World’s Strangest

If you want to have a pet goldfish, park in your own driveway, or die, here are some places you probably shouldn’t live. 1. Satan If the Son of Perdition is looking to vacation in Florida, it looks like he’ll have to skip the town of Inglis. In 2001, the town of 1400 residents banned Satan by [...]

When you and I got the itch to walk, we usually go around the block a couple of times. But not Canadian Jean Béliveau. He went walking for 46,600 miles through 64 countries. And perhaps [...]

Well-appointed Internet cafes have signs that remind users to log out of any applications before leaving. Not everyone pays attention, including as two robbers at one in Colombia: It happened in the neighborhood of Calima, north of the city of Cali, Colombia. Two men arrived to an internet cafe, rented two computers, did their thing for [...]

As the dot-com bubble reached its peak in 2000, Internet entrepreneurs faced a problem: every word in the dictionary had been registered as a dot-com domain name. So their bold new innovation was to register domains ending in something other than dot-com! Let’s take a look back at the stories of three [...]

"Come with a story and leave with another", says Colsubsidio Book Exchange of Colombia. To strike home the message, Lowe/SSP3 ad agency came up with these clever print ads. The first one above mixes Snow White and Sherlock Holmes. Can you [...]

We may never know the true identities of Annoying Facebook Girl and Good Guy Greg, but we do know a little bit more about the people who inspired these memes. 1. College Freshman As a first-semester freshman, Griffin Kiritsy agreed to do an interview for Reader’s Digest, complete with a photo shoot on the UNH campus. “No [...]

Most of us have heard of the international NGOs Doctors Without Borders and Engineers Without Borders, and you might know about Reporters Without Borders. But what about Monks Without Borders? Or Clowns? Here’s a list of borderless organizations you really should hear about. 1. Bikes Without Borders Bikes Without Borders is a Canadian non-profit group that [...]

It may be a slum, but it’s a slum with an escalator! Officials in Medellin, Colombia, have inaugurated a giant outdoor escalator in one of its poorest slums: For generations, the 12,000 residents of Medellin’s [...]

© HO/Reuters/Corbis Pablo Emilio Escobar Gaviria was born December 1, 1949, in the town of Rionegro, nestled in the northern Andes not far from the city of Medellin in the Colombian province of Antioquia. The son of a peasant farmer and a schoolteacher, there was nothing in Escobar’s background to suggest the meteoric and spectacularly sociopathic [...]

11/22/11 is the 791st anniversary of Frederick II being crowned Holy Roman Emperor, the 293rd anniversary of Blackbeard’s beheading, the 254th anniversary of the Austrian defeat of Prussia in the Seven Years’ War’s Battle of Breslau, the 48th anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s assassination, and what would have been novelist George Eliot’s 192nd birthday. [...]