Z-43 | A planet covered in cannabis! Well, that's what they want you to think. |
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". |
Rule 34 | "If it exists, there is Internet porn of it." |
Mark V. Shaney | A fake Usenet user whose computer-generated postings were created using Markov chain techniques. |
Sam Hyde | An American comedian blamed for numerous terrorist attacks and killings. |
Shock site | Don't look! (No, really.) |
Shrek fandom | Maybe "fandom" isn't the correct word? |
Sitting and Smiling | A YouTube series in which a man sits and smiles for four hours, documenting his descent into inevitable madness. |
Storm Area 51 | An Internet meme which, as all great things, began on Facebook and spiralled a bit of out control, and of course Wikipedians couldn't be stopped in making it its own article. |
Suntukan sa Ace Hardware | Fight Club taking place at a hardware store of all places. |
Ted Cruz–Zodiac Killer meme | A mock conspiracy theory gone wild. |
Time Cube | The personal website of a schizophrenic old man who claimed that time is "cubic" in nature and that all of modern science is a lie. |
Tourist guy | The picture of a Hungarian man on 9/11. |
Very erotic very violent | How erotic and violent would it be? |
VTuber | Anime meets Streaming Culture with lucrative and often rather sexual results. |
Unusual eBay listings | Those strange things people sell on the Internet... |
wikiFeet | The world's largest image sharing website devoted to foot fetishism. |
Wikipedia | The site you are on right now. |
Yaminjeongeum | 세종머앟늰익 읚머한 윾산. |
See also List of Internet memes.
Festivals [edit]
Stage shows [edit]
The Elvis Dead | Evil Dead II retold in the style of Elvis Presley, later released on VHS in 2020. "I gonna build a groovy chainsaw arm". |
Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark | At $75 million, the most expensive Broadway musical, which is infamous for its troubled production history and cast member accidents. Also holds the record for the largest number of preview showings (182) before the official opening. |
- See also
- List of Alfred 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 [edit]
Nom nom nom burp nom nom nom nom...
No durians. (But no fine if you have some anyway?)
The King's Hand — a meal described by many as "a culinary fever dream"
Ayds | Ayds was a great way to lose weight, until the mid-1980s... |
Banana production in Iceland | Weirder than Björk? |
Bird's nest soup | Asian delicacy. |
Boneless Fish | A frozen fish scaled, gutted and deboned, then glued to its original shape using a food-grade enzyme. |
British Rail sandwich | A culinary match to the quality of the train service. |
Bacon Explosion | Not as dangerous as it sounds. |
Cannabis edible | Various foods containing cannabis. |
Carmine | A common food dye manufactured from insects. |
Casu martzu | 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. |
Chả rươi | Vietnamese dish made from the polychaete worm. |
Chubby bunny | A common (but sometimes lethal) game played with marshmallows that look like, well, bunnies. |
Competitive eating | In which the main goal is the quick and vast consumption of food. |
Cockle bread | Bread made by English women in the seventeenth century that involved kneading and pressing against the woman's buttocks. |
Deep-fried Mars bar | A Scottish delicacy. |
Dishwasher salmon | Salmon cooked using the heat from a dishwasher. |
Charles Domery | A Polish soldier noted for his unusually large appetite. While imprisoned in England, he remained ravenous despite being put on ten times the rations of other inmates, eating the prison cat, at least twenty rats and, on a regular basis, the prison candles. |
Durian | King of fruits. King of smells? |
Engastration | Dishes consisting of animals stuffed into each other. Turducken and whole stuffed camel are prominent examples. |
Eyes (cheese) | There are eyes in the cheese, but no cheese in the eyes. |
Flies' graveyard | A delicacy in the United Kingdom. |
Fried spider | Exactly as it sounds – and a regional delicacy in Cambodia. |
Fruit ketchup | Plum ketchup, anyone? |
Adolf Hitler and vegetarianism | Hitler believed that a vegetarian diet could both alleviate his personal health problems and spiritually renew the Aryan race. |
Hitler bacon | Can it possibly be kosher? |
Hottest chili pepper | Gettin' silly with chili. |
Hufu | For all you vegetarian cannibals out there, the tofu product designed to look and taste like human flesh. |
Human placentophagy | The consumption of a newborn's placenta is common among mammals; humans do it too. |
King's Hand | A delicious(?) dish, first appearing in a dream. It consists of cookie dough and M&Ms molded in the shape of a hollow hand, then filled with Greek salad. |
Kit Kats in Japan | There have been more than 300 limited-edition seasonal and regional flavors of Kit Kats produced in Japan since 2000. |
Ketchup as a vegetable | Makes junk food seem healthier. |
Kosher locust | Can Jews eat grasshoppers? |
Luther Burger | Described as the "cardiologist's worst nightmare" |
Lychee and Dog Meat Festival | Vegans are the only group who can oppose this festival without any fear of hypocrisy. |
McWords | McDonald's has their own language now. |
Michel Lotito | Known as Monsieur Mangetout (or "Mr Eat-all"). |
Milbenkäse | A type of German cheese containing live mites, which are eaten along with the cheese. |
Military chocolate (United States) | Originally designed to taste "little better than a boiled potato". Not much has changed. |
Monkey brains | A supposed delicacy that has been made famous through films. |
Alferd Packer | Before Dahmer there was Packer... |
Pieing | A slapstick stunt, or a kind of political protest. And there's even a list of victims. |
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. |
Salmon chaos | The turmoil of salmon. |
San-nakji | Small octopuses eaten alive with sesame oil. |
Sealed crustless sandwich | A patented peanut butter and jelly sandwich. |
Square watermelon | Rather expensive and very much inedible. |
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 fermented 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. |
Testicles as food | Available fresh during castration season. |
Toast sandwich | An English dish with an "extravagance of blandness". Add salt and pepper to taste. |
La Tomatina | A gigantic food fight with a ham-topped greased pole as the start. |
Sonya Thomas | What weighs 105 pounds (48 kg) 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." |
Virgin boy egg | Eggs cooked with the help of young boys' urine. |
Volkswagen currywurst | Volkswagen's best-selling product isn't cars, but sausages. |
Who Ate All the Pies? | A chant sung by football fans in England and Scotland, aimed at supposedly overweight footballers, officials or opposing supporters. |
Beverages [edit]
Capitol Hill's mystery soda machine | A vending machine in Seattle that might be haunted. |
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. |
Diet Coke and Mentos eruption | Diet Coke + Mentos = geyser. |
Fucking Hell | A German beer named after the Austrian village of Fucking. |
Ganesha drinking milk miracle | Hindu statues drinking milk. |
Grapefruit juice–drug interactions | Be careful – that delicious food item could be dangerous to prescription-drug users. |
H2NO | Why drink tap water, when you can pay to have a cool, refreshing glass of Coca-Cola or freshly chilled bottled tap water? |
If-by-whiskey | A famous speech successfully both attacking and defending booze. |
ISO 3103 | The ISO standard cup of tea. |
OpenCola | The world's first open-source beverage. |
Pussy | The drink's pure, it's your mind that's the problem. |
Snake wine | A type of Vietnamese wine that includes a whole venomous snake in the bottle. |
Vodka eyeballing | Here's looking at you, kid. |
Restaurants [edit]
Conflict Kitchen | A Pittsburgh take-out restaurant, exclusively serving ethnic foods from countries in which the United States is in conflict. |
Cross Cafe | A Hitler-themed Indian restaurant, formerly known as "Hitlers' Cross" [sic]. |
Dinner in the Sky | Enjoy a delicious meal—suspended 150 feet (46 m) in the air. |
Fortezza Medicea restaurant | Eloquent, fine dining in a high-security prison. |
Hamburger University | Where McDonald's employees learn their stuff. |
Heart Attack Grill | Noted for its 8,000-calorie "Quadruple Bypass Burger". It also lives up to its name. |
Ithaa | The world's first underwater restaurant. |
Kayabukiya Tavern | A Japanese restaurant where guests are served by employed monkeys. |
Loving Hut | A vegan restaurant run by a cult. Get to watch "Supreme Master TV" in nearly all of their locations! |
MaDonal | A McDonald's knock-off in Iraq. |
McDonald's urban legends | Is that worm meat in your Big Mac? |
Modern Toilet Restaurant | A restaurant chain whose furniture and decor is based on – yes – toilets. |
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. |
Pyongyang | A restaurant chain whose sole proprietor is the Government of North Korea. |
The Shed at Dulwich | TripAdvisor's #1 fake restaurant. |
Sports [edit]
The "Estonian Carry". Mmm.
