John Law's Company

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

01Mary Daly held two doctorates in theology from the University of Fribourg and was a practicing Catholic when she published 'Beyond God the Father.'
02She argued that the sentence 'God is male' was not a statement about God but a statement about men — conferring divine authority on maleness itself.
03Boston College repeatedly tried to remove her; she taught women-only classes for 25 years until forced out in 1999.

Enemies being killed and roasted in South America – engraving by Theodor de Bry (1592)

A typical crossbow

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.

Pac-Man (Atari 2600 video game)

Tod Frye had five weeks to port Pac-Man to the Atari 2600 — constrained to a 4KB cartridge — and shipped a version so degraded that 12 million units moved but consumer trust in Atari never recovered.

Harold Holt

Harold Holt, Prime Minister of Australia, waded into the surf at Cheviot Beach on December 17, 1967, and was never seen again. No body was ever recovered. Australia has no official cause of death on record.

Beyond God the Father

Mary Daly's 1973 book made one syllogism its entire engine: if God is represented as male, maleness absorbs divinity itself. She called this not metaphor but the operating system of Western civilization. She was a Catholic theologian when she wrote it.

Travis (chimpanzee)

Travis, a 200-pound chimpanzee raised as a human child in Stamford, Connecticut, mauled neighbor Charla Nash in 2009, leaving her without a face or hands. His owner called 911 mid-attack, saying: 'He's eating her.'

Human cannibalism

The Fore people of Papua New Guinea ate their dead as mourning rite; it transmitted kuru, a fatal prion disease, killing thousands. Women and children died faster — they ate the brain.

Dik-dik

The dik-dik marks territory by pressing a preorbital gland — located millimetres from its eyeball — directly onto twigs, essentially staking claim with its own face, one poke at a time.

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.

Crossbow

The Second Lateran Council banned the crossbow against Christians in 1139 — the first arms-control treaty in Western history. Knights ignored it, and within a century the bolt had made armor obsolete and chivalry theatrical.