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Category / Obscure history

The Secret World of Pageant Pigeons

They’ve been increasingly antagonised over the last century, reduced to nothing more than a plague upon Midtown Manhattan, Trafalgar Square, Notre Dame (we could keep going). But today at MessyNessy, your internet watering hole for misfits and chic oddities, we’d like to show you that pigeons, yes pigeons, can meet those two categories with flying colours.…

France, Is That Really You?

Ah, la douce France! Cobblestone streets and cafés lost in time, quaint little ancient villages surrounded by vineyards, heart-achingly beautiful architecture and skylines, just like you’ve seen it in the movies. Right? Well sure, but that’s only half of the story. Sometimes, France can look like the Eastern Bloc. Sometimes, it can look like the…

How Humans Have Toyed with Time

Who dictates Time? Depends on who you ask, and in what century. Like us, you probably rely on a Western, 365 day calendar to tell you that today, it’s such and such date in 2020 AD. But if you asked a French Revolutionary, “Year 1” began in 1789. And if you asked an American Kodak…

How Does a 10 Day Week Sound? The French Tried It For 13 Years

It’s the Year 232, cccording to the French Republican Calendar. If a wine’s vintage is decided by the year the grapes were harvested, wouldn’t it be fitting for France to celebrate the New Year at harvest time? At the turn of the 19th century, that’s just what France did. With the rise of the First…

You Are Invited to a Harlem Rent Party Circa 1944

The weekend is fast approaching, we’re looking forward to letting our hair down, maybe go dancing, listen to some music and have a glass or two. In early 20th century Harlem, New York, these cards would have been your ticket to a good time. They advertise what was known as “Harlem rent parties”, a social phenomenon…

How to Make an American Anti-Hero

They crusaded with horns sprouting from their heads, and rifles slung across their backs. Legend has it they decreed the virtues of the Holy Bible in one hand, and a torch in the other. They were known as the “Bald Knobbers,” and for a period of time in the lawless Ozark Mountains of a post-Civil…

Radioactive Jockstraps and other Lethal Cures to Improve ones Sex Life

It’s almost easy today, a century later, to laugh about the questionable medical inventions of yesteryear. But another hundred years from now, will people be laughing at the harmful products you and I use today? Here on MessyNessyChic, we’ve become quite familiar with the generation that brushed its teeth with radioactive toothpaste and that fell for the radioactive quackery…

The Guy That Built His House in a Sports Stadium

Even the most expensive VIP box seat at the Superbowl has nothing on this. Rewind to 1968 and we’re at the gilded Astrodome stadium in Houston, Texas. This luxurious and flamboyant stadium was the brainchild of Roy Hofheinz, a former mayor of Houston and sports super fan who spent $6 million (around $41 million today)…

The French Castles, Literally Fit for a Pigeon

They might easily be mistaken for playhouses fit for a princess, like Marie Antoinette’s little hamlet houses at Versailles, but these pint-sized castles dotted around France were in fact designed for a much smaller tenant– one with wings to be precise… You might vaguely recognise the mini-castle pictured above, which has been cleverly re-imagined by photoshop and…

Everybody who was Anybody had Dr. Feelgood and his Speed Shots on Speed Dial

What do Elvis, President John F. Kennedy (and Jackie), Alfred Hitchcock, Truman Capote, Marlene Dietrich and Marilyn Monroe all have in common? Apart from the obvious cultural and historical significance, they all shared a special relationship with Dr. Max Jacobson or as he would later become known, ‘Dr. Feelgood’. Private physician to the rich and…

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