1916 Cumberland vs. Georgia Tech American football game | The most lopsided game in American football history (featuring the godfather of American football himself, John Heisman). |
1967 NFL Championship Game | Often called "The Ice Bowl", a game between the Dallas Cowboys and the Green Bay Packers played in absolutely frigid conditions, at a temperature of −15 °F (−26 °C) (and that's before the wind chill.) |
1969 Talladega 500 | What happens when the CEO of NASCAR, Bill France decides to build a ginormous speedway that cost an even more ludicrous money to build? Oh, and that venue causes tire failures? Why, everyone boycotts and the chaos ensues! |
1978 CONCACAF Champions' Cup | The only time in the history of association football in which an official championship ended up being championed ex aequo by more than one team; in this case there were three. |
1992 Troy State vs. DeVry men's basketball game | The highest scoring NCAA basketball game ever. |
2005 United States Grand Prix | A race in which 14 out of 20 drivers retired before the start of the race. |
2014 Hiram vs. Mount St. Joseph women's basketball game | How a dying teenager's wish became one of the year's biggest stories in American sports. |
Artistic roller skating | All the grace and charm of figure skating...but with roller skates. |
AS Adema 149–0 SO l'Emyrne | Taking own goals to the extreme. |
Australia 31–0 American Samoa | The most lopsided "fair" match in association football history since World War I. |
Australian Football International Cup | The "World Cup" of Australian rules football...in which Australia does not participate. |
Barbados 4–2 Grenada | An association football where the winning team won with 4 goals despite scoring only 3 goals due to a weird rule change that was abused by both teams in the last few minutes of the match. |
Baseball metaphors for sex | Basic Instinct...? No, Baseball Instinct. |
Bat and trap | An English bat-and-ball pub game. |
Battle of Bramall Lane | An English professional association football match that was ended at the 83rd minute because the home team lost too many of their players due to injuries and red cards. |
Bladderball | Yale University's contribution to the world of team sports. |
British baseball | An intermediate species between cricket and baseball played in the hinterlands of Wales and Western England. |
Bog snorkelling | The noble art of competitive snorkelling through cold, noxious bog water. |
Bottle-kicking | A ruleless drunken rugby-like sport played every Easter Monday since the 1700s in Hallaton, Leicestershire. |
Butt Fumble | Be careful where you run with that ball, Mark. |
Chess boxing | A sport that alternates rounds of speed chess and boxing. |
Collision in Korea | A WCW pay per view event in 1995 wasn't so unusual. A professional wrestling match in North Korea, however, is a once in a lifetime event. |
Cooper's Hill Cheese-Rolling and Wake | An annual event held each May at Cooper's Hill near Gloucester. |
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? |
Dwarf-tossing | A sporting competition where padded dwarfs are thrown by competitors. |
Dwile flonking | A sport that gives a new meaning to the term "drinking game". |
Elephant polo | Variant of polo that is played while riding elephants, mostly played by royals in Rajasthan. |
Eton wall game | A sport played annually on St. Andrew's Day on a 5-by-110-metre (16 ft × 361 ft) 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. |
Fierljeppen | A Frisian sport where the objective is to jump over a trench. |
Football tennis | Wimbledon meets Wembley... in Czechoslovakia. |
Gillidanda | In this Indian game, instead of hitting a ball with a stick, players use a stick (danda) to hit another stick (gilli). |
Heidi Game | The last-minute comeback in this American football game wasn't seen by television viewers, as the network cut off the game to show the children's film Heidi. |
Henley-on-Todd Regatta | An Australian boat race that is cancelled when there is water in the river. |
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. |
Lawn mower racing | Leaves the lawn in a very poor condition. |
Lingerie Football League | "Uniforms consist of helmets, shoulder pads, elbow pads, knee pads, garter belts, bras, and panties." Renamed the Legends Football League in 2013 and Extreme Football League in 2020, with the garters, bras, and panties replaced by slightly more modest performance sportswear. |
Mall walking | Usually done with larger groups of senior citizens. |
Men's marathon at the 1904 Summer Olympics | The disastrous and ridiculous marathon that saw, among other things, a competitor hitch a ride in a car, a postman joining at the last minute, a tribesman being chased by aggressive dogs, and the actual winner being forced by his trainers to take rat poison in order to keep him going. Yes, among other things. |
Mormons vs. Mullets | December 2, 2020: An unbeaten college football team finds itself with an unexpected open date... and another unbeaten team is looking for a game. December 3: Game on. December 5: Kickoff. |
Mythical national championship | When is a champion not exactly a champion? |
New Testament athletic metaphors | Blessed are the healthy in heart... |
One-armed versus one-legged cricket | According to Charles Dickens: "The one-legged men were pretty well with the bat, but they were rather beaten when it came to fielding." |
Pillow Fight League | The first rule of Pillow Fight League is that you do not discuss Pillow Fight League. |
Plainfield Teachers College | Their American football team was un-beaten, un-tied...and non-existent. |
The Play (American football) | Before going onto the field for your postgame musical performance, make sure the game is over. |
Quidditch (real-life sport) | An international real-life sport, without magic objects. |
Rocket Racing League | A racing league intending to use rocket-powered aircraft to race a closed-circuit air racetrack. |
Scorigami | The practice of finding a scoring combination that has never occurred in that league's history. The term was coined by SB Nation writer Jon Bois, and has been a common injoke in sports circles ever since. The Seattle Seahawks are the reigning champion. |
Ski ballet | Skiers doing flips and spins on a slope. A smooth slope. Wearing skis. |
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 "Animals in sports" below) launched a bid to host the 2010 Winter Olympics in New South Wales, Australia. |
Sports-related curses | A variety of excuses for bad performance. |
Stoolball | An ancestor of cricket (a game it resembles), baseball, and rounders. |
Ten Cent Beer Night | A Major League Baseball game that tried to attract fans with a beer promotion got progressively worse, until an all-out riot broke out at Cleveland Stadium. |
Traditions and anecdotes associated with the Stanley Cup | An ice hockey trophy with a long history of abuse, superstition, and tests of buoyancy. |
Ultimate Tazer Ball | A sport in which players must compete to get a large ball into the goal of the opposing team. Oh, and everybody is armed with a stun gun. |
Ultimate Typing Championship | Created in order to promote typing and find the fastest typists in the United States of America. |
Underarm bowling incident of 1981 | An infamous end to an international cricket match that was arguably not cricket at all. |
Wellie wanging | Competitors are required to hurl a Wellington boot as far as possible. |
Wife-carrying | One need not carry one's own wife to take part, although you may want to run away as fast as possible afterwards. |
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. |
World Black Pudding Throwing Championships | A super championship for a super food. |
Wrestling at the 1912 Summer Olympics – Men's Greco-Roman light heavyweight | Possibly the longest final in any Summer Olympic event. Also possibly the only one where no gold medal was awarded (ignoring those Olympics where gold medals had yet to be introduced). |
Yukigassen | Competitive snowball fighting. |
Animals in sports [edit]
Buzkashi | Something like rugby, played on horseback, with a dead goat. |
Conger cuddling | The "most fun a person could have with a dead fish". |
Egg tapping | One holds a hard-boiled egg and taps the egg of another participant with one's own egg intending to break the other's, without breaking one's own. |
Fatso the Fat-Arsed Wombat | Sydney's other Olympic mascot. |
Ferret-legging | A stunt in which a live ferret is put down one's trousers. According to Snopes: "Ferret-legging, allegedly a 'sport' ... was reported in an article twenty years ago [in] Outside magazine, was riddled with factual errors ... that apologists attribute to 'poor research on an actual sport.' The Wikipedia article ... has no direct sources except for Katz's article. It has been nominated for deletion twice; both times, the votes were split fifty/fifty and the article was kept. Did Katz write a poor article on an actual sport, or did he make it up?" |
