Menander I

A cannibal feast on Tanna , Vanuatu, c. 1885–1889

Coat of arms of the Indies Company, with the reclining figure representing the Mississippi River taken from Law's Compagnie d'Occident , and the motto Florebo quocumque ferar taken from Louis XIV's East India Company

01'Kubla Khan' was written in a single opium-induced session in 1797; Coleridge claimed an interruption by 'a person from Porlock' broke the trance.
02By 1816 Coleridge was consuming up to two quarts of laudanum per week, documented in letters to his physician James Gillman.
03Wordsworth formally ended their friendship partly over Coleridge's unreliability — lectures cancelled, manuscripts undelivered, debts accumulated.

Greek king Menander I ruled a Buddhist kingdom in modern Pakistan around 150 BCE. He debated Buddhist monks so rigorously that, at his death, multiple cities demanded his ashes — and split them, relic by relic, like the Buddha himself.

Dark forest hypothesis

Liu Cixin's axiom: the cosmos is a dark forest where every hunter hides. One transmission, one coordinate — and the shooter never misses. The universe's silence is not emptiness; it's discipline.

Cannibalism in Oceania

Pacific Islander cannibals called human flesh 'long pig' — not metaphor, but olfactory report: it smelled indistinguishable from roasting pork. The term traveled back to Europe in 19th-century missionary journals.

Vermin Supreme

Vermin Supreme has campaigned in every U.S. presidential race since 1992 wearing a rubber boot as a hat, promising mandatory tooth-brushing laws and one free government pony for every American citizen.

John Law's Company

John Law sold France shares in the Louisiana Territory — mostly swamp — by convincing Paris that the Mississippi River ran through mountains of gold. Share prices rose 3,600% then fell to zero in 18 months.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Coleridge wrote 'Kubla Khan' in an opium dream in 1797, then spent forty more years unable to quit — dictating, borrowing money, and theorizing consciousness while his doses climbed. Wordsworth eventually cut him off. The poem stayed unfinished.

Rhythm 0

Abramović placed 72 objects on a table — razor, wine, loaded pistol — and let strangers use them on her body for six hours. By hour three, someone had pressed the gun to her temple.

Battle of Chosin Reservoir

At −35 °C, 17,000 UN troops punched through 120,000 encircling Chinese soldiers over 17 days at Chosin Reservoir. Weapons froze mid-fire. Marines carried their dead rather than leave them. They called the retreat a march.

Radullan Sahiron

Raddulan Sahiron commands Abu Sayyaf with one arm — the other lost to combat — and has carried a $1 million U.S. State Department bounty since 2002. He has evaded capture for over two decades in Sulu.