Frank Hayes (jockey)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Hayes_(jockey)

On June 24, 1923, Frank Hayes was riding Sweet Kiss, a 20-1 underdog, during a horse race at Belmont Park.

He died of a heart attack during the race. Sweet Kiss won the race while his corpse was still on her back.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Sullivan

Park ranger who was struck by lightening on seven separate occasions. I shouldn't laugh, but the descriptions of each strike are pretty hilarious.

Can't imagine having to carry around a bucket of water at all times in case your hair gets lit on fire again. Felt really bad for him after reading the fourth strike.

Sounds like the lightning and the bears have a deal going on. Strike 3 bears and the lightning strikes you.

Can I get a pic of this guy? Surviving 20+ physical bear encounters and 7 lightning strikes makes him Chuck Norris-esque

If you read damn article, you wouldn't ask for a pic.

uhhhh

what the ****?

****in lol so hard, yea they are pretty funny the way they are written. the hair on fire for the 4th time had me rolling, lmao

Jury Nullification.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification

The trope of movies, letting the vigilante go because who wouldn't want to avenge the murder of their loved one by shooting everyone dead within 15 feet of the perpetrator? Of course, the movies wouldn't work in real life because it is illegal for the defense to make a case for nullification to the jury.

So, what's the story? Is nullification a way to silently protest unjust laws, like minimum sentencing for dealing drugs (IMO, obv), or is it a free ticket to openly discriminate against the defendant by the jury?

Anyone got any podcast recommendations along the lines of Interesting Things Explained Well? I'm sure there's a podcast thread somewhere but I feel like I'll get good answers here. I've listened to all of Hardcore History and Revisionist History. Tried out Damn Interesting's podcast as well but found it a bit dry.

Sam Harris’s Waking Up.

The BBC’s In Our Time is the closest I can think of. It’s one topic (from history, science, literature) and three experts plus an irascible host. There’s a massive back catalogue because they’ve been going for years.

Can't link this one because of no cursing policy, so I'll copy/paste the entire article here:

Artist's **** (synonym for poo) in case you want to find it on wikipedia. You can find a link to this article from here as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shock_art

Intro

Artist's **** (Italian: Merda d'artista) is a 1961 artwork by the Italian artist Piero Manzoni. The work consists of 90 tin cans, each reportedly filled with 30 grams (1.1 oz) of faeces, and measuring 4.8 by 6.5 centimetres (1.9 in × 2.6 in), with a label in Italian, English, French, and German stating:

Artist's ****
Contents 30 gr net
Freshly preserved
Produced and tinned
in May 1961

Inspiration and interpretations

At the time the piece was created, Manzoni was producing works that explored the relationship between art production and human production, Artist's Breath ("Fiato d'artista"), a series of balloons filled with his own breath, being an example.

Manzoni's father, who owned a cannery, is said to have once told his artist son: "Your work is ****."

In December 1961, Manzoni wrote in a letter to his friend Ben Vautier:
“ I should like all artists to sell their fingerprints, or else stage competitions to see who can draw the longest line or sell their **** in tins. The fingerprint is the only sign of the personality that can be accepted: if collectors want something intimate, really personal to the artist, there's the artist's own ****, that is really his. ”

Another friend, Enrico Baj, has said that the cans were meant as "an act of defiant mockery of the art world, artists, and art criticism".

Artist's **** has been interpreted in relation to Karl Marx's idea of commodity fetishism, and Marcel Duchamp's readymades.

Value

A tin was sold for €124,000 at Sotheby's on May 23, 2007;[5] in October 2008 tin 83 was offered for sale at Sotheby's with an estimate of £50–70,000. It sold for £97,250. On October 16, 2015, tin 54 was sold at Christies for £182,500. In August 2016, at an art auction in Milan, one of the tins sold for a new world record of €275,000, including auction fees.[6] The tins were originally to be valued according to their equivalent weight in gold – $37 each in 1961 – with the price fluctuating according to the market.[1]

Contents of the cans

One of Manzoni's friends, the artist Agostino Bonalumi, claimed that the tins are full not of faeces but plaster.[7] The cans are steel, and thus cannot be x-rayed or scanned to determine the contents, and opening a can would cause it to lose its value; thus, the true contents of Artist's **** are unknown.[8] Bernard Bazile exhibited an opened can of Artist's **** in 1989, titling it Opened can of Piero Manzoni (French: Boite ouverte de Piero Manzoni). The can contained an unidentifiable, wrapped object, which Bazile did not open. There are rumors that some cans have exploded and that there is one can within the can.[1]

The piece received media coverage due to a lawsuit in the mid-1990s, when an art museum in Randers, Denmark was accused by art collector John Hunov of causing leakage of a can which had been on display at the museum in 1994. Allegedly, the museum had stored the can at irresponsibly warm temperatures. The lawsuit ended with the museum paying a DKK 250,000 kr. settlement to the collector.[9]

Which leads us on to the following Japanese artist who uses her genitalia for art: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megumi...hi?wprov=sfti1

She made a kayak based on a 3D scan of her vulva.[13] She paid for this project through a crowdfunding campaign, sending the 3-D data of the kayak to all donors who contributed over ¥3,000.[14] Those who contributed were sent 3D data of her vulva.[10]

And weirdest of all:
Igarashi married Mike Scott, the frontman of The Waterboys, in October 2016.