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. |
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. |
Kudu dung-spitting | Games for conservationists. |
Kyz kuu | Involving a man and a woman racing horses. Described as a kissing game, but the woman wins by whipping the man. |
Legend of the Octopus | If you're going to an ice hockey game in Detroit, be sure to bring your octopus. |
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. |
Pig Olympics | An international contest between pigs. |
Rabbit show jumping | Watership up, Watership Down. Watership up, Watership Down. Watership... |
Robot jockey | Robots designed to ride dromedary camels. |
Snail racing | Ready, steady, slow! |
Teddy bear toss | A Christmas tradition in minor league ice hockey. |
Turkey bowling | So much for "don't play with your food". |
Vinkensport | Finch-singing in Belgium. More competitive than you might think. |
Yak racing | A spectator sport held at traditional festivals in Tibet and Mongolia, among other places. |
Athletes [edit]
1956 Olympic flame hoax | Why the Olympic Flame is pants. |
Barefoot running | Why is there an entire article devoted to running without shoes? |
Ebbo Bastard | Murdered South African rugby union player from Kokstad, whose son became seminal in the British sausage industry. |
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. |
Philip Boit | How many other Kenyan skiers can you name? |
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. |
Rajai Davis | "Quick, Jason, ride me to Citi Field, I've been called up!" |
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 Saint-Germain. In 2007, The Times branded him the worst-ever player in top-flight soccer. |
Mariya Dmitriyenko | A Kazakh Olympic sports shooter. When she won the Amir of Kuwait International Shooting Grand Prix, the parody national anthem from Borat was accidentally played instead of the Kazakh national anthem. |
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. |
Eddie "The Eagle" Edwards | A British sportsman famous for coming last in the 1988 Winter Olympics ski-jump competition. |
Eddie Gaedel | A 65-pound (29 kg) baseball player, 3 ft 7 in (1.09 m) tall. Career on‑base percentage: 1.000. |
Dolly Gray impostor | Possibly the least known NFL player in history. |
John Hilton (table tennis) | A man who won the men's singles at the European Table Tennis Championships despite being only the fourth-ranked player at his local YMCA. |
Prince Hubertus of Hohenlohe-Langenburg | A blue blooded Alpine skier, from the frozen wastes of Mexico City. |
Carlos Kaiser | A footballer who managed a decade-long career despite lacking pro-level ability and never playing a regulation game. |
Shizo Kanakuri | An Olympic marathon runner who took a 54-year detour. |
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. |
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. |
Sturla Snær Snorrason | An Icelandic alpine skier who (as of October 2018) has competed in 1 Olympic Games and 2 World Championships, but has yet to finish a single race. |
Elizabeth Swaney | A Hungarian-American freestyle skier who competed at the halfpipe event at the 2018 Winter Olympics, despite being incapable of performing basic tricks. |
Taro Tsujimoto | An imaginary ice hockey player, drafted because a manager was reportedly "fed up with the slow drafting process via the telephone". |
Rube Waddell | The most distracted pitcher in MLB history. |
Sport teams and associations [edit]
Atlanta Black Crackers | A Negro League baseball team named like many others after a local white baseball team, but in this case the Atlanta Crackers were named after a racial nickname. |
East Africa rugby union team | Did this rugby team really select a future dictator to play for them? |
FC Slutsk | How a group of Australians brought worldwide fame to this modest Belarusian football club. |
Jamaican bobsled team | The real life inspiration for the film Cool Runnings. |
London Rippers | A Canadian independent league baseball team that modeled its logo and mascot after Jack the Ripper. Local feminists were not amused, but Rush Limbaugh came to the team's defense. |
Mongolia national baseball team | They've only scored 3 runs at the Asian Games. Without ever finishing a game, because of the mercy rule. |
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. |
Sark national football team | Also known as The Bad Lions, the only national team that failed to ever score a goal. |
Somalia national bandy team | The only African national bandy team is seated in Sweden. |
Steagles Card-Pitt | Sports teams get relocated all the time (especially in the NFL), but what if they had mergers? Wartime conscription during World War II forced the Pittsburgh Steelers to do exactly that. Twice. |
Tropical nations at the Winter Olympics | More than just Jamaican bobsledders. |
Windsor Swastikas | A Canadian ice hockey team with a well-known logo. |
Vatican City national football team | The squad makes up more than 2 percent of the national population. |
Games and strategy contests [edit]
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. |
Blood-vomiting game | "Go" is serious business. |
Ghettopoly | An unauthorized version of Monopoly that played on black and other stereotypes. The NAACP was not amused. |
Human chess | Enacted by costumed "pieces" on a scaled-up chessboard. |
Kancho | A Japanese children's game that simulates anal probing. |
Kasparov versus the World | "The greatest game in the history of chess", per Kasparov. His opponent suffered from flame wars, poor chess software and accusations of ballot stuffing. |
List of games that Buddha would not play | What would Buddha do? None of these, apparently. |
Mornington Crescent (game) | A deceptively tricky game of navigating the London Underground—don't be caught in Nidd! |
Poole versus HAL 9000 | "I'm sorry, Frank, I think you missed it..." |
Taikyoku shogi | Japanese 'ultimate chess', with over 400 pieces per side. |
The Turk | An 18th century chess computer, which turned out to be a hoax. |
USA Rock Paper Scissors League | Organised finger sport. |
War on Terror, the Board Game | 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. |
Modern Defense, Monkey's Bum | A good chess opening |
Folklore [edit]
1593 transported soldier legend | In a matter of seconds, a soldier fell asleep in Manila and woke up in Mexico City. |
Bird people | The widely recurring motif in legends and fiction of birds who are people, or people who are birds. |
Behind the sofa | Where young British children hid from menacing scenes in sci-fi TV, now recalled humorously and nostalgically by British adults. |
Bigfoot trap | Believed to be the world's only Bigfoot trap. |
Cottingley Fairies | A successful photographic hoax in 1910s England. |
Count of St. Germain | The original Tommy Wiseau, an eighteenth century polymath who made a number of contradictory claims about his origins, including that he was 500 years old. People have also claimed he is an important theosophical figure who many have claimed to have met years after his supposed death in 1784. |
Easter Bilby | How do you have an Easter Bunny in a country that has had a bad experience with rabbits? With an Easter Bilby of course! |
Faxlore | Forms of folklore circulated via fax machine. |
Flying ointment | A hallucinogenic ointment said to be used by witches in the Early Modern period. |
Global Orgasm | Make love, not war... all over the world! |
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. |
Icelandic Elf School | Possibly the only school granting elf-spotting degrees. (Though certificates are also available from John Oliver.) |
Josiah S. Carberry | An expert on cracked pots, and one of only three fictional people to have won the Ig Nobel Prize. |
Liver-Eating Johnson | A 19th-century mountain man with a penchant for revenge and the consumption of livers. |
Machine elf | An entity that people claim they become aware of after having taken tryptamine based psychedelic drugs such as DMT. |
Man-eating tree | Hoaxes and unsubstantiated reports in Madagascar and elsewhere. |
Mari Lwyd | It's all fun and games until the horse skull comes knocking on your door. |
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. |
Proverbs commonly attributed to be Chinese | ...although they're probably not. |
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. |
Russian reversal | In Soviet Russia, Wikipedia edits YOU! |
Spring Heeled Jack | A mysterious character said to have existed in England during the Victorian age. |
Telling the bees | An alternative explanation for the declining bee population. |
Titivillus | The patron demon of scribes, responsible for many errors. |
