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Category / Obscure history

Antique Chronicles of Japanese, erm, Fart Competitions

To send you off for the weekend, here are the seventeenth century Japanese fart scrolls you didn’t ask for. The unusual images from an Edo period between 1603 and 1868, are known as ‘He-gassen’, which can only be translated as “fart battle” or “competition” and they’re all about, well, farting! It’s Friday, and on Fridays, I get…

A Thanksgiving Compendium of Go Big or Go Home

Are you ready to eat your weight in stuffing and sweet potato? Sure, there’s the big fat turkey, but isn’t the test of a true Thanksgiving chef really about who can roast their yams to perfection and convert any brussels sprout skeptic with their secret recipe passed down for generations? While the big bird gets…

Why don’t they bring back Ice-Skating Cocktail Waiters?

Winter is coming, and while I do enjoy having an excuse to quote Game of Thrones at any given moment, you know what would be really fun? Skating cocktail waiters delivering whisky and wine at our beck and call, pirouetting in their coat tails as they skate off to fetch our 3rd round. That, my soon-to-be frost-bitten friends, would be a…

Preserved Moments of Historical Sass (Vol. 9)

sassy: adjective \ˈsa-sē\ impudent, lively, spirited, vigorous, distinctively smart and stylish, showing no respect for people in authority, saucy, pert, confident, chic. I haven’t done one from this series in a while, so this is long overdue. And it’s all thanks to an archive I stumbled upon through Flickr called SimpleInsomnia– a true treasure trove of vintage found photos with…

Pigeons of War and their Double Decker Buses

To me, one of the greatest miracles/ mysteries of nature is the homing pigeon. No matter how many times someone tries to explain it to me, I still can’t quite grasp why or how those birds manage to find their way home from such long distances. To further fuel my intrigue, today I came across…

Postcards from Sochi: Summering with Stalin

Sochi, a Russian city on the Black Sea, is known for being a controversial host of the 2014 Winter Olympics, but I thought we might take a look back at the “Florida of Russia”, when it was still a socialist holiday resort for Soviet workers hoping to experience a semblance of the utopian future they had…

Ghosts of Nigeria: A Colonialist’s Photo Album

I had a good dig through the British National Archives this morning and began fixating on the “Nigeria” album, containing over 900 photographs from the Colonial Office photographic collection. It’s an exhaustive album of portraits and documentation of the photographer’s tour through what was then Colonial Nigeria in the late 19th century. The photographs capture so…

The Girl with the Impossible Waist

If you look up “hourglass figure” in the dictionary, Betty Brosmer’s picture should probably be next to it (if you Google it, she’s right there next to Kim Kardashian). Meet the highest paid pin-up girl of the 1950s, considered by many as the first true supermodel, Betty appeared in thousands of magazine including LIFE, Time, Fortune,…

London has a Subterranean Veggie Farm in an Abandoned WWII Bunker

We’re all trying to switch to local produce these days and for Londoners, it doesn’t get much more local than the 2½ acre farm growing fresh veggies right under their feet. Growing leafy greens and herbs without any natural light 100 feet below the streets of central London in an abandoned air raid shelter is…

Cobra Cocktails, a Mad Scientist and his Roadside Serpentarium

Nothing says American kitsch like a 35-foot giant pink cobra. I stumbled upon this old postcard in my morning rounds of obscure internetting and knew there had to be a story worth telling behind it. That’s how I met Bill Haast, the man who charmed both snakes and visitors at his Miami Serpentarium and lived to the…

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