Mary Daly

01Daly grouped Chinese footbinding — which broke and rebound girls' feet from age 5, targeting a billion women over ten centuries — alongside 20th-century psychiatric treatment as equivalent tortures.
02Audre Lorde wrote Daly a letter in 1979 accusing her of using women of color only as victims in a white feminist framework; Daly did not respond for over a year.
03The book coined the term 'gynecide' and introduced 'hag,' 'crone,' and 'spinster' as reclaimed feminist honorifics still in academic use today.

Medieval English split tally stick ( front and reverse view). The stick is notched and inscribed to record a debt owed to the rural dean of Preston Candover , Hampshire, of a tithe of 20 d each on 32 sheep, amounting to a total sum of £2…

An illustration of Cantor's diagonal argument (in base 2) for the existence of uncountable sets . The sequence at the bottom cannot occur anywhere in the enumeration of sequences above.

An electric steam iron

Mary Daly's 1978 'Gyn/Ecology' classified Chinese footbinding, Indian suttee, African genital cutting, Nazi medical experiments, and American gynecology as a single continuous system — all chapters of the same male text written on the female body.

Back to Back (Drake song)

Drake mocked Meek Mill's silence after leaked ghostwriting allegations, released 'Back to Back' before Meek responded, and received a Grammy nomination — the first for a diss track in rap history.

Tally stick

For 700 years, the English Exchequer split hazel sticks to record royal debts — the king kept one half, the creditor the other. In 1834, Parliament burned the old sticks and accidentally set Westminster on fire.

Marshall Applewhite

Marshall Applewhite convinced 38 members to voluntarily castrate themselves, then drink phenobarbital-laced pudding to 'shed their containers' and board a spacecraft trailing Comet Hale-Bopp. Five had already been surgically castrated.

Diocletian

In 305 AD, Diocletian became the first Roman emperor to voluntarily abdicate — then rejected offers to return and spent his final years at his Split palace growing cabbages, apparently content.

Cantor's diagonal argument

Cantor showed in 1891 that the infinity of real numbers cannot be listed — proving it by constructing one number guaranteed to be missing from any list. Infinity has a size hierarchy; most people never heard it.

Ben Johnson (Canadian sprinter)

Ben Johnson ran 9.79 seconds in Seoul — the fastest human ever timed — with visibly yellowed eyes. Within 72 hours, stanozolol was confirmed in his urine, and the world record was erased as if it never happened.

Wang Yuanlu

In 1900, a self-appointed monk named Wang Yuanlu swept dust from a sealed cave wall in Dunhuang and uncovered 40,000 manuscripts hidden for 900 years. He then sold them to foreigners for pocket money.

Clothes iron

Named from the Old English 'sæd,' meaning solid — not sorrowful — the sad iron was a 6-pound cast-iron slab heated directly on the stove. Women rotated three irons to maintain one usable temperature.