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 (14 km) borehole drilled by Soviet scientists uncovers the sounds of millions of damned souls. Hot stuff. |
Witch window | A superstitious practice in the State of Vermont to prevent witches from flying through open windows at night. |
Mystery animals and animal folklore [edit]
Bonnacon | A mythical ox which flings burning dung at its enemies from its rear and horn. |
Cattle mutilation | The alleged killing and subsequent mutilation of cattle, sheep or horses by unknown perpetrators. Some say they may be aliens. |
Chupacabra | A legendary creature in the folklore of parts of the Americas, generally reported in Latin America, that preys on livestock. |
Dog spinning | Do Bulgarians really twizzle their domestic canines to foretell prosperity? The British Green Party thinks so, and they're not happy about it. |
Drop bear | A fictitious Australian marsupial supposedly related to the koala. |
Entombed animal | Tales of live toads and other creatures encased in stone. |
Fearsome critters | North American lumberjack folklore, with Axhandle hounds and jackalopes. |
Flying pig | The classic impossibility has been officially proved possible by the Internet Engineering Task Force: "With sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine." |
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. |
Humanzee | A hypothetical(?) human/chimpanzee hybrid. |
Hodag | The animal of Rhinelander, Wisconsin and has been confronted by Scooby Doo |
Jersey Devil | A mythological creature said to inhabit the New Jersey Pine Barrens. |
Liver bird | A legendary cormorant or eagle that is the symbol of a major English city. |
Lluvia de Peces | It's raining fish in Honduras. |
Mongolian death worm | A large, bright red worm that kills using acid and electrical discharges – allegedly. |
Montauk Monster | Actually a decaying raccoon... or is it? |
Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus | An endangered creature, whose major predator is the sasquatch. Apparently. |
Phantom kangaroos | They're not just found in Australia. |
Popobawa | A bat-winged monster from Zanzibar said to sodomize people during election campaigns. |
Pig-faced women | A lesson never to 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. |
Rhinogradentia | A fictitious mammal order documented by an equally fictitious German naturalist. |
Sidehill gouger | Fictional creatures said to inhabit the Rocky Mountains of British Columbia and the southwestern sandhills of Saskatchewan. |
Spherical cow | "Consider a spherical cow in a vacuum..." |
Vegetable Lamb of Tartary | Money might not grow on trees, but maybe sheep do. |
Society, economy and law [edit]
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. |
Banned in Boston | Boston now has a reputation as a liberal city, but it wasn't always so ... |
Beard Liberation Front | A British interest group which campaigns in support of beards and opposes discrimination against those who wear them. |
Biotic Baking Brigade | Pie-throwing anarchists. |
Birth tourism | Going on vacation to get a different citizenship for the child. |
Frank Chu | All he wants is royalties for being featured in a real life soap opera broadcast in 12 galaxies – or was it 785,249,000,000,000? |
Stephen Colbert at the 2006 White House Correspondents' Dinner | A controversial performance, directed, amongst others, toward an uncomfortable President nearby. |
Crypt of Civilization | A time capsule not to be opened before 8113 A.D. |
Fedspeak | A deliberately confusing, carefully rehearsed cryptic language, whose delphic dialect is used to effectively prevent the understanding of Fed policy. |
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 |
Japanese adult adoption | The vast majority of adoptees in Japan are childless adult males, adopted by families needing a strong heir or a male successor for their businesses. |
Karen (slang) | I dislike this article. Can I speak to your manager? |
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. |
Long-time nuclear waste warning messages | How do you warn people to stay away from nuclear waste repositories, in a way that will be understandable 10,000 years from now? |
Man of the Hole | The last survivor of an uncontacted tribe in Brazil, and arguably the world's loneliest person. |
Money burning | 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.) |
Đorđe Martinović incident | 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. |
Olim L'Berlin | A Facebook page that urged Israelis to move to Germany by comparing prices of a popular Milky pudding. |
Emperor Norton | Emperor Norton I, the man who claimed to be "Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico" in 1859. |
Panty tree | Trees covered in various articles of clothing cast off by ski lift passengers. |
Pink Pistols | They're here, they're queer – and they're armed to the teeth. |
Pole and Hungarian brothers be | A two-nation proverb often cited, usually while drinking, in both Poland and Hungary. |
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 | An autonomous stone-age human tribe which completely avoids contact with the outside world. |
Socialist Patients' Collective | An organization that charged that diseases were caused by capitalism. |
Politics and government [edit]
Who knew legislation could be so sweet?
1803 Gatton by-election | 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. |
1927 Liberian general election | The most fraudulent election in recorded history, with a turnout of 1,680%. |
Munafri Arifuddin | Ran unopposed for mayor of Makassar, Indonesia, won more than 250,000 votes, and lost. |
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? |
Anton Bakov | A man currently trying to recreate the Russian Empire off the coast of the Gambia. |
Bald–hairy | Russian leadership has alternated between bald and hairy leaders since 1825. |
Boris Skossyreff | Russian adventurer, who tried to seize the monarchy of Andorra and called himself Boris I of Andorra. |
Catmando | A cat who was the head of the Official Monster Raving Loony Party. |
Charles the Bald | A 9th century emperor of the Carolingian Empire who is depicted in artwork as having a full head of hair. |
Count Binface | An intergalatic warlord and British political candidate (formerly Lord Buckethead). |
Division of Batman | A former electoral district in Melbourne, Australia. And no, it wasn't named after the superhero. |
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. She proved to be a competent politician and was re-elected in 2015. |
Brown Dog affair | Political scandal that resulted in police protection for the statue of a dog. |
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. |
Candy Desk | A desk on the floor of the U.S. Senate has been filled with candy since 1968. |
Mel Carnahan | In 2000, he was elected to the United States Senate, despite dying in a plane crash 3 weeks before election day. |
Jimmy Carter rabbit incident | Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter's scrape with a "killer" rabbit. |
Chief Mouser to the Cabinet Office | An official government position in the United Kingdom. |
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 $1 billion in foreign aid. |
Deez Nuts | A satirical candidate who ran for president during the 2016 U.S. presidential election and polled 10% at his best. In the polls, he had defeated other notable candidates such as Harambe, Beast Mode, Darrell Castle (this one is real), and nearly Jill Stein. |
Democracy sausage | Part of Australia's tradition of holding a fundraising sausage sizzle at polling places on election day. Not connected to the observation about similarities between how laws and sausages are made. |
Donald Duck Party | A non-existent political party, at occasions among the top ten parties in Swedish parliamentary elections. |
Eddie Eagle | The National Rifle Association's controversial mascot who is supposed to teach kids gun safety. What, you didn't know the NRA had a mascot? |
Euromyth | Paranoid and imaginative speculations about the bureaucratic excesses of the European Union. |
Flatulence tax | When you keep a lot of cattle, you're contributing significantly to the greenhouse effect... aren't you? |
Rob Ford | Former Mayor of Toronto, who became embroiled in a scandal for being recorded smoking crack cocaine. His brother, Doug, later became the Premier of Ontario. |
Jennifer Gale | A woman who gained some measure of fame for repeatedly running for public office in Austin, Texas and for singing during city council meetings. |
Jón Gnarr | An Icelandic comedian who started the satirical Best Party, and became the mayor of Reykjavik. |
George H. W. Bush broccoli comments | The president's strategy for winning the baby vote. |
Greek Ecologists | A Green party which uses nudity in its political campaigns. |
