gnostek‹›1 / 4Piero Manzoni900%Critically acclaimed modern artIn 1961 Manzoni sealed his own excrement into 90 numbered tins, priced each at its weight in gold, and signed them. Tin No. 18 sold at Sotheby's in 2016 for £182,500.+ See More01Each tin weighs exactly 30 grams and is labeled 'Artist's Shit, Contents 30 gr net.'02The original gold-equivalent price in 1961 was roughly $37 per tin.03No one has opened a tin to verify the contents; the mystery is part of the market value.
gnostek+11‹›1 / 18Siege of Marawi600%abu sayaffIn 2017, Hapilon's ISIS-aligned Abu Sayyaf faction and the Maute group held Marawi — a Philippine city of 200,000 — for 154 days. The military retook it building by building; most of the city was leveled in the process.+ See More01The siege ran from May 23 to October 23, 2017 — 154 days of urban combat in a city of 200,000.02Philippine government forces sustained 165 killed; civilian death toll exceeded 800.03The battle displaced approximately 360,000 residents; large sections of Marawi remain uninhabitable years later.
gnostek‹›1 / 3Laika700%Fascinating CaninesSoviet engineers gave Laika a one-way ticket in Sputnik 2, 1957 — her cabin had no re-entry capsule. She died within hours of launch from overheating, not the planned euthanasia. The USSR announced her alive for days.+ See More01Laika died within 5–7 hours of launch from cabin overheating, not the planned day-six euthanasia.02Sputnik 2 was built in under four weeks; there was never a design for her return.03The Soviet government falsely reported she survived for several days after launch.
gnostekMen Behind the Sun500%Japanese unit 731Director T.F. Mous used an actual child's corpse — sourced from a local hospital — for a dissection scene. Chinese censors banned it; Hong Kong screened it. The corpse is in the frame.+ See More01Director T.F. Mous obtained a real child's body from a local hospital to film the autopsy sequence.02China banned the film; Hong Kong screened it; it grossed over HK$6 million in its opening week.03Live rats were reportedly set on fire for one sequence, prompting an SPCA investigation in Hong Kong.
gnostek‹›1 / 2Iamblichus5705%Most obscure philosophersHe rose ten cubits off the ground — glowing gold — while his students watched twice. A Syrian Neoplatonist who made ritual magic philosophically respectable. What do you do with a man who keeps floating?+ See More01Students witnessed Iamblichus levitate ten cubits, bathed in golden light, on two separate occasions.02He systematized theurgy — divine ritual magic — as philosophically superior to mere intellectual contemplation.03His commentary on Pythagoras described numerical mysticism as the architecture underlying all reality.
gnostek‹›1 / 6Albert Fish700%most gruesome serial killersAlbert Fish mailed Grace Budd's mother a letter explaining, in clinical detail, how he butchered and ate her ten-year-old daughter over nine days in 1928. He was 58 when he abducted her; he called human buttocks 'the best part.'+ See More01Fish mailed the Budd family a letter in 1934 describing Grace's flesh as 'sweet and tender.'02X-rays before his execution revealed 29 needles he had inserted into his own groin over the years.03He claimed to have 'had children in every state,' suggesting up to 100 victims across decades.
gnostek‹›1 / 3Heaven's Gate (religious group)200%the 10 most interesting wikipedia articles everThirty-nine people castrated themselves, donned identical black tracksuits and Nike Decades, and drank phenobarbital pudding to board the Hale-Bopp comet. Their bunk beds were made, bags packed, and hands folded across their chests.+ See More01All 39 wore identical black Nike Decades — a detail the shoe brand quietly tried to suppress.02At least 8 male members had voluntarily castrated themselves before the 1997 mass suicide.03Leader Marshall Applewhite convinced followers their bodies were mere 'containers' for alien souls called 'Next Level beings.'
gnostek+2‹›1 / 9Ryugyong Hotel600%Unique buildingsNorth Korea's 105-story pyramid hotel has been under construction since 1987, was capped in 1992, and has never hosted a single guest — its empty windows visible from Pyongyang for 30 years like a concrete tombstone.+ See More01Construction on the Ryugyong Hotel halted in 1992 with the shell complete; it sat visibly unfinished for 16 years.02The building was so embarrassing that North Korean state maps omitted it entirely for nearly two decades.03At 330 meters tall, it would be the 4th-tallest hotel on Earth if it ever opened; its 3,000 rooms remain empty.
gnostek‹›1 / 7District Six2050%Conflicts of Recent Past and their Origins: Rhodesia to White GenocideUnder the Group Areas Act, apartheid bulldozed Cape Town's District Six — a jazz-loud, mosque-and-church neighbourhood of sixty thousand people — and relocated them to sand flats twelve miles away. The rubble sat empty for decades.+ See More01Sixty thousand residents were forcibly removed beginning in 1966; the last families were expelled by 1982.02The cleared land stayed mostly vacant for over 30 years — developers refused to build on what they called cursed ground.03A District Six Museum opened in 1994 in a former Methodist church using residents' embroidered memory maps as primary exhibits.