There’s a team of women in India who
bring justice to the oppressed women of
their country. ‘The Gulabi Gang’ wear
pink saris, carry bamboo sticks as
weapons, and are trained in counter-
aggression techniques, like smearing
abusive men with chili powder. If police
fail to help an abused woman, the gang
steps in and asks the husband to change
his ways- but if he won’t, they ask his
wife to join them in beating him. SourceSource 2Source 3
Tama the cat used to be a station master
at a Japanese railway. Her job was to
greet passengers, which increased
ridership by 10% during her tenure and
earned her a promotion of ‘super station
master.’ When Tama passed away in 2015,
thousands of people attended her
funeral, she was enshrined as a goddess,
and she was awarded the title of
“Honorary Eternal Stationmaster.” SourceSource 2
Cobweb paintings were invented by 16th-
century Austrians. Monks and peasants
collected cobwebs from attics, sheets of
grass, and tree branches then stretched
them onto postage-stamp-size canvas
frames and carefully painted them with
opaque watercolors. The artform died
out with the onset of WWI, and fewer
than 100 known paintings exist today. SourceSource 2
On the left, you can see the fibers at the edges of the cobweb painting. On the right, the same cobweb painting is held up to the light.
There are ‘baby dragons’ in the Western
Balkans. Olms are eyeless, cave-dwelling
amphibians that locals used to mistake
for dragon babies in the 1600s. Dragon
legends were so popular in the area that
when floods washed olms out of their
caves, people who’d never seen them just
assumed they were magical cave dragons
and then went about their business. SourceSource 2Source 3
In 1898, one of the world’s first
escalators was installed at Harrods
department store in London. People
were so freaked out by England’s first
‘moving staircase’ that attendants
began standing by to give away free
smelling salts and glasses of cognac. SourceSource 2
Reflecting on his youth, Pablo Picasso
once said: “When I was a child, my
mother said to me, ‘If you become a
soldier, you’ll be a general. If you
become a monk you’ll end up as the
pope.’ Instead, I became a painter
and wound up as Picasso.” SourceSource 2
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