Laika

A tulip, known as "the Viceroy" ( viseroij ), displayed in the 1637 Dutch catalogue Verzameling van een Meenigte Tulipaanen ("Collection of a Crowd of Tulips"). Its bulb was offered for sale for between 3,000 and 4,200 guilders (florins)…

Heracles , wearing his characteristic lion-skin, club in right hand, leash in left, presenting a three-headed Cerberus, snakes coiling from his snouts, necks and front paws, to a frightened Eurystheus hiding in a giant pot. Caeretan hydria…

Laika was sold to Soviet schoolchildren as a hero who lived days in orbit; in 2002, her handlers admitted she died of overheating within five to seven hours of launch, on November 3, 1957.

Guy Hocquenghem

Hocquenghem's 1972 'Homosexual Desire' declared the anus — not the phallus — the true seat of revolutionary politics. He died of AIDS in 1988, at 41, unrecanted.

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion

On Oblivion's 2006 launch day, a modder released a nude patch that worked perfectly — because Bethesda had shipped the fully modeled naked body meshes on the disc, just hidden under underwear textures.

Viktor Orbán

Viktor Orbán told a summer university audience in July 2022 that Hungarians must not become a 'mixed-race' people — prompting his own advisor, Zsuzsa Hegedűs, to resign and call it a 'pure Nazi speech.'

Tulip mania

In 1637 Amsterdam, a single Semper Augustus tulip bulb sold for 10,000 guilders — enough to buy a canal house. Within three months the market collapsed; bulbs sold for the price of onions.

Djamolidine Abdoujaparov

Abdoujaparov was metres from a Paris stage win, green jersey on his back, when he hit a Coca-Cola advertising barrier on the Champs-Élysées and somersaulted into the tarmac. He still finished — and kept the jersey.

Septimius Severus

Rome's first African-born emperor marched his army to Scotland's edge, declared the campaign unfinished, and died in York in 211 AD — 3,000 miles from Leptis Magna, where he was born.

MV SuperFerry 14

A single bomb hidden in a SuperFerry's cargo hold on August 2, 2004 killed 116 people in Manila Bay — the deadliest peacetime maritime attack in recorded history. Abu Sayyaf planted it for $400.

Cerberus

Greeks slipped honey cakes called meli into the mouths of their dead to bribe Cerberus at the underworld gate. Virgil's Aeneas carries one. The three-headed dog's middle head was considered the most dangerous.