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Unless you are fascinated by mummies, the beauty of their well-preserved bodies may be lost on you. But surely you can appreciate the shapely leg of a woman from the Bronze Age, the supple skin of a wife from the Western Han Dynasty, and the enigmatic smile on the face of King Tutankhamun’s grandmother. The [...]

We’ve all achieved something in our lives, and some of these feats are quite amazing. Just today, for example, TopTenz sent this page to hundreds of millions of homes, and made billions of people happy when they read it aloud for the amusement of friends and family.  If you aren’t doing that now, by the [...]

Academic books and essays about movies use lofty phrases and multi-layered interpretations to make the fact the authors have watched movies too many times seem like an insightful and meaningful practice. Anyone who has spent much time on a movie set realizes that’s usually giving filmmakers a bit too much credit. In fact, as we’ll [...]

Advocates of civil disobedience believe it’s OK to disobey an unjust law.  And everybody disobeys those silly small-town laws that prohibit things like training lions to ride unicycles on Sunday.  This is OK, because what else are you gonna do on a Sunday?  Read? Then there are laws and rules, on the books basically everywhere, [...]

Eighteen is a special time in a person’s life.  In most countries, 18-years-old is when an individual is legally considered an adult and can assume control over their actions and decisions.  As we move into the 21st century, the age of maturity has risen.  A 15-year-old boy living in the Middle Ages had greater responsibilities [...]

Finding love is hard, and it’s even harder when you’re only attracted to Asian midgets with Parkinson’s disease and a lisp. In the old days you would have died alone, but thanks to the Internet we now know that no matter how insane your tastes are there’s a community out there that shares them. If [...]

The top 10 lizards brought to you buy a guy who knows about all sorts of things – creepy, crawly, and otherwise. 10. Phrynocephalus Also called the Toadhead Agama, these small desert-dwelling lizards exhibit several odd behaviors. They communicate to one another by curling and uncurling their tails, vibrate their bodies to bury themselves quickly [...]

The practice of binding books in human skin, also known as anthropodermic bibliopegy, is not just the stuff of dark legends and horror fiction.  It was a real technique which, although frowned upon and considered ghastly by today’s standards, was officially practiced since the 17th century.  The technique gained considerable popularity during the French Revolution and among [...]

Before people were able to access information by way of the Internet, written text was the primary resource for knowledge.  The history of books has been linked to political and economical contingencies, as well as the history of ideas and religion.  In the ancient world, humans developed writings as a desire to create a lasting [...]

Mohamed Al-Fayed caused a stir by unveiling a statue of deceased pop singer Michael Jackson, the only man reputed to be even more eccentric than the Egyptian businessman himself. Its placement outside Fulham FC’s ground at Craven Cottage was more baffling than controversial: Jackson once watched a game in 1999, and had no other connection [...]