Maybe it’s not Hitler’s head hole?

The story of Adolph Hitler’s final demise is well-known among the educated elite with whom I lunch and occasionally sup. First he yelled about getting banned from Wikipedia, then he took a cyanide pill and popped a cap through his dome-piece just before the Soviet Army cracked its way into his bunker in Berlin.
The Russians [...]

Wolfgang Mozart has a cold…

The popularity of the 1984 Milos Forman film Amadeus — which was based on the 1979 Peter Shaffer play Amadeus, which was based on the opera Amadeus and Salieri by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, which was based on the short play Amadeus and Salieri by Aleksandr Pushkin — has inspired decades of conspiracy theories and century-spanning amateur [...]

The British Government Should be Sorry

Pax Arcana
Not since the Royal Academy of Sciences callously rejected my paper titled “Seven Hilarious Things I Saw on the Internet Yesterday” have I been so furious with the British government.
Last week I read a terrific book by Simon Singh called The Code Book, which details the history of cryptography from ancient times through the [...]

Streetfights! Swordsmen! Artists! Scandals! Puns!

Pax Arcana
If the central thesis of a new book by a pair of art historians is correct, everything you knew about how Vincent Van Gogh lost his ear is wrong.
When we were kids, we were told he cut his own ear off after being jilted by the love of his life. When we were teenagers [...]

Mark Antony will have his revenge

Pax Arcana
Zahi Hawass, the flamboyant spokesman for Egypt’s archaelogical treasures and star of 8.1 million History Channel specials, told the press last week that a team of researchers from the Dominican Republic may have found the final resting place of Marc Antony and Cleopatra.
Antony and Cleopatra are famous mainly for being played by Richard Burton [...]

Cavemen were nice

Pax Arcana
Researchers say they have found a skull they say proves that our ancestors cared for deformed children rather than smashing them between rocks or something like that:
“Her/his pathological condition was not an impediment to receiv[ing] the same attention as any other Middle Pleistocene Homo child,” the the team of Spanish researchers write in the [...]

Nefertiti had a great personality

Pax Arcana
The famous bust of Nefertiti is one of the world’s sharpest and most captivating images of ancient beauty. Ever since its discovery in 1912, the bust has served as a symbol of the ethereal and elegant queen of the Nile.
However, recent advances in CT technology have allowed researchers to delve deeper into the multiple [...]

British people giving us fewer reasons to love them

Pax Arcana
While their empire disappeared faster than a plate of bubble and squeak at an RAF reunion, the British have always provided the world with a surfeit of  awesomely giggletastic surnames for us to mock.
Who hasn’t chortled at the thought of boarding the tube at Piccadilly and running into old Eton chums like Phineas T. [...]

Predator X will ruin swimming forever

Pax Arcana
Norwegian scientists say they have discovered a prehistoric sea creature whose chomping power was far greater than that of the Tyrannosaurus Rex or just about anything else that ever lived.
The sea creature’s name is Predator X, though its birth name was Alduous Garfinkel before it converted to the Nation of Islam in prison.

To get [...]

We’re gonna need more bricks

Pax Arcana
An archaeological dig on an island north of Venice, Italy, has uncovered evidence that medieval Italians knew way more about vampires than even the most learned of modern men.
At the site of a mass burial pit on the island, researchers discovered the remains of a woman in her 60s who had been buried around [...]