We dig through the past so you don’t have to. Expect weird, wonderful, and utterly interesting stories. (Born at 336 ppm)
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This is Harry Eastlack's skeleton. Those sheets of bone welding his spine, ribs and shoulders together grew from his own muscles. A disease called FOP slowly turned him to stone until only his lips could move. He died in 1973 and requested his body be used to help others.
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A woman with the same disease, Carol Orzel, saw Harry's skeleton in 1995 and told her doctor she wanted to be put next to him when she died.
She got her wish, and they now stand side by side at the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia.
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Remembering Ray Charles on his birthday. Here he is with Ira Newborn, Dan Aykroyd & John Belushi messing around as John Landis looks on during the filming of The Blues Brothers, 1979.
The 'making of' is crazy
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Because it's THAT day.
For years I thought they chose the 21st because it just fitted. Apparently it was the date Maurice White's child was due to be born.
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The Welsh way of life in the 19th century...
Though a couple of portraits presented here were moments witnessed through the lens of other, mostly unknown, portrait artists, the vast majority come to us courtesy of John Thomas (born 1838, Cellan, Ceredigion) 🏴
A short 🧵
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Remembering Amy Winehouse on her birthday. This clip is from 2004, a nervous and still relatively unknown singer delivering a perfect version of Dinah Washington's 'Teach Me Tonight'.
Absolutely glorious.
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One of the most vicious alligator attacks caught on film.
Dear reader, this is NOT for the faint hearted.
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John Howard Griffin posing as a black man in the Deep South as part of an experiment to see life and segregation from the other side of the colour line. In 1959 he had darkened his skin and for six weeks he 'lived as a black man', navigating the harsh realities of segregation. 🧵
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Griffin had been blind since 1946, when injuries from WW2 left him completely sightless. Living without the ability to see meant he could no longer judge people by their skin color, which profoundly reshaped his thinking about race.
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In 1957, he unexpectedly regained his vision, but the perspective he had gained during blindness stayed with him.
So he decided to conduct this experiment.
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Happy Birthday to On The Road. Written by Jack Kerouac and released on this day in 1957.
Here is the manuscript he typed on a single 120 foot page scroll of paper, it sold this year for $12m. 🧵
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The roll isn't even complete though. The ending is missing because a friend's dog chewed it off, Kerouac made a note of it right on the manuscript.
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Meet Robert Cornish, he killed five dogs and 'brought two back to life' on a giant see-saw, then played himself reviving one in a real 1934 Hollywood film. He wanted to try it on a death row inmate next. California said no. He spent his last years selling toothpaste instead.
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The dogs that survived weren't unscathed, one was left permanently blind. That's actually the tell that this was real and not a hoax: six to ten minutes without oxygen does exactly that kind of brain damage even when you do get the heart going again.
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In 1988, Irish World War I veteran Jack Campbell appeared on The Late Late Show with Gay Byrne at the age of 93.
A former soldier of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers, Campbell shared memories of his experiences during the Great War and life on the front lines.
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In 1970, John Lennon and Yoko Ono cut off their hair to trade it for a pair of Muhammad Ali's boxing shorts, all to raise money for Michael X's Black Power centre in London. Within two years, Michael X had fled to Trinidad. By 1975, he was hanged for murder. 🧵
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X was convicted of killing Joseph Skerritt. The second victim, Gale Benson, was the daughter of a British Conservative MP. X was never even tried for her death, only Skerritt's, even though he was widely believed to have ordered it too.
Such a crazy story
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