I think the See Also is weird as well...

Feminist art
Labia pride
Jamie McCartney, an artist known for the Great Wall of Vagina

Those links are just rabbit holes I don't feel like exploring tooo much.

***

In the Shock Art link, there are things like this:

rtist Rick Gibson made a pair of earrings with freeze-dried human fetuses (Human Earrings - 1987),[19] publicly ate a slice of human tonsil (A Cannibal in Walthamstow - 1988)[20] and human testicle (A Cannibal in Vancouver - 1989)[21][22] and proposed to make a diptych with a squashed rat (Sniffy the Rat - 1990).

^^^ That's just gross, wtf? ^^^^^

12 Square Meters, a 1994 performance art display by Zhang Huan in Beijing wherein Huan "lathered his nude body in honey and fish oil" and exposed himself to "swarming flies and insects".

^^^ That's something a magician like David Blaine does too, right? ^^^

Shoot, a 1971 performance piece by Chris Burden in which friend shot him in the arm with a .22 calibre gun from a distance of 3.5 metres (11 ft).

^^^ That's not a performance, that's just being stupid ^^^^

Forget Me Knot: In 2012, Sruli Recht documented a one off surgery/performance during which a plastic surgeon removed a 110mm x 10mm strip of skin from his abdomen while he was awake. The piece of skin with the hair was tanned and mounted to a 24kt gold ring.



******

The Holy Virgin Mary

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holy_Virgin_Mary

A painting so gross that it doesn't have an image on the page and even the opening paragraph doesn't bother with the details....

The Holy Virgin Mary is a painting created by Chris Ofili in 1996. It was one of the works included in the Sensation exhibition in London, Berlin and New York in 1997–2000. The subject of the work, and its execution, caused considerable controversy in New York, with Rudolph Giuliani – then Mayor of New York City – describing Ofili's work as "sick".[1] In 1998, Ofili was the first black artist to be awarded the Turner Prize. The painting was sold for £2.9 million ($4.6 million) in June 2015


***
Piss Christ

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piss_Christ

Immersion (Piss Christ) is a 1987 photograph by the American artist and photographer Andres Serrano. It depicts a small plastic crucifix submerged in a small glass tank of the artist's urine. The piece was a winner of the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art's "Awards in the Visual Arts" competition,[1] which was sponsored in part by the National Endowment for the Arts, a United States Government agency that offers support and funding for artistic projects.

^^^ I want a tax refund!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ching_Shih

Was just introduced to this one, which is basically GoT storylines intersected with IRL storylines through history that were probably worse. Haven't listened to entire thing yet, but many people enjoyed it.

De re metallica

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_re_metallica

A huge book published in 1556, De re metallica was the tell-all manual for mining. Before this book, mining knowledge was passed down by word of mouth. It was sufficiently advanced that the book remained the authoritative text on mining for 180 years. It was also an important chemistry text as well.

I haven't cracked open this book myself, but apparently it is full of amazing illustrations showing every step of mining and refinery. At 672 pages, It is separated into 12 books:

I: Arguments for and against this art
II: The miner and a discourse on the finding of veins
III: Veins and stringers and seams in the rocks
IV: Delimiting veins and the functions of mining officials
V: The digging of ore and the surveyor's art
VI: The miners' tools and machines
VII: On the assaying of ore
VIII: Roasting, crushing and washing ore
IX: Methods of smelting ores
X: Separating silver from gold and lead from gold or silver
XI: Separating silver from copper
XII: Manufacturing salt, soda, alum, vitriol, sulphur, bitumen, and glass

If I had a library, this would definitely be somewhere in it.

this was interesting:

Interesting number paradox

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intere...number_paradox

Is there a set of uninteresting numbers? According to the paradox, the first number of this set would be interesting because it is the first number of a set of uninteresting numbers. Repeating that thought would eventually deplete the set to an empty set.

The mathematician and philosopher Alex Bellos suggested in 2014 that a candidate for the lowest boring number would be 247 because it was, at the time, "the lowest number not to have its own page on Wikipedia". As of 13 February 2018, the lowest number not to have its own page on Wikipedia was 254.

What...?

That was annoying to read.

Not sure what happened to My explanation here but she was a female pirate in China who is considered the most successful ever. Had a fleet of 30k pirates, fought with the British Portuguese and of course Chinese government and eventually got amnesty and retired.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/300_million_yen_robbery

guy in Japan robs a van transporting 800k usd worth of money by dressing as an officer and telling the armed guard that there is a bomb under the van. Statute of limitations in Japan is 20 years so as of 1988 he's completely gotten away with it.

I missed that Ching Shih the first time and read that earlier. It's a great read just to learn about the rules she laid down. The dynamics of how to treat and fall in love with their captures is scary and complex to say the least.

Loled at Piratical Career

Great read thanks!

Earlier, there was a lot of fascination with true crimes.

Murder of Junko Furuta

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Junko_Furuta

I have no words...