Remember that Chinese mushroom that can cause you to hallucinate tiny people? The best guess for this bizarre effect is that the mushrooms contain some kind of psychoactive substance unknown to science, rather than cultural conditioning, because the effect is limited to a single species of mushroom.  — Read the rest

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Claude Monet's first paying work was caricature. At fifteen, he sold unflattering drawings of well-known men around Le Havre through a framing shop, and crowds gathered at the window to look at them. By his own later account, he was among the most successful artists in the Norman port city. — Read the rest

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Roger Waters built the opening of Pink Floyd's "Money" in 1972 out of spliced tape: cash registers, torn paper, and coins. Open Culture posted a video of a German band that played those same sounds live at Abbey Road Studios, where Pink Floyd recorded The Dark Side of the Moon, and identifies the drummer as Sina Doering. — Read the rest

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Pompous scholars were a standard joke on the Italian stage through the 16th century. Arnoud Visser writes in The Public Domain Review that Francesco Belo, a playwright from Rome, published the first play to put one at the center. In El pedante, from the 1520s, the schoolmaster Prudenzio "talks in a mangled mix of Latin and vernacular." — Read the rest

The post A 1582 comedy translates "pedant" as "worthless idiot, donkey head" appeared first on Boing Boing.

In 1941 the National Park Service hired Ansel Adams to make a photo mural of the national parks for the Department of the Interior Building in Washington, DC. Adams took the pictures between 1941 and 1942, and then the project stopped. — Read the rest

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How Buildings Learn is a six-part BBC television series from 1997 about what happens to a building after the builders leave. Stewart Brand wrote and presented it, and Brian Eno wrote the music.

Brand made the series from his illustrated book of the same name. — Read the rest

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The world's southernmost ATM is at McMurdo Station in Antarctica, at 77°51′ south. It is the only cash machine on the continent.

Atlas Obscura says the machine works the same way as an ATM in the United States, and it gives out U.S. — Read the rest

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Louis Pope Gratacap was the curator of mineralogy at the American Museum of Natural History from 1880 until his death in 1917. He usually read during his three-hour round trip to the museum from Staten Island. He also wrote novels, and one of them, The New Northland (1915), may be the earliest novel to feature a Tyrannosaurus rex. — Read the rest

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The ComicBooks.com Reading Room is a free online library of old comics that you read in your browser, one deep-zoomable page at a time. Open Culture pointed to it this week. The counter on the front page listed 20,109 books. The site promises "No login, no paywall, no catch." — Read the rest

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A French manuscript from about 1485 shows a woman spinning wool in her doorway while her child plays beside her. The doorway is the mouth of a giant snail shell. She lives there.
Robert Testard painted it for Charles d'Angoulême, a count in southwestern France, as one of 56 miniatures in Les secretz de l'histoire naturelle.  — Read the rest

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Charles le Brun (1619–90) drew a set of human heads that match the heads of animals: an ox, a fox, an eagle, a raven, a parrot, and a pig. Louis XIV put him in charge of the decoration of Versailles in 1669, and the palace pictures needed crowds of figures a viewer could tell apart at a glance. — Read the rest

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F. D. C. Willard was a Siamese cat named Chester, who lived from 1968 to 1982. In 1975, his owner, the physicist Jack H. Hetherington of Michigan State University, wrote a paper on low-temperature physics and used the word "we" throughout, according to Wikipedia. — Read the rest

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Doi Toshitsura was a feudal lord in Edo-period Japan who studied snow for about twenty years. His 1832 book of woodblock prints, Sekka Zusetsu, has eighty-six drawings of what he called "snow flowers" (sekka), plus a dozen more copied from a 1779 Dutch natural history book. — Read the rest

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1999 A.D. is a short film the appliance maker Philco-Ford made in 1967 to show what family life would look like at the end of the century. It opens with a boy named Jamie, who builds a sandcastle version of his family's house on a Southern California beach. — Read the rest

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Luke Howard was an industrial chemist in London. He studied clouds as a hobby in the early 1800s. In his Essay on the Modification of Clouds, he gave the standard cloud formations the names we still use today. Cirrus is the Latin word for a wisp of hair, cumulus for "convex or conical heaps," stratus for a "horizontal sheet." — Read the rest

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"From The 'London Times' in 1904" is an 1898 Mark Twain short story set six years in the future, and it describes something very close to the internet. It opens as a murder mystery. Clayton, a hot-tempered army officer, is accused of killing Szczepanik, the inventor of a machine called the telelectroscope. — Read the rest

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De Acupunctura is a 1683 book by the Dutch physician Willem ten Rhijne, and it came out of one of the most roundabout translation jobs on record. Ten Rhijne was living at Dejima, the artificial island off Nagasaki that was the only piece of Japan open to Europeans during the Edo period. — Read the rest

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The Florence Y'all Water Tower stands beside Interstate 75 in Florence, Kentucky, and it says "Y'all" because of a paperwork problem. When it went up in 1974 it read FLORENCE MALL. The developers had given the city the land for the tower on the condition that the mall's name be painted where interstate drivers would see it, and the mall itself was still two years from opening. — Read the rest

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Georg Danek and Stefan Hagel have worked out a way to sing Homer, and Open Culture has their recording. Danek teaches at the University of Vienna and Hagel is at the Austrian Academy of Sciences. What they recorded is lines 267 to 366 of book 8 of the Odyssey, the passage where the bard Demodocus sings about the love of Ares and Aphrodite. — Read the rest

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If you were moving diamonds across the Deccan Plateau in the 1830s, there were rules about when to set out. Leave on a Tuesday or a Thursday, on the 5th, 13th, or 28th day of the lunar month. Eat coriander seeds before a Tuesday departure and jaggery before a Thursday one. — Read the rest

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