gnostek‹›1 / 2A Jake and Dinos Chapman fused mannequin piece from the exhibition Come and See at the Serpentine GalleryJake and Dinos Chapman200%disturbing art workThe Chapmans bought original Goya Disasters of War etchings — pages witnessing Napoleonic atrocities — and painted Ronald McDonald clown faces over the mutilated corpses. Goya's plates beneath remain untouched.+ See More01They purchased an original bound set of Goya's 80 Disasters of War etchings and overpainted them with acrylic.02The clown and puppy-dog faces were painted directly onto Goya's depictions of executions, impalements, and dismemberments.03They titled the defaced series 'Insult to Injury' — and the original Goya etchings still exist beneath the paint.
gnostek+10‹›1 / 17Piles of new Notgeld banknotes awaiting distribution at the Reichsbank during the hyperinflationHyperinflation in the Weimar Republic910%Top economic collapsesBy November 1923, a loaf of bread in Berlin cost 200 billion marks. Workers demanded to be paid hourly so they could sprint to buy food before the next price update.+ See More01Weimar inflation peaked at 29,500% per month in October 1923; a postage stamp cost 10 billion marks.02The German government printed money to pay World War I reparations; by 1923, paper notes were cheaper as fuel than firewood.03A new currency, the Rentenmark, was introduced November 15, 1923 — one Rentenmark exchanged for one trillion old marks.
gnostek+8‹›1 / 15Pronghorn300%Fastest AnimalsThe pronghorn runs at 55 mph with an endurance no living predator can match — because it evolved to outrun the American cheetah, extinct for 10,000 years. It is the fastest land animal on a continent that no longer threatens it.+ See More01The pronghorn's top speed of 55 mph is second only to the cheetah among all land animals.02Its oversized trachea and lungs deliver oxygen at a rate far beyond what any current North American predator demands.03The American cheetah, its evolutionary co-author, vanished with the Pleistocene megafauna around 10,000 BCE.
gnostek‹›1 / 6Taichang Emperor1100%Chinese emperors who met an untimely demiseThe Taichang Emperor reigned 29 days before dying — reportedly after swallowing red pills supplied by a court official named Li Kezhuo, whose formula was never fully disclosed.+ See More01Taichang Emperor died on September 26, 1620 — his 29th day on the throne, cause officially undetermined.02Court official Li Kezhuo supplied the red pills; he was later exiled but the formula remained secret.03The 'Red Pill Case' became one of the Three Great Cases of the Wanli era, debated for centuries.
gnostekTarrare600%Craziest Guinness Book of World Record RecordholdersTarrare, an 18th-century French soldier, ate live cats, eels, and a silver fork whole — and was suspected of swallowing a toddler from a hospital ward. Hunger never left him.+ See More01Army surgeons watched him eat a live cat — skin, bones, and all — in one sitting.02Hospitalized in 1794, he was expelled after a 14-month-old infant vanished from his ward.03His body ran so hot that physicians recorded his core temperature as permanently fever-level.
gnostek‹›1 / 3Andres Serrano1000%Critically acclaimed modern artSerrano sank a plastic crucifix in a tank of his own urine, photographed it glowing amber, and received a $15,000 National Endowment for the Arts grant. Congress spent months trying to defund the NEA.+ See More01The photograph is called 'Piss Christ' and was printed at 60 × 40 inches.02U.S. senators read the title aloud on the Senate floor in 1989 as evidence of federal depravity.03A print was physically attacked with hammers by protesters in Avignon, France, in 2011.
gnostek‹›1 / 632 Battalion (South Africa)600%Conflicts of Recent Past and their Origins: Rhodesia to White GenocideSouth Africa's 32 Battalion was composed almost entirely of Angolan FNLA soldiers — men fighting for a country that wasn't theirs, led by white Rhodesian officers, denied citizenship after the wars ended.+ See More0132 Battalion fought in over 100 combat operations between 1976 and 1993, operating deep inside Angola and Namibia.02Its soldiers were Angolan FNLA defectors; most were denied South African citizenship after disbandment in 1993.03The battalion's white commanding officers included Commandant Jan Breytenbach, a former Recce who recruited FNLA prisoners directly from the bush.
gnostek‹›1 / 2Messenia , homeland of Sparta's helot population, from Mount Ithome .Crypteia1500%Readers of Bronze Age Mindset also enjoyedSpartan boys earned citizenship by stalking and murdering helot slaves at night, alone, with a knife. The state called it education. The helots called it nothing — they left no record.+ See More01Krypteia initiates were given a knife and sent into the countryside to kill helots without witnesses.02The ritual was supervised by the ephors — Sparta's top magistrates — making murder an official curriculum.03Helots outnumbered Spartans roughly 7-to-1; the Krypteia was demographic terror dressed as a rite of passage.
gnostek‹›1 / 4Wii Sports200%Wii games that make you miss childhoodWii Sports shipped inside every Wii console sold — 82.9 million units — making it the best-selling sports game ever made, played by grandmothers who had never held a controller and eight-year-olds competing at the same level.+ See More01Wii Sports sold 82.9 million copies, more than any sports game before or since, entirely via hardware bundles.02Retirement homes in the US and UK adopted Wii bowling as a weekly resident activity by 2007.03The Mii avatars players created for Wii Sports became their digital stand-ins across every Wii game they owned.