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. |
Harold Holt | He goes swimming, and then missing. |
Incidents of objects being thrown at politicians | In various countries, objects have been thrown at politicians for reasons varying from comedic to harmful with objects from pies to grenades. |
Kasongo Ilunga | A man who spent several months of 2007 as the Minister for Foreign Trade of the Democratic Republic of the Congo – even though he wasn't a real person. |
Ku Klux Klan titles and vocabulary | If you ever find yourself an alien in the Klavern and someone asks "AYAK?" remember to answer "AKIA". Its all "CABARK". |
Pedro Lascuráin | President of Mexico for 45 minutes. |
Legislative violence | Where politicians actively fight for what they believe in. |
List of Kim Jong-il's titles | Because just being the "Great Leader" wasn't enough. |
Lord Bloody Wog Rolo | Australian political personality and founder of the British Ultra Loyalist League Serving Historical Interests Today. |
Marxist-Leninist Party of the Netherlands | A fake Maoist political party set up by the BVD in order to spy on the Chinese government. Fooled Zhou Enlai, and may have helped facilitate Richard Nixon's tour of China. |
Maryland's 3rd congressional district | When gerrymandering is taken too far. |
McGillicuddy Serious Party | A satirical political party in New Zealand. |
Merkel-Raute | More than one German leader has been known for a distinctive hand gesture. |
Mitt Romney dog incident | American former Presidential candidate carries his dog on top of his car, and it gets diarrhea. |
Ninja–Russia relations | "Anti-Soviet activity by Ninjutsu Practitioners" would be quite the Jeopardy! category. |
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. |
Antanas Mockus | The surprisingly effective mayor of Bogotá, Colombia known for civically-targeted publicity pranks. |
Niuas Nobles' constituency | An electoral constituency consisting of just three voters, who elect one of their number to one of the twenty-six seats in the Legislative Assembly of Tonga. |
New shoes on budget day | One of Canada's less grand political traditions. |
Nobody for President | Vote for Nobody! Nobody will listen to their campaign promises! |
Pascual Racuyal | A Filipino presidential aspirant who promised to build plastic roads and govern the Philippines "via satellite". |
Phoenix Foundation | A libertarian group that attempted to create their own country 3 times. All of them failed. |
Richard Nixon mask | One of the United States' most popular masks. |
Nuisance candidate | In the Philippines political candidates can be disqualified for bringing the election into disrepute or mockery, having a name which confuses voters or not actually intending to run for office. |
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. |
Dunwich | Another rotten borough which had almost entirely fallen into the sea over two centuries before it was abolished. |
Patrol 36 | The most famous group of Neo-Nazi Israelis. |
List of people who have lived at airports | Wish you were here? |
Polish Beer-Lovers' Party | One of the major political powers in Poland in the early 1990s. |
Redskins Rule | When the Redskins won, the party of the current president retained the presidency; when the Redskins lost, the opposition party won. |
Resignation from the British House of Commons | Illegal since 1624. |
Rhinoceros Party | A former political party in Canada, which often promised outlandishly impossible schemes designed to amuse and entertain the voting public. |
Russian political jokes | In Soviet Russia, the article reads you. |
Günter Schabowski | A Freudian slip of this East German official started the demolition of the Berlin Wall. |
Screaming Lord Sutch | British musician, founder of the Official Monster Raving Loony Party. Holds the record for losing all 40 elections in which he stood. |
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. |
Socialist fraternal kiss | When two socialist leaders are very close... |
Smash sparrows campaign | Mao Zedong's campaign to eliminate all sparrows in China. |
Ilona Staller | A Hungarian porn star elected to the Italian Parliament. |
Texas Legation | Don't worry, you're not the only one that doesn't pay their rent! |
Tsang Tsou Choi | From the 1970s to his death, he claimed to be the "Kowloon emperor". |
Threatening the president of the United States | Illegal words? |
Wilson Tucker (politician) | A resident of Seattle who was elected to the Western Australian Legislative Council in 2021 despite receiving 98 voted (0.17% of the regional total), courtesy of group voting tickets. |
John C. Turmel | With a record of no wins and 100 losses in campaigns since 1979, he's probably the world's least-successful would-be politician. |
Unabomber for President | Somehow, there was a presidential campaign for an infamous serial killer serving eight life sentences in a supermax prison. |
Veracity of statements by Donald Trump | Despite the constant negative press covfefe. |
Vermin Supreme | A presidential candidate with a boot on his head, who carries around a large toothbrush and pledges that, if elected, he will give every U.S. citizen a pony. |
White House horseshoe pit | Where George H. W. Bush won an epic duel of horseshoes 21-0 in five minutes. |
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. |
The Wizard of New Zealand | A friend of the Prime Minister of New Zealand who he made the "Wizard of New Zealand." |
Above Znoneofthe | A Canadian politician who changed his name so that people would misread it as "none of the above" on the ballot (with the Z added to appear at the end of the list) and pick his name by mistake. |
Nicolás Zúñiga y Miranda | Mexican eccentric who participated in the country's 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 [edit]
Orion in the sky, EURion on your money.
BackpackersXpress | It's hard to see what went wrong with this proposal to fly Boeing 747s full of singing, dancing and drinking backpackers between Australia and the UK. |
1933 double eagle | An extremely rare U.S. coin that is illegal to privately own. |
Big Mac Index | Big Mac economics. |
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. |
Boss key | A special button on an application used to quickly mask an employee's counterproductivity. |
Dead cat bounce | In finance, a small, brief recovery in the price of a declining stock, because "even a dead cat will bounce if it falls from a great height." |
Dead mall | That formerly active and popular mall that no one goes to anymore. |
Elongated coin | What better souvenir than a mangled and defaced penny. |
EURion constellations | Not-so-secret recognition patterns you can find on banknotes. |
Fukuppy | A branding exercise by a Japanese refrigeration company, which turned into a, well, ... |
GameStop short squeeze | Internet traders meme their way into a battle for Wall Street. To the moon! |
Ghetto tourism | And if you look to your left you will see an impoverished minority neighborhood. |
Gruen transfer | In shopping mall design, the moment when consumers enter a mall or store and, surrounded by an intentionally confusing layout, lose track of their original intentions, making them more susceptible to making impulse buys. |
Hungarian pengő | The worst inflation in history caused this currency to be replaced with another that was 400,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times its value. |
Inflatable rat | Nothing makes a labor statement like a blow-up monster rat. |
Men's Underwear Index | An economic indicator popularised by Alan Greenspan. |
Merchant marine of Switzerland | A landlocked country with a significant commercial fleet. |
Oil futures drunk-trading incident | A rather costly drunken mistake. |
Parliamentary train | In the United Kingdom, it is cheaper to keep an unwanted railway station open than to close it. This is why there are some railway stations not officially closed with no services in the United Kingdom. |
Purple squirrel | Mythical creature, a job candidate with precisely the right education, experience, and qualifications that perfectly fits a job's requirements. |
Rai stones | Stone money, some of which is 3 meters (10 ft) in diameter, and weighs 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. |
Ting Hai effect | A sudden drop in the stock market that follows whenever Hong Kong actor Adam Cheng stars in a new TV show. |
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. |
Veblen good | Goods whose demand increases as price increases, violating the law of demand. |
Zero rupee note | A method of reducing bribery in India. |
Trillion-dollar coin | A concept that was proposed as a way to bypass US debt-ceiling crisis through the minting of high-value platinum coins. |
Law, law enforcement and crime [edit]
A fruit or a vegetable?
