If you ever invent a time machine, be sure to head back to the Time Traveler Convention held at MIT on May 7, 2005. (If you’re coming from the far future, MIT was at 42.360007° N, 71.087870° W.)
The convention was covered on the front page of the New York Times, so presumably it’ll be well attended … eventually.
An optical illusion. The long lines are parallel.
Justo Gallego Martínez of Spain joined a Trappist monastery as a young man, but he had to leave in 1961 when he contracted tuberculosis. So he decided to build his own cathedral, on a plot of land he had inherited in the Spanish village of Mejorada del Campo.
He has no plans, permissions, permits or even the blessing of the Catholic Church — he’s basically been improvising for 40 years, with the help of six nephews and the occasional volunteer, using recycled construction materials, old gas drums and bricks from a nearby factory. But he’s doing pretty well — that dome is 40 meters high.
“If you think you can win, you can win,” wrote William Hazlitt. “Faith is necessary to victory.”
A photographer from Country Life Magazine reportedly took this picture while shooting a feature on Raynham Hall, a Norfolk country house, on Sept. 19, 1936. The “ghost” has become known as the Brown Lady of Raynham Hall because of the brocade dress she wears.
No one’s seen her since.
An optical illusion. The square’s sides are straight.
When sunlight is refracted through ice crystals in cirrus clouds, it sometimes produces this rare phenomenon, known as a circumhorizontal arc.
It happens only when the sun is high in the sky, so there’s no pot of gold.
(Thanks, Mysticwolf.)
The Fugate family of rural Kentucky has an odd trait — since the early 1800s, some members of the family have been blue.
Not depressed — literally blue. The family share a genetic blood disorder that has left generations of Fugates with blue-hued skin.
The family’s inbreeding has diminished with time, and today’s members are mostly pink, but a blue Fugate was reported as recently as 1975. Somebody should write a song.
French postman Ferdinand Cheval (1836-1924) tripped on a stone in April 1879 and was never the same again. Claiming he’d been inspired, he began collecting stones during his daily rounds, carrying them home in huge quantities and assembling them at night by the light of an oil lamp.
After 20 years he’d completed the outer walls of his palais idéal (“ideal castle”), combining styles suggested by the Bible and Hindu mythology. But when Cheval finished the project after 33 years of work, authorities refused to let him be buried in it. So he built his own mausoleum.
His dedication was rewarded — he was interred there the following year.
Like Carl Herman Unthan, Prince Randian (1871-1934) achieved more without limbs than most of us do with them.
Born in British Guiana, Randian was discovered by P.T. Barnum in 1889, and he toured American sideshows in the 1930s as the Living Torso, “the human caterpillar who crawls on his belly like a reptile.”
In reality Randian could shave, write, paint, and roll cigarettes unaided. He spoke English, German, French, and Hindi and was reportedly a skilled carpenter, joking that he would someday build his own house.
He married and fathered four children and ultimately lived to age 63, touring American carnivals and museums for 45 years.
Inspiration can strike anywhere. Born in 1884, “arborsculptor” Axel Erlandson made living trees into works of art for more than 40 years, eventually even opening a “Tree Circus” in 1947 in California’s Santa Clara Valley.
