'Brfxxccxxmnpcccclllmmnprxvclmnckssqlbb11116'. In 1991, a Swedish couple registered this atrocity as their son's name when they were fined by a district court for not naming their son for 5 years. They claimed it to be "a pregnant, expressionistic development that we see as an artistic creation", and was to be pronounced 'Albin'. The court rejected the registeration, after which the couple tried to name their child 'A' (hmm... a preincarnation of Upendra?). The court didn't accept that either - but only because it was illegal in Sweden to have names that short!Cadigans are thingies, and thingies is a cadigan! Cadigans are between nouns and pronouns - they work grammatically like nouns, but their reference is generally previously mentioned, like pronouns. Common examples are thingy, thingamajig, gizmo, and whatshisname. Like when you say I just put the thingy on, just like whatshisname told me to! And you might have guessed as much, but the metasyntactic variables foo and bar would be cadigans too.
The practice of keeping rats as pets probably started with Jack Black, the official rat catcher of Queen Victoria in the 1860s. Whevener Jack Black caught an unusually coloured specimen, he would keep it to breed new colour varities. He would then sell the new varities to "well-bred young ladies". The famous author Beatrix Potter was one of his customers!
Chess Boxing is a sport that alternates rounds of chess and boxing! Envisioned by cartoonist Enki Bilal, and brought to reality by Dutch artist lepe Rubingh, the concept is based on the ideal of a sound mind and a sound body. A match consists of up to eleven alternating rounds of boxing and chess sessions, starting with a four-minute chess round followed by two minutes of boxing and so on. Between rounds there is a 1 minute pause, during which competitors change their gear. Players can win by knockout or checkmate!
The Alamo, a compound in San Antonio, Texas houses a church and some surrounding buildings. It was used as a fortress in many battles, most notably in the Battle of the Alamo during the Texas revolution. An urban legend goes that Ozzy Osbourne once urinated on the side of the building in 1982 while dressed in his wife's clothes. Ever since then, the numbers 666 started gradually appearing on the front of the church. They are supposedly getting darker as time goes by. Find a picture if the church at Alamo here, and if you can manage to notice something, do tell me.