A vegetable or a fruit?
A vegetable.
2007 Boston Mooninite panic | A guerilla marketing campaign for an animated TV series that quickly became a homeland security issue. |
62 Cases of Jam v. United States | When is imitation jam not jam? |
Sada Abe | Sensational journalism—from the Land of the Rising Sun. |
Acoustic Kitty | A failed CIA experiment at using a cat for covert surveillance. |
Animal trial | Historically, the law in some areas of Europe subjected animals to criminal liability for their conduct. |
Baby Jesus theft | When a child is gone... |
Batman v. Commissioner | Batman said his teenage son was his partner. The Commissioner wasn't having any of it. |
Batman rapist | Batman's back at it again, but this time it's actually a sex offender who attacked woman in the city of Bath. |
Beard tax | Used to be imposed in England and Russia. |
Bowling Green massacre | A nonexistent massacre mentioned by the Trump administration, subject to parody. |
Chewbacca defense | "Now, why would Wikipedia have an article about the Chewbacca defense? That does not make sense!" |
Cicada 3301 | Criminals or puzzle enthusiasts? |
Crime in Antarctica | Regulated by the 1959 Antarctic Treaty. |
Michael Cicconetti | A judge renowned for his strange alternative punishments. |
Danish flag rules | Why the only flag you can burn legally in Denmark is the Danish one. |
Dead Man's Statute | Prevent a witness from testifying about communications with a dead person. |
Emo killings in Iraq | Music fans killed for their alleged Satan worship and homosexuality. |
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. |
FTC v. Balls of Kryptonite | In some ways, the U.S. government is more powerful than Superman. |
Glasgow Ice Cream Wars | In 1984, violent conflicts between ice-cream vendors left six people dead. |
Troy Leon Gregg | Escaped from death row, got killed in a bar fight that same night. |
Guano Islands Act | This strange piece of legislation enables citizens of the U.S. to take possession of islands containing guano deposits. |
Hermesmann v. Seyer | A Kansas Supreme Court case that decided that a 12-year-old boy who was molested by his 16-year-old babysitter had to pay for her child support. |
Hobby Lobby smuggling scandal | A craft store chain purchases stolen Iraqi artifacts. |
I know it when I see it | "Not that, but something sort of like that?" |
Jarvis v Swans Tours Ltd | A legal complaint about the lack of gemütlichkeit during a Swiss Christmas holiday. |
A moron in a hurry | A real legal doctrine used in passing-off law. |
Not proven | A controversial Scots law verdict for those neither guilty nor innocent. |
Lawsuits against the Devil | Who would you think had 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. |
Lesbian rule | Not the replacement for the Patriarchy, but an archaic term meaning legal flexibility (and originally a building tool from Lesbos). |
Liebeck v. McDonald's Restaurants | When an old lady accidentally spilled hot coffee on her own lap and sued McDonald's over it. |
Ricardo López | An obsessed fan who attempted to kill Icelandic singer Björk by a letter bomb rigged with sulfuric acid. |
Rodrigo Rosenberg Marzano | A Guatemalan attorney who arranged his own death and blamed it on the President, seeking justice for his murdered girlfriend. |
Manacled Mormon case | The religious rape case that became a movie and involved the cloning of a dog. |
Massachusetts School Laws | How 17th-century Massachusetts sought to rid itself of the Prince of Darkness. |
The Matrix defense | A claim that the defendant committed a crime under the belief of being inside a simulated reality. The defense has been successful more than once. |
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. They also claimed Chuck Norris was a Satanic Cult leader. |
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? |
Monkey selfie copyright dispute | An actual monkey made a monkey out of the law. |
Nix v. Hedden | The U.S. Supreme Court decides that the tomato is a vegetable, not a fruit. |
Onion Futures Act | Why you can't buy any onion futures, but you can for corn, oats, rice, aluminum, crude oil, wood, etc. |
Perry Mason moment | "Mr. Menendez, did you know Big 5 stopped selling handguns in 1986?" |
Phantom of Heilbronn | A DNA-traced serial killer, also known as the "Woman without a face", who turned out to be nonexistent. |
Prenda Law | A law firm that blackmailed people for allegedly downloading pornography; the firm was described by one court as a "porno-trolling collective". |
Prohibition of dying | There are really some places where death is illegal. (Although it is unknown what happens to anyone who breaks this law.) |
Sand theft | What do you mean I can't take the sand home? |
Shaggy defense | Caught committing a crime, but don't know what to do? Say it wasn't you. |
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 v. Linkhaw | He sang so badly in church that a jury found him guilty of "disturbing a religious congregation". |
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. |
Andre Thomas | Serial killer who tore out his eyes and consumed them in order to prevent the government from reading his mind. |
Twinkie defense | When you don't want to go to jail. |
Toy Biz, Inc. v. United States | Are the X-Men humans under U.S. law? |
Trial of the Pyx | Whence the British Pound lands in court every year. |
Ugly law | A type of U.S. city ordinance banning anyone "diseased, maimed, mutilated or deformed in any way, so as to be an unsightly or disgusting object" from being in public. |
United Airlines Flight 976 | The worst case of air rage ever? Or just a very bad case of traveler's diarrhea? |
United States v. 11 1/4 Dozen Packages of Articles Labeled in Part Mrs. Moffat's Shoo-Fly Powders for Drunkenness | The FDA will not tolerate misbranding. |
United States v. Causby | Planes vs. farmers. |
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. |
United States v. Article Consisting of 50,000 Cardboard Boxes More or Less, Each Containing One Pair of Clacker Balls | Yes, they sued cardboard boxes containing clacker balls. Fifty thousand of them, more or less. |
Angie Sanclemente Valencia | A former lingerie model alleged to have run one of the largest drug cartels in the world. |
Whipping Tom | On seeing an unaccompanied woman, he would grab her, lift her dress, and slap her buttocks repeatedly before fleeing. He would sometimes accompany his attacks by shouting "Spanko!" |
Wet feet, dry feet policy | America seems to not like wet feet. |
Punishments [edit]
Bamboo torture | Death by a growing bamboo shoot. |
Disneyland with the Death Penalty | Best way to describe Singapore according to William Gibson. |
Drunkard's cloak | Attire for the village drunk. |
Hanged, drawn and quartered | Dark Ages punishment for high treason. |
Rough music | A form of vigilantism, more loud than violent. |
Schwedentrunk | Victims were bound and were forced to swallow large amounts of foul liquid, usually excrement. |
Scold's bridle | A muzzle for the nagging wife. |
Whipping boy | A boy who received corporal punishment for misdemeanors of a prince; as well as some of his privileges. |
- See also
- List of fictional Prime Ministers of the United Kingdom
- List of fictional U.S. Presidents
- List of frivolous political parties
- List of nicknames used by George W. Bush
- List of nicknames used by Donald Trump
- List of scandals with "-gate" suffix
Religion and spirituality [edit]
Can be a hare-y matter in Wicca.
A representation of Kolob (reference numeral 1).
An artist's impression of one of Xenu's space planes.
