Ahoy!
I’ve been thinking about the moon. Yep, I’m whimsical.
I seemed to hit on a lot of stories this week about the moon (you’ll find a cracker below), and it put me in mind of one of the weirdest, most brilliant film shorts I’ve ever seen: The Wolfman, by Tim Hope. Not seen this creepy delight about a “huge rancid dog” that can “punch suns”? BRACE, BRACE.
Let’s dabble!
The moon! (unsurprisingly)
Why do we say the moon is made of cheese? I’ll tell you, sunshine. It apparently started with a medieval fable, in which a fox convinces a predatory wolf that the moon’s reflection is in fact a block of cheese. The greedy wolf goes to eat it, fills with water and bursts, while the fox skips off in glee. I don’t judge the wolf tbh; as a cheese obsessive I couldn’t resist either.
Reanimated corpses!
Halloween may be over, babes, but the horror continues here on The Pocket Polymath. Allow me to introduce Giovanni Aldini, the real-life Frankenstein who charged corpses with electricity in an attempt to reanimate them – and of course, ultimately inspired Mary Shelley’s novel. I bet he was a right hoot at parties.
Pizza tricks!
I was shook – shook, I tell you – to learn that glue used to be used in pizza commercials to make the cheese look extra stringy (yep, that’s two cheese-related stories this week. Nope, I have no regrets.) Nowadays, however, a heat gun is more likely. I don’t really get it; for me, cheese’s sexiest quality is its oily, salty goodness, rather than its stretch appeal. In fact I hate it when the cheese sticks to your chin and makes you look like a dick.
Swiss army knives: origin story!
I really wanted a Swiss army knife when I was a child. Why? I can’t answer that question, but this piece answers a whole other host of questions such as ‘why did it become famous?’, ‘what happened that almost prevented it coming into being?’ and ‘is it really Swiss?’ Surely ‘why does is have a corkscrew?’ is self explanatory…?
Making friends with crows!
Sometimes I come across an article with such a great headline that I just want to share that. This one – “How to befriend a crow” – would be one such article, if it weren’t such an intriguing premise. I mean who wouldn’t want to have a crow as a mate? This is a cool story – if only because it makes you aware of the existence of CrowTok – of how one woman got chummy with several local birds.
The question on everyone’s lips…
Is there such a thing as the perfect alarm tone?
Word of the week
Sgrìob poige (Gaelic; pron. skree-UP pee-je): “an itching of the lip, superstitiously supposed to precede a kiss from a favourite.”
And finally…
See you next Friday!
My life is better and stranger for seeing that animation. Thank you x
Excellent, as always!
Love the Swiss knife review too.