The All-Joking, All-Drunken Synod of Fools and Jesters | Started by Peter the Great, and consisted mostly of drinking and partying. |
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. |
Braco (faith healer) | Meet the Gazer and be healed with a single glance. |
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. |
Crepitus (mythology) | A Roman god of flatulence (allegedly) |
Criticism of Mother Teresa | Seriously? Yep, seriously. Her detractors include Christopher Hitchens, Tariq Ali and devout Hindus. |
Dhana Kumari Bajracharya | A woman did not walk for 60 years. |
Dinkoism | A parody religion that places Dinkan, a comic character from Malayalam Children's magazine Balamangalam, as the one true God and the creator of the Universe. |
Disconnection (Scientology) | 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. |
Ejaculatory prayer | A short and impulsive prayer not—as the name may suggest—a prayer related to ejaculation. |
Flirty Fishing | Sharing the Gospel through prostitution. |
Fluffy bunny | A controversial epithet in Wicca. |
Flying Spaghetti Monster | The basis of a satirical religion created to make fun of Intelligent Design. |
Freedomites | A Canadian religious cult that bombed and set fire to public buildings. All while nude. |
Gambling on papal elections | How much you wanna bet he's going to be Catholic? |
Gang Bing | After his act of self-castration, he became the patron saint of eunuchs. |
Great Disappointment | Hundreds of people were convinced the world would end on a very specific date. Turns out they were wrong. Ahem. |
Haitian Vodou and sexual orientation | Surely a troll, you say? No! A perfectly legitimate article! |
Hell house | A type of Christian horror house to make children more pious. |
Holy Prepuce | One of several relics purported to be associated with Jesus. Also known as The Holy Foreskin. (See also Circumcision of Jesus.) |
Incident (Scientology) | Bubble Gum Incident, Obscene Dog Incident, Bodies in pawn, blah, blah... |
International date line in Judaism and Jewish law in the polar regions | Jewish law can get tricky when you travel to Hawaii...or go for a hike near the North Pole |
Invisible Pink Unicorn | Best buds with the Flying Spaghetti Monster |
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 Grand 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 would've made it 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..? |
Johnson cult | Was US President Lyndon B. Johnson worshiped as a god in Papua New Guinea? |
Kacchera | Sikh underwear. |
Kolob | Which star does God live on? |
List of UFO religions | Our Father, which art in spaceship... |
List of people claimed to be Jesus | Christ has risen...again...and again. |
Matshishkapeu | The "fart man" of Innu mythology. Don't cross him or he'll make you constipated. |
Mental health of Jesus | Jesus? Are you okay? |
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 – even pagan ones – much more than you'd think. |
Open-source religion | And we're not talking about the Church of Emacs either. |
Our Lady of Perpetual Exemption | A legally recognized religion created by comedian John Oliver for the sole purpose of exempting his show from taxes by way of the Religious Tax Exemption |
Pope Joan | Medieval documents cite 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 late husband, Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, was a divine being. |
Pseudoskepticism | The philosophical or scientific argument that tries to appear skeptical, but really is trying to prove a position, as in "I don't see enough evidence that we landed on the moon". |
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 Saeculum obscurum or the "Rule of the Harlots". |
Religion in Antarctica | There's no continent on Earth without organized belief. |
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 the textures of corn chips, cinnamon rolls, toast, clouds, etc. |
Rumspringa | Amish Gone Wild. |
St. Priapus Church | A religion based on the worship of the phallus. |
Space opera in Scientology | 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". |
Sudanese teddy bear blasphemy case | How a British schoolteacher teaching overseas in Sudan got in trouble for letting her six-year-old students name a teddy bear "Muhammad". |
Taghairm | A couple of uncomfortable methods of fortune telling. |
Tiberius Julius Abdes Pantera | Was Jesus' father buried in Germany? |
Tlazōlteōtl | Aztec god of vice, purification, steam baths, lust, filth, and a patroness of adulterers. |
Toilet god | God living in the toilet. |
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 Christian 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. |
The Urantia Book | Over two thousand pages of anonymous, religious, subconscious ramblings on religion and "God" (whatever that means in the billion planets out there). |
Wicked Bible | A 1631 reprint of the King James Bible, which contained an infamous printing mistake. |
Yakub (Nation of Islam) | Mad scientist creates white race. |
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
- List of sexually active popes
- List of Buddha claimants
- List of messiah claimants
- List of names for the Biblical nameless
- List of people who have been considered deities
Military [edit]
3rd Dental Battalion | Even Marines have to keep their teeth clean. |
Adrian Carton de Wiart | Fought in two World Wars, shot repeatedly, survived two plane crashes, escaped a POW camp, married a countess, and amputated his own fingers when his doctor refused. Also looked like a pirate. |
Vasily Arkhipov | Potentially averted a nuclear war. |
Bolivian Navy | Not having access to the sea won't stop Bolivia from having a 5000 man navy. |
Boot Monument | In celebration of Benedict Arnold's foot. |
Jack Churchill | Longbows and broadswords weren't used in World War II. Or were they? |
CONOP 8888 | The Pentagon's zombie apocalypse plan. |
Deborah's Hole Camp | An Iron Age hillfort situated atop the cliff above Deborah's Hole cave. |
D-Day Daily Telegraph crossword security alarm | Crossword puzzles: A major danger to national security. |
Devil Eyes | A psychological warfare program designed by the CIA to distribute Osama bin Laden action figures throughout South Asia. The faces, when heated, were designed to peel off and reveal a demonic face underneath. They were made by Hasbro, the same company behind the G. I. Joe toys. |
Dickin Medal | Only awarded to animals. |
Dreadnought hoax | A practical joke at the expense of the Royal Navy, inspiring the influential Bloomsbury Group. |
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. |
Moro Islamic Liberation Front | A rebel, some might say terrorist, group in the Southern Philippines who may or may not be aware that their initials are also an acronym for mom I'd like to... |
Navies of landlocked countries | Mongolia once had one of the world's largest navies. Today they have one vessel with a crew of seven sailors, one of them able to swim. |
Nebraska Admiral | The landlocked U.S. state of Nebraska and its "Great Navy". |
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. |
Stanislav Petrov | Another guy who potentially averted nuclear war. |
Philadelphia Experiment | An alleged experiment in 1943 involving electromagnetic technology to render vessels invisible. |
Portuguese Fireplace | A fireplace in the middle of the New Forest. |
Project A119 | If you can't land on the Moon, nuke it. |
Sergeant Stubby | The only dog to be promoted to sergeant through combat. |
Siachen Glacier | The world's highest battlefield, with very predictable terrain. |
Simo Häyhä | Showed some extraordinary Finnish sisu in the Winter War against the Soviets. |
Skunk (weapon) | A nonlethal weapon with an extremely strong odor that may linger on clothes for years. |
The terrorists have won | Or have they? |
Truelove Eyre | A man who supposedly saved William the Conqueror's life during the Battle of Hastings. |
United States Camel Corps | Full-blooded Arabian mount, imported! |
Wojtek | Arguably the most extraordinary soldier of all time. |
Wars, operations and battles [edit]
Anglo-Zanzibar War | The world's shortest war. It literally lasted 38 minutes. |
Battle for Castle Itter | American and German soldiers team up against the Nazis in a battle for a medieval castle. |
Battle of Lake Baikal | Czechoslovak Legionnares stole a steamship and won a naval battle against the Red army |
Bahia Incident | Did you know that the American Civil War also took place in Brazil? |
Battle of Domažlice | A Hussite army routs the twice as numerous crusading Holy Roman army with the power of singing. |
Battle of Fishguard | That time when France tried to invade Wales, got drunk and surrendered because they took the British forces too seriously. |
Battle of Karánsebes | How the Austrians fought against themselves over liquor and resulted in 1,200 own casualties. |
Battle of Kiska | In 1943, 7,800 American and Canadian troops invade the island of Kiska which had been occupied by Japan since 1942. Allied forces suffer 122 dead, 300 injured and lose one destroyer due to mines, difficult terrain and friendly fire before realising that the Japanese had secretly abandoned the island two weeks prior. |
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. |
Emu War | A military operation undertaken in Western Australia against hordes of emus, or, how large flightless bird triumphs over modernized army. |
Football War | A six-day war fought between El Salvador and Honduras in 1969 that was triggered by a game of football (soccer). |
If Day | A simulated Nazi invasion of the Canadian city of Winnipeg, complete with book-burning, arrests of politicians, and newspaper censorship. |
Gombe Chimpanzee War | A four-year war, fought between two groups of chimpanzees in Tanzania. |
Operation Mincemeat | A misinformation plan to hide the invasion of Sicily using a corpse as a British officer. |
Operation "Pig Bristle" | A daring air force operation to transport 25 tonnes of pig bristles from Chongqing in China to Hong Kong during the Chinese Civil War. The bristles were shipped to Australia to be made into paint brushes. |
Operation "Tamarisk" | Claimed to be the most successful intelligence operation in the Cold War; emptying supplies of Soviet Union toilet paper, forcing them to use documents, and retrieving these documents after use. |
Operation Wikinger | Poor communication leads to the German air force scoring a great victory... against the German navy. |
Pastry War | Looting a pastry shop? This means war! |
Pig War (1859) | A war between the United States and the British Empire that almost erupted over one dead pig. |
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. |
Toyota War | A war in the last phase of the Chadian–Libyan conflict, named after the Toyota trucks that were used in the battle. |
War of the Bucket | Started when Modenese soldiers stole a bucket from a city well in Bologna. |
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 [edit]
Anti-tank dog | Failed 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. |
Baynes Bat | An experimental British glider, designed to convert tanks into gliders which could fly into battle. |
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). |
Dazzle camouflage | A colorful way to hide in plain sight. |
Double-barreled cannon | A failed civil war era attempt to create a weapon of mass destruction. Now a monument in Athens, GA. |
Explosive rat | A World War II weapon designed to cause boiler explosions. Never used, yet still a success. |
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 | 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. |
Puckle gun | A gun with square bullets to be used against non-Christian enemies. |
Sticky bomb | The most unpopular weapon the British soldier has ever been asked to use. |
Tachanka | Twentieth century chariot used in combat. |
Tsar Tank | An Imperial Russian tank designed as a tricycle with nine-metre wheels. |
United States 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
- List of military disasters
- List of wars extended by diplomatic irregularity
Death [edit]
Lal Bihari | An Indian, who, among other things, ran for elected office despite the notable handicap of being officially dead. |
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. |
Coffin birth | When a pregnant woman dies, the decomposition of her body can result in a gas build-up that causes the fetus inside her to be expelled. |
Collyer brothers | When packratting was taken to a tragic extreme. |
Death by coconut | You can die if a coconut falls on your coconut. |
Death by GPS | Turn-by-turn directions to the afterlife. |
Death during consensual sex | Going out with a bang. |
Death erection | Usually not related to the above. |
Death from laughter | Don't laugh – it's happened. |
Death by misadventure | Death probably due after one saying "Hold my beer, and watch this!" |
Defenestration | The time-honoured tradition of throwing people out of windows. |
Disappearance of Frederick Valentich | 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. |
Dyatlov Pass Incident | A group of Russian hikers attempt to escape an unknown horror on "Death Mountain." |
Euthanasia Coaster | A roller coaster intended to kill its passengers. |
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 medical professionals – regularly report on people dying because they left a fan running 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. |
Hammersmith nude murders | Murders that involved the other unidentified serial killer named Jack, with the title "the Stripper". |
The Hands of Che Guevara | Documentary about the search for the severed hands of the Latin American guerrilla fighter Ernesto Che Guevara, who was captured and executed by Bolivian Special Forces in October 1967. |
Hell money | Apparently, the Chinese afterlife is subject to hyperinflation. |
Sogen Kato | Believed to be the oldest living man in Tokyo... until the discovery of his 30-year-old mummified corpse. |
Kennedy curse | Apparently John F. Kennedy was not the only Kennedy to meet an early demise-far from it. |
Kick the bucket | A heated argument lies behind the origin of this idiom. |
List of expressions related to death | "Go home in a box", "go bung", "hop the stick", ... |
List of people who died on the toilet | You could say they died on the throne |
List of entertainers who died during a performance | "And for my last act...I shall die and not come back to life" |
List of postal killings | "Don't let Walter Hobbs deceive you; this life is not all shiny bins and fun", ... |
Lead Masks Case | Two electricians tried to contact aliens with psychedelic drugs and masks made out of lead. They died shortly after. |
London Necropolis railway station | Single tickets only, unless you're a mourner or other visitor. |
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. |
Michael Malloy | Like Rasputin, but homeless, drunk, and Irish. |
Micromort | A quantitative death risk equivalent to one in a million. |
Herbert Mullin | Haven't had any earthquakes recently? Thank this man. |
Oliver Cromwell's head | This English political leader's head has an interesting journey after its owner is posthumously executed, more so than the one he cut off himself. |
Poe Toaster | Not a kitchen appliance, but a mysterious figure who paid 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. |
Refrigerator death | A cool way to die. |
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 | A former railway line that served a cemetery near Sydney. |
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. |
Frane Selak | Dubbed the luckiest/unluckiest man to exist, cheated death seven times and also managed to win the lottery! |
Sky burial | It's not really a form of burial. Also known as jhator which means "giving alms to the birds." |
Sokushinbutsu | A practice of self-mummification among Buddhist monks. |
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. |
Tamam Shud case | A dead man is found on an Australian beach with no identification and a bizarre fragment of a book in his pocket. To this day, his identity and cause of death are still unknown. |
Toilet-related injuries and deaths | As if constipation wasn't enough. |
Uttar Pradesh Association of Dead People | A group of Indians suffering more from theft than cardiac failure. |
Joyce Vincent | A woman who sat dead in her home with the TV and heater running for three years until her corpse was found. |
Video-Enhanced Grave Marker | Graves with video screens and speakers on them. |
Xin Zhui | A remarkably preserved Chinese mummy from 163 B.C. with all features and soft tissue still intact. |
- See also
- List of premature obituaries
- List of unusual deaths
Questions [edit]
Wikipedia is not afraid to tackle the tough questions:
Lists [edit]
Other pages [edit]
Ø (Disambiguation) | Not to be confused with a disambiguation page. |
meta:meta:meta | A page with a weird title. |
Talk:Talk | Three talk pages with weird titles. |
Talk:Talk Talk | |
Talk:Talk Talk Talk | |
Wikipedia:Discussions for discussion | Great venue for grating big discussions. |
Unusual featured pictures [edit]
Wikipedia:Featured pictures contains some unusual images.
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Aerial turning house
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Tank treads on an airplane
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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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See also [edit]
- Wikipedia:Did you know/Statistics § All-time DYK page view leaders
- Wikipedia:Featured articles
- Wikipedia:Unusual articles/Removed
- Category:Adages
- Category:Conspiracy theories
- Category:Famous body parts
- Category:Hoaxes
- Category:Internet memes
- Category:Ironic and humorous awards
- Category:Profanity
External links [edit]
- 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". Jamie Frater. Retrieved 28 March 2011.
- Lih, Andrew (May–June 2006). "Wikipedia Unusual Articles". andrewlih.com. Retrieved 28 March 2011.
- "Interesting and unusual Wikipedia articles". The Straight Dope. June 2009. Archived from the original on 2011. Retrieved 28 March 2011.
- A. Kleinman, M. Strachan: "The 49 Most Entertaining Wikipedia Entries Ever Created" 14 January 2015 (updated 6 December 2017) Huffington Post; Retrieved 15 September 2019
- Archive of A Random Collection of Unusual Articles on Wikipedia game on The Nethernet
Creepy Book Pregnant Lady Yoga Ball Weird Drawing
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Unusual_articles